Clemons and McBeth - MavDISK

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46 PARTI . THEORY AND PRACTICE conversation! had two weeks before with Averell Harriman. . . sadly, neither of us forced a debate within the administration on that fundamental issue, and no such proposal was presented to Hanoi. (p. 300) Johnson was asking the right questions. But in his poker-playing fashion, he had held back crucial knowledge the Wise Men needed to give fully informed answerS. . . they had.received no Written materials. . . they did not receive Rear Admiral LaRocque's devastating re- port that a military victory in Vietnam was highly unlikely. Nor did they see Dick Helms's analysis that the risks of U.S. engagement were limited and controllable. And. to my disappointment, the president did not disclose to them a memorandum lhad given him the day before. (p. 306) A major cause of the debacle there lay in our failure to establish an organization of top civilian and military officials capable of directing the task. Over and over again, as my story of the decision.making process makes shockingly clear, we failed to address fundamental issues; our failure to identify them was not recognized; and deep-seated disagreements among the president's advisers about how to proceed were neither surfaced nor resolved. As I have suggested, this resulted in part from our failure to organize properly. No senior person in Washington dealt solely with Vietnam. With the president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and their associates di- viding their attention over a host of complex and demanding issnes,. some. of our shortcomings-- in particular, our failure to debate systematically the most fundamental issues-could have been predicted. (p. 332) Source: Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Copyright @}995 by Robert S. McNamara. Used by pennission of Times Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. Rationality or Something Else? We repeat our questions. Was the U.S. pursuit of the Vietnam War hurt by, or would it perhaps have been helped by, the use of the rational model? Is it accurate to characterize decision making at the highest levels of government during the Vietnam War as following the rational model, or is it more accurate to claim that it was not used? The story of decision making told by Robert McNamara reminds us not of the rational model. but of the model of decision making best described in Richard Neustadt and Ernest May's 1986 book, Thinking in Time. Neustadt and May argue that policymaking is predominantly marked by the following characteristics, which are antithetical to the rational model: I. Actors plunging toward action. 2. Decision making heavily based upon "fuzzy analogies." 3. The issue's past given inadequate attention. 4. Key presumptions not reexamined, or (sometimes) even examined. S. People and organizations seen through the lenses of "stereotyped suppositions." 6. "Little or no effort" made to consider choices in the light of an "historical sequence." (pp.31-33) This sort of decision making-what one might call the all-too-human model, not the rational model-is what was exemplified by McNamara's history lesson. The common critique is t1awed. There is plenty to fault with the decision-making process during the Vietnam era, but upon examination we do not believe it can credibly be used to discredit the results derived from using the rational model. Interestingly, the decisions sUITounding the Iraq war have been attacked as flawed due to a perceived lack of rationality. The President, or his "neocon" advisors, I t , I , t II I I I 1 CHAPTER 2 . THE RATIONAL PUBUC POUCY METHOD 47 are attacked for abandoning realism in favor of a Wilsonian foreign policy; for ignoring intelligence that did not fit their world view; for being unreasoning, unbending, and iITational. Could rational decision making have prevented, or improved the results from, the war in Iraq? Obviously even the question, let alone the answers, are subjective and value driven. In 2007 we learned that analyses predicted an insurgency and a long and bloody occupation that could fuel teITorism. Yet, the Bush administration (publicly at least) argued in 2003 that American involvement would be only a matter of months. As the examples of Vietnam and Iraq suggest, policy advice should not be tainted by political ideology. One of the major elements of the rational model is neutrality. While we do not necessarily believe that somebody can be totally neutral, we do believe that it is important that as an analyst you try to distance yourself from issues, and realize you own biases. Do not look at data and cherry-pick facts that meet your policy preferences. Oftentimes, your job will actually require you to try to keep your opinions and preferences out of your reports. But the core questions raised by the critics remain. Can rational decision making occur, and if it can, would it help? Does the rational model offer any help in deciding public problems? The mini-case that follows illustrates the potential usefulness of the rational model in practice. The community of Portersville (a fictional name) is located in a rural area in an under- .populated state and has a population of 500. The nearest cornmunity (population 3.500) is located 60 miles away. Portersville had a.small health care clinic that was located in a decaying old drug store on the community's only paved street. In the fall of 1993, the city's buildil1ginspector closed the clinic after several bricks fell off the building's facade and onto theside-walk.In addition, the building's roof was in disrepair and near collapse. The health care.clinic provided primary care to the citizens of Portersville, and withollt it citizens would have to travel 60 miles for basic immunizations, ankle sprains, flu sYmptoms, and so forth. The city decided to pursue the building of a new health care clinic. The decision-making process illustrated the usefulness of the rational model. The community had received a grant for $10,000 to hire an urban architect to design a bll;ilding for the clinic. The architect, unaware of rural realities, designed a spacious 4,100"square.foot building complete with the latest medical technology and a helicopter pad. The design stilTed interest among the community's health care specialists and among some citizens. The problem was that the architectural design was made without any analysis. Word of the multi-million-dollar design quickly spread throughout the community. The word around town was that the city leaders were trying to get the community to support a multi-million-donar could support. clinic that neither the community's tax base nor patient base City leaders feared the project was doomed. An outside university planner then entered the picture and took the community through a rational planning process. First. a mail sllrvey was sent to all residents, asking if they would support a new clinic, and, if so, under what circumstances. Second, focus groups were conducted at a town meeting one month after the survey mailing. From these two events, a problem was neatly defined, (continued)
48 Portersville citizens overwhelmingly wanted a primary (basic).healthcare clinic but only otlethat their smalI community could support without any large increases in taxes. From the survey and focus groups, it was detel'mined that the major evaluation criterion was .simply cost and effectiveness (would the clinic meet the needs of the citizens?). From this information, the community leaders brainstormed several alternative struc- tures. Using local building contractors, cost estimates were conducted and the pros and cons of each design discussed. A medical planning expert was brought in and took the community through a "health care utilization" planning process. This process used the cOffiII).unity'sage profile from census data to show demand for basic medical services. This formula predicts the annual number of primary care patients based on a community's demograpl1ic profile of age and gender. The formula was based on an empirical analysis of primary health utilization by age groups. For Portersville, the predicted number of primary care patients per year was 1,339. Using this number, the health care planner then was able to use another formula to subdivide the categories of likely utilization. For example, a certain percentage of the primary care visits would be vaccinations, a certain percentage for flu, and a certain percentage for broken bones, and so on. The data calculated, were then multiplied by the fees charged for each type of medical procedure, producing an estimated annual revenue flow for the proposed clinic. . With this revenue data in hand, and knowing what the county could afford tOisubsidize in the form of taxes, the planner decided that a much less-expensive and elaborate StrUcture should be built. It was clear that the proposed 4,lOO-square-foot, $750,000 strUc- ture was weIl beyond the needs and resources of Portersville. This rationaiand empirical analysis helped the community understand both what PortersvilIe would support financially and the correlated likely demand for services. The leadership group then engaged in some brainstorming and quickly determined that a simple 2,500-square-foot customized house could easily serve the community's health care needs. So, the two options now on the table were as follows: Option #1: A 4,100-square-foot building at a cost of $750,000 Option #2: A customized house converted into a health clinic at around $100,000 in costs Health care experts and community physicians all agreed that the customized house wouldmakean effectivehealth clinic. The costs were easily absorbedby the.community andby the county'sexisting tax base. This case is a good example of the usefulness of the rational model. The $750,000 building fi~t proposed by the architect could easily have destroyed the community's chances of getting a health care clinic. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the $750,000 building was not going :0 work in such a small community. But community leaders were excited about the elaborate iesign and the prospect of having such a facility in their town. Without rational analysis, the lttempt to sell this StrUctureto the community would have failed miserably, and if the building lad been built it would have been underutilized-a white elephant sitting mostly unused. The :urveys, focus groups, and outside experts helped the community leaders focus on the problem Ind on a politically acceptable solution. Evaluation criteria were discovered, solutions generled, pros and cons discussed,-and eventually a successful decision was generated. PARTJ . THEORYAND PRACTICE CHAPTER2 . THE RATIONALPUBUC POUCy METHOD 49 t I i SMALL CHANGE FIGURE 2-2 DECISIONALTYPES PROBLEM DEFINITION (Agreement) Health Clinic Case PROBLEM DEFINITION (No Agreement) 2 4 LARGE CHANGE The decision made in the Portersville case resulted in a policy in which problem definition was agreed upon and the policy change was small (the community already had a small clinic). The decision rested in quadrant I of the 2 X 2 matrix represented in Figure 2-2 (adapted from Braybrooke and Lindblom 1970, 78). Some scholars suggest that it is only on the rare and relatively less-important issues like the Portersville Health Clinic, and unlike Vietnam, where the rational model makes sense. (Deciding what to do in Vietnam, especially with all the value conflict over problem definition, places it squarely in quadrant 4.) For example, Braybrooke and Lindblom (1970, pp. 78-79), referring to a rational model of policymaking as synoptic methods, write that "Synoptic methods. . . are limited to . . . those happy if limited circumstances in which decisions effect sufficiently small change to make synoptic understanding possible." They also quote Herbert Simon stating: "Rational choice will be feasible to the extent that the limited set of factors upon which decision is based corresponds, in nature, to a closed system of variables" (p. 39). In sum, the charge has been levied that the rational model is of little relevance or value to the policy analyst. Is this true? How does one evaluate models? An explanation of model evaluation follows. Model Evaluation The rational model, like almost all models, can best be judged by three criteria. The first criterion is the ability to accurately describe. The fancy word scholars use for this is verisimilitude. Verisimilitude translates to the two familiar words it sounds like-very similar. In other words, models are usually expected to describe accurately. A model of a B-52 bomber should look enough like the real thing that you can identify it or at least distinguish it from the model of the space shuttle (even assuming you know no more about airplanes than the authors of this text). The second criterion is what has been called the ah-hah factor. That is, models should explain the world to us; they should help us make sense of what it is they purport to represent.
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