[Special Edition] Frameworks to Understand Public Policy

A compilation of frameworks that have featured in this thought-letter

We resume regular programming starting October 27. Meanwhile, here’s a special edition that you might enjoy.

On the lines of our policyWTF Long List, this edition is our Frameworks Long List. Over four years of writing this thought-letter, we have compiled quite a few frameworks that can help us analyse public policy issues.

We believe in the power of frameworks to zoom in on the most important aspects of complicated public policy issues. They are helpful in sense-making and should be thought of as a starting point to reflect on public policy issues rather than definitive solutions.

Some of these frameworks are our own creations, but most are credited to leading thinkers of public policy, politics, and philosophy.

For ease of reading, we’ve put these 80+ frameworks into a few categories. Click through on any of them and hopefully, you’ll discover a new frame to observe the world. Don’t forget to bookmark this edition!

Public Policy

1. Not all Unintended Policy Consequences are Unanticipable & How to Anticipate the Unintended?

2. India and the Three Dimensions of Decentralisation

3. Policies vs Programmes vs Practices

4. 8 Things to Unlearn Before Learning Public Policy

5. A Taxonomy of Policy Failures (and Policy Successes) & What’s a Policy Success?

6. What Makes a Good Policy Problem Definition?

7. Wicked Problems

8. Hyper multi-objective optimisation: the bane of policymaking & One Instrument One Target

9. Errors of omission and commission — how VLSI relates to subsidies

10. Four Components of an Economic Strategy

11. Conceptualising Opportunity Cost Neglect

12. When do Conditions Become Policy Problems?

13. Seven Stages of the Policy Pipeline

14. Understanding Corruption

15. Public Sector Reform

16. Outlays-Outputs-Outcomes

17. All Things Governments Do

18. Complexity and Public Policy

19. Making prisoner’s dilemma a part of the Policy Engineering toolkit

20. Nine Competing Visions of Equality

21. No More COP-outs

22. Public Policy Solutionism

Political Thinking

1. Why Aligning Cognitive Maps is Important

2. The Overton Window

3. Kingdon’s Three Streams Schema

4. Types of Causal Narratives

5. Stakeholder Management in Public Policy

6. Wilson’s Interest Group (IG) Matrix

7. What Makes a Good Narrative?

8. How to Confront Trade-offs?

9. Why Weak Dictators Get Softer Loans

10. Political Policymaking

Public Finance

1. Three Functions of the State

2. Marginal Cost of Public Finance

3. The Domar Rule for Public Debt Sustainability

4. An Algorithm for Fiscal Federalism

5. How to Make Sense of Bengaluru’s Water Woes? A Wicksellian Disconnection

Foreign Policy, Defence and Geopolitics

1. The Paradoxes of India’s Westernophobia

2. How to Describe a State’s Policy on a Geopolitical Issue

3. How to Deter Reasonable People from Engaging in Undesirable Behaviour?

4. Why is the US Policy Towards Pakistan so Flaky?

5. Dictatorship and Democracy in Israel and Pakistan

6. India and the Post-COVID-19 World Order

7. Guns and Butter

8. Ingredients of a New World Order & What Global Order Are We In?

9. What Makes an Asset Strategic?

10. National Security Preparedness & Planning for COVID-19

11. Responding to the Standoff on the LAC in Ladakh

12. Three Schools of Thought on the India—US relationship

13. China’s Predicament

14. the Human Capital Investment Model for India’s National Security System

15. How do Democratic States Perceive Each Other?

16. What Made the US Enable China’s Rise?

17. Aap Hamaare Hain Kaun, Russia?

18. Hypocrisy in International Relations

19. A Framework for India’s Approach Towards Chinese Firms & India’s Techno-strategic Stance on China

20. Decoupling Dynamics

Society

1. Internet + Politics

2. Social Norms and Public Policy

3. Building Digital Communities

4. How do Social Norms Flip?

5. Radically Networked Societies

6. What’s the Relationship Between Terrorism, Poverty, and Education?

7. The Basis of Morality

8. How to Analyse an Analysis

9. Defence Against the Dark Arts in the Information Age

10. Three Truths Of Ideology

11. Why do we do Stupid Things in Groups?

12. Why People Rebel?

13. What is a Nation?

14. The State and the Society

15. Census reveals a lot about a State and Society

16. Why Large WhatsApp Groups Are So Ineffective?

Universe

1. How to Build a Good 2x2 Matrix

2. The Three Binding Constraints on Technological Progress

3. Building Models

4. Moralising is Central to Storytelling

5. Social Media’s Rule of Three & How Social Media Expands our Reference Networks

6. Inter-state Water Sharing

7. The Impossible Trinity of Indian Cities

8. Hal Varian’s Tips on Building an Economic Model

9. Prohibition and Morality

10. Xi’s Trilemma

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Since we are talking frameworks, I must mention this iconic short story, which I first heard from Ameya Naik. It highlights the usefulness and limitations of models and frameworks as tools for thinking.

On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658