Distribution dominates policy. Resources are injected at a point and distribute across communities. Can the distribution be almost instantaneous as in the heat equation? Do the resources morph and distribute, drawing in the wave equation? Where is stability (cf. Laplace equation)? These seem basic questions of public policy. Yet, the big three rarely feature in scholarship on public policy. Why?
Look at the three equations as conceptual frames and move your thoughts to the policy space.
Take a walk through nature. We see convolutions of pockets of reality with Gaussian kernels. And we can close our eyes and imagine the Gaussian kernel sliding across pockets of reality. It is beautiful. It is accessible. Yet, our visualisation becomes even more beautiful when we bring in the heat equation. Diffusion of heat is a similar Gaussian convolution. And better still, that is what policy seeks to do. We must bring the heat equation to our policy students. And we can do so without Greek letters! Though the Greeks will torch out deeper questions and allow finer tuning of policy.
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