Dollars and Sense: Tax, Spend, and Satisfice

• Published date: 01 May 2021
• Author: Jeremy L. Hall
• Date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13393

Dollars and Sense: Tax, Spend, and Satisfice 361

The nature of public administration, policy,

and management is that, sooner or later,

all things come down to money. What will

it cost? How will we pay for it? Or, on what basis

shall we allocate scarce resources to one focus versus

another, to paraphrase Key(1940). As central as such

questions are to public administration research and

practice, PAR has all too often passed on works with

a fiscal focus, subjugating them to specialty journals

in the field. Over the past few months, I have been

collecting accepted works and watching as themes

emerge within that collection. In keeping with the

editorial role of curator I spoke about in our most

recent issue (Hall2021), the time seemed ripe to

return some focus to the monetary side of governance.

Certainly, it is clear that we are going to have to

spend some time thinking about the value of public

investment at all levels. The window of opportunity

that opened during COVID-19 has led to multi-

trillion dollar spending for relief that extends

years into the future. New talk from the Biden

administration emphasizes the importance of similar

investment in infrastructure, but the definition of

infrastructure seems to be softening; an unfamiliar

term has surfaced—social infrastructure. As we wait

to figure out what that means, exactly, policy makers

are beginning to question the associated cost. While

the U.S. federal government has the ability to print

money, inflationary concerns will likely make it more

prudent to finance such expenditures through debt.

Let us be fair about the contents of this issue—most

of these pieces were submitted before COVID-19

became a household word. Certainly all of the data

were collected and analyzed from the pre-COVID

era. I have pointed out in recent presentations that

our discipline must continue to sort out what from

before the pandemic will continue to apply after, and

what has changed. Of course, this is as true for our

taxing, spending, and financing mechanisms as it is

for the various other strategies and approaches used to

manage organizations and solve public problems.

In a recent talk, I reflected on some of the trends I

observed in PA research in recent years, and then

expounded on the ways COVID-19 may have

impacted them, at least in the short term. I spoke

about higher standards for validity and reliability in

public administration research, a stronger emphasis

on bodies of theory and the conceptual relevance

of the research questions being introduced, the

richness of comparative work that incorporates

globalization of the public administration community,

interdisciplinary traditions of the field, coupled

with the strengthening of public administration as a

discipline on its own, and the long trend focusing on

the “softer side” of public administration. To the latter

point, we have begun to put less focus on institutions

and more focus on people, their attributes, and their

contributions to governance, and more emphasis

on informal mechanisms like collaboration,

coproduction, partnerships, and networks. All of these

trends should be fairly widely recognized. But the

emphasis of my talk was on the way that COVID-19

has adjusted or interrupted these trends.

To that end, my anecdotal perspective is based

largely on the focus of manuscripts I have received

and reviewed from the editor’s point of view. While

sophistication remains the name of the game, there

has been a subtle shift to re-emphasize quick results

and findings; this elucidates the tradeoff between

results based on timely data and those using methods

that emphasize rigor, reliability, and validity. On

the conceptual side, more pieces are noticeably

decoupled from theory, offering more interest in

the direct and immediate effects on institutions and

outcomes without connecting, or contributing, to the

literature in tangible ways. For comparative and global

work, there seems to be increased recognition that

we have major differences across place that impact

the effectiveness of different strategies. From the

perspective of interdisciplinarity, it seems that we are

learning that political variables are still important—

perhaps increasingly so. And, for the ’softer side’ of

PA research, more blame and expectation has been

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida

Dollars and Sense: Tax, Spend, and Satisfice Editorial

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 3, pp. 361–364. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13393.