Policy Studies Organization
7 total works
Super-optimum decisions involve finding alternatives to controversies whereby conservatives, liberals, or other major groups can all come out ahead of their best initial expectations simultaneously. This book is organized in terms of concepts, methods, causes, process, substance and the policy studies profession. Concepts clarify that policy evaluation traditionally involves: 1. Goals to be achieved 2. Alternatives available for achieving them 3. Relations between goals and alternatives 4. Drawing a conclusion as to the best alternative in light of the goals, alternatives and relations 5. Analyzing how the conclusion would change if there were changes in the goals, alternatives, or relations. Super-optimizing also involves five related steps, but with the following improvements: 1. Goals are designated as conservative, liberal, or neutral 2. Alternatives get the same designations 3. Relations are simplified to indicate which alternatives are relatively high or low on each goal 4. The conclusion involves arriving at an alternative that does better on Goal A than Alternative A and simultaneously better on Goal B than Alternative B 5. The fifth step involves analyzing the super-optimum or win-win alternative in terms of its feasibility as to the economic, technological, psychological, political, administrative and legal matters
The "essence of the book" is to clarify what is involved in using decision-aiding software in evaluative decision-making at a non-technical level. Decision-aiding software in this context means software that can process a set of goals to be achieved, alternatives available for achieving them, and relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose or explain the best alternative, combination, allocation, or predictive-rule. The book is divided into "four main parts". A "general" introduction to decision-aiding software. That material is based on papers and workshops that have been presented at meetings of associations in political science, public administration, evaluation, public policy, and decision analysis. A set of chapters dealing with the "skills" which decision-aiding software enhances. Those skills include (1) choosing among discrete alternatives the best alternative or combination, (2) allocating scarce resources across people, activities, places, or other allocation categories, (3) explaining decisions that have been reached or predicting those to be reached, and (4) using decision-aiding software for teaching evaluation methods or substance.
Chapters dealing with "analytic obstacles" that decision-aiding software helps overcome such as (1) multiple dimensions on multiple goals, (2) multiple missing information, (3) multiple and possibly conflicting constraints, (4) multiple alternatives that are too many to determine the effects of each one, and (5) the need for simplicity in spite of all that multiplicity. Chapters dealing with "applications" in different fields of knowledge. Those fields include public policy evaluation, law-related problems, and all other fields of knowledge.
Chapters dealing with "analytic obstacles" that decision-aiding software helps overcome such as (1) multiple dimensions on multiple goals, (2) multiple missing information, (3) multiple and possibly conflicting constraints, (4) multiple alternatives that are too many to determine the effects of each one, and (5) the need for simplicity in spite of all that multiplicity. Chapters dealing with "applications" in different fields of knowledge. Those fields include public policy evaluation, law-related problems, and all other fields of knowledge.
This title was first published in 2000: A history of the ideas behind public policy studies, which can be defined as the study of the nature, causes and effects of government decisions for dealing with social problems.
This book analyzes various aspects of international interactions designed to deal with shared policy problems. Such policy problems can include trans-boundary problems like people, pollution, or goods literally going across international boundaries; common property problems like the oceans, Antarctica, or the atmosphere, which nobody owns but are a kind of common good that need to be regulated or else expanded or substituted as in the case of natural resources; and simultaneous problems like health, education, and welfare about which all countries can learn from each other. The field differs from but builds on international relations, comparative public policy, and domestic policy studies. The field tends to be cross-national, interdisciplinary, multi-methodological, and multi-ideological.
Creativity in general can be defined as an ability or an occurance. Either way, it refers to developing an alternative way of, for example, explaining gravity, writing a symphony, lessoning the problem of poverty or dealing with some other subject. The distinctive aspect of a creative alternative is that it is better on whatever criteria are considered relevant than the alternatives that were previously being considered. A special kind of creativity involves not merely finding a better way of doing things, but of finding a way that exceeds the best initial expectations of whatever sides or viewpoints may have been in contention over how to deal with the problem. That kind of creativity can be referred to as super-optimizing creativity. It does more than find a new, better or best alternative, it finds an alternative that is better than what the previous perspectives had as their best expectation, simultaneously across all those previous perspectives. Focusing on political and policy aspects, this text presents a study of creativity and innovation in a general, technological, business, scientific and artistic context.
Decision-aiding software helps in processing a set of goals to be achieved, alternatives available for achieving them, and relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose or explain the best alternative, combination, allocation, or predictive decision-rule. Such software with a spreadsheet base of columns corresponding to goals and rows corresponding to alternatives is usefully applied in this book to government, personal decisions, law, teaching, decision-analysis research, cross-national decision-making, business and politics.