Hi, My Name is Chris and I Am a Wonk
When I was in college it seemed that a revolution was both necessary and possible. I went to graduate school to study socialist economies so that I could help to build one here. So it goes.
I did manage to learn a great deal of economic theory and history, a bit of statistics and the SAS Data Step. I currently use the last of these in my day job in health care. I have had various wonk jobs that used my economics and statistics, teaching and policy research, but none of them have paid nearly as well as my current job as a data monkey. As I get some distance from my wonk career I have begun to notice some characteristic attitudes and approaches that unite wonks everywhere and across the political spectrum.
- A strong desire to help people or, at least, to make them better. Not necessarily a bad thing.
- A keen appreciation of subtle and indirect mechanisms and the importance of small changes.
- A general view that people calculate the costs and benefits of their actions and base their choices on incentives.
- A compulsion to create hopelessly elaborate and unworkable schemes and a supreme ability to ignore the failure of these schemes
- A confidant belief in the importance of our views and opinions and a strong desire to share them with you.
As I look at what wonks have wrought over the past decades I become more convinced that we would all benefit by a little more directness and simplicity. Because I retain my wonkish desire to share my views with the world I have set up this blog to talk of these things in a simpler, more direct way.
Let's have some exemplary wonks matched up against your list of characteristics. Is (either) Clinton a wonk? Can there be a Republican wonk? Or does "starve the beast" in its many policy manifestations make you a crank instead? Are British Liberals more wonkish than Labour, or do they just have a different agenda? Just trying to get a handle on this.
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Clinton is the archetypal wonk. The Coalition Provisional Authority that oversaw the occupation of Iraq are a group of Republican wonks. The Cato Institute is a hotbed of libertarian wonks. I know little or nothing about British politics.
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