If individuals have limited attention spans, so must organizations. The notion of policy agendas recognizes the “bottleneck” that exists in the agenda that any policy-making body addresses (Cobb & Elder 1972). These attention processes are not simply related to task environments — problems can go for long periods of time without attracting the attention of policy makers (Rochefort & Cobb 1994). A whole style of politics emerges as actors must strive to cope with the limits in the attentiveness of policy makers — basically trying to attract allies to their favored problems and solutions. This style of politics depends on connections driven by time-dependent and often emotional attention processes rather than a deliberate search for solutions (Cohen et al 1972, March & Olsen 1989, Kingdon 1996, Baumgartner & Jones 1993).
Because attention processes are time dependent and policy contexts change temporally, connections between problems and solutions have time dependency built into them. As an important consequence, policy systems dominated by boundedly rational decision makers will at best reach local rather than global optima. Because of the time dependence of attentional processes, all policy processes will display considerable path dependence (March 1994).
– Jones, Bryan D. “Bounded Rationality.” Annual Political Science Review. 1999. 2:297-321.
Does this say that we lose interest in a topic/problem before we have had the time to find a solution?
Jones is talking about:
(a) how it requires strategic behaviour to even get an issue onto the agenda of policy-makers
(b) this behaviour largely depends on personal connections and the ability to have an emotional impact, rather than a rational search for solutions to ignored problems
(c) such systems produce policies that serve some limited needs, but which sometimes fail to address important needs of large groups of people
(d) these factors largely re-enforce the degree to which policy gets locked into moving in a particular direction, once it sets off on one
History is a good place to look for answers. Five devastating slumps—starting with America’s first crash, in 1792, and ending with the world’s biggest, in 1929—highlight two big trends in financial evolution. The first is that institutions that enhance people’s economic lives, such as central banks, deposit insurance and stock exchanges, are not the products of careful design in calm times, but are cobbled together at the bottom of financial cliffs. Often what starts out as a post-crisis sticking plaster becomes a permanent feature of the system. If history is any guide, decisions taken now will reverberate for decades.