There are plenty of things in public policy to disagree about, but often too much energy and resources get focused on the wrong ways to disagree. Groups can bicker over whether or not a problem exists, when they are subconsciously trying to avoid how the framing of a problem will lead to solutions that they do not want. Individuals talk past each other because one is favoring the near-term, and the other the long-term. Or vice versa when it suits them to switch perspectives for other reasons. Improving public policy discourse can be an important step to building more effective and efficient governance. Towards this end, my personal interest is in how combining tools from economics, social psychology, and political science can help clarify the ways the general public and interested stakeholders engage public policy debates. For example: the minimum wage debate can be viewed through the lens of what people think about karma. The immigration debate is a fight over how we should define the tribe or in-group that "our public resources"​ should be used to protect. The reproductive rights/abortion debate is really about a struggle between perceptions of oppression and things that are gross/impure. Currently, I'm working with a world class team on problems at the intersection of public retirement systems and various areas of public policy. Equable is a bipartisan group that thinks hard problems require hard conversations and often hard solutions. Our focus on the municipal finance challenges created by the politicization of retirement benefits for public sector workers is grounded in data showing that the costs of debt financing retirement benefit programs is increasingly crowding out public resources in many states. This damages the public's ability to effectively educate well, pay teachers appropriately, manage and expand infrastructure, build quality public safety programs, or afford various other public goods and services. There are plenty of options for solutions to these problems, but they require collaborative efforts, a focus on data-driven analysis, and the energy to improve the discourse.