On his book When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency
Cover Interview of April 30, 2018
Lastly
Street-level bureaucrats are the first to take the blame
when things go wrong. We sometimes forget, however, that the constraints they
operate under are largely of our own making. They reflect the amount of
resources that we, as a democratic public, have chosen to devote to public
services.
Describing what happens when the state meets the street is
like holding a mirror to ourselves as a polity. If we do not like what we see,
we need to reconsider our own values and priorities.
This provides us with a different starting point for reflecting
on democratic politics. We usually think first about what laws and policies we
should have, and only then about how to implement them. Once we know what we
want the state to do, we can figure out how to do it.
But what if we flipped things around—thinking first about how
we would want the state and its officials to interact with citizens and working
our way back, from there, to questions of management style, institutional
design, and policy choice?
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
Street-level bureaucrats are the first to take the blame when things go wrong. We sometimes forget, however, that the constraints they operate under are largely of our own making. They reflect the amount of resources that we, as a democratic public, have chosen to devote to public services.
Describing what happens when the state meets the street is like holding a mirror to ourselves as a polity. If we do not like what we see, we need to reconsider our own values and priorities.
This provides us with a different starting point for reflecting on democratic politics. We usually think first about what laws and policies we should have, and only then about how to implement them. Once we know what we want the state to do, we can figure out how to do it.
But what if we flipped things around—thinking first about how we would want the state and its officials to interact with citizens and working our way back, from there, to questions of management style, institutional design, and policy choice?