Making Public Policy

...Government operates through bureaucracy...

...That parsimony permits mathematical formulation and yields precise, unsettling predictions...

...In such a time, bureaucracy, lacking strong and institutionalized stimuli to public-spiritedness, is bound to be ineffective and inefficient...

...And from the judiciary there comes a remarkable statement of William O. Douglas who asserted that in his four decades as a Supreme Court Justice he never witnessed or even heard of an attempt by an outside organization or official (presumably other than Franklin Roosevelt...

...In so doing we can save ourselves and our government...

...It is distressing to acknowledge, but whether one approves of the self-interest assumption or not, by and large the facts bear out the theory's predictions...

...Unfortunately, Kelman did not devote enough of his book to confronting this awkward circumstance...

...Political biographies contain numerous references to soul-searching when the interests of politicians' constituents are obvious but the public interest is not...

...Not only does Kelman reject theories that would explain human actions solely in terms of self-interest...

...To bolster his case Kelman offers dozens of examples, from aggressive mass media to congressional oversight committees to the robes in which we drape our judges...

...Since economists are citizens too, the new theory has become all the more attractive and influential in the age of • Ronald Reagan, whose main achievement may have been to convince large numbers of people that government is a waste of money...

...been the logic of economists...

...All who are interested in government - and many others who should be - ought to thank Steven Kel an for giving us his lovely vision of public-spiritedness...

...Recognizing selfishness in people is hardly an innovation...

...to " tamper'' with the Court...

...But we must work even harder than he suggests, toward devising institutions to which people will be drawn in part by self-interest but where incorporation in a community develops generous impulses...

...A few years ago he demonstrated the obtuseness of the Grace Commission (on waste in government) and he has been a practical philosopher, arguing the superiority of deontological ethics over utilitarianism as a basis for justifying social policies...

...Enter Steven Kelman with a dissenting view...

...What's more, he believes there is and it does...

...He is no devotee of this new science, but has even bigger fish to fry...

...REV...

...JOSEPH M. powers is professor of sacramental theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California...

...A professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Kelman has written widely on governmental matters...

...Congressional voting records on such issues as oil price regulations and strip mining defy explanation in purely parochial terms even when a large number of a politician's constituents have a clearly defined interest in the issue...

...Indeed, the most important finding of policy research in the past couple of decades is that for much of what government does, expenditures do not yield results...

...RICHARD P. McBRIEN is chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame...

...The immense bureaucracies of government were not envisaged by the Founders, nor is there any plausible contemporary theory to support an expectation of bureaucratic effectiveness...

...However, thinkers in this country usually expected the self-interest of public servants to be tempered by duty...

...Although he exhorts Americans to demand measured outputs from government and to develop a "culture" of public-spiritedness in government, Kel-man confronts a task tougher than he acknowledges...

...Kelman sets out to evaluate American government by asking two questions: Does it produce good public policy...

...He makes bold to say that this disposition is stronger the more important the issue on which the Congress is working...

...He comes well prepared...

...Their message to a skeptical world was that freedom, order, justice, prosperity, and small government are compatible...

...Unlike Congress, the president and the courts, bureaucracy tends inherently to inefficiency and demoralization...

...The sad fact is that bureaucracies receive insufficient public respect or scrutiny, their members insufficient inspiration or prodding for them to be productive organizations...

...Again and again, "members of Congress have voted to deprive themselves of some things that many commentators believe they seek above all - power and the chance to provide visible constituency benefits - so as to bring about good public policy.'' REVIEWERS JOHN BRANDL is acting dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and a member of the Minnesota State Senate...

...Now economics has become intellectually imperialistic, claiming to explain how all manner of organizations operate, from government agencies and labor unions to colleges and even families...

...When the Founders accepted Madison's idea that keeping Americans busy making money would distract them from needing much government, could they have foreseen that after a couple of centuries their endorsement of self-interest would result in the Ivan Boeskys and General Secords of our world...

...Public choice theory asks how organizations would operate if populated by single-minded self-seekers...

...Only a few pages of Making Public Policy are devoted explicitly to public choice theory, aspects of which Kelman dismisses with such epithets as "zaniest," "brazenness," and "bjzarre...

...That is the kind of research for which Professor James Buchanan won the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics...

...Public choice theorists hypothesize that the individual actions of bureaucrats, as self-interested as anyone else, aggregate not to order and efficiency but to hugeness and gross inefficiency...

...It is not too much to predict that in a generation it could be remembered as the most important development of our time in the social sciences...

...Mathematics provides a powerful calculus for solving maximization problems, which has enabled economics to become an elegantly developed discipline, rich in hypotheses for explaining how the economy works...

...In economics self-interest is construed as the attempt by consumers and producers, demanders and suppliers, to maximize satisfaction and profits, respectively...

...Since Adam Smith, maximization has...

...Could they have expected people not only to extol greed, but to pattern themselves after the theory of the efficacy of self-interest...

...The governmental system designed by James Madison and its cousin, Adam Smith's economy, both are attempts to show that the self-interested behavior of individuals can produce, when aggregated, acceptable social arrangements...

...His method is to find and describe actions that would not have occurred if policymakers were merely self-interested - a simple device with engrossing results...

...Kelman underestimates the force and importance of public choice theory...

...Madison himself believed that the new nation would require public-spirited statesmen...

...Meeting it requires replacing oligarchy with participation, rules with inspiration, employeeship with stewardship, client-ship with ownership, public monopolies with diversity, coercion with choice, Federalism with Anti-Federalism - and self-interest with public-spiritedness...

...The argument is both that government is replete with instances of public-spiritedness and that such behavior is fostered by the design of our institutions...

...A sense of the legitimacy of greed is seeping from the private sector into the public and that is ominous...

...Replacing bureaucracy with community as the organizing principle of the executive branch and of the schools, the two great loci of bureaucracy in America, is the major challenge of domestic government today...

...Public choice theory rests on the dis-armingly simple assumption that people act self-interestedly...

...Does it make us a more dignified people...

...he insists that only if there is a healthy portion of public-spiritedness in its politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and citizens, can the American political system work well...

...And in a gibe at economists for whom preferences are fixed, Kelman notes that in congressional debate good arguments change people's minds - indication, he says, that honest efforts are being made to find and do what is right...

...The great flaw in American government today is the organizational structure of the executive branch, and that is where Kelman's thesis falls short...

...John Brandl Choices of the political art With little fanfare a new approach to the study of government has be-come remarkably influential in the academy...

...Public choice theory, an outgrowth of economics, is supplanting traditional methods of research in political science, law, sociology, and organization theory...

...For example, politicians are assumed to be interested only in maximizing their probability of being reelected, bureaucrats in maximizing their agency's budget...

...Still, by itself that is not much of an accomplishment for the new theory and it does not betray any great flaw in the system...

...It can explain why legislatures move slowly and why - more often than he acknowledges - they protect the interests of local constituents when the broader public interest is otherwise and would seem to be clear...

...Go-getting political reporters and the recent proliferation of countervailing interest groups have made it harder for legislatures to give unpublicized and undeserved benefits to potent constituencies...

...That case is also made for actions of the president, the only person elected by all the voters...