Policy Bubbles

This authoritative book explains the phenomenon of sustained policy overinvestment or overreaction over extended periods. These long-term patterns of policy overproduction, known as policy bubbles, arise from psychological dynamics, institutional routines, and deliberate strategic action that generate positive feedback loops and lock policymakers into persistent overinvestment. Leading expert Moshe Maor underscores the need to examine policy bubbles across their full life cycle: emergence, maturation, and termination or incorporation. Drawing on diverse case studies — including the NATO expansion foreign policy bubble, the corresponding political bubble in the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. crime policy bubble — the book traces the full life cycle of real-world policy bubbles and outlines how governments can better detect, understand, and respond to them. Through this analysis, Maor provides a comprehensive account of how policy bubbles persist and why uncovering their underlying drivers is essential for designing proportionate, evidence-aligned, and resilient policies. Investigating a highly relevant policy anomaly, Policy Bubbles is an essential resource for scholars and students of public policy, public administration, and public management. Economists studying financial and asset bubbles, as well as government analysts, will likewise benefit from its groundbreaking insights.