One thing I love about Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving is the guidance Bardach gives to policy analysts to avoid common mistakes they make in the analysis process.
One tool Bardach uses is called “pitfalls and semantic remedies.” The general idea Bardach presents is that there are common pitfalls in how we do policy analysis and if we articulate our problems and approaches in certain ways, we can avoid these pitfalls.
We can find an example of this in problem definition, the first step of the Eightfold Path. One mistake policy analysts can make is to define the solution into the problem.
Let’s take student loans as an example. If we were to say “students have not had enough student loan forgiveness,” we are assuming that “forgiveness” is the best solution to the underlying problem. By redefining the problem as “too many students are burdened by student loans” or “students with student loans have too heavy burdens,” we open ourselves to solutions besides student loan forgiveness.
As a former undergraduate philosophy major, of course my mind goes to “well, too many students are burdened by student loans” isn’t our final question, right? Isn’t the deeper problem “college graduates do not have enough resources?” Or is it rather “student loans are an unfair burden to place on adults that young people do not understand the financial ramifications of?”
You can see how defining this question takes us in different directions. On the one hand, we could be talking about burden as a utilitarian problem: people aren’t able to get as much of what they want because their resources go toward student loans. On another hand, we could be talking about norms of fairness: students should not be burdened with unfair loans they do not understand the gravity of.
There are a couple of interesting questions this opens up. As analysts, we are usually asked to be utilitarians. This problem can seem like a hammer searching for a nail. Yes, we are (relatively) good at measuring things like consumer surplus, but often questions of fairness are what policymakers are more interested in. Maybe that’s not the place for a policy analyst, though. Questions of fairness are often better handled by the political process, reasoned debate, or by decisions of policymakers.
So where does this leave us as policy analysts? I’ll put forth a few problems that crop up when trying to apply the semantic tip of stripping a problem to mere description.
Where do we stop? We can keep digging deeper and deeper and getting to more and more philosophical questions. How do we know when to stop stripping our question down?
What do we do when our questions branch? If we end up facing multiple different problem definitions, which one do we choose?
I will offer two pieces of guidance for policy analysts stuck in this muck around stripping down problem definitions.
First, maintain client orientation when defining the problem. While we can push our clients to think about problems in a larger way, we also have to meet them where they are.
The policymakers who we are working with may be further along in the decision making process than we are as analysts and if we get bogged down in philosophical questions, they can leave us in the dust. So try to define your problem in a way that stretches your client to open their mind to different possibilities, but not so much that the alternative possibilities opened by the problem definition become irrelevant to the client.
For instance, if you are writing a policy analysis on student loan burden for a state senator who ran on a platform of reducing student loans, coming back with a problem definition of “poverty is too high” would likely be astray of what she is looking for. Instead, a problem definition of “too many college graduates are in poverty” could be closer to what she is interested in actually having a policy analysis written around, depending on her political orientation.
Second, embrace the tools of policy analysis. If you are stuck between different ways to define a problem, sometimes it is better to ask yourself which question looks more like a nail. Policy analysts are not philosophers or politicians–they are applied social scientists. Leave the questions about metaethics to the metaethicists and the questions about political feasibility to the political strategists: as a policy analyst, you are best at applying the insights of economics to policy problems.
In this example, a path of “too many people are burdened by student loans” is a more straightforward problem definition than “the student loan system is too unfair.” If a client is ambivalent between the two, you are going to be able to analyze the former better than the latter and give better insight because of your particular technical expertise.
Policy analysis is messy, but by (a) understanding what our clients want, and (b) understanding what you are good at, you will be able to produce analysis that is more relevant to a policymaker. And relevant, insightful analysis is ultimately what we mean when we talk about good analysis.