It is a fair hypothesis, I think, to say that all chronic policy failures are wicked problems.
Chronic policy failures are societal problems that defy any reasonable attempts to resolve. In Australia, indigenous issues are prominent, as they are, or should be, in the Americas. In Norway, it seems that there is constant bickering over the way we treat senior citizens but little real progress against goals everyone agrees about. Most of the entire continent of Africa is a chronic policy failure, and we can spend a long time just arguing whose chronic policy failure.
I suspect that the hallmark of chronic policy failures is that they involve truths that are politically unacceptable to the point that they can’t even be articulated. Usually these involve trade-offs that we make consciously but are unwilling to admit. For example, we are willing to accept a large number of motor vehicle deaths if we can get a higher speed limit.
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