Policy is fascinating. Understanding systems, peering through into their flaws, and conceiving clever and humane fixes is a wonderful intellectual exercise and one with much more everyday relevance than a crossword puzzle. But the more you dig into the research around systems, the more you'll be impressed with how many share your hobby. Choose your area of policy failure -- global warming, health care, taxation, non-proliferation policy -- and you can be assured of a vast and glittering universe of brilliant ideas by serious thinkers who understand how to redress precisely the problem that so obsesses you.The problem is, policy is not enacted by fiat, nor through virtuous competition that seeks the wisest answers to the toughest problems. Rather, policy is intercepted by politics. And too often, the understanding of the politics around a policy failure is far less mature than the understanding of the technical problems involved. So, in the past year, I've been trying to pair my work on health policy with a similar focus on health politics. Which is why, when Slate asked me to write the health care section of their "How To Fix It" series, what I ended up writing contained precious little policy, but a whole lot of politics. POLICY AND POLITICS.
Policy is fascinating. Understanding systems, peering through into their flaws, and conceiving clever and humane fixes is a wonderful intellectual exercise and one with much more everyday relevance than a crossword puzzle. But the more you dig into the research around systems, the more you'll be impressed with how many share your hobby. Choose your area of policy failure -- global warming, health care, taxation, non-proliferation policy -- and you can be assured of a vast and glittering universe of brilliant ideas by serious thinkers who understand how to redress precisely the problem that so obsesses you.The problem is, policy is not enacted by fiat, nor through virtuous competition that seeks the wisest answers to the toughest problems. Rather, policy is intercepted by politics. And too often, the understanding of the politics around a policy failure is far less mature than the understanding of the technical problems involved. So, in the past year, I've been trying to pair my work on health policy with a similar focus on health politics. Which is why, when Slate asked me to write the health care section of their "How To Fix It" series, what I ended up writing contained precious little policy, but a whole lot of politics. 
