Why policy fails

Cattle dealers

A few days ago I was browsing through some books in my book cases and my eye was caught by the next quote, which I had underlined, in a already rather old book by Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian-born sociologist (1893-1947):

“Every specialist is acting in good faith when he believes that his own method is the right one, for he unconsciously confuses the section of reality on which he is working with reality itself ...” (Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949; p. 29).

Everyone looks at the world from his or her perspective and everyone thinks that this perspective is right if not the best, for why else would s/he have it? As for this, specialists in who knows what are not different than other people. The problem is, however, that specialists, unlike the men in the street, can have a decisive influence on what other people do, or at least on what those people do that are touched by their specialisms. As long as a specialist is open to the world and particularly to critical remarks from people touched by his doings, his methods tend to become the best he can have. But often this is not the case and often the specialist considers the problem to be solved only from the perspective of his specialism. Then his method has become a one-way approach. This can be fatal in cases that the problem involved is not purely technical in the sense that it concerns mere things, but if men are involved in it, so if the problem concerned actually is a human problem. For people tend to interpret what a specialist does in their own ways, and these ways are often different from what the specialist had thought out. Then it can happen, and it often does happen, that what was thought out by the specialist takes another turn than expected. Look around and you’ll see how often this occurs. You simply need to have an open eye for it. However, many policy makers keep their eyes closed and that’s why their policies so often fail.