Political arenas,life styles,and the impact of technologies on policymaking

Public policies are often founded upon or employ specific technologies. Two basic types of technology are distinguished—behavioral and physical technologies—and their contributions to policy and policymaking are discussed. The attractiveness of a technology to policymakers depends on how politically significant groups view the technology's impact on life styles and its implications for the allocation of values. Following Theodore Lowi's groundwork, behavioral technologies generally are perceived to redistribute values (power, respect, wealth, status) and regulate styles of living, while physical technologies generally appear to distribute values, opportunities, and freedom to pursue desired life styles. The policy sciences are given separate treatment as a behavioral technology with both distributive and redistributive aspects. The creative use of physical technology, development of multidisciplinary policy studies, and efforts towards more distributive behavioral technologies are discussed as more relevant and productive for policymaking.     

Avoidable causes of death and their effects on life expectancy. A socio-demographic interpretation. The case of the northern frontier, 1980-1990

"This study forms part of [a] research project on the health-disease-death process along the [Mexican] Northern Frontier--a by-product of the socio-economic structure of a specific social formation that determines disease and death--to support regional and sectorial design of policies and actions for the improvement of health conditions for its population.... An important finding is a 4.1 year increase of life expectancy due, among other causes, to a slight decrease in avoidable death causes, although these still produce about 50% of deaths." (SUMMARY IN ENG)