ABSTRACT
There are substantial possibilities for raising the level of rationality in political systems that depend neither on new advances in political philosophy nor on the new techniques for calculation and simple decision-making. They take the form of specific calculated adaptations to the enormous discrepancy between man's cognitive faculties, even when extended by electronic computation and other helpful devices, and the complexity of the problems that he must attack. They do not promise rationality, but they raise its level. Theories of decision-making that continue to examine the rationality of forms of decision-making without regard for the relation of one decision-maker to another are impoverished. The second is that what can be listed as a rational adaptation depends on the position of a decision in a sequence. To move the preoccupation of decision theorists from the decision to the sequence of decisions, as it has been moved in statistical decision theory, is to enrich theory and to discover new possibilities for rationality.
