179 Quotes About Policy

Scholars have long debated whether capital markets lead to appropriate levels of saving and investment for future generations.

Populism offers the headless heart; ideology offers the heartless head.

But when something is easy to imagine, it’s often because you’ve failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by ‘one-handed’ economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.

Policymakers cannot take the situation lightly, for at its worst, it speaks to “intergenerational inequity” – a breaking of the social contract between two generations.

We could write a completely new manual incorporating all our new policies and spelling out the emerging philosophy behind them. Or we could do away with the old manual and not just replace it. That way we would force people to make decisions based on common sense…We tried to write new rules. We really did. But at every turn we found ourselves wading into a swamp of minutiae.

Over the next three or four months we simply collected all our procedures manuals…People would ask us from time to time when the new manuals would be ready. Eventually, some began to suspect that an update wasn’t going to appear and asked us why. Only then did we say aloud what we had been thinking: that we were trading written rules for common sense. And that is the system we have today, which is barely a system at all.

A true professional not only follows but loves the processes, policies and principles set by his profession.

The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments. Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.