Subject: Theories of Policy Process (decision making in government and other organizations)
Recommendation: Understanding Public Policy: Theories and Issues (2nd Edition) by Paul Cairney (or his blog https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/).
Reason: The interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) field of policy studies is essential for understanding decision-making in organizations (notably how governments make policy decisions), research and normative debates on the use or non-use of evidence in decision-making processes, and advising or influencing those who make policy. The field is broad and fuzzy around all its many edges, but several theories or related debates have spawned concepts—such as bounded rationality or decision windows—that are essential in other fields discussed on Less Wrong.
The Scottish scholar Paul Cairney makes nearly all of the material in his excellent books on policy-making available on his blog https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/. Note his interesting experiments with summarizing key ideas in 1000-, 750-, and 500-word posts (and 1000-second audio lectures, which equals about 16 minutes). If you’d prefer a book format, his key textbook is Understanding Public Policy: Theories and Issues (2nd Edition), which reviews most of the major theories about policymaking and much more. A follow-up to that textbook is his The Politics of Policy Analysis. For both good advice on the politics surrounding the use of evidence in government decisions and a survey of the research on what some call “knowledge utilization,” see his The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making. I think most of the material for the first and third books can be found on his blog. I’m not sure about the middle one listed. There are several alternatives to his textbook, but none are as equally succinct and broad.
If the major theories are covered too quickly by Cairney, then Theories of Policy Processes (5th Edition) by Paul A. Sabatier and Christopher M. Weible (Editors) contains a half-dozen or so chapters each reviewing one major school of thought and a few more chapters making comparisons across theories and considering the future of policy process research. Alternatively, if you want a single textbook with a quicker look at many theories mingled with more on the goals and pitfalls of policy analysis, there is The Public Policy Theory Primer (3rd Edition) by Kevin B. Smith and Christopher Larimer.
However, I prefer Cairney as he brings the theories along with related discussions in the social sciences (determinism, social construction, power, chaos or complexity theory, Marxism, etc.). In short, if the phrases garbage can model, advocacy coalition framework, and punctuated equilibrium (as applied to policy making) aren’t familiar to you, but you are interested in decisions in organizations, then you might give Cairney’s blog a look and then consider his books.
I don’t know what you mean by predictive history unless you mean a pedagogical method. It is true that asking students in any field, “What might come next?” can keep them engaged, build creativity, push them to review what’s been studied, get them to ask what needs to be known next, etc. However, this would only go so far in the classroom as it doesn’t teach content, sources, use of sources, interpretation, or methods (other than whatever predictive history uses). However, I’m not sure if you are using the term “predictive” in a more deterministic sense. If so, consider how bad we are at prediction. Predicting population change (which is just birth, deaths, migration in, migration out) is pretty hard. Predicting 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, any of the “color” revolutions, the invasion of Ukraine, the rise of Trump, etc., humble “predictive history” (there’s no Hari Seldon). History is not physics or math, so it can not be taught like them. Cliometrics and cliodynamics didn’t get very far, as I understand it. Plus, humans are self-reflective, so as people learn about what the future might hold, they change and the game shifts again. Can you clarify what you mean by predictive history?