When, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order (EO) 12291, he placed what the legal scholar and policy guru Cass Sunstein calls “the cost-benefit principle” at the heart of American statecraft: “no action”, it goes, “may be taken unless its (prospective) benefits justify its costs.” In principle, this meant that all proposed policy and regulation was to be subject to some sort of formal cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In practice, Sunstein notes, it confronted policymakers with a series of new and troubling questions:
Isn’t the cost-benefit principle hopelessly open-ended? Couldn’t it mean anything at all? How can we decide how to quantify costs and benefits? How do you put value on human life? What is a cost, and what is a benefit?
Now, this confrontation seems like it could be a problem for the principle! After all, why should policymakers embrace a technique that, despite promising clean, technical solutions to their daily problems, actually opens up on a series of tricky new questions, including some quasi-philosophical ones to boot? However annoying philosophy is this is not a good reason to reject the cost-benefit principle. Sunstein explains:
… many constitutional provisions […] have something important in common with the cost-benefit principle: They consist in generalities, which other officials have to fill in. They consist of incompletely specified abstractions.
In other words, in confronting policymakers with philosophical/conceptual questions, the cost-benefit principle actually belongs to an important category of political abstractions, one that Sunstein labels “incompletely specified abstractions” and that — so as to avoid any personal finance-related confusions — I will acronymise as “IS-abstractions”.
What are IS-abstractions?
To answer this question, let’s consider more closely how EO 12291 remade what policymakers do. In ratifying a government-wide cost-benefit principle (formally, at least — in reality, CBA had been floating around in American government since the mid-19th century), Reagan provided policymakers with a set of new concerns to shape and focus their efforts around, but it is one whose contents are vague enough that policymakers are also forced to work out what it means in practice. As a result, educationalists and public health authorities designing free school meals or mass vaccination schemes know that their proposed policy’s “costs” must be outweighed by its “benefits”, but also that they need to establish what “costs” and “benefits” mean in this particular context. The principle, far from answering policymakers’ questions or resolving their debates, merely refocuses them.
Once they have been accepted by policymakers, all IS-abstractions (which, as we will see momentarily, are omnipresent) work in this way: they are action-guiding (e.g., policymakers agree to only implement policies whose “costs” are outweighed by their “benefits”) but non-specific enough in meaning (e.g., it is not prima facie obvious what a “cost” or a “benefit” is, or how they should be quantified) that part of a policymaker’s role is to operationalise them within a given context (e.g., policymakers must work out what “costs” and “benefits” mean and how to quantify them in this situation, here and now). Importantly, IS-abstractions are not wholly devoid of meaning; their meanings are just vague enough to support very different, even incompatible, contextual interpretations. An analogy with memes may be clarifying here: they are both little pockets of non-specific meaning circulating through cultural networks, whose contents are reinvented and remade depending on their context of use.
IS-abstractions litter our policymaking talk and broader political debates. Beyond the cost-benefit principle, Sunstein provides “free speech”, “religious liberty”, and “the independent judiciary” as examples. To this, we could add “economic prosperity” (left and right typically agree on its importance but disagree on what it looks like), “the People’s will” (all democrats claim to be led by it, but few agree on what it is and how it can be known), and “British values” (what are they and should we care?). Or we could turn to a couple of recent books arguing that our politics should be organised around abstractions like “the common good” and “the national interest”. However, the most consequential IS-abstraction of the early 2020s has — in my opinion, at least — been “health”.
To see why, we need to take a quick step back and consider the field of policy in which “health” is most often deployed and operationalised: public health. Public health can, at first glance, seem like a jumble of disparate programs and interventions, comprising state-backed policies (like sumptuary taxation or mains water fluoridation), private sector initiatives (like a HR department’s mental health “awareness” campaign), voluntary recommendations (like being told to eat five fruits or vegetables a day), and coercive measures (like mandatory vaccination or forced eugenic sterilisation). Nonetheless, a classic statement by one of the field’s founders, an American bacteriologist named C.E.A. Winslow, continues to pick at its common theme:
Public health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts […] which will ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health.
On these terms (since reiterated by big names like Donald Acheson), all of public health’s interventions, from sin taxes and vape bans to “SMOKING KILLS” packaging and posters reminding us to feel for lumps, are organised around the same concern: promoting “health”. However, “health” is also non-specific in meaning, signifying very different things to different people in different contexts, and so an important part of any would-be public healthist’s job is working out what it means here and now. How a public healthist does this will define how they intervene in our lives.
So, returning to our example, March 2020 saw our public healthists operationalise “health” as “minimising the transmission of a particular virus, in large part to save the NHS from being overwhelmed”, with dramatic and wide-ranging consequences. For nearly two years our lives were led on those terms and every meaningful activity, however small, from going for a stroll in the park or a run in the gym to attending school, a loved one’s funeral, or having sex with someone outside of your household was effectively reevaluated in terms of its impact on COVID-19 transmission and regulated accordingly. It was because of a particular understanding of “health” that a bomb was dropped on economic and social life, that we were propagandised, that a generation of youths was set back or irredeemably broken, that the elderly and the sick were condemned to suffer and die bewildered and alone, and that our basic, liberal relationship with the law was flipped on its shell, going from “everything that isn’t explicitly prohibited is permitted” to “everything that isn’t explicitly permitted is prohibited”.
The COVID-19 debacle raises pressing questions about IS-abstractions, in particular: who gets to operationalise IS-abstractions and how?
Clearly, operationalisation involves making qualitative value-judgements about what is most relevant to understanding and intervening into a given situation. In 2020, the Whitehall machinery settled on the epidemiology-inspired judgement that what mattered most for promoting “health” was limiting the spread of a particular disease. They could — and should — have decided differently. They could (as, by some accounts, Boris Johnson wanted to!) have listened to those arguing that “health” depends on far more than avoiding an infection, that human beings are essentially social animals, or that reductions in viral transmission could not justify such an attack on civil liberty. This raises the question of who gets to decide what “health” is. Who gets to make the qualitative value-judgement that operationalises such a consequential abstraction? And who, for that matter, gets to decide what “prosperity” means, what the “national interest” is, or what “British values” are? Elected representatives? Civil servants? Experts? The People? I don’t know, and I doubt that a single answer exists, but the question seems essential.
The problem with relying on numbers … is that they … cannot actually tell us what matters
It is tempting to respond to the problems of operationalisation by appealing to numbers. Numbers convey an appearance of clarity, certainty, objectivity, and a transcending of local or self-interested value-judgements. Indeed, part of the reason that an epidemiological understanding of health won out in 2020 was that a vacuous prime minister, his special advisors, and a gaggle of hapless ministers, lacking the serious-mindedness or smarts to articulate an alternative, latched onto the handful of easily-digestible numerical indicators like NHS bed occupancy and disease transmission rates being offered to them by epidemiologists (this latching was later described as “following the science”).
The problem with relying on numbers in this way, however, is that, almost by definition, they cannot answer operationalisation’s essentially qualitative questions. Numbers cannot actually tell us what matters. Consider it the following way: while numbers are often invaluable to policymakers, making use of them means already having decided which ones matter and what weight to give them. It means already having made qualitative value-judgements about the numbers’ relevance that do not inhere within the numbers themselves. So, when Boris and his ministers appealed to epidemiological indicators, they didn’t avoid making a value-judgment but instead deferred to a tragically narrow judgement already made elsewhere by scientists on SAGE and SPI-M. (Note that appealing to different numbers like GDP or to a broader range thereof such as what would be included in a cost-benefit analysis does not help us here: as we saw above, even CBA entails qualitative, pre-numerical value-judgements.)
IS-abstractions are not only inevitable in politics (we are, after all, animals with the capacity for abstract thought), they are also exceedingly useful. In being action-guiding but thin in content, they can provide us with a common frame of reference and concern. While all will not agree on what “health” or “free speech” mean, minimally agreeing that they should be promoted or defended gives shape and direction (albeit, an open-ended one) to policymakers’ efforts. In this way, IS-abstractions may hold part of the answer to achieving a stable modus vivendi in our increasingly heterogenous and plural societies. However, the obverse of this is that it has never been more important to reflect on which IS-abstractions can play this role, who gets to operationalise them, and how.
