Government as a Tool-Kit

Abstract

Thinking of government as a tool-kit helps us to do at least three things. First, it can help us to make sense of the apparent complexity of government activity as some combination of a relatively limited basic range of instruments, we have what cyberneticians call a ‘variety reducer’, or, in plain language, a mode of simplification. The ‘table of elements’ that is referred to in the epigraph above is precisely such a variety reducer, enabling us to make sense of a chemical world that would otherwise be intelligible only by laborious verbal description.

Suppose, for example, as the French mathematician Henri Poincaré reminded us, that instead of a finite number of chemical elements there were billions of them; that some were not common and others rare, but they were uniformly distributed so that every time we picked up a new pebble, there would be a great probability of its being formed of some unknown substance. If that were so, all that we know of other pebbles would be worthless. Before each object we would be as a newborn babe.

(Heirs and Pehrson, 1982, p. 29)