Policy Science

Applying Knowledge on Behalf of Human Dignity

Greetings:

This site contains papers about strategic thinking and public policy, reflecting new ideas and research developed for the Rapid Learning Economics, International Scientific Networks, and Government Learning projects, and related writing of Lloyd Etheredge. It includes a reference copy of the annotated bibliography of Harold D. Lasswell's work prepared by Rodney Muth et al. and published in 1990: References. (For books, other publications, and teaching materials, and annotations of key works by Ithiel de Sola Pool, see my academic homepage.)

This site also includes a cv.

Rapid Learning Economics and Other Current Projects

I. International Scientific Networks Project

A. Major Papers

B. Working Papers and Memoranda

II. Government Learning Project

A. Overviews, Literature Reviews and Related Work

  • Recapitalization: Documents Uploaded for Review and Public Comment to the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (2010).
  • Dept. of Justice & AAAS: "The Gathering Storm Case." (August 2008).
  • AAAS: Communication to Dr. James McCarthy, President of AAAS, and the AAAS Governing Council concerning AAAS, the "final favor" requested by Socrates, and the withdrawal of Bruce Alberts. [The redefinition of "conflict of interest" discussed briefly in this message refers to issues discussed in a letter to Attorney General Mukasey (below) on March 26, 2008 that was forwarded to Dr. McCarthy and the AAAS Governing Council.] April 7, 2008.
  • Dept. of Justice: Letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey concerning prosecutorial discretion, attesting that the self-correction mechanisms of science have failed and have been exhausted. Includes background documentation concerning three violations of law and the unresponsive revision of National Academy procedures and the official redefinition of "conflict of interest" Policies on Committee Composition and Balance and Conflicts of Interest" and Our Study Process under Bruce Alberts. March 26, 2008.
  • AAAS: Letter to Dr. James McCarthy, President of AAAS. Discusses further NAS erosions after the Carnegie Commission meeting: the hiring of Barbara Boyle Torrey, the hiring of Richard Atkinson, and the erosion of macroeconomic data systems. March 17, 2008.
  • Dept. of Justice: Letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey concerning prosecutorial discretion , the erosion of government credibility, and the current paralysis of the government's/NSF's agenda-setting system in several key areas of science. March 12, 2008.
  • AAAS: Letter to Dr. James McCarthy, President of AAAS with further discussion of the mistaken appointment of Bruce Alberts. March 9, 2008.
  • AAAS: Letter to Dr. Holdren. Chair of the AAAS Governing Council, recommending that the Council, at its forthcoming meeting, rescind the appointment of Bruce Alberts to become Editor-in-Chief of Science in March 2008 and reopen the search. January 31, 2008.
  • Dept. of Justice Filing: "Breach of Contract, Conspiracy, Fraud, and Coverups Affecting NSF Programs." The Luce Commission Case (September 2007).
  • NSF Recommendations: Fresh Thinking for the 21st Century. Selected Recommendations for NSF's Five-Year Plan (2006-2011). (March, 2007).
  • "A Project to Rethink and Upgrade Economic Statistics". (November, 2005). An overview letter to Robert Rubin (9/27/2005) and a related memorandum to Dr. David Lightfoot and the NSF Working Group on Transformative Research, "NSF and 67 Ways to Guess Gross Domestic Product." Brings to Dr. Lightfoot's attention a recent Op Ed piece in the Financial Times by John Kay and calls into question the complacency of NSF and the National Science Board.
  • "Wisdom and Public Policy" by Lloyd S. Etheredge. A reference copy of a chapter in A Handbook of Wisdom: Psychological Perspectives edited by Robert Sternberg and Jennifer Jordan published by Cambridge University Press in 2005.
  • Transformative research and improving NSF processes.. Letter to Dr. Nina Fedoroff's Taskforce, March 2005. Discusses the case of hierarchical imagery and clinical ideas - and reactivated fears and top-level breakdowns of scientific integrity.
  • "Increasing Resources for Political Science: Nine Strategies for APSA". Draft (5/7/2004) with a cover letter to Dr. Susanne Rudolph and Dr. Margaret Levi, President and President-elect of APSA. Suggests nine strategies; also a redesignation of the role of the three APSA Vice Presidents, and 50% release time and expenses for the Chair of the Development Committee to develop proposals for "midrange" ($10 million - $100 million, in the definition of the National Science Board) investments.
  • "How to Nurture Creativity and Progress in the Social Sciences: Comment on the National Science Board's Draft Report". January, 2003. Supplemental filing recommending 12 Centers for Comparative Foreign Policy at international sites. January, 2003. The NSF Infrastructure Task Force has been charged to identify the investments (e.g., facilities, global observation and measurement capabilities, and datasets) to assure the maximum productivity for research faculty, in all NSF-supported fields, during the next decade. I.e., for state-of-the-art research & fast discovery science about the most important questions in their fields. The national science budget is expected to double and the new infrastructure investment budget under discussion is about $18 billion to $20 billion.
  • "Science and Public Policy: Millennium Questions". Prepared for the Policy Sciences meeting, Yale Law School, October 27-29, 2000.
  • "What's Next? The Intellectual Legacy of Ithiel de Sola Pool". Presented to a symposium at MIT. Later, this was published as the final chapter in the second volume of Ithiel Pool's papers that I edited, Humane Politics and Methods of Inquiry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications, 2000). (1997).
  • "Wisdom and Good Judgment in Politics" from Political Psychology, 13:3 (1992). The original paper had to be cut substantially and condensed to meet page limitations of the symposium issue. The uncut version flows more smoothly, identifies additional research issues, and begins with the story (apologies to Mark Twain's "The Good Little Boy and the Bad Little Boy") of "The Good President and the Bad President."
  • "Thinking About Government Learning". With James Short. From Journal of Management Studies, 20:1 (1983). Definitions (e.g., intelligence & effectiveness, individual & organizational) and three case-study illustrations of the distinctions.
  • Flow diagram for a simulation model of the American political system. Based on Aaron Wildavsky's "The Past and Future Presidency" in The Public Interest, 41 (1975). Draft, 1982.
  • "Government Learning: An Overview". The original review, supported by NSF, to develop the field with an interdisciplinary foundation. It expanded the idea of cumulative diagnostic repertoires (from The Case of the Unreturned Cafeteria Trays (below)) and laid the foundation for follow-on steps in foreign policy (e.g., Can Governments Learn? & nuclear deterrence ("On Being More Rational Than the Rationality Assumption")) and domestic social & economic policy/ideology. (1981)
  • "Decision Making and Learning in Scientific Emergencies: The NRC and Three Mile Island." A review, with Philip Tetlock, of ten literatures in the behavioral sciences to study and improve small group decision making and learning in government. Develops a framework and methodology for multivariate content analysis and AI/cognitive modeling to integrate these approachs and analyze tapes of the meetings of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Three Mile Island crisis. Among others, builds upon Barber's Power in Committees, Axelrod's cognitive mapping, Holsti, Hermann, Bales, Suedfeld, Steinbruner, Verba, Osgood et al., Janis, Alker, and earlier work by Tetlock and myself. Still a state-of-the-art research design, esp. for political science. (1980).
  • "Why Do Politicians Speak Vaguely?". A brief exercise re an aspect of professional political behavior, with fourteen specialized theories, along the lines of Cafeteria Trays. (1976).
  • "The Case of the Unreturned Cafeteria Trays". An introduction to thirty theories that are useful for public policy and the analysis of individual behavior. With an independent file to download only Figure 1. (1976).

    B. Modeling Non-Rational Behavior

    . (See also the sections on ideology and economic behavior, and international relations, below).

    C. Domestic Policy (including ideological assumptions, economics, and national science policy)

    [The suggestion (represented in some of the papers and correspondence, below) for a competitive test of ideological assumptions, in the tradition of the Michelson-Morley experiment in physics, is broader than testing the hypotheses in the hierarchical psychodrama model of ideological passions and beliefs. It may be helpful to say that I do not believe that the truths about social and economic policy issues lie at a single point along the current liberal-conservative dimension in American politics. And they may not lie along this dimension at all.]

    D. International Relations

    See also "Hardball Politics" and "On Being More Rational Than the Rationality Assumption" in Modeling Non-Rational Behavior (above) and Can Governments Learn? on my academic homepage.)

    E. Other


    Contact: Lloyd Etheredge (email) and 7106 Bells Mill Rd. in Bethesda, MD 20817-1204. If you reached this Web page while searching for papers on national health policy, that's my brother, Lynn Etheredge.

    To view the papers, you will need the (free) Adobe Acrobat Reader.

    I have included a References page on this site, with relevant documents, hard-to-locate citations from earlier papers, and misc. items.

    The Government Learning and International Scientific Networks projects are activities supported through the Policy Sciences Center Inc., a public foundation created at Yale Law School in 1948 by faculty members Harold D. Lasswell, Myres McDougal, and George Dession. The foundation may be contacted at 127 Wall St., Room 322, P. O. Box 208215 in New Haven, CT 06520-8215, 203-432-1993 (v). Further information about the Society of Policy Scientists is available at http://www.policysciences.org.

    This page was last updated on May 12, 2016.