Bring me my apple, biatch!

I start teaching tomorrow. 17 lucky, lucky little boys and girls are going to get the benefit of my 29 years of acquiring knowledge and life experience. And my 29 years of acquiring neuroses and bad habits. Oh boy...fun!

There are a ton of ways to organize a class on public policy, because there are a ton of ways to organize the field of public policy. It's like a grocery store...what's the "right way" to group foods together? Maybe canned tuna and canned green beans should be together, because they're both in cans! I don't know!

I've decided to start out with the policy analytic approach to public policy, which starts with the magical benefits of a perfectly competitive market and then builds up rationales for government intervention in those places where markets fail to maximize social surplus. Then I'll look at other justifications for government intervention...namely fairness and morality.

Then we'll move on to looking at policy typologies and policy tools. That'll be followed by a an introduction to U.S. political ideologies, followed by a wham-bam-thankyoumaam introduction to federalism and the Constitution.

Gonna follow that up with an intro to some of the policy process frameworks: the Stages model, the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, Punctuated Equilibrium, and the Multiple Streams Framework.

Finally, gonna do a bit on international governance and international development. Hopefully, by then, I will learn something about those topics, cause right now, I don't know shit. Fun!