 A couple of announcements real quick. Next week, of course, we're going to do a lot of things, but we're going to conclude talking about public policy by looking at future challenges facing public policy. In addition to the slides from this week, which I will post up on the committee, I will post one final reading of Chapter 7, and it will go by Eleanor, our chairman. It's a very interesting view of some of the challenges that I want to be talking with you about regarding where I think public policy as a field is going, and where I think the challenge is doing policy analysis. Basically, tensions between science and politics in virtually every conceivable realm of knowledge and realm of public policies, so we're going to be looking at that. Second announcement, since we're on the subject of evaluation, you should all have received an email, probably recidivist emails from student services concerning course evaluations, not just for this course but for others, but I do want to encourage you, those are course anonymous, but I do read them. Of course, Chair, I read them for everybody in my department, and they are very important to the process of assessment and evaluation in many dimensions, and on a more direct and pedagogical dimension for this course is for others that I teach. I like feedback because it's a way that I try to then improve courses or change them or modify them to make them better in the future. So I do want to encourage you to fill out those questions. Okay, evaluation. We were talking about the manned space programming, particularly the effort to land men on the moon, which was successful. We talked about not only the fact that it was successful but popular, and that it had a lot of societal benefits that were actually not totally easy to measure or quantify, but nevertheless they were measurable. One is the economic spin-offs, the multiplier effects, and the multiplier effects, I did not say this on Tuesday, but I will say it now, those multiplier effects actually had an upside and a downside, which is very, very important in understanding policy evaluation. The upside, obviously, is that for every dollar the federal government's debt through NASA and developing a manned space program, particularly the efforts to land people on the moon, meant that there were jobs created in investments in many other sectors. So what's the downside? Think about this, use your imagination. Well, what would happen if those dollars ever stopped? Where would those jobs go? Would they exist? They would not exist, or they'd have to be replaced by something else. In fact, and I'll come back to this one in a little bit, what NASA ended up creating, what Congress ended up creating through the space program was a distributive policy. It was a policy that came to bestow benefits to various regions of the country, particularly the Sun Belt. Those regions became highly dependent on these investments. Some of them were able to sustain activities in the absence of federal bowlers, but many were not. Being an aerospace engineer in the 1970s was a cool thing. Being an aerospace engineer in the 1980s was not so cool. You want fries with that. But seriously, you need that attention. And then I talked about the huge technological spinoffs, which I think we still benefit from. The whole digital technology realm, really everything from communication to entertainment to computers. The internet indirectly, the internet was not created by NASA. It was, neither was it invented by our board as to qualify that. It was actually created through an effort called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which back in the 1970s was trying to come up with a way to make sure that in the event of a nuclear war, people could still communicate through computers and through digital electronic devices. Literally, that's how it was invented. Fortunately, we haven't had to test that hypothesis, but the technologies that went into that were first developed in the space world. So, questions about this. So, let me talk about failure as success. Changes in the public movement. At the beginning of the 1960s, when the effort to send people into space and to land men on the moon began, there was an atmosphere of great expectations in the United States. The public very much supported the space program. It cost $10 billion, and it cost $100 billion. People probably wouldn't have thought it was great. This was wonderful. In the 1960s, the entire mood of this country changed dramatically. We didn't know that from historical accounts. Americans became pessimistic, cynical for government, especially much of that cynicism that persists today really began in this period. And in fact, sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists who have monitored the public mood over decades have really traced much of even our current malaise to this period. The Vietnam War severely divided the nation. Much of that legacy continues to persist today in terms of the role of the United States in the world, attitudes toward the military, talks versus doves and expressions that come back into vote, are being made of military intervention or opposed to it, the racial divide, persistence of poverty and of urban problems, urban blood. These things definitely affected the space program. There was a lot of cynicism. It particularly were opposed in the framework of congressional oversight of NASA and the congressional oversight of the entire space program by the end of the decade. Four questions were asked, and I want to go through these with you because they're very important in understanding evaluation issues. Should we continue to spend money on this? There are so many other problems facing the country, why are we spending money doing something we've already proved we can do? If the goal was putting a person on the moon and getting them back alive, well, we did that. Okay, one nothing. Game over. Let's move on. Is it appropriate to continue to do this? That was a question that Congress frequently asked of NASA. And NASA would come up with answers like, well, you know, what if Columbus, you know, discovered the new world and no one followed? And Congress kind of looked at that argument and said, yeah, fine. You can tell that to the voters in my district. If the goal is science, exploration, fine. Can't we do that with unmanned probes? Why do we have to send people to the surface of the moon? Send up unmanned probes that can land and dig holes and drill and do all kinds of tests and experiments. And of course, that technology existed in the 1970s as well. And it would be cheaper. Unless what you're saying is by sending a person up there, you're making a statement, a symbolic statement. And of course, NASA was. And this question, one of my favorites, I remember this, if we can land a man on the moon, why can't we fix our cities? Well, I think you all know the answer to that. These are two very different problems. The program succeeded beyond its expectations. I mean, this was a success that only failed because it was a success. There was tragedy. In 1967, one of the first models of the spacecraft that would actually put men on the moon had a terrible accident on the launch pad and the astronauts were killed in a fight. It was a very bizarre situation. There was a congressional investigation. There was a presidential commission. There was lots of consternation about this. It was horrible. It was tragic. But it was fixed. That problem didn't arise again. The goal of landing people on the moon was achieved. And the scientific and the political gains were significant. Politically, the prestige. Scientifically, we did learn a lot from these explorations. Not just, by the way, about the moon, but we learned a lot about how people could live in space for long periods of time. And that was a very important thing. But the success spread some contempt. Massive made it look too easy. And in fact, that was exactly what Congress said. Okay, improvement can be done. Now you're doing it again and again. We can't fund something that just does the same thing repeatedly. You have to articulate new goals. In 1970, I mentioned Apollo 13 on Tuesday, a tragedy was averted that was the good news. But the bad news is this only reinforced the argument that maybe we shouldn't be testing science too much. You know, maybe that was a near mess. Maybe we should back off on this risk and go back to just unmanned missions to the moon. If we're going to send men into space and women too, we ought to make sure that we can put them up in a situation where we can get them back pretty easily, like orbiting the Earth, sending them to another world that's a little risky. So given the need for new goals and the desire to avoid risk as part of the people who are evaluating this program, the question that I believe you with is maybe we could better spend a space program budget on other things. And that's basically what Congress asked. That's basically what the public asked Congress to ask. That's basically what presidential administrations began asking of NASA. Those of the questions really that generated the whole subsystem. And we'll see how that played out in a moment what kind of policy transformation that resulted in. Questions about this? Do you see where this is going? This is significant for a lot of programs, science and technology programs in particular. So where did it go? Well, remember the diagram. Evaluation is feedback. Feedback goes back into, it's a closed loop that goes back into the process of articulating new demands, generating support for new programs or changes in old programs or modifications or reforms or something. Well, by 1972, when the Apollo program was still going strong, the last sets of astronauts were being sent onto the surface of the moon. Congress forced NASA into a, in quotes, a choice. You don't really get the choice, but it's phrased as a choice. It's kind of like the choice that your parents gave you. You can make your bed first and clean up your room. Or you clean up your room first and then make your bed. But I'm just leaving the choice to you. And if you didn't leave your room, then you're not going out with your friends. Okay. The choice. We can continue moon landings. That's really what you want to do. If you can prove that this is scientifically viable, that there's something to this that warrants continuance. Or you can have something that you've also told us you'd really like to have. A space shuttle program. Of course, we all know about the space shuttle program. The space shuttle program and a space station. By the way, do we have a permanently staffed space station? Anybody know? Not something that gets a lot of coverage in the media, but it is. It's an international space station. There are Russians living on it. There are French living on it. I can't understand how that can work. But there are people living up there permanently. There are American astronauts up there and scientists. At any rate, the idea would be that these would be two programs that would provide a permanent presence in space. The shuttle would effectively help build the space station. In fact, many shuttle missions since the 1980s have actually been, almost like one commentator joke, teamsters in space delivering stuff that could be put into the space station or build parts of it. Literally that's true. You'd have a reusable space craft. Not a one-time mission, but something that could go up, land on its own, go up again, land on its own. And it could perform various missions, including build what NASA called Near Earth Capacity. Who knows what might come of this? Not only could it help build the space station, but down the road, if the federal budget could afford it, that Near Earth Capacity could be used maybe to launch probes to Mars or to other planets from outer space. You'd already be there. You wouldn't have to land, launch something from the Earth, which is very expensive. You'd already be in space. You'd have the space station. You could do all this neat stuff and you could do it on a fairly good budget. Distributive policy, very important. Such a program would serve many constituencies, many more than landing on the moon. It would serve a scientific constituency. What does the shuttle do? What has it done over the past 20 years? A lot of experiments. Lots of experiments. NASA not only takes up astronauts, but it takes up scientists who are trained as scientists and astronauts to go up and conduct various experiments. Geological experiments, photographic experiments, biological experiments, chemical experiments. To my knowledge, no social scientists or planners have a lot of them in the shuttle, which actually is maybe a shame because I think there's a lot of things that we all know about as well. Just looking at the Earth and outer space, certainly, but it gives a little different perspective on things I wouldn't manage. Educational. Maybe we could even send teachers into space. That idea, obviously, came and gone. Challenger disaster. But that was the idea. It would serve not just as a scientific platform, but a teaching platform and a commercial enterprise. The space shuttle also, many of those missions have been financed by private enterprise. To do what? Anybody? No. Times of things commercially have been done in space through the shuttle? Tourism? Tourism? Tourism, not on the shuttle. The Russians have done that. Maybe NASA should have done that. I don't know. How about communications satellites? Satellites are private ventures and, of course, we get all of our telecommunications or cell phones, GPS systems and cars, satellite TV and radio. Those are commercial enterprises. They pay NASA to deliver their satellites and place them in the orbit, instead of launching it on their own. They load this stuff in the bay of the shuttle, they take them up and you can even go back and fix them. Repair them. Think of that. This is a real business enterprise. There's a lot of junk up there. It's incredible how much junk there is up there. It's actually a little fragile. So space policy is distributed policy. This would be, in Congress's thinking, a cost-effective strategy. It would also permit other monies to be spent on man-planetary problems. Think of it. If we stopped this crazy idea of trying to land men on the moon and bringing back, we'll have this reusable space shuttle, a permanent space station, the ability to send probes to Mars and Venus and other places, and you can have your exploration and you can have a permanent presence in space. But you can't have those things and keep going to the moon. And is there any place in here to send people to other planets? That's a real far distance. It's not even far off. And in fact, it's not even in any of the budgets for NASA. It hasn't been for decades. You had changes in temporal perspectives. You had changes in perceptual perspectives. You even had changes in cultural assessments about why we should be having a space program. And according to John Loxon, who's a policy analyst, a space policy expert at George Washington University who's written extensively on NASA for many, many years, this led to a policy transformation. Essentially, the change was we would have a very different set of programs. Questions? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you're going to go over this more, but I was kind of curious about this program and how important it is in the eyes of the public about pursuing this opportunity. I mean, you guys understand kind of symbolic implications and try to, like, one up the Russians? But, I mean, how important it is in terms of the priority in the public perception and, like, do we really need this program? Great question. We are going to talk a little bit about that in a few moments, but to answer that right now, this is a good example. And Baldwin's Tarte and Tarte sort of address this issue, but they don't spell out its implications very solidly. There is a game when you look at policy success as well as policy fight, or when you look at programs that have characteristics both of what we've been describing and which decision makers try to read what they think the public wants, even if the public doesn't articulate it very clearly. But without getting too far ahead of the public, but at the same time, not being behind the public opinion. And essentially, that's kind of what's happened with this program as we're seeing it. How much support was there really for this program is kind of the question you're asking. And I think the answer is it was probably very widespread, but about an inch deep. There was never a huge depth of support for this whole notion of a manned space flight program that would put man on the moon and return them to do that on a kind of permanent basis. It was broad because it appealed to a lot of feelings during the Cold War, and it seemed to be scientifically and technologically achievable. But it rested on certain premises, as we'll see in a moment. One of those premises is that we could afford it. It wouldn't divert money from anything else, and that it was, in effect, morally right. And that's a very important issue. Should we be doing this if we have all these other problems? What kind of a message does that send? If we're trying to influence the rest of the world, what kind of a message does it send that we're sending people on the moon to plant an American flag? When we have all these problems in our cities and all of this racial unrest and we have an interminable war, it's extremely unpopular and divisive. Does that help a little bit? Yeah, we're going to come back to that in a moment. That's a very good question. So, again, it comes back to this, I think, larger question of, in whose opinion or according to whom are we estimating a program to be down to the moon? We're not so sure. Can you give a couple of words about the last point about the change in temporal, sexual and cultural assessment? Do you mean like the change in the public mood you were talking about earlier? Yeah, largely changes in the public mood. The temporal change was Congress and, of course, President Kennedy in the early 60s who really was the sort of architect of this thought they read the public mood as ambitious. This would be something that people would really buy into and there was a surplus of resources available to do this so it would be something good. Temporally, values changed by the end of the decade. But perceptual really evolves around what it is that you think it of as the benefits. And in this case, you start out with something that's seen as national prestige and science for science sake. But we've got to go there because it's there and we can do it. Why do we climb the mountain? Because it's there. What else do you need to know? But by the end of the decade, it's way to benefit cost. Is this the best way to, you know, if we're trying to improve communications and computers and all of this stuff, there could be other ways of investing in those things. You don't have to send people to the moon to do that. There are other ways you can do that. And then cultural, I think we're next to this deeper question involved in some hard talk about in terms of the value of certain things symbolically. And we'll come back to that in other policy issues as well. In particular, this broader set of perceptions. So in the sense that the loop, I mean, it's just sort of whatever the place in the positions because if you think about technology, you would inspire the virtue or the value of the nation and then you go and you focus on something and then something else happens that then makes us unhappy with that technology. Or to have the same technology that we thought created a good virtue, made us simple or whatever and then it starts all over again. Right. Or you begin asking other questions, hard questions that weren't asked initially like, okay, this is good for America. It's also going to create all these jobs. What are we going to do with all these people when we're no longer going to the moon? For everyone to go to college and study aerospace engineering, is that what we're saying? Is this the future? What about all of these social problems that aren't being addressed with a sufficient level of attention by policy makers? So the notion of being a policy analyst is knowing that every situation is going to have multiple factors and trying to account for them to the best of our ability and then make the best of your time. Best of your ability, yes. And Logston, by the way, who's written extensively on the space program since this time, actually was actually appointed to the Presidential Commission to examine the challenges as to the first space shuttle disaster. And one of the things that Logston introduced is that what was created during this era was not only a program, but a culture that became very insular and insulated. If we can send a man to the moon, by gosh, we can send a space shuttle up and it's below freezing. There's no danger to the astronauts. Yes, we've been told that these fuel pods have some good luck. They know the risks. They're astronauts, you know. It became very cavalier, arrogant, and that carried on to a lot of the ways the space community can run. So it has those deeper implications. Did policy analysts forecast this? No, they weren't asked to. They were asked to assess very narrow criteria. So let's go ahead and move on to some concluding observations about this case. So again, media reaction. These are just some samples of things that are said when Congress decided to end Project Apollo. And I like these because just a sample, this is certainly not a systematic content analysis of the media that people have done such things. But kind of a nice way of also I think addressing this question about what kind of support was there really? And support vary. One columnist from the Chicago Sun-Times and now thank God a whole crazy business is over. Sort of something for a lot of people. Christian Science Monitor. Very innovative. Step back. Let's look at this in a broader and more perspective. I love this. Such technological feats as going to the moon do not absolve people of responsibilities on earth. I mean, you could, you know. And in Time Magazine, I don't know what you'd make of this elaborate quote other than person that wrote it probably could have also written scripts for movies. There. Magnificent efforts to develop the machines, blah, blah, blah, blah. Americans lost the will and the vision to press on. Probably true in a period of time. This writer claims that long after we get through all of the problems that continue to face the world, we'll look back at that period of going to the moon as a very glorious period. That's an interesting question. It's hard to prove this is true or false that's asking for the perspective of history. But it's an argument that I think we've all heard. Well, yes, it might seem in the context of the press of contemporary events, contemporary meaning even into our era. What awaits the time? Oh, gosh. Who cares? But, you know, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, somebody might look back and say, that was really the defining moment in human history. All this other stuff was... Take your pick. Different perspectives. But I think the perspectives and these perspectives came out in 1972 give us some barometer, if you will, as to how the public or at least opinion readers look in the immediate corner. Let's totally switch gears. I'm going to need you to hear about the proof that I got. What does this project prove about policy good? What do you want to start? This is a classic case in policy analysis and it's a classic case in policy evaluation. That is, we're going to see in a few moments illustrates a lot of the issues that Bowmans and Tarte talk about. And also, I think, talk about many of the issues that we've been amplifying last week when we talked about implementation and also our discussion that began Tuesday on valuation. This is a picture of Pruitt-Igoe shortly after it was completed in the mid-1950s. It was a modernist design, housing project. It was first designed in 1951. By the way, the architects that designed Pruitt-Igoe, the architectural firm, there were several architects involved. One Japanese architectural firm. The same firm that later designed and built the World Trade Center. It's named World Trade Center in New York. It was a high-rise complex, 35-acre site, 33 11-story buildings. And it was in the words of the planners and architects designed for interaction. What do you think? Did you interact comfortably in that? Multiple benefits were proposed for this project. It would be a solution to problems of urban renewal. The site, I wish I could show you a picture of the site, but it was basically a blighted slum neighborhood of single-family buildings that it was just basically raised and this was built as a place. It would not only provide housing, but it would combine housing and various social services within the complex. There would be family service agencies. There would be a medical clinic. There would be shopping. There would be social services provided within the complex so that the lower-income families living in this complex would need not go far to get the services they need to presumably, well, this is part of the question, presumably A, lift them out of poverty or B, manage their poverty. And that's kind of what this theme and talking about in this case is very significant. Was this really designed to promote the welfare of low-income people providing public housing project where they could get services in a nice, neat way of segregating them from the rest of society, sticking them in an enclave away from nice neighborhoods, away from nice people. Okay? And just kind of keep them almost contained. Managed. Managed poverty is a theme that we see in much of the discussions surrounding Pruitt-Eiger. But when it was designed, the designers believed they were not only combining housing and services, but they were providing a park-like setting that would be environmental amenities. Children could play safely in this area. There was green space. You could picnic. Families could enjoy it. And having these people living in these high-rises with services present and with access to public transportation, you can see the bus. My goodness. It will facilitate a sense of community. I mean, aren't these things that we want public housing to do for low-income families, certainly seem to make sense. So, when it was completed, this is what we came up with. This aerial view was also taken shortly after it was completed. This view I find more striking in terms of the statement that this makes in terms of urban design. Now I could ask the question again. How many of you would want to live there? I'm seeing one. Go ahead. Yes. Yes. Thank you for raising this. That's absolutely true. This is a model that may have gone out of hold in some ways in the United States. In highly dense cities in Asia, you still see this. And it does raise the question as to whether or not all of the social failures of planning and policy embedded in this may also be very mild. Or if there are some cultural factors that mediate in this. Something about the architects and planners that designed this. This was a federal policy. Federal funds permitted the city of St. Louis to build a housing project, public housing project. It was a redistributive policy which is to say benefits would be given to a certain segment of the population, the Y-thousand. But like many federal programs, the discretion on how to implement it was left to local officials. So this was not really the federal government that made this project. It was the city of St. Louis that made this project. And city officials decided to do several things. Yes, they wanted to build a public housing project. Yes, they wanted to concentrate on this. Yes, they wanted to do all these things that seemed noble and perhaps well-intentioned. If you make a reminder on that, it's not going to be a little bit wile. But they also wanted to build a model that they honestly believed could be useful for middle income as well as low income subsidized families. In fact, the phrase that was used in the 1950s was a Manhattan-style development. In fact, if you drive New York City, you do see also this kind of housing. Although they might look this way from the outside, from the air, inside, they're very different. And the kind of quality of life that persists within those developments are not the same. One of the initial failures of policy was the substitution of design for planning. It was assuming that simply design would satisfy all of the needs of planning and really not regard the possibility that other things might happen to this development. This became the use of phrase that I talked about on Tuesday a multi-modal failure. We can start with social expectations and public perceptions. It was anticipated again as an integrated development. It would combine housing, social services, environmental amenities and so forth. Although the term was not used much in the 1950s, it would also be a transit oriented development close to downtown and would have public transit access. So from a design standpoint it seemed to make sense within the context of the time, particularly for low income people that might not have long needs. It was also to be an integrated development, racially. But it didn't turn out that way. Whites, by and large, did not want to live in close proximity to blacks. And yet the whole idea of this development was that everyone would live in close proximity to everyone. So, first off, you're segregating the poor. This is public housing that's not a mixed use neighborhood or a mixed residential neighborhood. It's an isolated enclave. And now you have a situation where de facto, that is to say, in fact, not by law. By law by the mid-1950s in the state of Missouri housing was supposed to be integrated. But in fact, people could choose to live where they want. And white people did not want to live in close proximity to black people. So this became a income segregated and racially segregated community. Thus, the entire project soon had only black residents. Von Hoffmann has done one of the best studies, by the way. Housing Studies Senator Carter on Pruitt-Igoe, I urge you to read his work if he's not. He argues that basically what happened from this point forward was a cascading set of failures. One failure led to another failure led to another. But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. Once it was populated by impoverished residents, the project's outcome, the whole notion of being a model of our densified urban Manhattan-style development became out of sync with the original decision-maker goals of being a high-density model of residential development. In effect, once, although initially viewed as a social experiment, over time the project became seen by the public, remember our discussion Tuesday, as a locally unwanted land use. Oh my gosh, you know who lives there? That's just poor people and they're all African-American. You don't want to go into that area. And besides that, since it's only poor people, we don't really want to spend a lot of money and time maintaining this thing. After all, I mean, my gosh, we built it. What do we have to do? They have a sense of community, let them maintain it. It was poorly maintained and neglected, largely due to inadequate continued funding, so we had perceptual and temporal change. Initially, this was supposed to be a symbol of urban development, but it soon became transformed into something much more pragmatic and unfortunately much more negative. Something that we built probably was a mistake, but we're stuck with it, so we certainly don't want to invest anymore in it. We'll just kind of put it out of our minds and forget about it, not maintain it, and maybe it'll go away. A multi-mobile policy failure, almost by definition, is a failure of unanticipated consequences. And Pru and I go, is a classic example of cascading unanticipated consequences. Instead of putting bullets on here, I chose some actual quotes from some studies that we've done on Pru and I go, which to me say much more about the failures in the policy stand than I could ever say. Self, the problems were endless. Yeah, okay. Elevators stopped on only the fourth, seventh floors, tenants complained of noisy roaches, crime, drug use, no one felt ownership of the green spaces. Oh, we're going to have all these green spaces be great environmental amenities, but who owns it, who manages it, who takes care of it? Well, I don't know. You guys, look here, on many cities, this is quite striking, 33 buildings remember, 10,000 people stacked in an environment of despair. Lee Rainwater is a sociologist who's also done some studies of Pru and I go. Great case studies. I love this quote, a federally built and supported slum. There's an update. As perceived as a failure, policymakers literally as well as figuratively abandoned it. You've heard the expression of success is adopted by everyone and failure is an orphan. Well, here you go. Punanticipated consequences, changes in perceptions, and let me mention a final general category of failures that Pru and I go symbolizes. And to some extent, many of the other social policies to deal with questions of poverty and the underclass and underrepresented groups in America would also probably fit into this category. What Boven's and Tart call goal-based failure. And if you're wondering what that phrase means, I think Pru and I go really is the poster child if you will for goal-based failure. Planners and policymakers assume that a rationally built project designed in a modernist context based on objectivist models of human behavior e.g. poverty not as understood by the poor not as felt and experienced by the poor but poverty is understood by academic and social sciences. We know what the problem is. The problem is they don't have affordable housing. We can't take a bus downtown. That's the problem. We could just fix that. We'd solve the problem of poverty. Rationally constructed project based on objectivist models of human behavior would provide a reasonable solution. This, my view, and I think in others, a classic principal agent problem. Had this project been built, which projects were not built in the 1950s by asking the poor what kind of housing would create a sense of community without living with the poor, without going into poor neighborhoods, without actually understanding the conditions of poverty, racism, oppression, breakdown of families, breakdown of community, would you create a rat maze for people living? No, you wouldn't. We might not know what we would build, but we wouldn't build this. This is what we build. A couple of other observations. Tru and I go was the most, probably the most notorious example of this huge, categorical, cascading policy failure of public housing by all of these problems. But as many analysts, Rainwater, Von Hoffman, others who have written on this, was this an exceptional case? What would you think? Did we do things like this in Los Angeles? We do things like this in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, in Chicago, in Panama? This is a model that has been replicated, was replicated throughout the 1950s in particular in the 60s. Tru and I go was the most notorious failure for a lot of reasons that were probably unique to the setting of St. Louis, but by no means were unique in terms of the overall symptoms and problems. A lot to digest here. Questions? Comments about this? You know, behind both situations where there was a really complicated, really nuanced problem and the solution was of kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. They kind of ignored the local context, the local culture and all the aspects on the ground that really are an impact out of this. That's an excellent point. It's better than anything. One-size-fits-all. We know, top down, we're going to design it, we're experts and sure enough it's got to work. I mean, we have the knowledge so it's got to work. It's exactly right. It's exactly right. It is a one-size-fits-all solution. So here's a question. I'm going to come back to this later, but I'll raise it now. So we have this one-size-fits-all solution that clearly it doesn't work. Clearly it ends up being an adjunct failure. There's crime, there's concentrated poverty, there's neglect. So once you realize that this failure occurs what do you do? Do you think the logical outcome is the next time around that you're faced with this set of challenges? You do something very different? I mean, logically that would hold, right? Assuming that the policy process is a process of learning, would you do something? You would. You guys would, I know. But what do you think? I mean, is that the way the policy process worked with Crew-it-I? Didn't we say, well, this didn't work. So let's admit, let's fess up. We goofed. But we're going to do better next time. We're going to talk to the poor. We're going to embrace the community. We're going to get to know what the problems are. And sure enough, we're going to turn it around and we're going to come up with a better model. Does that happen? I feel like with that solution, even though it's the ideal solution where you try to get that support from the local community and try to do research, I feel like after one year they're going to try to quantify those roles really quickly and say, okay, it didn't work. Let's go back to the old model. Let's go back to what we know. Yeah, let's go back to what we know. And besides, I mean, these buildings, you can rep, I mean, it's very easy to build. Once you have plans for them. That's pretty much the case. Public housing policy in the United States, housing for low income families has been in a kind of funk, if you will, for decades. We don't really know what to do. There have been many experiments in more visionary communities where efforts have been made to kind of construct a political consensus working with the poor. Some solutions have been developed that are tenable. They're not well publicized, perhaps precisely because they're not generalized, which is the whole point. They don't need to be generalized. What you don't need is a one size fits all policy. You need something that works in East LA, in Anaheim, in Word. So it becomes harder to elicit the lessons. And it becomes harder to come up with a kind of textbook example of what you do. And maybe that's the point. You don't. But if you're impatient, as you point out, and you say, we've got to have results of the plan in one year. We have to see the direction where you're not going to have political support, then you're probably not going to have much success in improvising and experimenting. Other comments or thoughts? Classic problem. So here's the inside of one of these beautiful 11-story buildings. This, by the way, this particular picture was not when the complex was condemned. This was when it was occupied. This is what it was like. Absolutely untouched. And between 1972 and 1976, the city of St. Louis raised the entire complex. So who would I go? It only exists in the photographs. At the quote, basically. It could be an example of victory disease when, after the war, he had a system analysis. He had a systems planning. And it worked. It wouldn't work for something like NASA because that kind of need, that kind of art science, we need to come on a camaraderie to create that kind of program. But when you approach it in social policy, in public policy, as this example I'm not able to start to say the idea of a quantified veterinary top-down analysis and these pictures kind of remind me of this quote that although America won the war, in some ways it appeared as if America was the country that was bombed. Yeah. I mean, this could be dressed in or something. Yeah. No, that's a great point. And we'll sort of come back to that a little bit later, but I think you phrased it really elegantly. There is this sort of systems thinking and it was also part of the Cold War culture of America. You know, I wasn't joking before when I showed you that quote. Well, if we could put them out on the moon, why can't we fix our cities? They're very different problems, but in fact, in some ways, we approach them comparable. Well, if we just put our initiative together, we could come up with a technological solution. Well, for what I know, it's a technological solution. Cheap economical design seems to fit together from a design standpoint, but it's not. It's not fit. It doesn't fit. This is the way we often do it. To get back to the systems thinking, let me have you think about this challenge as well, if we will come back to this. Systems thinking generally lends itself to very sort of narrow technological issues, putting people on the moon, maybe even designing a weapons system for the Pentagon. But in fact, research has shown, and we'll come back to this in a little bit, some problems in evaluation research, maybe systems theory isn't really systematic. Maybe it doesn't work for any kind of evaluation. Maybe in all evaluation and in the generation of new policies or as a result of feedback, we need systems thinking that's true. But we also need thinking that presumes failure at the beginning of the policy. And back to that point, I want to think about this. We call this adaptive policy. Assume that a policy probably will fail. Assume problem issue, unanticipated consequence. You simply cannot anticipate. If you start from that kind of humble and humbling premise, which by the way is supported by good social science research and good planning research, and they equate the two here because they really come out with the same sets of experiences. If you assume that's true, then the challenge is not to try to figure out what it is you don't know. The real challenge is to create a setting for the policy making so that as you learn of the potential for failure you can do what? You can adapt. Which means what? Make changes. Reverse direction. Retool. Re-evaluate. Right. Right. And in fact that's one of the great challenges. And without getting too far ahead of myself, unfortunately while we have begun to do that in many programs, we don't usually do them without a film. There has to be some major systemic failure that gives us pause and then we say, we maybe really need to rethink this whole thing. And even then you don't really adaptively think about these policies for duty and being able to do it. It's true, even in systems models failure can be the only difference is the failure is systemic. It's the whole system fails. Other questions are coming. So let's do violence push on just a little bit here. So what kinds of overall lessons can we take? Not just from crew at IGO and not just from NASA, but from all of these policy failures at moments are talked about. We've been alluding to really throughout this course. These are not an exhaustive menu of why policies fail. That would be an endless list, I know. But what I've tried to do is to give you what I think are six of the major lessons that come out of much of the policy literature including studies of cases like crew at IGO and including many analyses of a whole range of public policies. Not just in the United States but worldwide. And I think these six things I would say are among the most major reasons why policies fail. Now what we can do about these studies is another matter, but let's go ahead and look at these one by one. And let me start with this issue of timing and information. It's not enough to say that policies fail because they don't have good information. We have to push it further. The end goal has to be pushed much further. And this is one of the things we've learned in evaluation studies of education. Housing, poverty, development, transportation alluded to this couple weeks ago. The environment. You have to try to gather information about future conditions. I'm reminded of a humorous quote I think it was might have been by J. Robert Oppenheim who invented it. Singularly responsible for developing the atomic bomb. But it was a great quote. He said, you know, predictions are hard. Especially about the future. Love it. Yeah, I guess that would make sense. We need to at least make some intelligent estimates about future conditions when we undertake public policies. There is a whole subfield in policy analysis and policy evaluation which is called future studies. There's even a series of journals about this. A lot of people look at this and it sort of looks like some sort of magic or some prognostication that has no basis in science. In fact, that's not true. Future studies argue that while we cannot predict the future what we can do is if we understand failures in the present and in the past we can at least ask good questions about what we'd like to know about future conditions so that we can make intelligent guesses. And they are guesses. They're not categorical judgments. They're not certain. They are guesses. In fact, we do this when we make investment decisions where sort of making predictions based on past history and past achievements how the economy is likely to grow. We may be wrong but if our information is extensive if it comes from multiple sources if we talk to several groups of stakeholders all of these things really tight together if we talk to many different groups and stakeholders if we have many models of information multiple sources are we more likely to be right or not? We ain't going to be perfect but at least we'll have some sense of what it is that we need to revisit what it is we're going to need to know. Predicting societal attitudes are very difficult but one prediction that is safe to make is that whatever the public thinks about an issue today is not necessarily a good predictor of what they're going to think tomorrow or next year or the decade. So we have to understand if this policy evaluators are saying when they put this idea out there is that we not only want information about the future but what we're really saying is we want to have a good understanding of policy history. We really want to understand the past unless we understand why policy failures occur and we understand all of the missteps what information was ignored why it was ignored that we can't avoid these things in the future. And at least we can structure a model that takes into account multiple sources of information and maps out multiple places where we'll need to revisit and revise our thinking a long way. This is part of adaptive thinking and I'm building sort of a platform for us to think about policy success a little later on but this is one big reason. Second this is an organizational problem this second but I think it's naturally enough related to the first bullet. Ingram and Frazier we've done a lot of work on path determinacy in public policy we talked about path dependent policies a couple weeks ago cases of Europe and the United States one of the lessons that comes from their work and other work is that one of the reasons why failure occurs is because of the kinds of organizations within the state that make decisions and how we structure those organizations Again if you stop and think about this if failure is at some level inevitable we all fail we all fall short that is human nature there is a thing as human nature that certainly would be at the core of it the problem isn't failing the problem is do you have an administrative capacity to reverse a failure or are you so arrogant and conceited and sure of yourself and proud of exposing your error that you are centralized in your decision making and as a result immune to counter veiling pressures and counter veiling information we call these accountability resistant cultures and they could be just about any agency of government at least any agency of government at certain stages in their growth and development how many of you have developed an accountability resistant culture is it only government and we have them in the private sector of course we have them in the non-governmental nonprofits yes centralized bureaucracies resistant and immune to counter veiling pressures we see this in many public works type decisions the army corps of engineers bureau of reformation well that dam failed well that's okay we'll build another one but this one will be better we'll just keep doing what we know how to do because that's what we did that's how we fix water problems we build dams Los Angeles river floods I know how to fix that we turn it into a concrete canal that'll show them we won't have that problem anymore social welfare programs cruel idea accountability resistant cultures we know how to do it and we're not going to change let me stop with those two questions this makes sense these kind of tie together but they are different symptoms different problems big rights and responsibilities on Tuesday I talked about the fact that when failure occurs people want to know who's responsible and you'll notice when failures occur in public policy in both of them there are other examples that you and I see every day in public policy is the supremacy of the passive voice well it failed not we failed it failed the outcome did not necessarily fail not we blew it's an avoidance of responsibility language is very important in understanding public policy when we talk in a passive voice we are in effect giving up responsibility and accountability William Asher who is an economist who has studied this problem in environmental policy and in natural resource policy and in other areas says that this vagueness of rights and responsibilities of policy actors is often to blame for why policies failure I was going to jump ahead and talk about this later but I'll mention this example we all remember that Bill blowed out last summer he was responsible well if you listen to all the protagonists no one no one failed it failed it didn't work the outcomes didn't occur the way we thought they would responsibility you're going to get you remember the head of BP said I'm not responsible I want my life back I want to talk about organizational resistance to change that doesn't say something so we get a picture bias and agenda driven behavior this one kind of speaks for itself if a decision is driven by an agency or an organization's ideology or political objectives rather than in response to a clearly defined problem do we really understand what the problem is the organization that has a way of dealing with these problems we're paid to build dams we're paid to build roads don't bother us with public transit questions we're paid to build public housing projects that's what we do we're going to work, we're going to be safe that's someone else's problem that's the social service agency's problem our problem is just to build a housing project we don't worry about that we work on restoration conflicts of interest we haven't mentioned this very much but it needs to be stated we know because of the subsystem of policy making that every phase of the policy process is interest driven and interest influenced and what that does create and this question came up a couple days ago conflicts of interest and a core distinction between implementation and evaluation the people who do the evaluation often are the same ones that implement the programs and because of that there's no real accountability one of the things we do know and there actually has been a book that came out by a sociologist at Santa Barbara on the Gulf Oil Law a fairly recent book which argues that it was a boom novel but it was a conflict of interest the government the department of the interior essentially said here's the way you should implement safety systems on an oil platform and they mapped it out very thoroughly and all these manuals and all these training programs and then they said furthermore we don't have the time to come and visit you in a value like this you guys do you evaluate yourself and then you report to us and you tell us how it's working well, what are you going to say oh we're failing abysmal we're not doing anything you've asked us to do now, you're going to say it's all working, we haven't had an explosion so it must be working hasn't been an accident space shuttle accidents NASA the accountability resistant culture came into this issue presidential investigations of the space shuttle accidents a few years back the first one in 1986 and the last one in 2003 or 2004 said that there was basically a conflict of interest between the engineers and the launch officials and the people that were supposed to be overseeing and auditing their behavior and their decisions they would basically just sign off whatever they would do, oh that's fine oh a tile fell off just say it's over just check it off we've got to get this launch in the way check it off on the sheet it's just one tile can't cause problems so there we go and finally this one what we're going to talk about next week when we talk about future public policy and I do want to say something about it now and this is the reason I made it last the failure to seek and to acquire public acceptance of decisions this is a categorical failure on its own and you cannot look at a single program environmental policy housing policy poverty programs community development education in which a failure at some level cannot be traced to the failure to incorporate the public in decision making schools that ignore parents public housing projects that ignore the poor nutrition programs that ignore families you can just go on and on and on and list this includes input into alternative models of choice hey here's how we would design the housing project what do you guys think oh no no we'd like something else what about this here's a different model an incorporation of public values in program design proved I go clearly failed no effort to incorporate public development no more implementation for that minister questions about fees a lot of a lot of reasons for policies failed I could list 1800s but I think these six pretty much captured let me leave you with a few minutes remaining so that's the bad news so this comes back to some questions some of the numbers you've raised about what have we learned from this the systems models adaptiveness can we ensure that policies succeed and let me let me give you my spin on that no we can't but we can design them to be technically credible scientifically defensible and when I say scientifically I mean science as well as engineers and planners as well as social science we are all sciences many different so the police study of social science and planners is much more difficult to figure out because they have many more nuances than predicting the weather and they can be politically effective if adaptively designed by an active design well a lot of research has been done on this we start out assuming that public policies will fail to fully embrace temporal spatial, perceptual and goal-based values let's really parse it up let's assume that we're going to blow it on at least one of these dimensions over time attitudes will change there will be spatial differences but works in Connecticut won't necessarily fit California and what Washington wants won't necessarily apply in Sacramento and goal-based values big term in this second sub-bullet incorporate an error provocative design in public policy what in the world does that mean well within a policy assume that flaws are inevitable and politically unavoidable given the interest group pressures in their design public policies are not developed in a vacuum the poor weren't consulted but you better believe that the rich were the powerful interest in St. Louis we want the poor stuck in this neighborhood we don't want them in our neighborhood let's build a development for them in this neighborhood and we want to make money we want to have a design that can be replicated maybe changed a little bit to serve middle-income folks as well so policies are going to fail for these reasons I'll leave you with this third bullet and we'll pick up on it on Tuesday next but I just want to get you thinking about this anticipate these flaws by providing checks and balances in the design of a policy at the first sign of a problem a street level official remember that phrase street level bureaucrat a street level bureaucrat responsible for some policy mode should be able to veto a decision you what I'm asking for here what I'm suggesting to you is that organizations that can adapt are flat a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines can walk into the chairman of the board's office and say you know what I've got a better idea of making this airline work by the way Southwest runs okay the street level inspector can come in and say I have a better idea I found a flaw and you're listening to and you can demand that some problem be inspected, audited re-visited we're starting to do these things in local government we're starting to do some of them in state government federal government another story but we'll come back to that on Tuesday questions we'll pick up on this on Tuesday