Critical Thinking and Policy Development and Analysis

This blog builds upon Part 4: Policy Development. It is the opening part of a series on critical thinking and policy development and analysis. It provides the framework, as shown in the opening figure, for policy development and analysis. Following parts will use this framework to assess some key US federal policies.

I suspect we have some significant issues in policy development and analysis at the federal level. The examples we will use in Follow-on parts will help to illustrate this problem. Roughly speaking, the drivers for this problem include:

Political agendas that can skew policy.
Regulatory capture (see Critical Thinking: Logic and Rationality).
Lack of training.

I have seen firsthand some policy problems and failures. The causes of the problems and failures include:

Poorly defined policy objectives.
Poorly defined end state and success criteria.
Limited risk analysis, mitigation, and balancing.
Poorly designed processes to implement and assess the policy.

While the follow-on pieces will address specific policy problems, the table below summarizes key policies and their problems.

Table Example Policy Issues
Policy	Issue(s)
Food quality	The ostensible objective is to maintain a safe and healthy food supply. Yet obesity and other food related problems are exploding. Using ethanol in the fuel supply pulls corn away from food. What are the balancing metrics?
Drug Effectiveness	The ostensible objective is to provide safe, effective, and affordable medications for the American people. Yet drug prices are high, effectiveness is sometimes questionable, and they often compromise safety. An example is Alzheimer’s drugs. Recent reporting shows they are not effective. Same with drugs for ADHD. The drugs are increasingly tainted with fentanyl and as we medicated our kids to make them pliable, are we risking death and future impairments?
War on Drugs	The ostensible objective is to eliminate the flow of addictive illegal drugs in America. Yet drug deaths have continued to increase, and the flow of drugs is up, especially across porous borders. Drug trafficking organizations are strong and rich.
Poverty	The ostensible objective is to ensure American citizens have a quality of life and the goods and services they need to maintain it. Yet between the New Deal and Great Society programs, we have spent trillions of dollars and poverty is still with us and by some metrics is getting worse. How do we define poverty? Are the current definitions dated? Why don’t the programs work?
Afghanistan	The ostensible objective was to protect the American homeland from attack. Yet twenty years of combat took a toll on the American psyche. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan was problematic and left the Taliban in charge and potentially more dangerous than in 2001. The enormous expenditure of time, talent, and treasure spent in Afghanistan may have been better invested in the southern border and working to create more stable conditions in Latin America.

I used the term “ostensible object” in Table 1 because these objectives are not really clearly stated in publicly available documents. And in a Republic, where the citizens are owner operators, that is a huge problem.

The framework above provides a vehicle to address these problems and issues.

Table Policy Development and Analysis Framework
Component	Description
Qualities (C³V²)
Critical Thinking	Critical thinking provides the engine from policy development and analysis. See Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Key Components and Dimensions. Critical Thinking: Logic and Rationality Critical Thinking: Decisions and System 1 System 2 Thinking, Critical Thinking: Bounded Rationality and Time. The critical thinking framework and approach in these blogs is important for effective policies.
Competence	In the age of Social Justice, where hiring, especially in the government, is based more on demographics than competence, competence is an issue. To the extent hiring focuses on demographics or surface diversity, it may sacrifice cognitive and technical skills. Critical thinking and the associated activities require cognitive capabilities, training, and experience. The social justice focus is on the surface rather than deep diversity, which emphasizes cognitive diversity. Effective policy development and analysis require cognitive diversity.
Credence and Veracity	Credence and veracity are two sides of the same coin. Veracity is the truth, and credence is creating the conditions that convince people you are telling the truth. Like counterfeiters, policy-makers, however, can readily debase the credence and veracity coin. People hired for a specific trait often consciously or subconsciously shape their thoughts, decisions, and actions around this trait. On a conscious level, they may push programs that further this trait-focused agenda and perhaps compromise their veracity and rely on social engineering to prop up their credence. On a subconscious level, they may engage in several cognitive biases that could blind them to data and shape the way they see the environment. Regulatory capture may also skew policy and processes, and bureaucrats and legislators seek to please those they regulate in hopes of future lucrative jobs and campaign contributions.
Virtue	The antidote for potential debasing is virtue. Virtue helps people rise above their trait-focused agendas and biases to do the right thing. See several blog entries on virtue: Virtue, Wherefore Art Thou?, Virtue: Honor and Integrity, Virtue Leadership and Power. and Virtue And Courtesy are Requirements for Effective Solution Development and a Healthy Society. Unfortunately, our society does not seem to teach and value virtue and the political process is almost based on compromising virtue to make deals.
Activities
Processes	I discussed processes and process develop extensively in my book, Thrive in the Age of Knowledge. A policy is virtually meaningless without an implementing process or set of processes. The process(ess) needs to deliver the policy’s objectives and meet the desired end state. Therefore, the process needs to identify the factors and metrics to assess performance and achievement. They need to be instrumented to collect the data required to assess the metrics and evaluate them against established standards.
Data	Data, by itself, holds little value. Rather, it is a foundational element to create information and actionable knowledge. As mentioned above, processes need to identify the data required for metric assessment, create it and store it in a repository. Assesses data, such as evaluating a metric against a standard, creates information. Understanding the assessment implications and having the wisdom of what to do creates actionable knowledge. Thrive in the Age of Knowledge has chapters on data quality and assessment, repository development, and processes to manage the data>information>knowledge chain.
Policy Update & Adjustment	There is a robust literature on program analysis and evaluation. The materials apply to policy analysis and evaluation as well. The textbook we used in our doctoral course on program evaluation is pretty good and easy to read: 2Rossi, P. H., Lipsey, M. W., & Henry, G. T. (2019). Evaluation: A systematic approach (8th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN-13: 9781506307886. In addition to the concepts in this and other books and papers on program evaluation, the policy needs an evaluation process. Ideally, the process uses workflow to collect data and assess metrics. The workflow provides alerts if a metric is out of tolerance. The policy also needs a formal review process on at least a quarterly basis to assess performance against the desired objectives and to determine whether positive results for this policy negatively impact other policies or areas of concern. Balance is critical and policymakers need to establish trade-offs and rules to determine whether the policy does more harm than good.

The framework above has value only if it is used. It requires a bipartisan effort to put into place and to hold legislators and bureaucrats accountable for its use. The current aggressively partisan environment could, and most likely will, hinder any implementation. Therefore, the electorate must also engage in critical thinking to assess why politicians and bureaucrats resist accountability. The electorate are the owner-operators of the Republic. Politicians and bureaucrats are their agents.

And these agents have consistently violated their duties as agents. The owner-operators need to hold them accountable at the ballot box.