New development: Scarcity, policy gambles, and ‘one-shot bias’—training civil servants to speak truth to power

ABSTRACT

Allocating scarce resources to meet policy objectives incurs opportunity costs. A vital element of ‘speaking truth to power’ thus involves officials advising ministers on the opportunity costs of high-risk ‘pet projects’. In democracies, the brevity of ministerial office can produce ‘one-shot bias’—radical policy-making that deploys ministers’ time-limited powers to the full, yet risks producing significant opportunity costs for public service organizations. Examples include the UK’s recent social security, healthcare and European policies. Training in the economics of organization, development of new techniques for coping with uncertainty in opportunity-cost estimates, and stronger incentives for decision-makers to consider ‘benefits foregone’ by their actions could all provide greater protection against the downsides of one-shot bias.

IMPACT

Public sector reform invariably requires significant resources that are in short supply, such as time, money and brainpower. Allocating these scarce resources between alternative purposes thus incurs ‘opportunity costs’—potential value that is lost simply by resourcing one project rather than another. Opportunity costs are notoriously difficult to factor into organizational decision-making, especially in the public sector. They are implicit rather than overt costs, depend on an unobserved counterfactual, and government has no single metric for conceptualizing ‘value’ analogous to profitability in the private sector. Beyond these challenges, a further barrier in democratic contexts is ministers’ willingness to accept risks associated with radical reforms given the brevity of ministerial tenure—which we term ‘one-shot bias’. We provide three contemporary examples and outline some of the strategies that might help combat one-shot bias without damaging capacity for innovation or democratic responsiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Audit
• Brexit
• National Health Service
• opportunity costs
• prospect theory
• public management reform
• public sector reform
• Universal Credit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).