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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (14740)	12/26/2001 9:17:30 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I'm still struck, reading it from the distance I do, just how unobjectionable it all is. Probably read too much Said lately. Now there's someone who writes from outside the policy mainstream. agreed. and I fully understand how narrow the range of actual debate is, compared to the full spectrum of alternative policies that would hypothetically be possible. And yet, and yet... Most of those hypothetical policies are not realistically available alternatives, because they would be eliminated somewhere along the way by powerful forces of one kind or another. That's not nefarious conspiracy theory, just the way the world works. So for actual policymakers, it becomes a two-level game. First, what is the real extent of the range of choice that I have? in other words, what policy options are plausibly available to me? Second, given an accurate assessment of the relative merits of those options in light of a wide range of different interests, which nets out the best (or the least bad)? I open my classes on these subjects with what I call "tekboy's first law of foreign policy": all policies suck, but some suck more than others. The students' job, I tell them, is to understand that policymaking is an act of constrained choice; understand the constraints; and understand how to maximize the utility (however defined) of the choices made. tb@mr.chips.com