Outcomes versus emotions as policy drivers

What should drive policy? Not ideology, I don't think, because it essentially faith based; the faith being that approaches that succeeded in the past will succeed today. (Paul Krugman has a column today on how conservative ideology has done much to precipitate the mortgage disaster in the US.) Not spending, because pumping money into activities or institutions is no guarantee efficiency in delivering outcomes will be maintained or improved. I'm also suspicious of top-down restructuring having worked in an organization that was restructured eight times in my 17-year career there. The immediate result was a loss of morale, losses of well-qualified employees, and waste of resources. There were short-term accountancy-type gains, but the main discernible goal seemed to be to enhance the curriculum vitae of those who planned the restructures. It's not only me who is skeptical of these sorts of policy driver. But there are worse, and one such is emotion.

A recent article on Science Daily is titled "The Effect of 'In-Your-Face' Political Television on Democracy". It reports on research showing that:

[T]he incivility and close-up camera angles that characterize much of today’s “in your face” televised political debate also causes audiences to react more emotionally and think of opposing views as less legitimate.

I think this finding is important. Television is vastly influential in politics. TV corporations have their own imperatives, and these have everything to do with audience figures (and subscription and advertizing revenue) and very little to do with fostering the mutual respect of opposing sides in political debates. Arguments are polarized, attitudes become extreme on all sides. In the US the influence of emotion as a policy driver seems to me to show in the attitudes towards, amongst others,smoking, guns, abortion and capital punishment. To this outsider there seems very little mutual respect on either side of those arguments, and the disease seems to be spreading within the US to immigration and welfare. And outside the US? I don't really know what television is like in other countries except perhaps New Zealand, where there also seems to be a descent into incivility.

It seems that emotion is supplanting other policy drivers. It's not too much of a surprise, because society is growing ever more complex as are the relationships between cause and effect in social and environmental policy. Emotion is easier to communicate and to exploit. But as a policy driver it has obvious faults. It's far too easy to manipulate for mercenary and more sinister ends. I'd much prefer to see meaningful outcomes drive policy. These could bypass the complexities of our economy and society, so they would be easy to understand. It's far simpler, say, to target violent crime, or climate change, than it is to make a case for (say) subsidizing leisure centres for youths or urging poor countries to stop building coal-fired power stations. These actions might be necessary and efficient, but it should be up to the market to make the case for carrying them out, rather than remote, cumbersome and monolithic central government. But that's not the only advantage of targeting outcomes: the other is that it would be direct and accessible to ordinary people. It would appeal to people's rationality, make us aware of trade-offs, encourage public participation and buy-in, and engender mutual respect amongst people with different views - in stark contrast to appealing to people's emotions.