查看文章

Policymaking is about the future. If we were able to predict the future accurately, preferred policies could be identified (at least in principle) by simply examining the future that would follow from the implementation of each possible policy and picking the one that produced the most favorable outcomes. However, for most systems of interest today (particularly social and economic systems), such prediction is not possible, due to their increasing complexity, their increasing interrelationships with other systems, and the increasing uncertainty of developments external to the system that have important effects on the system. When even the best model cannot reliably predict the details of a system’s behavior, the classical approach of choosing a policy based on the outcomes from a best estimate model is no longer credible. Such policies are ‘best’for a future that most certainly will not occur, and have implications for the …