Some people go into politics because they care about policy. Others view politics as another species of sport: who wins? how? what tactical maneuvers are effective? What’s the score? For those of us who have been unable to understand how or why a man with no obvious engagement with any policy issue, domestic or foreign, became President, game theory may supply the answer.
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Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance
Fight Fair, Dammit
In Florence, Italy, there is a famous marble statue of two Greek wrestlers,nude, and magnificently muscular. The statues are, as we say, ‘anatomically correct,’ and one wrestler has hold of the other by an organ that my male friends tell me is quite vulnerable. I have forgotten the statue’s real name, but my husband always calls it "fight fair, dammit."
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Connecting the Dots
As the Bush Administration continues its relentless push to starve the agencies of government, its tax cuts are choking off federal payments to states and cities for federally-mandated programs like Medicaid, special education, the President’s "No Child Left Behind" law, and hundreds of others. While there is plenty of pain to go around, the haphazard mess that is the current American health care system may suffer most.
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Words, Words, Words
If any of these answers comes as a surprise, it is because Americans have increasingly substituted labels for analysis. Turn on talk radio, or one of the numerous television shows where political pundits scream at each other and you will hear terms like liberal or right-wing used to dismiss a point of view with which the commentator disagrees. What you won’t often hear is a reasoned discussion of the merits or flaws of that point of view.
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Lessons Unlearned
America’s attention is focused on Iraq these days, so the Bush Administration’s recent announcement that it plans to privatize 800,000 federal jobs, beginning with air traffic controllers, got very little attention.
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