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Eric M. Patashnik Julis-Rabinowitz Professor of Public Policy, professor of political science, and director of the Master of Public Affairs Program, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University.

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Promoting the General Welfare

Brookings Institution Press

Chapter One

Alan S. Gerber and Eric M. Patashnik

Journalists, activists, and other policy actors have strong incentives to publicize and stir up political conflict. Newspapers frame stories about complex issues around personality battles among the players. Political activists with parochial interests claim to be on the front lines of a "cultural war" that will determine the fate of the nation. And candidates for public office go to great lengths to differentiate themselves from their allegedly extremist opponents.

Lost in the political system's focus on conflict and controversy is the tremendous common ground-among ordinary citizens and political elites alike-over government's role in contemporary American society. No prominent leader or influential social group today advocates a wholesale shedding of the federal government's responsibility in any major area of public policy. Regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are elected to office, the government will continue to protect the environment, assist senior citizens with health care costs, and maintain the world's most formidable military. Although the media tend to magnify the differences between opposing sides on policy issues, the reality is that even ideologically charged clashes typically take place within certain boundaries.

Consider a contentious issue such as Social Security reform. Important social values are undeniably at stake in choosing among pension reform alternatives. Liberals and conservatives have very different reform ideas. Yet, as political scientist Hugh Heclo points out, not even the most radical privatization plan calls for a total government withdrawal from the problem of retirement security. First, there is a general consensus against relying solely on "do-it-yourself" pension arrangements. The public expects the government to address the problem of financial security in old age. Second, there is no "government-less private sector in sight to withdraw to." Even the most "private" individual market plan would require an extensive framework of government rules to govern withdrawals, borrowing, and investment choices. Most plans would also include new subsidies for the poor.

This pattern repeats itself across the full scope of governance. Policy alternatives are debated, often quite vehemently, but the essential role of government as supplier of public goods and guarantor of public health and safety is not. Total government expenditures in the United States accounted for 30.9 percent of gross domestic product in fiscal year 2004. This aggregate level of government activity has been remarkably constant in the face of large-scale economic, social, and political developments since the 1970s. It is highly unlikely that the United States will soon develop a government as large as Sweden's, but it is equally unlikely that the federal government will shrink back to the size it was prior to World War II and the Great Depression.

If activist yet limited government is a widely desired and, in any event, permanent fixture of modern American society, government performance matters greatly. Can the government identify and solve collective problems? Does the government possess the political incentives, institutional capacity, and analytic tools to weigh social benefits and costs and generate useable information about problems, preferences, and policy priorities? What are the major causes of government performance troubles? When all is said and done, can the government promote the general welfare?

This book offers new perspectives on government performance. The essays in the volume address the topic by examining both the government's performance in specific policy areas and the capacity of key political institutions to identify and solve important societal problems. The first group of essays demonstrates that the government is failing to tackle significant problems in key arenas of domestic policymaking, including health (Alan Gerber and Eric Patashnik), transportation (Clifford Winston), housing (Edgar O. Olsen), and special education (Jay P. Greene). These cases are both illustrative of the tasks performed by modern American government and designed to stimulate thinking about government performance. They do not, however, represent all the important tasks government does or might undertake. We chose to study these policy areas not only because they are substantively important, but also because they demonstrate the pervasiveness and significance of market and government failures and the incompleteness of existing explanations of the sources of government underperformance. These case studies underscore the need for fresh thinking about the reasons for government underperformance and are complementary to other studies that formally test hypotheses by considering the effect of variation in independent variables across cases or over time.

It is helpful when policy analysts not only address problems that decision-makers have placed on the agenda, but also speak up for the general public and other diffuse interests that lack adequate representation in the political process. As David L. Weimer and Aidan R. Vining explain in chapter 2, prominent among those interests deserving greater voice is efficiency. The concept of efficiency takes a variety of forms. In practice, many policy analysts use the concept of potential Pareto improvement. The relevant test is whether a policy change produces sufficient social benefits that winners could theoretically compensate losers and still come out ahead. This concept of potential efficiency (formally known as the Kaldor-Hicks criterion) is not uncontroversial. Its implementation requires the ability to measure gains and losses in a common metric. Moreover, in practice, the transfer payments needed to compensate losers may not be made. Nevertheless, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion gives analysts a powerful diagnostic lens for seeing potential opportunities to improve on the status quo. Weimer and Vining forcefully argue that efficiency should not necessarily override other social values, such as equity and human dignity, but it deserves much greater respect than it often receives in the democratic process.

The second group of chapters examines novel institutional mechanisms for improving government performance, including the use of laboratory experiments as a tool for policy design (Charles A. Holt, William M. Shobe, and Angela M. Smith) and the creation of information markets (Robin Hanson). The chapters explain how new analytic tools can promote more informed decisions and the conditions under which their use is likely to be compatible with the incentives of policymakers. The point of these chapters is not that such methods can identify the "right answers" to complex problems such as the prevention of terrorist attacks, but rather that they may help policymakers evaluate alternatives and reduce the uncertainty under which they must make high-stakes decisions.

In the third part of the book, the authors step back from the details of specific policy debates and assess the overall performance of three foundations of American government: Congress (chapters by David R. Mayhew and Sarah A. Binder), the political party system (Morris P. Fiorina), and federalism (Mark Carl Rom and Roberta Romano). These contributors evaluate whether electoral incentives and institutional...