”You Can’t Enlarge the Pie”: Six Barriers to Effective Government

Why do our government leaders continually make decisions and craft policies that everybody knows are foolish? Because they, like the rest of us, remain trapped in foolish and unproductive habits of thinking. ＂You Can’t Enlarge the Pie＂ analyzes the unspoken assumptions that lead to bad policy, wasted resources, and lost lives, and shows exactly why they’re wrong. With fascinating case studies and clear, compelling analysis, it dissects six psychological barriers to ineffective government:1. Do no harm. 2. Their gain is our loss.3. Competition is always good. 4. Support our group. 5. Live for the moment.6. No pain for us, no gain for them. By freeing ourselves from the narrow way we evaluate our government leaders, we can learn to judge their performance more as that of business leaders is judged: by the overall health of their organizations.

Max H. Bazerman is Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jonathan Baron is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia. Katherine Shonk is a research associate at Harvard Business School and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.