PPB AND THE PUBLIC POLICY-MAKING SYSTEM: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE PAPERS BY BERTRAM M. GROSS AND ALLEN SCHICK.

This article focuses on the interaction between planning-programming-budgeting (PPB) and public policy-making system. PPB is closely related to politics, being strictly constrained by politics, trying a little to change politics, and serving as one of the symptoms of the state of politics. But, after all, not every symptom is a useful starting point for analyzing a complex series of developments and the author, for one, doubt whether PPB is a necessary or useful jumping board into the faster-moving streams of politics. As public policy is a product of complex interactions between a large number of components, similar changes in the output can be achieved through many alternative variations in the components. This means that different combinations of a variety of improvements may be equally useful in achieving equivalent changes in the quality of policy making. This is a very helpful conclusion, because it permits us to pick out of a large repertoire of potentially effective improvements those which are more feasible under changing political and social conditions.