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CHAPTER TWO ECONOMIC INDIVIDUALISM AND THE “PUBLICNESS” OF POLICIES: CASES AND CONTROVERSIES Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. —PAUL SAMUELSON (Lohr 2004) Is economic individualism sweeping the world? In the words of economist Robert Kuttner (1997), is “everything for sale”? Do we serve “one market under God,” with market populism being “the New American consensus” (Frank 2004, xv)? Or perhaps public policies and public management are proceeding more as less as usual, the cyclical shifts in public and economic forces occurring well with normal range? One might well argue that in the United States not much of consequence has changed. There is still a “social safety net,” albeit one that seems to be shrinking, and the New Deal compact forged by Roosevelt is still in place, if a bit shaken. This book cannot provide a good answer to the “have things really changed” question, and, fortunately, its justification does not depend on any particular answer to that question. Policy and public management history is always about the ebb and flow of political and economic forces and the values they represent. Ideas pertaining to those values have perennial importance. This chapter emphasizes policies and government reforms arising from the shifts to market-based policies and governance, but less because of an inexorable march toward market-based policies than because there will always be market (and political) forces in democratically conceived governance. “COUNTERBALANCING”? Note the book’s subtitle: “Counterbalancing Economic Individualism.” This subtitle does not imply that policy-theories-based assumptions of economics or economic individualism are harmful, wrong, or of little practical use. Indeed , economics-based policy theories and ideas often contribute enormously 22 to policy deliberation, formulation, implementation, and, especially, analysis. Nor should the subtitle be taken as a rallying cry to more centralized policies emphasizing political control. Rather, the need for counterbalance owes more to shortcomings of ideas and theories pertaining to public interest and public values. These theories are generally not as well developed, not as precise, and rarely have accompanying analytical tools. Microeconomics-based policy theories have succeeded so well that they have in some instances driven competing policy theories, including theories of public interest and public value, from the intellectual playing fields. An assumption I make in this book, one not easily proved, is that the analytical power, including theory and tools of application, of contemporary microeconomics has helped lend force and persuasiveness to policies based on economic individualism. There are, of course, a great many forces in play that affect the ebb and flow of public policies and government reforms, and many of these (e.g., changing demographics, cross-national conflicts) have nothing to do with formally expressed ideas. But there is no claim here that economic individualism is the only factor affecting changes in public policy and management but rather that it seems to be making headway against public interest and public values influences. THE PUBLICNESS OF POLICIES: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE MIX OF ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY CHANGES? Regardless of how one feels about the relative importance of ideas as an ingredient of policy change, there is the fact of change awaiting explanation. Is there an imbalance not only in formal ideas, theories, and analytical tools but also in policies themselves? The answer to this question is that there is no answer , at least not apart from one’s values. What does “imbalance” mean with respect to policies? Another way to think about the question of policy change is this: Has the mix of market and political control of public policies changed? Are there changes in the relative publicness (Bozeman 1987) of policies and institutions? As suggested in chapter 1, we can think of almost any set of policies (as well as most sets of industrial firms and government agencies) as representing and responding to a distinctive mix of political and market forces. In this chapter we consider some contemporary policies by gauging their implications for this volatile aspect we have referred to as “publicness.” The implicit question for each policy is this: Has the mix of economic and political authority represented by these policy domains shifted from earlier periods? The answers to these questions are rarely straightforward. In this chapter we examine privatization cases, ones in which the mix of economic authority has changed such that publicness has diminished. These policies are not representative of the degree of publicness (or privateness) in contemporary policies. Indeed, they were chosen as examples of the different ECONOMIC INDIVIDUALISM AND THE...

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