Introduction

 

  In this Chapter additional governmental modifications to promote governmental innovation will be proposed. As was pointed out in Chapter 1, the rate of governmental innovation should be commensurate with the rate of private invention and innovation. And as was pointed out in Chapter 2, the current rate of governmental innovation is seriously deficient. Modifications to government were proposed in Chapter 8 to promote governmental innovation through a better estimate of the common weal. In this chapter modifications to obtain a better strategy for implementing governmental innovations will be proposed.

To promote a level of public innovation commensurate with private invention and innovation, the government would greatly increase its promotion of two types of discoveries. The first type would be discoveries which create new opportunities for governmental innovations. Discoveries in many disciplines would promote governmental innovation. For example, the future governmental control of negative externalities such as pollution would place much more emphasis on creating incentives for the participants to reduce the negative externality themselves. Consequently, discoveries in the social sciences which would provide new insights into the implications of alternative incentives systems would create new opportunities for innovations in environmental incentive systems. For another example, some discoveries in operations research would create new opportunities for governmental efficiency. Also, some types of computer science discoveries would create innovations in governmental data processing.

The second type would be discoveries which provide new improved tools for analyzing alternatives in governmental tasks. A governmental innovator, like other innovators, must forecast the potential performance all the proposed alternatives. The long range goal should be to make the analysis of potential alternatives for innovation much like the current analysis of alternatives in invention using tools of computer assisted engineering or like the analysis of business alternatives using spreadsheets. For governmental innovation, the software tools for analyzing the alternatives would be simulation programs to forecast the cost and behavioral consequences of selecting each of the alternatives. Consequently, in order to improve innovation performance, government should take steps to promote discoveries which would increase the predictive capability of the social sciences.

To promote these two types of discoveries, governmental modifications would include revising current information policy and much greater governmental research support for these two types of discoveries. The scientific information policy discussed in Chapter 7 would increase the rate of discovery promoting public innovation. In addition, as was proposed for private innovation, government would increase the funding for basic research promoting public innovation, and part of this funding increase would sponsor a much larger number of social experiments. Such increased innovation-promoting research funding would be required to better balance the high levels of invention-promoting research funding.  

However, many more governmental modifications to promote innovation are required in addition to creating better tools for analyzing alternatives and new opportunities for innovation. Even with the professional review to keep estimates of the common weal in compliance with the precedents established for general benefits, consistency and efficiency there will generally be competing estimates of the desirable social objectives for any task assumed by government. For example, for the foreseeable future there is unlikely to be any precise agreement on the best tradeoff in the conflict between environmental preservation and economic growth. Empirical observation of the consequences of different objectives would be necessary in order to obtain a better estimate of the common weal.

And in the foreseeable future, while the predictive performance of the social sciences is likely to improve considerably, the social sciences are unlikely to develop to the extent that the consequences of government alternatives can be precisely forecasted prior to the actual implementation. This means that simulation tools will be useful for reducing a large number of potential alternatives to a few promising alternatives, but that actual implementation of each promising alternatives would be necessary to accurately rank them.

Finally because of the limits of knowledge, obtaining good performance out of the implementation of a chosen policy alternative would require much applied discovery in order to achieve the best results from that alternative. A critical factor in governmental innovation, then, is the strategy for implementation.  

  Given such difficulties, the key to developing a better strategy for implementing governmental innovations is the creation of a more rational criteria for governmental decentralization than the current purely political criteria. To consider how this might be accomplished let us start by reviewing the current status of governmental  decentralization. The Supreme Court interpretation of the 10th amendment determines the amount of decentralization from the federal government to the states. Originally the states were to have all powers not explicitly assigned to the federal government. With the growth of the federal government in the 20th century, the Supreme Court creatively interpreted the 10th amendment to sanction the expanding role of federal government. Under the Garcia precedent, federal decentralization to the states is now solely determined by the federal political process. And since the 19th century Dillon rule, government decentralization below the level of the states is totally a prerogative of the state governments. Thus current decentralization of governmental activities is determined by legislative whims at the federal and state levels. For example, the Bush administration in order to reduce the federal deficit is decentralizing federal governmental activities to the states.

What would curtail legislative whims in governmental decentralization in informational society is the professional review. Under such a review governmental  decentralization, like all other governmental acts, would have to have the properties of general benefits, consistency and efficiency. By the definition of governmental innovation if implementation of a new governmental decentralization criterion leads to a higher rate of innovation, it implies better performance as measured by the true, but unknown common weal. Thus such a new criterion would have general benefits. The consistency criterion implies that governmental decentralization should operate under a consistent policy which would be created by the development of rational criteria for decentralization. The efficiency criterion implies that government activities should be assigned to the level of government at which they would be most efficiently performed.

In this chapter we shall propose rational decentralization criteria which balance the need to place governmental activities at the most efficient level against the need for greater variation to achieve a higher rate of innovation. Also in order to obtain more effective strategies for implementing governmental innovations, we shall propose that the current government be restructured to place governmental activities at their proper level. Once this is done the professional review would be employed to maintain rational criteria for governmental decentralization which in turn would result in improved strategies for implementing governmental innovation. We shall then forecast the operation of the decentralized government of informational society.