A New Approach to Public Administration Theory and Practice
The New State is an attempt to cultivate an ongoing public and academic dialogue surrounding issues of government administration theory and practice. Traditional methods of public administration academic discourse have been tied up in the realm of limited access and temporally latent journal publications. The New State brings immediate and relevant discourse to readers and contributors through the use of web and Internet technologies.
Virtual machines?
Consider a machine. Levers. Pulleys. Engines. Computers.
Each has a design that deploys rules of nature to consistently generate a result. Fuel. Flame. Combustion-> Movement. Friction. Ratios.
There are more abstract machines— social machines like organizations. There is no clear conception of “what an organization is” or natural laws on “why they work” but some do and some don’t. Just like other machines. It took many failed attempts at flight before success. But with social machines, organizations, the lack of natural laws on human interaction has led to some uncertainty.
There are even more abstract machines that exist virtually, basic ideas or logics that turn inputs into outputs, maintains order, so on. Democracy is one.
Debt limit
What happens when the debt limit becomes political? U.S. debt is not bad, it serves to stabilize international currencies as gold once did. So … enact a balanced budget and what happens to the value of U.S. debt? Placing the payoff of U.S. debt as a priority above all other things, the tax payers of the united states back the debt, with the balanced budget in place the value of our debt sky rockets as the stability of it is demonstrated to be absolute… it is a no risk bet, but the amount of it is decreasing as we are not generating more debt and are focussed on paying it back.
Knowledge Utilization and Policy Analysis
This post discusses two journal articles:
Hird, J.A. (2005). Policy analysis for what? The effectiveness of nonpartisan policy research organizations. The policy studies journal, 33 (1), pp. 83-105.
Shulock, N. (1999). The paradox of policy analysis: If it is not used, why do we produce so much of it? Journal of policy analysis and management, 18 (2), pp. 226-244.
Both Shulock and Hird discuss the use of the knowledge generated by policy analysis in policymaking. Both scholars argue that policy analysis is primarily used in the policy process, and has a smaller effect on the policies themselves.