The last major theme concerns the conflicts and dilemmas that face public policy makers-the impossibility of reconciling all worthwhile social goals, These conflicts arise between highly valued goals such as efficiency and justice, and between different groups such as young and old. The distinction between allocative efficiency and distributive justice receives particular attention throughout the book. Economics has a great deal to say about the former, but the justice of any particular distribution of income cannot be established by economies. All public policies, whether they concern children or the elderly, health or education, work or family life, have effects on both efficiency and justice. The economic perspective can help clarify those effects, even though it cannot provide the final answers. These must come from our values – from our vision of the kind of society we want to shape for ourselves and for future generations.
In developing these themes the book presents many numbers, but no more than are necessary to help the reader understand and remember the points that are being made. “The office of the scholar,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is . .. to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.” Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy for a writer– or a reader to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is, and to “remold it nearer to the heart’s desire.”