Presidential address—The extrapolation problem: How can we learn from the experience of others?

Abstract

I want to pose a very common but largely unrecognized problem of professional practice. It is also a problem of great intellectual complexity. I call it The Extrapolation Problem. It goes like this: Suppose you are a young policy analyst. Your boss calls you in and says, “We’ve got this problem here in Jackson County of big fire hazards building up in the rural-urban interface. Go find out what they’re doing about it over in Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln counties. See if anything they’re doing about it might make sense for us.” What methodology should you use in fulfilling this request? How do you conceptualize “what they’re doing,” and see which if any elements might “make sense”? As an additional challenge, you must assume that strict and faithful replication is not in the cards. That just isn’t the way of the world. For lots of very good reasons, if people wish somehow to borrow from the wisdom and practice of others, they want to adapt it, customize it, localize it. If you want to perform well for your boss—not to mention the public interest—you must think not only about what you do see, but also, to some extent, about what you don’t see. That is, you have to speculate about those modest variations that would show up, both by accident and by design, when some practice would move from those source sites in Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln counties to your target site, Jackson County. PREVALENCE