The world is not what it should be.

Charles Lindblom, below, on one of the reasons why stat-driven policy analysis can lack authorativeness. I just love the last few sentences.

A common failure to achieve an authoritative solution to a problem arises because critics or skeptics of the solution can – and do – allege that the problem has been incorrectly defined.

Suppose we begin, as an excise in defining a problem, with the family “Why Johnny can’t read.” To specify the problem more precisely, someone will suggest that the problem is one of reading difficulties among certain urban ethnic groups. But then it will be said that the problem is one of inadequate family incomes for these groups. And to that it will be responded that income itself is not the problem; the problem is basically a deficiency in the family’s ability to implant an incentive to learn to read in children. Hence the problem becomes that of the inadequacy of the urban ethnic family as a social institution – an institution that is failing to perform its required functions. That may provoke the suggestion that the problem is one of defective socioeconomic organization; socioecomonic institutions do no integrate these families into normal social functioning. But perhaps, then, the problem is one of faulty political organization in the society at large, since presumably the right kind of political decision could remedy the faults of the economy, the structure of urban society, and the place of the family in it.

At this point someone is also certain to suggest that politics is not an independent influence on economy and society, being itself dependent upon them. It might then be proposed that the problem is one big interlocked problem of social organization – to which formulation one may or may not add some further problem specifications, such as that the phenomena of social class are the “real” problem. But problem definition at this level can perhaps be counted on to produce another abstract formulation. Any big interlocked problem of social organization, it will be suggested, can only be understood as a product of history and culture. The problem, then, is a fundamental one of a historically produced culture that is inadequate. From which it seems only a small step to the conclusion: the world is not what it should be. That is the problem.

Charles Lindblom and David Cohen. Usable Knowledge – Social Science and Social Problem Solving