SOUND POLICY COMPARES APPLES AND ORANGES

Responsible policy makers avoid primary emotions and media hypes and question established behavioral patterns. For a proper allocation of resources they weigh the relative importance of needs in society. For that purpose they have to compare forces that some see as incomparable but, in fact, are not.

For apple-orange comparisons policy advisors have instruments to express needs or dangers in comparable ways. Such instruments include cost-benefit analysis, multi-criteria analysis, decision support systems, policy workshops, expert interviews and future scenario structuring. These instruments are not perfect but sophisticated enough to generate priorities and certain quantifications in terms of money or numbers of people and degrees of their being positively or negatively affected. On the basis of the results it is possible to reallocate more realistically the available resources to different interests or solutions of problems.

With the help of these instruments relative importance can be established of such widely different subjects as the risk of being territorially or culturally conquered by outsiders, saving lives by better prevention in health care, improved quality of life by introducing advanced school didactics, distribute work and free time equally in society, create more satisfying jobs for the employed, calculate future costs of global warming or enhance the efficiency of civil servants.

These exercises can also lead to, for instance, a redistribution of available resources so far allocated to different government ministries and departments or to energy generating facilities based on non-renewable and renewable resources.

Can we also compare deaths resulting from murder with other causes of death? Of course, there is a difference but there is also a similarity, just like other causes of death have a difference and a similarity with each other. There is a difference between people who die young and those who die old. There is a difference between slow onset and sudden death. There are differences between degrees or periods of suffering. And there are difference between bereaved such as poor and rich widows or between young and adult children. 

If we want to assess qualitative gaps between different types of death, using apple-orange instruments can be of help to specify and compare such differences.

Such exercises are also excellent ways to broaden the mind and train us in searching for balanced opinion making and behavioral adjustments. They help us to put things in perspective and combine things that we otherwise treat separately.

Of course, society will have its resistances. Outcomes of policy exercises are not always easily brought in line with differences in social power, interests and opinions, but at least create more clarity about such differences and can lead to more balance than trench war debates, confusion, inertia or over-excitement.

And especially, such exercises prove that apples and oranges are most certainly comparable. If, after learning about such exercises, the argument that apples and oranges are incomparable is still maintained, it is perhaps more the result of unhealthy emotions than of sound policy thinking.