ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to establish the significance of a problem that has been largely ignored and a plea for further inquiry into its many aspects and implications, including the spontaneous forces required to realize policy goals with respect to which policymaker knowledge is inadequate. The main implication of the priority of the epistemic in political decision-making is that, ceteris paribus, the relative epistemic burdensomeness of competing policy goals serves to determine the goals that policymakers pursue. In the presence of policymaker ignorance, even the most altruistic policymakers by natural bent might appear quite venal, because seemingly venal policies are the only ones they know enough to pursue. Policymakers are likely to be quite successful, and government is likely to be quite effective, where policymaking is constitutionally constrained to the relatively epistemically simple and rather less successful where policymakers are permitted to pursue the epistemically fanciful.
