Chapters 08 & 09: Why Policy Math Favors the Rich
June 29, 2026
This episode was generated using Google NotebookLM based on the course reading for SOWK 588 Advanced Policy Practice, and is designed to help you engage with and review Chapters 8 and 9 of Peter Linquiti’s Rebooting Policy Analysis. The chapters introduce what Linquiti calls the panoptic approach — the argument that effective policy practice requires holding both an equity lens and an economic lens simultaneously, because neither alone is sufficient.
The equity half of the episode unpacks why fairness fractures the moment it moves from principle to policy. Drawing on the distinction between rationalism and social intuitionism, it explores why data-driven arguments often fail against deeply held moral intuitions, and why understanding that gap matters for advocates. The episode also traces how inequity compounds across time — through the wealth-income gap, intersecting wage disparities, broken treaties, and emerging technological displacement — while using the federal COVID-19 response as proof that deliberate policy intervention can demonstrably alter those trajectories.
The economic half builds the case for why MSW students must become fluent in microeconomics. It covers market failures, Pareto efficiency, externalities, and the Caldor-Hicks compensation principle — then lands on the central critique: traditional cost-benefit analysis measures benefit through willingness to pay, which structurally amplifies the preferences of the wealthy and renders the needs of low-income communities mathematically invisible. The takeaway is pointed — your job isn’t just to protest the math, it’s to rewrite it.