Policy Formation and the Economist

Running through my presentation are four assumptions or assertions which I believe to be true. First, our founding fathers put a heavy emphasis on education by word and deed. They believed it necessary for the functioning and preservation of the type of society they were forming. Second, the changing structure of our society in recent years has increased the number of decisions made in the public arena relative to the private. Third, while all disciplines of a university may contribute research results necessary to policy formulation, economics is the pivotal discipline. And fourth, because policy decision making is so value laden, it requires a special educational approach. Back in the late 1920s when I became associated with Purdue University, the average yield of corn in Indiana for the decade of the 1920s was 35V2 bushels per acre. This was typical of the Corn Belt. It was just 1?/2 bushels more than was produced per acre in the decade of the 1870s, fifty years before. Corn was being produced according to conventional knowledge. Then, a stream of technical knowledge was added by the universities, supported by supply organizations, and from this combined stream we have increased yields on the average of 1/2 bushels per acre each year. Today we are making policy decisions at the local, state, and national levels from the stream of conventional knowledge plus a small stream of scientific policy information. Do we not need to enlarge the scientific policy stream just as in the technical areas? In my title I have used "Policy Formation and the Economist," not the agricultural economist. Many of us are economists with an agricultural specialty, but many people in the agricultural economics departments are working on problems broader than and other than agriculture. Therefore, I do not believe we should get trapped by the agricultural economic term. Some departments have already changed their name without materially changing their staffs. Let us now turn for a moment to what certain distinguished economists and public administrators have said about public policy and the economist. Chester Davis, one of the grand old men of agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s, in summarizing the previous policy work of the economists in the 1940 Department of Agriculture Yearbook suggested that the economist "was strong on analysis and weak on remedy" (p. 312). James Nielson, in his presidential address to this Association said that "in the past decade, I believe that we have overinvested in the development and refinement of quantitative methods. We have spent too little time and energy on discovering and tackling the emerging economic and social problems that most trouble our society" (p. 869). Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon approached the point more subtly when he stated, "I sometimes think that economists use decimal points in their forecasts to prove they have a sense of humor." James T. Bonnen, who was a director of a public policy study in 1968 for the presidents of the land grant colleges, said at the National Policy Conference in 1970, "I believe the universities have a great potential in public affairs if they will focus on the problems of society" (p. 13). Richard L. Kohls in speaking before the American Agricultural Economics Association said: