On his book When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency
Cover Interview of April 29, 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?
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
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?