ethnographic policy analysis. I want richly described accounts of the lives of people affected by policy changes before and after the change. How do they live? How do they represent the choices open to them? If the change shifts relative prices, how do they respond to the price change? If they change behavior in the face of changing prices, how do they conceive of their change of behavior? How do they justify and rationalize it. Do their mental models of the relevant domain change significantly? If so, do these changes spill over into areas not directly affected by the policy change at issue?
Why isn’t there more of this? I guess because anthropologists don’t generally think of changes in norms and cultural meanings having much to do with shifts in relative price.
Paging Dr. McCracken.