Don,

Excellent article. Explains a lot of the realities. Thank you for providing some reality and balance.

I can't help thinking about Labor's carbon pricing policy. It was bad policy at every stage. Ross Garnaut and Treasury's presentations of the costs and benefits of carbon pricing were misleading and disingenuous from the start. Treasury called it's modelling exercise "Strong Growth, Low Pollution" future. That is disingenuous. A more accurate title for what the modelling results show would be: "High Cost, No Benefit" policy.

Labor's GHG emissions reduction policies, at $19 billion per year now and $22 billion per year in 2019, are similar to the Defence budget, but for no benefit. They would not effect global GHG emissions and would not affect the climate. They would cost about $1000 per person per year, and rising rapidly in the future ... all for no benefit!

So Don, how did such bad policy get through the policy advisers? (By the way, I know the answer; part of it is that the new breed of policy analysts are young, gullible, and prone to fall for the new Greenie religion).

The knowledge problem is far more profound and insoluble than that.

The problem ultimately is that *all* human value consists of the subjective preferences of individual human beings for one state of affairs over another.

There is no way for any central authority to know what they are. It's as simple as that. This explains why there is never agreement on what "good policy" is.

All the statists just assume that there must be such a thing as good policy, not because they can show reason for their assumption, but because it never occurs to them to question whether the State, in its nature, is a fit means to achieve the ends they assume it can.

Certainly the electoral process provides no way for politicians to know which specific action of government (a majority of) the electorate want, because
a) you're forced by law to vote
b) politicians' promises are not binding, and
c) all the policy options are presented in a bundle, so no-one gets to vote on a specific action.

And what about the minority? Don't their values matter? Are they just to be herded along like so many cattle?

Thus the assertion or assumption that politicians do or can know what the public want the gumment to do, is factually false, and morally and logically incoherent.

By the same token, the government has no "mandate" from the election. All we know is that in each seat, so many more voted for this candidate than that. Nothing logically follows from this at the aggregate level.

'It is actually quite rare, at least in my experience, for academic research to lead straightforwardly to good policy. One reason is that governments tend to deal with the whole nation, or the whole state, whereas most academic research that bears on policy is a snapshot of a small sample, or community, or set of people'.

Yes, i agree with this. It is precisely this sentiment that led to my strategy for a PhD based on the Howard government's first term. While the PHd was not that good, I wanted to be fair to the govt by recognising how hard it is for a govt to deal with many economic, social and environmental issues while noting factors that tempered the govt's agenda.

It is all too easy to focus on one policy and criticise, as I did with the Rudd' govt and the Home Insulation Program.

It is much harder to conduct research that indicates all the factors that may aid or hinder a govt.

Chris Lewis,

Well said. Thank you.

It reminds me of the situation in the last term of the Howard Government. Now people are complaining that Howard and Costello committed to much to reduced personal tax and to expenditures that have locked in a structural deficit. While true, it is worth recalling the sentiments at the time and the calls to spend the money. It could not be resisted. Labor would have blown even more, and did when it won government. I recall. at that time some of my friends, in response to the surplus and locking it away in the the Future Fund, arguing vehemently that it's not the government's money, the government should stop robbing the tax payer and/or give the money back (meaning in middle class welfare and support for each individual's pet schemes). That was the irresistible political force that faced the Howard government during the boom in the last term of the Howard Government.