COU 1: Modeling A Policy Issue
Instructions
Below are three descriptions of policy issues. Pick ONE to work with, then use the one you pick to construct answers to all of the prompts.
- Issue 1: How Much to Increase Central Bank Lending Rates to Slow Inflation?
- A country’s central banks acts (among other things) as a short-term lender to private banks. By raising the rates at which it lends, a central bank can induce private banks to reduce the the volume of loans they make to businesses. That in turn can reduce the rate at which inflation (i.e. the average rate at which prices on all goods increase) increases. In late 2021, the rate of inflation in the U.S. and other wealthy economies around the world began to increase. Central banks in all those countries thus had to decide whether and how much to increase their lending rates. The decision entailed a trade-off. On the one hand, if a central bank raised rates too little, the rate of inflation might continue to accelerate. This would make persons who lived on fixed incomes (e.g. retirees), those with substantial savings and other assets, and those whose incomes were fixed by long-term contracts (such as landlords) poorer by quickly reducing the purchasing power of their earnings. On the other other hand, if a central bank increased rates too much, it could trigger a recession of its national economy. Recessions do the greatest harm to young workers (they tend to be the first to be laid off and the most impacted by hiring freezes), and workers in highly cyclical industries (such as construction, some service industries and durable goods industries).
- Issue 2: Federal Intervention in Local Elections
- After the 1964 U.S. Congressional elections, there was substantial support in the U.S. Congress for the passage of a new law through which the federal government would try to address the suppression of black persons’ rights to vote that had been common in the states of the former Confederacy since the 1880s. An issue that had to be resolved in writing such a law was how narrowly targeted federal scrutiny of local election practices should be. More specifically, should the new law impose standards on the administration of elections nationwide, and empower the U.S. justice department to prosecute suspected violations of those standards, regardless of where they occurred? Or should the law be written so that the new standards and enforcement regime would focus exclusively on localities in the U.S. South where suppression of black persons’ rights to vote had been violent, blatant, and egregious? For instance, the broadest possible law might prohibit certain voter suppression tactics (such as poll taxes) nationwide and empower the justice department to prosecute local officials in any state who violated those practices. A maximally narrow law, on the other hand, might name a handful of localities in the U.S. South where suppression of black voting had been well-documented, and promulgate election administration standards that would apply only to those named localities. An example between these extremes would be a law that set standards for how elections could be administered and make violations of these standards illegal only in places where the rate of voting among black residents was below a certain percentage, averaged over a certain number of years.
- Issue 3: Environmental Conservation vs. Clean Energy
- In early 2022, the U.S. federal government finally acted (after decades of inaction) to support the transition to non-CO2-emitting technologies. Specifically, the U.S. Congress passed a bill (misleadingly called the “Inflation Reduction Act”) that created massive subsidies for the deployment of wind, solar and geothermal electricity generation technologies, and for the manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles. If the new policy succeeds, it will substantially reduce U.S. CO2 emissions over the coming two decades. But whether it will succeed is highly uncertain. The challenge is that reducing emissions of CO2 in energy and transportation requires the construction of a massive amount of new infrastructure. Specifically, thousands of miles of new high-voltage, long-distance transmission lines must be built that can carry electricity from sunny and windy places where it can be generated cleanly (like Texas) to cloudy and non-windy places where it is needed (like New York). And at present, existing U.S. environmental laws make constructing those transmissions lines impossible. So the next major issue for U.S. climate policy is how or whether environmental laws ought to be changed to make it possible to construct the needed infrastructure. Current state and federal environmental laws allow almost anyone to stop the construction of infrastructure if they are concerned that that construction will harm an endangered species or otherwise alter an ecosystem. This makes it almost certain that any major infrastructure project (especially high voltage power lines) will be stopped by a lawsuit. But alternative policies are possible. At one extreme, of course, federal and state governments could pass laws that completely eliminate environmental protection and conservation restrictions on any electricity transmission project. Short of this, one can imagine laws that would put time limits on the judicial proceedings that result from environmental lawsuits against electricity transmission infrastructure, or would leave existing environmental regulations in place but remove the right of any citizen to sue to enforce those regulations.
Prompt 1
Write three or four sentences in which you state the policy issue you’ve chosen to work with, and then name two policies that lie at the extremes of that issue. Then, below what you’ve written, draw a policy space and place the two policies you named on that space in positions that represent the fact that they are opposite extremes on the issue.
Prompt 2
Name and describe a policy on your chosen issue that lies between the two extremes you named in response to Prompt 1. Then, below what you’ve written, draw a policy space and:
- Place the two policies you named in Prompt 1 on that space in positions that represent the fact that they are opposite extremes on the issue.
- Place the policy you named in response to this prompt in a position that represents the fact that it lies between the two extremes.
Prompt 3
Name and describe another policy on your chosen issue that lies between the two extremes you named in responses to Prompt 1. Then, below what you’ve written, draw a policy space and:
- Place the two policies you named in Prompt 1 on that space in positions that represent the fact that they are opposite extremes on the issue.
- Place the policy you named in response to Prompt 2 in a position that represents the fact that it lies between the two extremes.
- Place the policy you named in response to this prompt in a position that represent the fact that it lies between the two extremes. Make sure that policy is ordered in the policy space relative to the policy you named in Prompt 2 in a way that makes sense, given the order in which you’ve placed the two extreme policies.
Prompt 4
In two to four sentences, explain why you placed the policies you named in responses to Prompts 2 and 3 in the order along the line that you did. In your explanation, name the criterion by which the four policies you’ve represented in your model are ranked. (For instance, in the example of policies towards abortion in the Lesson, the criterion used in the model is “restrictiveness”.) Then, below what you’ve written, draw a policy space and:
- Place the two policies you named in Prompt 1 on that space in positions that represent the fact that they are opposite extremes on the issue.
- Place the policy you named in response to Prompt 2 in a position that represents the fact that it lies between the two extremes.
- Place the policy you named in response to this prompt in a position that represent the fact that it lies between the two extremes. Make sure that policy is ordered in the policy space relative to the policy you named in Prompt 2 in a way that makes sense, given the order in which you’ve placed the two extreme policies.
- Label the policy space with the criterion you named in response to this prompt and put an arrow next to the label pointing in the direction that represents higher levels according to that criterion. (For instance, in the example of policies toward abortion in the Lesson, more restrictive policies are placed to the right, thus the label reads “restrictiveness” and has an arrow pointing to the right.)
Prompt 5
In about one-half a page of double-spaced text, describe an aspect of the policy issue that you’ve chosen to work with that the spatial model you developed in response to Prompts 1 through 4 misrepresents or ignores and state reasons why that aspect is important. As in the Lesson, you may do this by describing a criterion that differentiates policies towards your chosen issue that is not the criterion your model represents. But you should also feel free to identify other important aspects of policy that the model ignores or misrepresents. What matters is that you show an accurate understanding of what the one-dimensional spatial model entails. Note that identifying aspects of your chosen policy issue that aren’t captured by your model may require knowledge of the issue that goes beyond what is covered in the introduction to this COU. Feel free to ask a TA for help if you feel like you don’t know enough about the issue you’ve chosen.
Rubric
You can earn up to 5 points on this COU, one point for each of the 5 prompts. Because evaluating your response to each prompt depends on part on your success in the previous prompts, getting full credit on any one prompt requires performing well on the previous prompts.