Policy Decision-Making Quotes

If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton.

Politicians are notoriously economically illiterate. And even when they know what would be the right thing, we don't really expect them to do it.

In political administration, no problem is ever simple. It can never be reduced to the question whether a certain measure is good or not.

I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews.

Politicians must pick sides regularly; every time they vote. So it's perhaps natural that they see the world as a battle between competing groups.

I see myself as more of a policy maker than a political leader.

Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.

We need a much better understanding of the climate before making policy choices that would impose substantial economic costs on our Nation.

I wanted to work on policy because I think it really makes a difference.

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails.

I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time?

The concern now is whether policymakers even understand the meaning of evidence. Whether there is any truth to this descriptor of "fact-free era." Whether policy is going to be made more and more in the absence of scientific input.

I'm an implementer of policy, not a maker of policy.

Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank... need to consider not only the most likely future path for the economy but also the distribution of possible outcomes about that path. They then need to reach a judgment about the probabilities, costs, and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.

I don't think the intelligence community itself institutionally is losing its focus; it will continue to do its job; continue to be vigilant on all issues that are besetting us. I think the greater danger is just the preoccupation of the policy community, and how much attention they pay to what the intelligence community is telling them.

I'm a big believer that good policy is good politics. And so, when it comes to making decisions on policy issues, what I endeavor to do is simply speak the truth.

Sometimes I think the Congress feels that if you only decided tomorrow to switch to wind power that in two years we'd be getting 80 percent of our electricity from wind power. It's nonsense. Normally it takes 20 to 30 years after a new technology is demonstrated and deployed before it powers even 15 or 20 percent of the grid. There's this long lag time, and we haven't even decided which directions to go.