Issue 3: Ensnaring Ourselves in Good Intentions
And a definitive declaration on the best bagel flavour
WELCOME
Before we dig in, a quick housekeeping item (literally): I recently had the immense luck and privilege to purchase my first home, a milestone very much out of reach for many young and new Canadians thanks to decades of poor policymaking. I’m looking down the barrel of approximately six weeks of renovations and move-related activities, so if you have a submission for the next edition of Policycraft now is the time to share it. I’m currently trying to understand unique First Nations’ approaches to policymaking - insight and resources on that topic are especially welcome!
THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS
💻Solving the Everything Bagel Problem by Russell King, Medium
In April 2023, Ezra Klein authored a piece in the New York Times that coined the phrase “everything bagel liberalism”. He lamented the well-intentioned but burdensome tendency of liberal American policymakers to append multiple policy goals to a single initiative, lowering the likelihood that the primary goal will be achieved. It’s an idea that has been rattling around the brain of your Policycraft curator in the modified form of “everything bagel policymaking”, a force not exclusive to a single political ideology or party but to policy thinkers in general. How might attempts to create ‘win-win’ scenarios instead burden and ultimately undermine policy effectiveness? What do true ‘win-win’ scenarios look like, and how do we identify when we are in a false one? The short article linked provides a succinct overview of some common drivers of everything bagel policymaking, as well as alternatives.
Disclaimer: Everything bagels are the best kind of bagel so this whole concept might need a re-brand.
💻“Policy prototyping is something you can do, and might already be doing” by L. Nelson Hamilton, Medium
A quick read on how to get to clarity in policy discussions by employing a ‘prototyping’ approach; one in which you think about the policy as a design. This concept may be particularly valuable when you aren’t the individual or the team making the policy, but you are responsible for figuring out how to deliver it.
🎓“Toward an Understanding of the Political Economy of Using Field Experiments in Policymaking” by Guglielmo Briscese and John A. List, National Bureau of Economic Research
Everyone1 loves an NBER working paper for good reason: they’re frequently timely, insightful, and free to access. This one examines the impact of policy field experiments on policymakers’ opinions; essentially, when experiments defy their expectations, policymakers cool on their use. Taking their analysis one step further, the authors contrast this finding with US public opinion on policy experiments, which is generally positive - but unfortunately impacted by growing skepticism surrounding the institutions that conduct them.
💻Policymaking by any other name by Zachary Spicer, PolicyReady.ca
Municipal policymaking is easily overlooked as a contradiction in terms or a role not suited to mere creatures of the provinces. This piece pushes back against that indifference, exploring the idea of who a policymaker is through the lens of municipal governance. Spicer shared ideas for “re-considering the municipal policymaker” and includes implications for policymakers in other orders of government.
📚Red Tape: Its Origins, Uses and Abuses by Howard Kaufman, Brookings Institution
If you can find a copy of this slim 1977 text, I recommend giving it a read. While his examples are deep in the time and place it was written, Kaufman gets to the root of “red tape” as a symptom of low trust and a lack of human judgement and accountability in government; the more we try to reduce unwanted behaviours and actions, the more we become snarled in its grasp, preventing the kind of governance we want. To wit,
“In some respects, this is a discouraging diagnosis if you want to reduce red tape because it forces hard choices on you. How much of what you want should you give up to lighten your red-tape burden? Or… how much red tape should you tolerate to get satisfying amounts of what you want?”
📣“My working model of policy change” social post by Eli Dourado, Twitter/X
If you’re looking to create policy change from the outside, is it better to get the median voter on board or not? A conversation-starter in under 600 characters.
Nerds like me.