Policy Argument I

Disability Rights:  Gradual Issue Emergence and the Importance of Precedent



Reactive Effects and Reactivity (p. 198)

Issue Emergence and Numbers -- last week's epigram:

In 1973, children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman launched the Children's Defense Fund with a survey. One US Census figure haunted her. Some 750,000 American children between the ages of seven and thirteen did not attend school ... `Handicapped kids were those seven hundred fifty thousand kids,' Edelman recalls finding to her surprise. `We'd never thought of handicapped kids. but they're out there everywhere.'"

-- Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity

Counting under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. See Child Find

Colin Powell on working the numbers:

If, for example, you are going to judge me on AWOL rates, I’m going to send a sergeant out by 6:30 a.m. to bloodhound the kid who failed to show up for 6:00 a.m. reveille.  The guy’s not considered AWOL until midnight.  So drag him back before then and keep that AWOL rate down.  I vigorously set out to better every indicator by which my brigade was statistically judged.  And then went on to do the things that I thought counted.

Concealment is a reactivity effect:

 

  The spike in Native Americans 

In episode 42, members of the Soprano crime family meet Chief Doug Smith, a sleazy casino operator.

SIL: No offense, chief, but, uh... you don't look much like an Indian.
SMITH: Frankly I passed most of my life as white, until I had a racial awakening and discovered my Mohonk blood. My grandmother on my father's side, her mother was a quarter Mohonk.
TONY: And all this happened when the casino bill got passed, right?
SMITH: Better late than never.

Psychiatrist Allen Frances:

DSM-IV may have started the autism epidemic, but other powerful engines drove it forward beyond all expectation. Probably most important was the positive feedback loop between spirited patient advocacy and the provision of school and therapeutic programs that require an autism diagnosis. As the population of "autistic" patients grew, they gained the power to push for many additional services— sometimes by initiating successful lawsuits. The additional services then provided further incentive to increased diagnosis. With more people diagnosed, there there was an ever larger constituency to push for more services.

Information disclosure as policy instrument (p. 322) -- a dramatic example right here