Defining risk

Risk is the focal topic in the management of many activities and technologies. For that management to be successful, an explicit and accepted definition of the term risk is essential. Creation of that definition is a political act, expressing the definers' values regarding the relative importance of different possible adverse consequences for a particular decision. Those values, and with them the definition of risk, can change with changes in the decisionmaker, the technologies considered, or the decision problem. After a review of the sources of controversy in defining risk, a general framework is developed, showing how these value issues can be systematically addressed. As an example, the approach is applied to characterizing the risks of six competing energy technologies, the relative riskeness of which depends upon the particular definition used.     

Graduate education in public policy

Contemporary social transformation and accelerated politicization are inducing and requiring changes in the epistemological structure and the substantive content of the social and political sciences. To accommodate to and to facilitate these changes there is here proposed an interdisciplinary program of graduate education in Public Policy which is designed (1) to aggregate the most relevant materials and usable generalizations of the sociopolitical sciences and (2) to strike a balance between viable theory and tested experience. Although the curriculum is intended to be primarily contemporaneous and futuristic, it incorporates comparative and historical as well as normative and positivistic materials and methods. A variegated and qualified body of students is expected to be recruited for the proposed program as its principal intellectual and creative component.