11 Jun 2015
At the Washington Monthly, Lee Drutman commented on Baumgartner and Jones' new book, the Politics of Information:
With simplicity comes clarity; with diversity comes loss of control. Yet clarity, appealing as it may be, has some harmful consequences for our political institutions. It limits the ability to examine problems creatively, from multiple angles, and makes it harder to change anything. Good luck solving health care or energy or immigration or global trade in three plain-language pages. But once you allow in more angles and dimensions, you inevitably open up the process to who knows what.
This conflict is at the heart of a fascinating new book by the political scientists Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones called The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America. Baumgartner and Jones are grappling with a fundamental question of governance: How do we collectively solve problems whose complexity exceeds the cognition of any one person? And what happens when we attempt to impose simplicity on complex problems that defy such control?
Read the full article here.