Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making
Deborah Stone
This was the main text for my Intro to Public Policy class at NYU. When I bought it, my plan was to sell it back to Amazon at the end of the semester, but now I am planning to keep it. I greatly enjoyed reading it and found myself taking down copious notes whenever reading it. Stone’s writing style fits a great deal of meaningful content into every paragraph, without being at all dense. Her main goal is to critique the “market model” of policy, and detail the specific ways and reasons in which it fails. She manages this quite well, and though her own “polis” model is not nearly as analytically tractable, she would consider that a feature, not a bug.