The Boat Captain’S Conundrum: A Whimsical Tour Through a Policy Wonk’S Mind

By Tom Corbett, PhD

In The Boat Captains Conundrum, author Tom Corbett completes an intellectual journey that reflects on his four-plus decades as a scholar and doer of social policy. That journey starts with Ouch, Now I Remember in which he recounts his early days growing up in a closed, working class, ethnic community from which he underwent several transformative experiences that broadened his worldview. In Browsing Through My Candy Store, the author shared his struggles while confronting many of the most vexing poverty and welfare battles of the last half century. This final volume, the Boat Captains Conundrum, completes the trilogy.

This work takes the reader on quite a different journey, a path that goes deeper into how to think about the big policy issues and social challenges of our times. In the end, Corbett makes a number of compelling points. Becoming a successful policy wonk is more than conquering the technical skills of doing quantitative analysis. It demands that we do more than merely dissect issues with analytical acumen. Rather, doing good policy work requires creativity, imagination, breadth of interests, a nimble and acquisitive mind, historical depth, and just a little rebellious risk-taking. But if you can conjure up such traits, there is no better way to spend your professional life.

Follow the author as he shares his take on how to do policy work well and even make a contribution to the public good. Get inside his head as he struggled to make sense out of the more daunting social challenges of the late twentieth century. Above all, enjoy his wistful and sometimes witty wanderings as seen through a policy wonks eye where he touches upon mind-numbing conundrums with deft insight. It is a great journey to be enjoyed both by students of policy and all those concerned with public life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524548209

Tom Corbett, PhD

Tom Corbett is an emeritus senior scientist and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he served as associate and acting director for a decade before his retirement. He received a doctorate in social welfare from the University of Wisconsin and taught various social policy and program evaluation courses there for many years. During his long academic and policy career, he worked with governments at all levels including a stint in Washington, DC, where he helped develop President Clinton’s welfare reform legislation. He has written dozens of articles and reports on poverty, social policy, and human-services issues and has given hundreds of talks across the nation on these topics. In addition, Dr. Corbett has consulted with numerous local, state, and federal officials on various poverty, welfare, and human-services issues both in the United States and Canada. Among many other things, he has testified before Congress, worked with the Wisconsin Legislature on important legislation, and served on an expert panel for the National Academy of Sciences. Now retired, the author lives with his wife of forty-four years, Mary Rider, and their lovable shih tzu dog, Rascal, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Book preview

Other books by the author

Ouch, Now I Remember (2015), Xlibris Press.

Browsing through My Candy Store (2014), Xlibris Press.

Return to the Other Side of the World, (2013) with Mary Jo Clark, Michael Simonds, Katherine Sohn, and Haywood Turrentine), Strategic Press.

The Other Side of the World (2011), with Mary Jo Clark, Michael Simonds, and Haywood Turrentine, Strategic Press.

Evidence-Based Policymaking (2010), with Karen Bogenschneider, Taylor and Francis Publishing.

Policy into Action (2003), with Mary Clare Lennon, Urban Institute press.

Praise for earlier works in the trilogy

I enjoy his writing style, it was comforting yet candid, like listening to a respected relative recount their own life with unabashed honesty.

Pacific Book Review

A thoughtful memoir about life and politics, told in an endearing style.

Kirkus Review

Corbett imparts an enormous amount of wisdom and humanity.

Clarion Review

If you truly want to understand how public policy works, read this book.

Mary Fairchild, Senior Fellow, NCSL

Corbett’s stories from the front lines of policymaking, like All Quiet on the Western Fron…, provide great insight into the way the world works, and not what the generals or policy planners think is happening.

Matt Stagner, Ph.D., MPR and the Univ. of Chicago

Additional reviews for the The Boat Captain’s Conundrum

"The author takes the reader on a witty and whimsical tour of how a policy wonk tackles some seminal social challenges of recent decades. It is a delightful and informative tour that integrates personal intellectual struggles with profound insights. Read this and you will be swept along by the daunting, yet seductive, challenges of doing policy work and of transforming experiences that broadened his world view and led him to his policy career.

- Lawrence Berger, Director, Institute for Research on Poverty,

University of Wisconsin-Madison

This book sings because Corbett writes with the authority of someone in the arena. as famously extolled by Teddy Roosevelt. As a lifelong policy wonk, Corbett brings to life the travails of being marred by dust and sweat and blood and the triumphs of daring to pursue a worthy cause, no matter how uncertain. This book is a worth read for all who consider jumping into the arena."

- Karen Bogenschneider, Rothermal-Bascom Professor of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Boat Captain’s Conundrum provides a nice survey of the last half-century’s public policy initiatives and their outcomes. It is a useful read for any one interested in these issues who follows the author’s admonishment not to settle for the obvious.

-Pacific Book Review

"Public policy work is noble and effective. Democracy demands that we respect this profession and listen to those like Tom Corbett who do this work so passionately and effectively. Without insightful public policy analysis, we put ourselves at the mercy of those with the loudest voices and the deepest pockets. I highly recommend this book to students, concerned voters, and public leaders.

- Mary Kay Plantes, Economist and business consultant.

The Boat Captain’s

Conundrum

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A Whimsical Tour Through

a Policy Wonk’s Mind

Tom Corbett PhD

Copyright © 2016 by TOM CORBETT Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/07/2017

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CONTENTS

Prologue

1.  Conundrums

2.  Culture

3.  Cui Bono?

4.  Witches and Other Demons

5.  The Onion

6.  Tilting at Windmills

7.  Supply and Demand

8.  Reconsidering Social Assistance

9.  Thinking Even Bigger

10.  The Promised Land

11.  Getting to the Promised Land

12.  Sharks in the Water

13.  At the Edges of Innovation

14.  The Epistemological Conundrum

15.  Leading by Letting Go

16.  Doing Public Policy: Craft or Science?

17.  Institutional Ethnography

18.  Rhythms and Ripples

Epilogue

Key Sources

About the Author

Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools because they have to say something.

—Plato

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

— Marcus Aurelius

Life cannot be predicted at the outset. Much more is possible to those who take a chance or two.

—The Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the many mentors and colleagues who shaped my growth as a man and as an intellect. With a couple of exceptions, specific individuals will not be named since I then risk omitting some who contributed mightily to my evolution and maturation. However, I do want to give a special thanks to Jennifer L. Noyes, who now serves as associate director of the Institute for Research on Poverty, a position I held for many years. She and I worked closely on several of the projects highlighted in this volume, and she was instrumental in the development of the ideas contained in several chapters. While we continue to differ fundamentally on politics, we share a common perspective on what a creatively designed human services system should look like. Besides, it has been fun sparring with her over the years, and I retain every hope that she will soon see the error of the political path she has chosen.

I would like to thank Karen Bogenshneider for being a good friend and colleague. We have labored long and hard on the issue of bringing evidence to the policy community. I have never come across a more dedicated and hard working scholar.

I also want to give a special thanks to the long-term members of the Welfare Peer Assistance Network (WELPAN), a group comprised of senior state welfare officials from the Upper Midwest. I learned much from their wisdom and experience. They define what excellence in public service is all about.

In addition, I want to thank all my colleagues (current and former) associated with the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) located at the University of Wisconsin. IRP is the pre-eminent national think tank assessing the causes of and cures for poverty. More importantly, it has been an intellectual home for me for over 40 years. Originally founded in 1966, the Institute has just been awarded another 5 year grant by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to be the national research center on poverty. I could not have selected a better place to pursue my professional mischief.

Finally, I had many academic mentors who inspired and instructed me over the decades. However, many who contributed the most to my development were not members of the academe. Some were policy makers and local officials with whom I worked closely to solve a few of society’s most vexing issues. Others worked in a variety of think tanks, foundations, evaluation firms, trade organizations, and advocacy groups that help shape our social welfare system. I learned as much from them as I did both from my academic colleagues and from my conventional work within the academe. I should also add a number of my college peers with whom I debated the great political issues during my youth as well as those students whom I later taught at the University of Wisconsin. My interactions with all of them have been priceless. Early on, I learned a simple truth: If we are open and know how to listen, the great lessons of life are all about us. The so-called teacher can easily become the student.

ON READING THIS BOOK

T his is what I like to think of as a crossover book. While it includes some weighty material of intellectual significance, it is designed to be of interest to any intelligent reader minimally conversant in public policy. Thus, the narrative style is accessible, personal, and even witty in parts. I also avoid excessive citations and complex sets of numbers that weigh down more academic texts. Serious scholars can find source material listed in the appendix at the end if they choose to go deeper into any particular topic.

I do employ one relatively unique literary device. In a number of chapters, I insert lightly edited, and sometimes abbreviated, texts from my earlier writings, most from issues of Focus, which is the highly respected publication of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin (see www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus.htm). These inserts are clearly marked and are found primarily in chapters 4 through 8, and again in 18. I thought it useful to use these older writings so that the feel and language of the issues being discussed are presented as accurately as possible, at least during the time period I was working on the issue. In almost all cases, I indicate the years during which I was focusing on the ideas and issues addressed in each particular section.

Let me be clear: This work is not a text on public policy. It is not a manual for doing policy work. It is not a polemical piece for advancing any ideological or partisan agenda. On one level, it is a memoir on how I think about the doing of policy work or how I thought about specific policy issues and challenges. On another, I convey the inner workings of a policy wonk’s way of thinking about things more generally. I attempt to capture the excitement, the difficulty, and the rewards that come with tackling society’s most vexing issues.

There is no strict unfolding of issues and topics, though the material is loosely grouped into several distinct sections. Chapters 1 to 3 provide insights into the art and craft of doing policy work. Chapters 4 to 7 explore the limits to rational decision-making, using real-life issues as case studies, as well as articles I wrote for Focus. Chapters 8 to 10 are big think pieces designed to put some of a number of traditional policy questions into a larger historical and conceptual framework. Chapters 11 to 15 focus on a topic of special interest to me, advancing the service integration agenda. I end with thoughts on special topics of interest, but with a special focus on what it takes to be a special policy wonk.

One caution! At points, the discussion of a specific policy topic can become somewhat detailed. Feel free to skip ahead if a particular issue fails to captivate you. There is always something interesting ahead. In truth, the details are for illustrative purposes only. The narrative really focuses on how a good policy wonk thinks about things, not on how one policy wonk thought about a specific issue at a given point in time. In short, don’t lose sight of the forest while in the midst of the trees.

PROLOGUE

R eaders who have endured my two previous memoirs should be quite familiar with my boat captain’s conundrum. By way of reminder, it goes something like this: The tugboat is proceeding east on a river at fifteen miles per hour. The river is flowing west at ten miles per hour. Then the rub! How long does it take the boat captain to eat his lunch? Well, that is how those high school algebraic challenges looked to me at least. Oh, sometimes a nefarious teacher would throw in a complicating factor such as giving the boat speed in knots per hour or suggesting an inhibiting wind out of the northwest, but you get the picture.

I knew there was an answer. I even knew that this was considered an easy problem with more imponderable puzzles soon to follow. I knew that the evil instructor had provided sufficient information to unravel this deep mystery. I knew that most others in the class would soon be working toward the correct answer; they were a clever lot. Some would make progress with alacrity, others with some effort and diligence, but most would advance, emerging from their diligent labors with a smile borne of success. Above all else, I knew that I, and I alone, would stare at this conundrum for hours and remain completely clueless. I might as well have accepted Einstein’s challenge of coming up with a unifying theory of all forces in the universe or taken on the solving of Fermat’s theorem. I was never going to come up with the answer to the boat captain’s lunch conundrum.

Such is the fate of the hapless soul who sinks into a paralytic state at all things mathematical. Elsewhere, I have recounted my effort to squeeze some compassion out of my high school algebra teacher through the exercise of my razor-sharp wit. This instructor was a Catholic Xaverian Brother who had dedicated his life to educating hopeless cases such as me. Talk about self-sacrifice and punching a sure one-way ticket to a heavenly reward. As time ran out on my quiz, I scrawled veni, vidi, flunki across the top of the page…I came, I saw, I flunked. Against all lessons drawn from actual experience, I was wagering that the good brother had a latent sense of humor he rarely displayed in class.

I grasped at a hope not borne of any prior evidence that being a good Christian just might translate into a measure of compassion for the irredeemably dense. When intelligence failed me, which was often, I typically fell back on my imagined wit, such as it was. Unfortunately, that worked as well as my dream that the cutest gal in the neighborhood would throw herself at me in a frenzy of sexual lust. Not to be! Next to my clever Latin observation, the good brother had scrawled a terse response: Almost!

My Puzzle

Therein lies my conundrum, which, if you permit a personal indulgence, I will discuss at much more length than probably required. How could a young man so dense that he could not handle basic high school algebra rise to a leadership position in a leading research institute at a top-flight university? This puzzle is more central to what I have to say in this volume than it may look on the surface. It actually touches upon the central point of all my musings.

Believe me, I do not understate my paralysis when it comes to all things numerical. I barely scraped through basic algebra and geometry. I took advantage of the first flexibility offered in my regimented Catholic high school to drop calculus but then took economics and another year of Latin instead. I would have taken four additional courses to avoid anything involving numbers. In college, where I first began to shine academically, I once again barely made it through the one required statistics class even as I made honors overall without, in fact, trying all that hard. When I was not working the eleven-to-seven shift saving the sick and dying at a local hospital, I wasted most of my college years chasing females, who remained remarkably fleet of foot, and attempting to end the Vietnam War. Both efforts resulted in equally dismal outcomes. Perhaps I should have gone back to that damn boat captain’s lunch puzzle instead.

Later on in life, I took several statistics courses, three of which were part of my doctoral studies for my terminal degree in social welfare. I went through this sequence with two fellow students, Jim and Mary Beth. Each of us, as social work–types, needed moral support. I recall our merry band of statistical adventurers as if it all happened yesterday. Mary Beth would comprehend the algebraic notation quite well and try to explain it to Jim and me with varying degrees of success—but usually very little, if the truth be told. I was always the first to grasp the deeper conceptual points being made in class. Then I would labor to communicate these abstract concepts to my colleagues as best I could despite the handicap of being mathematically illiterate. I typically understood these underlying concepts quickly enough, but only in my own way where I would visualize rather obtuse abstractions in some concrete or visual sense. Jim accepted the tutorials from Mary Beth and me with grace and much appreciation, eventually becoming the only one of our merry band to enjoy success as a conventional academic. The last I heard, he was dean of the School of Social Work at a major Southern university.

I recall my doctoral prelims very well. As I describe in Ouch, Now I Remember, I remained an indifferent doctoral student at best. So I approached the conclusion of my classwork with a slew of incompletes which, apparently, you were allowed to get away with in those days. My desultory performance might partially be explained by the fact that I was working almost full time on various welfare reform issues in Wisconsin. But even a loser like me knew I would have to knuckle down at some point. So I dropped everything else at this juncture to finish up the incompletes and study for the despised prelims. This terminal exam, back then, was a fifteen-hour ordeal testing your command of social work theory and substance, a rite of passage that was dreaded by the doctoral students of that era. Being rather weird, I looked forward to the prelims. Hey, it was an excuse for me to sit on my fat behind and just read and think about stuff for a summer. Oh, the glory of it. Thinking was far preferable to actual work.

Only one potential storm cloud lurked on the horizon. One of the five questions would focus on methods, things like experimental design (which was all right), and statistical reasoning and some command of mathematical notation (which was not). I felt doomed. I never should have missed that first day we started studying numbers in grammar school. For some reason, I never forgot missing that first lesson, largely because I never seemed to catch up after that. Maybe it was on that day that the secret to all things mathematical was imparted to everyone else. They all had this mysterious knowledge that was kept from me by some malicious plot. Damn them!

Now my quantitative shortcomings surely would catch up to me. As I was about to face each prelim question, I wondered if this would be the one to end my academic career. When I got to the fifth and last test of my stamina and encyclopedic knowledge, I thought this must be it. This had to be it; everyone knew that one question would focus on your command of all things methodological and statistical. Clearly, here was where my quest for a doctorate would end unless I were to shift my academic focus to English literature and join all the other PhDs with a command of Chaucer and Shakespeare now driving Madison’s taxicabs.

But no, it never came! The rules had been subverted. Were they merely being kind? Did they realize how hapless and hopeless I was and had taken pity on me? Did they like me that much? I never did get an answer. In fact, I never asked. I merely said a quick prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes—or is that St. Joseph? It has been a long time. In any case, somebody was taking care of me.

Later, I would discover that my prelim answers were considered exemplary, if not extraordinary. They were spoken of as model responses that future prelim takers might well emulate. In retrospect, I am not surprised. I got questions like Did we win or lose the War on Poverty? To which you were not permitted to give a monosyllabic response. Such questions were squarely in my intellectual wheelhouse. I could wax eloquent for hours, perhaps days, about such things, typically in compelling prose and replete with breathtaking insights. For me, though, all I could think about was why I was given a pass on the methods question. It left me feeling that I had been treated like a charity case. I never could quite shake the sense that I was a bit of a fraud.

To be honest, after all these years, I have no good answer as to why I was treated with such kindness. I do, however, have a theory—which is not surprising since I have a theory on just about everything. My doctoral committee saw me more as a colleague than as a mere student attempting to obtain membership in their august and select society. They liked me, even finding me useful. I had established a working relationship between the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) and the State of Wisconsin. In addition, I had contributed much in terms of saving some large research projects that were being conducted at IRP, particularly through my knowledge of how the real world worked. If nothing else, they owed me.

But I think something else was at work here. They knew I would never be a numbers man. I probably would never grind out the endless journal articles that looked at old questions in a slightly different way or by using more sophisticated estimation techniques or newly available data sets. Many of these articles did not advance our understandings of society all that much, but they did provide a venue through which the authors might demonstrate their quantitative artistry. This continuous return to old research issues and conventional policy questions with slightly different, often marginally new, estimation techniques was a safe way to pump out the volume of published pieces necessary to advance in the academe.

There is utility in this work, make no mistake. Despite my deep reservations about many aspects of the academic culture, I am not a total critic. The current focus on peer-reviewed journal articles, usually positivist in character to the exclusion of all else, has considerable merits. They serve as the foundation for any success in the academe, a rule that is well known in advance. You must publish certain kinds of articles in select journals, or, as they say with finality, perish. These pieces tend to be methodologically sophisticated but highly formulaic and ritualistic. They always struck me as lacking something, perhaps creativity and risk-taking. One thought always bothered me: since only one in twenty submissions might be published in a top journal, and statistical probability suggests that one in twenty significant findings would be false positives, perhaps our journals were filled with random errors.

The Club

What I think happened as I finished my prelims is that my committee had already decided I belonged in the club even though I did not possess the usual and ordinary skills and aptitudes. This was no small concession on their part. Perhaps the most critical quality of a successful doctoral candidate is not intelligence or hard work but accepting the norms of the academe along with an intense desire to be a member of that club.

Unfortunately, I was not well acculturated into the prevailing norms of the academe, which prized specialization over breadth, theory over application, narrow over broader target audiences, safety over risk-taking, technical acuity over imagination, and marginal progress over dramatic innovation or insight. Pursuing a doctorate is only partly about gaining knowledge and demonstrating competence. Successful candidates must also convey to the gatekeepers of the academe that the person seeking admission to their club has bought fully into its dominant norms and world-view. As in so many institutional settings, cultural conformity is key.

So why the pass? Perhaps they saw a little something in my makeup that might actually compensate for my obvious shortcomings. After all, my prelim responses apparently knocked their socks off, and I could hold my own in brown bags and hallway conversations. Better still, I could elicit the Celtic muse with the best of them, excelling in the written arts. Besides, their recognition of some latent talents seemed a preferable explanation than merely getting the pity vote or We better pass him since where else could this loser get a job? I sometimes wonder if they secretly admired the fact that I, unlike them, had gone my own way and not succumbed meekly to the cultural conformity imposed by the academe. In truth, though, I have no support for such a contention.

It was clear, or should have been at least, that I was a policy wonk by disposition and not a conventional scholar. The latter required a certain devotion to detail and a focus on pedestrian questions. The very thought of that drove me to distraction. Just shoot me! I loved grappling with complex, well-nigh-impossible social issues and policy challenges. At the same time, though, I did love the university setting. It promised great freedom and an opportunity to surround myself with really smart people. And besides, if I stayed in the cocoon of the ivory tower long enough, maybe I would finally learn something. In any case, I loved the notion of pursuing a policy avocation from a position in that very academe about which I retained so many reservations.

The Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin proved perfect in that respect. I recall, when I first got there in the mid-1970s, listening to senior faculty discuss how fortunate they were to be in a place where they were surrounded by like-minded colleagues. Academics hate being isolated in departments where no other colleagues share their disciplinary interests. In any case, IRP gave me instant legitimacy and access to all the best researchers, policy wonks, and institutions across the country. In that wider world, I was never seen as a failed academic but as a representative of IRP, the leading research entity on welfare and poverty issues in the nation. In later years, I was more than a representative of IRP; I was seen as one of the people running the place. That institutional association and professional identity opened up doors everywhere and made me an instant spokesperson on welfare and social welfare matters.

But all this begs the question. Just how did a hapless mathematical retard do so well at a top research unit in a policy world where quantitative skills were seen as the sine qua non for admission? Part of the answer to that puzzle is revealed in several recent publications of mine. Depending on how you count, this will be my fifth book that reflects on my past. Two edited works—The Other Side of the World and Return to the Other Side of the World—recount my experiences, as well as those of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, as we served in India during the latter part of the 1960s (see www.India44.com). That was followed up by a memoir on my policy career titled Browsing through My Candy Store, while my most recent work, Ouch, Now I Remember, recalls my early years where I somehow was transformed from a totally inept working-class kid to a college intellectual and ersatz revolutionary (see www.tomcorbettirp.com). Then, shocking to all who had known me in the early years I became a policy wonk and academic whose teachings and writings had significant impact on occasion. It was a remarkable journey, which I tell with great humor, which is not difficult to do since many have commented that my life is little more than one continuous joke.

One might assume that there is nothing more to say. I find, however, that each volume leaves a number of questions unanswered. After Ouch, I began to puzzle over just what it takes to be a good policy wonk and a rather inspiring teacher. How did someone with such obvious skill deficits get to be selected to a National Academy of Sciences panel on how to evaluate national welfare reform? How did such a person author several books and a plethora of articles on a wide range of research and policy topics including strategies for bringing rigorous research to policy makers? How did he manage to fool class after class of students that he had wisdom and life lessons to impart?

Most of my peers, both in the academe and in the higher reaches of the policy world, were the guys and gals who breezed easily through the boat captain’s lunch conundrum on their way to solving more complex mathematical challenges. They took calculus and trigonometry in high school, mastered statistics with ease, and (the practitioners of the dismal science at least) took pleasure in plumbing the mysteries of advanced econometrics. They loved to invert matrices and to debate the correct form of estimation models. Mathematics, for them, was the very language of reality. They would lose themselves in such endeavors for hours, if not days. Yet I would be invited into their numbers where few fully recognized that there was an imposter in their midst. What was with that!

It turns out that I was quite good at being an imposter. I recall that the secretary of the Wisconsin Human Services Agency, with whom I was consulting at the time, had concluded that I was an economist. Talk about being insulted. But that was clever, I thought at the time, since he was extremely smart and a former top administrator from the university.

In a way, my boat captain’s conundrum motivated the creation of this volume. Just what does it take for an ordinary numbnuts to make it to the top tier of the policy world, even enjoying occasional respect within the academe? This is not an idle or a totally narcissistic inquiry of a self-absorbed retiree with too much time on his hands. It ultimately taps at the heart of what elevates an ordinary analyst to someone who might command the attention of his peers, from someone who merely describes reality to a person who actually comprehends what is going on, from someone obsessed with just a few intellectual branches to that person who envisions the entire conceptual forest. In short, how do you evolve from just another skilled technician into a unique and creative thinker and policy wonk? This is the hundred-dollar question.

The Good Policy Wonk

The resolution to my motivating conundrum lies somewhere in the depths of what makes just another bright person a really good policy wonk. Thus, this work is really not about me, which is a bit odd since I am my favorite topic. It actually explores what makes a good policy wonk beyond the conventional technical skills we all try to master during our preparation to be researchers and scholars. I am convinced that the best policy folk are more than technical nerds or, as my good friend and now dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at Wisconsin liked to call his more mathematical colleagues, propeller-heads.

Back in the 1960s, there was some thought that the new statistical and estimation techniques, then just emerging, might well end normative and partisan disputes about policy. Emerging quantitative techniques, along with newly available abilities to generate larger and more complex data sets, could possibly resolve long-contentious social questions that had hamstrung previous generations. The power of knowledge would overcome the abrasive impediments of a policy sclerosis imposed by hard-edged ideology and hyper-partisanship. Hard numbers would replace subjective norms and passions as the arbiter of truth when positions on vexatious social issues clashed. A new day of reason and accord was just around the corner.

Guess what! The new dawn of reason did not happen. Rigorous analysis, large data sets, and advanced quantitative tools are wonderful aids to addressing many social questions. In some cases, they focus thinking and support clear directions. But they remain remarkably feeble when the questions under consideration become highly convoluted or where norms, values, and cognitive priors remain core matters of debate.

In Browsing through My Candy Store, I focused on what are called wicked social problems. These are social issues where the very nature of the underlying question is contentious, available theories are conflicted, causal paths are uncertain, policy ends are vague (and even contradictory), and the available research and analyses ambiguous at best. While such wicked problems are what make doing policy worthwhile in the first instance, they also lead to early hair loss, periodic depression, and occasional bouts of hypertension. At the worst, they lead to serious cases of substance abuse. Most of all, they defy easy quantitative solutions.

Thus, doing policy well demands more than mathematical competencies. Yes, these skills clearly help in so many ways, and I wish I had them. But you need much more than a grasp of statistics or advanced quantitative analysis to move from being just another good number cruncher to someone who can move a dialogue and get people to pay attention. Yet this is mostly what you will learn in public policy schools, economics classes, and most other disciplines that prepare students for advanced policy work. What these curricula miss is the following: To really make a mark in the world where policy debates are hammered out, you need much more than quantitative skills—much more, indeed. You need a creative way of seeing what is about you. You need to see things through a unique lens.

You should possess what I think of as a set of softer skills and aptitudes—approaches that are somewhat oblique to our familiar understanding of what is demanded of policy mavens. You need imagination, people skills, and the ability to see issues and challenges in new lights. You need an open and inquisitive mind, a capacity to listen to a seeming babble, and then figure out what is really being said. You also need a talent to reframe discussions and debates in ways that make people go Aha! You need to be able to speak without threatening others, to compose compelling prose, and to generally communicate in ways that make people sit up and take notice. Oh, and one more thing: it surely does not hurt if you can make people laugh. Humor is so desperately needed in an arena where too many take themselves way too seriously. Many policy wonks come across as if their prior consult was with God Himself.

As a student, Albert Einstein was not considered a good candidate for the academe. His professors found him undisciplined, disorganized, independent, and given to excessive daydreaming. These attributes were not highly prized in the academe of his day—or today, for that matter. In any case, his latent genius went unrecognized. And so his friends, in desperation, secured him a lowly job in the Swiss patent office. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Albert had plenty of time to exercise his creativity absent the rigid confines of the university culture of his day. He could do what he did best, blend together disparate facts and thoughts in ingenious ways and thereby turn our understanding of the world on its head. There always were better mathematicians than him, but no one else saw the world with his originality.

Let me assert right now that I do not claim to be the Einstein of public policy. But I often found those around me responding to my take on policy matters in surprisingly positive ways. I did use numbers, of course, usually in simple ways or with the help of more gifted friends. I realized at some point that I brought to the policy table some rather different gifts. They were not the usual gifts such as the ability to plumb large data sets or write mind-numbing econometric equations. Those skills, it turns out, are found in ample supply throughout the policy world, and thus rather easily secured.

No, my imagined contributions were found in rather unusual places. I would sit around a table of policy-makers or in a room full of what we call propeller-heads (those who live in the world of complex equations) and listen to what is going on. And then I might ask a question or make an observation that could actually turn the conversation in a new direction. It is hard to put a label on such a skill, or the other gifts I realized were in my possession. Such gifts do not earn chapters in planning texts or policy papers or program evaluation works. These softer skills are subtle, opaque, and hard to describe. They involve intuition, integration, synergy, and synthesis, with a dollop of imagination and a big helping of creativity thrown in when necessary. Policy analysis, it turns out, is more than seeing what is there. It is also embracing what might lie just beyond one’s ordinary vision.

We have banal clichés that try to capture what I am talking about. We say things like thinking outside the box or lateral thinking. Such labels are fine but may assign an excessive measure of mystery to this phenomenon. In fact, I am not all that sure there are any esoteric talents that I possess or to which we might ascribe a specific name. Perhaps that is the motivation for this book—to better understand how someone might make their way through the academic/policy world without the requisite skill set. As I have often said, you don’t really understand anything until you can explain it to others. And I won’t really know if I can communicate what is swirling around in my head until I get to the final chapter.

I am now on the north side of seventy years—or to put it in more dramatic terms, in my eightieth decade. As we all know at some level, age ravages both cognitive functioning and memory. The typical human annually loses 1 to 2 percent of their hippocampus—that part of the brain essential to memory, after age fifty-five. Given my excessive alcohol intake during a misspent youth, it is doubtful I have more than a couple of dozen brain cells left. Thus my effort to record life’s lessons probably should not wait much longer. The desperation that comes with the realization of one’s mortality is balanced by the need to express and share important personal messages—important to me, at least.

Let us never forget that truth is an elusive prey that can be approached in multiple ways. Some who seek answers use only numbers and never get close to the subject at hand. That is like seeing the target from 30,000 feet in the air. Other seekers of knowledge prefer the ground-level view, an up-close-and-personal perspective. They enjoy the fine-grained texture that comes with intimate contact with reality.

Both perspectives have their strengths and weaknesses. The long view gives you a broader lens, the bigger picture. Perhaps there is less distortion in this view. The ground-level perspective surely gives you more detail and context, but you can miss key elements of the issue at hand. I found a flexible telescopic approach most useful, focusing in and out to get both perspectives. It always seemed to me that both context and detail could only be ignored at great peril. The dispassionate view from 30,000 feet helped you avoid the misinterpretations that come from mistaking detail for the big picture while the up-close view provided you with an irreplaceable, textured understanding of things. Ideally, you keep working your telescopic lens back and forth.

The Trilogy

It turns out that I did not start on my professional journey with any grand plan. In fact, I had no plan whatsoever. Neither did I start writing down my life’s lessons with any particular end point in mind. However, I have concluded that much of what I have learned, and what I want to share with others, probably can be bound up in three volumes, two of which I mentioned earlier and are already available to an eager public.

My second book, Ouch, Now I Remember, logically should have come out first. Ouch essentialy describes my coming of age in a nondescript working-class family. I was a totally average ruffian who demonstrated not a whit of intellectual promise. And yet, context and serendipity served to help me rise from humble origins to the somewhat remarkable policy and academic career described in the second volume. The fundamental lesson of Ouch is that life cannot be predicted at the outset; much more is possible to those who take a chance or two. It also helps if you recognize serendipity when you are literally smacked by it upside the head. In the end, just figure out what it is you want, who you are, and go for it.

The second logical volume in this trilogy, Browsing through My Candy Store, describes my policy career and at least touches upon the issues with which I struggled as a combatant in many policy wars. The book also serves as a primer for some of the most vexing social issues of the last half century. I had the good fortune to be on the front lines, or close to them at least, of many of the big issues affecting our more vulnerable populations. Browsing gives the reader a ground-level view of what grappling with these issues was like. But the lesson here is deeper than that. I wanted to communicate that doing policy could be a stimulating and fascinating avocation. I hoped, in some small way, to reignite an interest in policy among young students of social work. Doing policy is hard in the extreme, but that is exactly what made it all worthwhile. Hopefully, some of my enthusiasm seeps through to younger readers.

This final book in the trilogy, then, is dedicated to teasing out a small mystery. Are there any underappreciated insights that can elevate a decent thinker into an above-average policy wonk? Are there any skills and dispositions that give one an edge in helping to craft society’s rules or in allocating scarce public goods? Are there larger perspectives and ways of looking at questions that provide some comparative advantage? In unraveling such conundrums, I hope others might think more broadly and creatively about this fascinating world of public policy. I hope they appraise their own talents and possible contributions. Surely, the world can use a few less lawyers and number crunchers and a few more imaginative and creative policy mavens.

If all policy debates could be settled with technical analyses, we would have few contentious issues remaining. But we have legions of difficult problems on our policy and political plates. The fact is that making a policy contribution goes beyond the manipulation of numbers. Progress in the future just may demand that we develop a more rounded, insightful kind of policy wonk. We just might need people who will be able to look at questions in fresh ways, get to the real issues beyond the surface, make linkages across phenomena not readily apparent to others, communicate insights in compelling ways, and bridge the chasms across people and problems.

We don’t teach such broad-based skills in the academe. I am not sure we even can describe this skill set with any coherence. It is much the same with teaching skills. We require elementary school teachers to spend many hours having their pedagogical skills examined and refined. Newly minted academics are merely told to get into the classroom and not screw up. If you are at a top research university, you soon discover that no one will much care how badly you teach as long as riots do not break out or any sexual harassment claims are made. The same is true of academics who stray into the policy world, as some are wont to do. No one prepares them for the culture of that world, how to think more like a policy wonk and less like a member of a cloistered academe. As a result, the intrusion into the real world by some members of the academe can be exercises in comedy and, more likely, tragedy.

That is why I wrote this third volume to my trilogy. In doing so, I relied heavily on my writings over the past several decades. In some chapters, I incorporate some long passages of my early writings. I’ve edited these chapters on occasion and not included the ordinary citations in a normal academic book since, in no way do I consider this a typical academic work. I want this to read more like an accessible novel that flows freely and stimulates thinking. If you want the detail and the tables, you can go back to the original articles, many of which can be found at the Institute for Research on Poverty website (www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus.htm). Everything is there.

Importantly, I add context, interpretation, and some insight into what was behind the words I wrote so long ago. What was I thinking and feeling while struggling with some very wicked policy problems? Why did I come to the conclusions I did, and what made my take unique in some instances? In the end, all the policy mavens I knew wanted to remain players; they wanted to remain involved in the next round of issues and debates in the arena where ideas are fought over. I remained a player until I decided that policy was a younger person’s game. I felt very fortunate, indeed, and sometimes wondered where that good fortune came from.

The topics selected only touch upon the many I tilted my policy lance toward in a long career. To be inclusive would have led to an exhaustive treatise that no sane person could endure. But what is included should provide the reader with a darn good idea of how a policy wonk thinks about things. It may not always be a pretty picture, but surely it is one that demonstrates just how frustrating and fascinating the world of policy can be.

So let us proceed to see what the boat captain’s conundrum might tell us.

Tom Corbett

Madison Wisconsin

September 2016

1

Conundrums

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

—Albert Einstein

I n June 2016, New York Times editorial contributor Nicholas Kristof wrote an intriguing piece about America’s welfare problem. It is now two decades after a vicious national reform struggle had finally been settled, or so many thought. By ending cash welfare as we knew it and creating the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, President Clinton had quieted a long-simmering policy debate. Kristof noted that he had joined the president and many others in hoping that we had finally turned the corner on this contentious issue, which was often called the Mideast of domestic policy. We finally could put that one wicked social issue to rest and move on to other equally distracting issues.

Now, however, he looks back and summarizes two decades of observing what has happened to poor families:

So, here’s where I come down. Welfare reform has failed but the solution is not to a reversion to the old program. Rather, let’s build new programs targeting children in particular and drawing from the growing base of evidence of what works.

How provocative and predictable! To my mind, this is precisely what is both compelling and consternating about doing policy. One generation’s solution is the next generation’s scandal. If you don’t like what we have done, just wait awhile. You will, never fear, get another kick at the cat.

Problems and challenges are never fully put to rest; they inevitably emerge again with new vigor and in slightly reframed ways. While that would be enough to discourage sensible men and women, the doing of policy work clearly is not for the sane or the sensible. You want reason and finality, try becoming an accountant or a butcher or a toll booth attendant. Still, some of us like this lack of finality. Some of us knew at the very moments of national welfare reform that the issue would not remain dead for long. Early on, as I describe in later chapters, a few of us figured out how the topic would one day resurface and what the next configuration of this societal challenge might well look like.

How is that, you ask? Seeing issues in ways that others might not is all part of being a policy wonk. And what exactly is a policy wonk? It is someone who loves the technical, conceptual, and theoretical intricacies of confronting society’s challenges, though not necessarily the intractable politics that come with it. Such a wonk is someone who loves tackling well-nigh-impossible problems and actually gets up each morning with that frisson of excitement that comes from knowing how hopeless is the day’s labors before him or her. And that is exactly what we shall be looking at over the following chapters: How does a really good policy wonk think about things? How do they see and deal with their world? In figuring that out, maybe we will figure out why policy wonks endure the frustration and pain. Our excursion into this world is not always a pretty sight, but I promise you an intriguing journey.

It Is Not What It Seems

In those deeper places where the challenges of doing social policy are more absorbing and possibly more intriguing, you just might encounter a provocative epiphany. Virtually nothing is as it seems upon first glance. Think for a moment about a time when you were in a very quiet place. Perhaps it was in a field, on a sunny day without a breath of any breeze anywhere. Nothing was moving; the tall, whispery grasses about you were silent; and the leaves adorning the nearby trees were serene. The whole world seemed still and stationary. The universe was at complete rest. Or was it?

In truth, the planet on which you stood was spinning on its axis daily. That same planet, Mother Earth as we like to call it, was orbiting the rather insignificant star at the center of our solar system at a rate of 30 kilometers per second (30 km/s). That star, our sun located in a remote part of the Milky Way galaxy, is orbiting around some distant black hole at 250 km/s. And our galaxy, one of countless others, is moving through a wider universe at 600 km/s. In fact, recent research has confirmed it is moving even faster than we had previously thought. If you read this paragraph while standing at rest in your idyllic field, you had traveled some 3,000 kilometers. Nothing, it appears, is as it appears; and yes, the redundancy is intentional.

The certainties of the world’s physical attributes are subject to relational constructs, perspectives, and measurement techniques. When I was a student of psychology some half a century ago, we spent a fair amount of time examining perceptual conundrums. Is line A bigger or smaller than line B when the ends of the lines abut a couple of convex as opposed to concave horizontal-laying V-shapes? Even when told the two lines were the same length, your brain would tell you something quite different. Is the man in a room taller or shorter than the table in the depiction of a room you are asked to observe? The answer is obvious until you realize that your sense of perspective has been tricked and the rear of the specially constructed enclosure, where the table is located, is much smaller than where the man is standing.

Common-sense observation is not everything. Check out the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, someday. There is a portrait of a famous person there. Up close, what you see are details of very tiny portraits, and you have no clue as to the iconic leader in front of you. As you back away, the outline of President Lincoln emerges. From the other side of the room, the visage of the sixteenth president is unmistakable, the obscuring details from the closer look now gone. Another famous piece of art is a collection of furniture from the side. You walk around and change your perspective, and once again, you have a portrait of Lincoln. The world is always playing with us. What you see depends upon where you stand and how you look at things.

After I stumbled into a career as a self-described policy expert and academic who endeavored to teach the policy arts to eager young students, I loved poking at various conventional assertions about policies and programs. Well, an advocate would say, half of all those who enjoyed the benefits of my policy initiative and/or endured the torture embedded in my therapeutic program got jobs or stopped smoking or didn’t get pregnant or did get pregnant or whatever. Even otherwise-smart people would look at post-program behaviors and assign the observed outcomes to whatever concoction was being peddled. Our ingrained assumption is to assume that no change would occur in the absence of whatever lever we were manipulating on behalf of some poor victim of our policy intrigues.

Of course, even the bored students who slept through my policy courses, and many did, would know that is total bull hockey. Behaviors change all the time for all kinds of reasons, only occasionally in response to whatever Machiavellian tortures we impose upon our subjects. Later on, I will talk more about the so-called welfare migration debate. As is true in so many policy debates, one’s values and political priors dictate one’s response to the evidence. If one state had higher welfare benefits than another state, poor mothers, of course, would flock from the stingy state to the more liberal state. That’s common sense, beyond dispute, at least to many politicians and most of the public. We know what these families are like. Besides, the neo-liberal stick-figure characterization of economic man (and woman) would predict no other response. Only economic incentives matter—the bedrock premise of behavioral economics. Each individual spends their day looking about for ways to optimize their economic utility—the calculating-machine view of the human soul. In this view, reality is transparent and quite simple.

Yet, the bored students in my policy courses, if they were paying any attention at all, would look at the claims about some program’s success and exclaim, Wait a moment. How do we really know that a person would not have gotten the same job, or stopped doing drugs, or gotten married, or whatever had they never heard of Program X? The best way, my crafty students would surely know if they had not yet succumbed to a deep comatose state, would be to conduct a real experiment. The results of randomized samples where individuals had the same chance of getting a treatment and not getting a treatment would be compared to each other on the outcomes of interest. And behold, the results of such experiments were often surprising, if not shocking. Sure, half of