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No Magic Bullets: Privatization's Threat to Urban Public Administration
Author(s) -
Chisholm Donald
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of contingencies and crisis management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.007
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5973
pISSN - 0966-0879
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5973.00050
Subject(s) - expansive , normative , government (linguistics) , public good , economics , public choice , law and economics , public administration , administration (probate law) , magic (telescope) , political science , politics , law , neoclassical economics , linguistics , philosophy , materials science , compressive strength , composite material , physics , quantum mechanics
The privatization movement poses a serious crisis for American urban public administration. It seeks to over‐turn the century‐old Progressive expansive vision of urban government and to revert many goods and services, now produced publicly, to the private sector. For its precepts and normative policy proposals, privatization relies on Public Choice Theory, a formal, deductive enterprise, itself founded in Adam Smith's 18th century economics. It is this deductive method, not the substance of privatization's proposals, which is so troubling. Public policy and institutional reform must rest on a firm empirical foundation, not on deduction from abstract first principles. In this, the privatizers ought to turn to the pragmatic method of the Progressives that treats public policies and institutional forms as hypotheses to be validated by empirical experminentation and to abandon deductive approaches.