Budgets as Dynamic Systems: Change, Variation, Time, and Budgetary Heuristics
本文提出用非线性动力学替代增量主义框架来理解预算动态，认为预算理论构建不切实际，应聚焦于用时间序列数据描述预算变化与变异。
Students of budgetary politics have recognized for some time that the incrementalist framework for understanding budgetary dynamics is flawed. The decline of the incrementalist paradigm suggests that new and innovative approaches to understanding budgeting should be considered. This essay presents an emerging paradigm from the natural sciences—nonlinear dynamics—as a foundation for reconsidering the possibility of a theory of budgeting. Nonlinear dynamics incorporates the elements of change, variation, and time, which are essential to understanding the budgeting process. This approach suggests that efforts to build a theory of budgeting are unproductive. When budgets are viewed as dynamic, changing systems, the ability to predict is a remote possibility, at best. Rather, this work contends, students of budgeting should concentrate on much more modest goals, such as using time-series data of rates of change in federal budget outlay categories as a means of portraying change and variation over time in budgets.