About one evening in three I spent with him as an adult–and after he had had his third Bombay Sapphire martini–my late grandfather Earl H. DeLong would start to rant about how the study of public policy as an academic discipline had gone way downhill over his lifetime as people who saw themselves as studying “public administration” were replaced by people who saw themselves as studying “political science”. Oh, there were exceptions–Grandfather Earl had a lot of respect for Aaron Wildavsky and James Q. Wilson–but, he said, rather than building up the mass of case studies and analyses from which one might actually be able to generalize and begin to draw useful and durable lessons about public management, people with chairs in graduate schools of public policy increasingly wanted to build orrerys and explain how their policies would bring about utopia.
As he used to say: “everyone wants to fantasize about Rommel, and nobody wants to be a real quartermaster, even though real quartermasters won a lot more battles than real Rommels have”.
But James Q. Wilson was an exception. And Buce has a very nice catch from his Bureaucracy::
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