Forget policy — start with people

Beatrice Karol Burks – Designing Good Things

This is a short polemic against the idea of policy, and by extension against the (self) importance of those who make it. It clearly and strongly makes an important point – but in doing so misses something important about policy and politics.

It is certainly true that starting with people and their needs is a good way of approaching problems. But it doesn’t follow that anything called policy is necessarily vacuous or redundant. Policy making, and indeed politics, is all about making choices, and those choices would still be there even if the options to be considered were better grounded.

None of that makes the practical suggestions in this post wrong. But if we forget policy, we forget something important.

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