Rejoinder to mead

As I understand him, Mead makes two arguments. First, he argues that relying on reasoning from general principles to answer practical questions of public management can be misguided if the policy analyst deliberately or inadvertently ignores available evidence. Of course he is right. As the purpose of the symposium was to invite public management scholars to use general principles to decide on the relative merits of mandatory and voluntary workfare, however, the authors, who are not experts in welfare reform, cannot be faulted for being unfamiliar with the evidence. It was their intellectual approaches to the problem that I sought to broach.