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wish it could provide them with more guidance in making decisions. They are conscious of the limitations of their tools and of the seriousness of the decisions they must make. Congress has established a pattern of delegating to regulatory agencies decisions that would normally be considered among the most sensitive in society. For the most part these decisions are shaped, and often made, by professionals who were not elected or even appointed by the president. In their ability, training, and dedication, this is a group worthy of their jobs. However, I continue to wonder why society appears to believe that difficult decisions involving values and rewarding one group a t the expense of another should be made by technical professionals.
LESTER B . LAVE is Professor of Econotiiics at Caniegie-Mellon University.
John E. Brandl
Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice, by David L. Weimer and Aidan R. Vining. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989, 417 pp. Price: $30.00 paper. With the publication of this textbook the field of policy analysis achieves a maturity that presages increased influence in the coming years. This is especially surprising because the book’s strengths lie along somewhat different lines than the authors intend. Weimer and Vining posit that “policy analysis is client-oriented advice relevant to public decisions,” but that overly broad definition would be met by words of wisdom from John Mitchell, Bert Lance, or Oliver North, none of whom would claim expertise in the book’s subject matter. The accomplishment here has to do not with teaching responsiveness to a boss but with the exposition of contemporary welfare economics, the discipline upon which Weimer and Vining’s policy analysis is built. The authors return often to their theme that attentiveness to the perceptions of clients is central to policy analysis. Whole chapters are devoted to that idea. Frequently the reader is cautioned to resist trying to mold problems to fit standard techniques; rather, the budding policy analyst is admonished to frame the client’s problem, then use whatever methods are necessary to shed light on it. Those parts of the book are ad hoc and unsatisfying. The meat of the book, which I intend to assign as required reading for students in the Humphrey Institute’s core course on policy analysis, is the section on market and nonmarket failure and on what Weimer and Vining call “generic” policies for correcting those institutional defects. In no other text can one find so thorough a discussion of market and nonmarket failure, and the presentation is all the more impressive because it is made in careful English and simple geometry. The greatest contribution appears in the chapter on generic policies, where the authors engage in creative synthesis of a sort rarely found in textbooks. For decades applied microeconomics consisted mostly of finding market failure and noting possible remedies that could be administered by government officials if they happened to be listening. The unexamined presumption
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was that public-spirited decision makers in government would right the wrongs thus identified. Applying the assumption of self-interest to public actors (thereby prcviding an explanation for nonmarket failure parallel to that for market failure) has expanded the domain of economics, a point that is developed in the book. The extension of the self-interest assumption has forced a search for policies the efficacy of which does not depend upon consistent public-spiritedness of government officials. This search has led Weimer and Vining to their five generic policies: freeing, facilitating, and stimulating markets; altering incentives by means of subsidies and taxes; establishing rules; supplying services through nonmarket mechanisms; and providing insurance and “cushions.” That list needs to be augmented and honed, but its creation is an achievement that will shape the study and practice of policy analysis in the future. It embodies the realization that there are inherent imperfections in many institutions, public and private. Simply identifying a flaw in the market does not imply that an activity would be better provided by government, and vice versa. The book’s few limitations lie in the discipline of economics. The preferences of the governed as well as those who govern are assumed to be given, so the authors miss the mark when in a brief discussion they construe rhetoric (“perhaps the most common political strategy”) as merely clarifying and elucidating the effects of policies. Economics and, by extension, policy analysis remain fields blind to a central fact of politics: Politicians persuade; they cause changes in the preferences and motivations of the people. Policy analysis does not know what to make of leadership. After 50 pages devoted to market imperfections, the reader finds four on remedying distributional ills-a reflection of another peculiar blind spot in economics. For its measurements of consumer surplus, benefit-cost analysis depends upon acceptance of the existing income and wealth distributions. A superior weight given to the desires of the wealthy is reified in areas under demand curves. A paradox pervades the book. The authors present a very useful inventory of ways that public as well as private institutions go awry because their members are (or so it is assumed) self-interested. And they proffer to policymakers an even more helpful category of generic policies for dealing with those flawed institutions. But all of this is done with the recurrent reminder that analysts are to rend to the wishes of clients. That the clients must be considered no less self-concerned than everyone else is never quite confronted. In a brief discussion of professional ethics, the authors posit that in the event of a conflict of “values” between analyst and superior, the analyst can either stay and fight or quit. Not acknowledged is the fact that in their construction of policy analysis the conflict is inherent. Economics as policy analysis is not merely a set of tools to be used in the service of clients. The worthiness of those tools depends entirely on a powerful and persuasive but controversial ethic; without its utilitarianism and radical individualism, neoclassical economics is impotent. Without consumer surplus and the compensation principle, benefit-cost analysis loses its force. Economics as policy analysis embodies assumptions about individual behavior that, if they apply to a client, make that person unsuited or disinclined to act in the public interest, which is understood as maximization of net benefits to the society. As that becomes more widely understood, one
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hopes that policy analysts will not only take to educating the entire society about the importance of the design of public and private institutions, but will also ponder the importance of public-spiritedness for the success of our form of government. In well designed institutions people, though often selfinterested, are oriented by incentive structures to act consistently with public purposes. The best designed institutions erode the meaner side of self-interest and foster other-mindedness. Weimer and Vining are showing us the transformation of policy analysis from advising clients to designing institutions. JOHN E. BRANDL is Professor of Public Affairs at the Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, and a member of the Minnesota Senate.
LEADERSHIP AND SOCIAL SCIENCE John J. Dilulio, Jr.
Leadership and Innovation: A Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government, edited by Jameson W. Doig and Erwin C . Hargrove. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 459 pp. Price: $39.50 cloth. Gubernatorial Transitions: The 1983 and 1984 Elections, edited by Thad L. Beyle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989, 342 pp. Price: NPA cloth. Making a Leadership Change: How Organizations and Leaders Can Handle Leadership Transitions Successfully, by Thomas N. Gilmore. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988. 279 pp. Price: $22.95 cloth.
Though these three fine books differ in many ways, their fundamental thesis is the same; namely, that individual leaders matter, sometimes greatly. Together the books offer a compelling case for the proposition that while “great man” theories are dumb, failure to explore the general conditions under which leaders shape important events is even dumber. No less a light than Alexis de Tocqueville would have endorsed this proposition, and without having to cite either the French Revolution or Napoleon in support of it. In the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), Tocqueville argued that the historic rise of democracy had narrowed the conditions under which individuals could shape political, social, economic, technological, and military life. With 700 years of European history in his gaze and France and America uppermost in his mind, he observed matter-of-factly that, as aristocracies had crumbled and the equality of conditions had increased, the causal influence of individuals on society had decreased. Even so, Tocqueville was at pains to stress that individuals could still shape events, large and small. He stressed this because he believed it was empirically true, and because he worried that the opposite belief would breed among the citizens of free nations a sense of personal and political inefficacy conducive only to spirtual decay and the tyranny of the majority.
