For about forty years, we have run public problems through instruments built for private ones — cost-benefit ratios, efficiency targets, performance dashboards — borrowed until a method hardened into a worldview. There was nothing wrong with any of this in business. The error was importing it whole into a place it was never built for.
Public problems are not private problems with worse margins. A firm can exit a market that no longer pays; a government often cannot — because the thing failing is also carrying identity, equity, public health, social trust: value no revenue line records. And a public policy is not only a fix for a problem — it is one of the ways a state intervenes in its environment to pursue goals, express priorities, and steer change. That deserves better instruments than the ones we've been borrowing — built again, deliberately, on three commitments.
The public sector deserves its own tools. Let's build them.