Looking back over the past 40 years, one can observe at least seven trends in public policy substance and in the study of public policy: (1) There is a trend toward higher goals for society in economic, social, political, and science policy. (2) Major changes in almost all fields of public policy have resulted in increased benefits for the less privileged groups. (3) There is a trend toward the use of positive incentives like subsidies, tax breaks, and low-interest loans for encouraging socially desired behavior. (4) There is a trend toward more policy-making on the part of the national government relative to the states and cities and on the part of the executive branch relative to the legislative and judicial. (5) There is a trend toward a more pragmatic, mixed approach in dividing responsibility between the public and private sectors for public functions. (6) There is a trend toward evaluation methods which emphasize multi-criteria decision-making and spreadsheet analysis. (7) There has been a substantial growth and now a plateauing out at a high level of activity with regard to policy evaluation training programs, research centers, funding sources, scholarly associations, and other policy evaluation institutions. Examples are given of super-optimum solutions regarding economic, social, technological, political, and legal policy problems, i.e., solutions that do better than either the liberal or conservative alternatives. Nine tables chart these and related trends. (Author/JB)