Why Government Fails So Often

Peter H. Schuck is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale University. He is the author or editor of many books, including Agent Orange on Trial, Meditations of a Militant Moderate, Diversity in America, and Understanding America.

Acknowledgments ix CHAPTER 1: Introduction 1 PART 1: The Context of Policy Making 37 CHAPTER 2: Success, Failure, and In Between 39 CHAPTER 3: Policy-Making Functions, Processes, Missions, Instruments, and Institutions 64 CHAPTER 4: The Political Culture of Policy Making 91 PART 2: The Structural Sources of Policy Failure 125 CHAPTER 5: Incentives and Collective Irrationality 127 CHAPTER 6: Information, Inflexibility, Incredibility, and Mismanagement 161 CHAPTER 7: Markets 198 CHAPTER 8: Implementation 229 CHAPTER 9: The Limits of Law 277 CHAPTER 10: The Bureaucracy 307 CHAPTER 11: Policy Successes 327 PART 3: Remedies and Reprise 369 CHAPTER 12: Remedies: Lowering Government's Failure Rate 371 CHAPTER 13: Conclusion 408 Notes 413 Index 463