Friday, December 01, 2006

The Product Cycle

This may be old stuff but it is new to me--the classic six stages of policy development (also sometimes called the stages of the product cycle):
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusion
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants
Pinched from Michael Froomkin. Idle curiosity, is this a riff on Lawrence Kohlberg? Or Elizabeth Kübler-Ross?

[Afterthought: This list isn't really right, is it? In our world, when we find the guilty, we make them President of the World Bank.

2 comments:

The New York Crank said...

I dunno where it got pinched from, but way, w-a-y pre-Internet -- in the ancient 1970s -- it was makling its way around Madison Avenue.

--The New York Crank

Anonymous said...

More like Aaron Wildavsky.