ABSTRACT
Teachers of policy analysis usually specify the components of the analytical process as a sequence of steps along the lines of the following define the problem, establish goals and valuation criteria, identify alternative policies, display alternatives and select among them, and monitor and evaluate the policy outcomes. Clients often ask questions that are not wrong, but rather are poorly formulated. Many times the policy will be presented symptoms that the policy client finds troubling. Because all of the other solution methods can be viewed as special cases of multi-goal analysis, the remaining steps in the rationalist mode set out how to conduct multi-goal analysis. Understanding a policy problem involves assessing the conditions that concern the policy client, framing them as market or government failures, broadly defined, and modeling the relationship between the conditions of concern and variables that can be manipulated through public policy.
