The target culture: origins - (2)

Herbert Simon and Rational Decision-Making

IBM 360 installation c.1962

In the 1950s computers were at the cutting edge of thinking: a computer installation was the very image of clean, modern rationality. In 1956, Herbert Simon, a young associate dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University established the first Computation Center.  (Later this would evolve into The School of Computer Science, the first such school devoted solely to computer science in the United States and a model for others that followed.)

Herbert Simon was an eccentric polymath who would later win a Nobel Prize for Economics (20 years after he stopped working in the field) for his work on bounded rationality. He claimed not to watch television, listen to the radio or pay attention to newspaper headlines, “First,” he said, “A lot of what’s in the paper today was in the paper yesterday. Second, most of the things that are in the papers today that weren’t yesterday I can predict, at least in general.”

As a mathematician and computer scientist, Simon was comfortable in a world in which knowledge came from collecting and analysing data. Just as Cochrane had found in medical education and practice, so Simon found in the social sciences that precedent, habit and tradition were trusted more than any evidence that could be gleaned from whatever data was available.

In a 1978 interview for UBS Bank, Simon explained, 

“Before you can have mathematical structures in a science, you have to have data, you have to understand the phenomenon," he said. "Before biology became modern molecular biology, with exact knowledge of genes and of chemistry, many people had to go out and collect countless plants to find out how they were put together. We haven’t done that yet in the social sciences."

Herbert Simon with an IBM 650  c.1958.  Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University

Both in his doctoral dissertation and in his 1947 book, Administrative Behaviour, written when he was in his early thirties, Simon attacked what he described as haphazard decision-making in public administration.

“Our work led us to feel increasingly the need for a more adequate theory of human problem-solving if we were to understand decisions. Allen Newell, whom I had met at the Rand Corporation in 1952, held similar views. About 1954, he and I conceived the idea that the right way to study problem-solving was to simulate it with computer programs. Gradually, computer simulation of human cognition became my central research.” [2]

Simon accused administrators of basing their decision-making on “Inconsistent proverbs drawn from common sense, and handed down expertise, completely lacking in scientific rigour”.[3] He said that public administration must be founded on rigorous and scientific observation and on laws of human behaviour.

But where Cochrane always viewed evidence-based medicine as an adjunct (but a hugely important one) to existing medical expertise, knowledge and common-sense, Simon went further. He insisted that public administration must be founded exclusively on information derived from data gathered for the purpose.

In his writing and his lectures, Simon used the buzzwords of the time, behaviour, decisions, computers and organization to suggest that decision-makers could achieve the most rational outcomes if – and only if – they thought logically and used the fabulous processing power of computers.[4]

He seems to have treated decision-making as a logical exercise in which you begin by analysing the situation and deciding what outcome you want. You then list all the possible different directions in which you could go and calculate the consequences of each, and then simply (!) choose the alternative that most closely gets you where you want to be.

Simon realised that it would not be possible to consider all possible courses of action let alone all their consequences. He accepted, too, that in many cases we are simply unable to gather all the evidence we need to select the outcome we want.

But he argued that this should not stop us from making a rational decision. What we needed to do, he said, was to look only at the options where we do possess all the evidence. And then we should look only at those options where this evidence can easily be expressed as computable numbers.[5] Significantly, in terms of Artificial Stupidity, Simon said we should ignore any ‘messy’ and ‘unreliable’ evidence based on common sense or experience.

He said that by separating facts from value judgments, we would allow objective scientific knowledge to control the social environment. Qualitative data that deals with complicated ideas like ethics and emotions, beliefs and motivation and cultural contexts and obligations (i.e. any data that could not be expressed in numbers) had to be overlooked in the name of rationality.

In this, I would like to suggest, Simon is asking us to behave like the cheat in our version of the Turing Test.

But it helps to see his rather radical position in the context of the social turmoil and talk of revolution in the 1960s.

New Public Administration

In 1968, Dwight Waldo, one the most respected American political scientists of the time, organised a conference at Syracuse University. No one aged over 35 was allowed to speak. The subject was public administration  (i.e the work of the Civil Service) in the context of the revolutionary feel of the times.

The conference participants raged against a society that was, in their eyes, full of discrimination, injustice, and inequality, and they argued that public administration supported – both practically and theoretically – this unbearable status quo. [1]

They wanted a civil service that was more democratic, accountable, and modern. In particular, they wanted public administrators to have an agenda: to do good for society. The conference was a jolt for political scientists. It was as if up to now everyone had accepted that public administration existed like an old boy’s club, dedicated to preserving the status quo. What was important about this conference was that from now on, more and more, people began to believe that public administrators should have the goal of serving the people and being transparent about how they did so, and above all, working hard to become more efficient. Articles, books and more conferences followed under the banner of New Public Administration.

For those who thought career administrators old fashioned and inflexible, Herbert Simon became a hero.

But somehow during the recession of the 1970s, the emphasis of New Public Administration shifted subtly. Its proponents still attacked the old guard who just wanted to preserve the status quo; they still wanted public administration to be transparent and ever more efficient, but the idea of striving to do good for society somehow became subsumed into the search for a more rational, business-like and accountable way of running the public sector.

Why and how Simon's ideas (as modified by New Public Administrators) became the basis for real policy-making in the UK, will be the subject of another post.

[Next: Thatcher and the rise of New Public Management]

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[1] Gruening, Gernod,  "Origin and theoretical basis of New Public Management" in International Public management Journal, Elsevier. April 2001
[2] Simon, Herbert A.  "Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980" ed. Assar, Lindbeck. World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore 1992. 
[3] ] Simon, Herbert A.  "Administrative behavior: a study of decision-making in administrative organization" The Free Press New York NY USA 1976
[4] Simon, H A; Smithburg, D W; Thompson, V A, "Public administration" Alfred A. Knopf, New York NY USA 1950

[5]  Simon, Herbert A.  " A behavioral model of rational choice"  in  The Quarterly Journal of Economics , vol. 69 issue 1 Oxford Journals, Oxford 1955)