By their innocence and goodness, by their boundless capacity for forgiveness, and by the sheer power of their faith and hope, children redeem their parents, bringing out their best selves.
Cass SunsteinRead
When government programs fail, it is often because public officials are clueless about how human beings think and act.
Interpretation
Government failures often stem from a lack of understanding of human behavior by officials.
The quote highlights a critical issue in governance where the disconnect between public officials and the realities of human behavior leads to ineffective programs. It suggests that without insight into how individuals think and act, initiatives designed to serve them may not address their actual needs or behaviors, resulting in failure. This reinforces the importance of understanding human psychology in policy-making.
In practice
In a discussion about the effectiveness of new government initiatives in a town hall meeting.
By their innocence and goodness, by their boundless capacity for forgiveness, and by the sheer power of their faith and hope, children redeem their parents, bringing out their best selves.
If a company has acted badly, people want to punish it - not in order to deter future misconduct, but simply because they're outraged. And the more outraged they are, the more punishment they want to inflict.
If you look at a great city, one of its amazing features is that you're going to find all sorts of things that you might not specifically have chosen in advance. And they will change your day. Maybe your month. Maybe your whole life.
It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That's not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as 'the other side.'
Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.
If the air quality is terrible in Los Angeles, if a particular university is unusually expensive, if crime is on the rise in Dallas, or if a company has a lot of recalled toys, transparency can spur change. Whenever public or private institutions have to answer to the public, their performance is likely to improve.
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own ... in order to create this common ground.
What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?
I debated in high school! If you told things that weren't true or just made things out of whole cloth, you were penalized. It's too bad they don't apply the same standards to presidential candidates as they do to high school students.
Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.
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