Professional Practice

APPAM members do a lot of what might be called “applied social science research.” They use scientific methods to describe problems of concern to public policy, to explore their causes, and to estimate the effects of existing policies. This laudable commitment to empiricism, however, often inhibits analysts from taking the next step that is logically required of policy thinking: asking “What if...” questions about the possible effects of various policy options on outcomes that policy-makers desire. These questions are uncomfortably—and unavoidably—speculative. They are also, perhaps equally uncomfortably, normative and multi-dimensional. Dealing with them sometimes requires special methods, such as creating decision trees or running the “Crystal Ball” program or doing break-even analysis. More generally, though, it requires simply a self-conscious effort to pose, and then speculate about, a series of thoughtful “what if...?” questions.