Edward C. Banfield

The blog of the American Enterprise Institute carries my impishly titled, “First We Kill All the Policy Wonks” (January 21, 2011).

The piece is a response to a smart post by Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Its subject?  Edward C. Banfield’s essay, Policy Science As Metaphysical Madness (1977).

Obviously, I do not think wonks are bad; and I certainly do not want to see them killed.  (I’m one of them!)

I do, however, believe a gulf remains between policy analysis and politics, and that practitioners of the former spend too little time studying the latter.

Lawrence M. Mead of New York University has suggested a method to unite policy analysis and political analysis.  (See “Policy Studies and Political Science,” Policy Studies Review, vol. 5, no. 2 (Nov. 1985), and “Welfare Reform and the Platonic Master Science: An Interview with Lawrence Mead,” Public Administration Review, November/December 2006).  It is an approach that I used in my Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005), but otherwise has not much caught on with academics.