ABSTRACT
Economists look at the decision process as involving, first, a set of alternative images of possible futures in the mind of the decisionmaker. Then there must be an evaluative process which orders these images in order of "goodness" and the decision is simply to move into the most highly valued image of the future. Decisions involve both agendas and judgment, that is, evaluations, and can be altered either by change in the agendas themselves or in the evaluation process which ranks them. Assessment is essentially evaluation of decisions and strategies, institutions and organizations, in terms of human betterment according to somebody's evaluation or according to some process of coordinating individual evaluations. Any kind of overall assessment involves some process of coordination of the diverse evaluations of different individuals. Even though evaluation only goes on inside one human head, the different evaluations are in fact coordinated by at several processes in society.
