Why Do They Bother Voting?

I’ve been looking at the results of the most recent New York Times/CBS Poll.  It’s about a week old now; recent, as polls go.  It seems like a real shame that we have to go through all the fuss and bother of having an election because, clearly, no one can be trusted with a public office.  Any public office.

Let’s see what we have here.  The national economy is bad.  If you add the “fairly bad” and “very bad” scores, you get 80%  Looking back, we see that the percent of people who thought things were pretty good came down under 50% in 2007 and have been headed mostly down ever since.  And it’s getting worse.  If you add together the “about the same” and “getting worse” scores, you get 85%.   Have things gotten “pretty seriously off on the wrong track?”  Yes they have, say 74% of those polled.

Trust in government to help?  The question asks whether you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right: the options are “always/most of the time” and “some of the time/never.”  That second measure is chosen by 89% of the people in this poll.

How about Barack Obama’s handling of things?  Not so good.  Only 50% approve of his handling of foreign policy; only 38% his handling of the economy; only 35% his efforts at job creation.

Congress?  In single digits for the first time since polling was begun.  Who are the 9% who approve of “the way Congress is handling its job?”

So let’s see if I’ve got this.  Things are bad and they are getting worse.  The government can be trusted to do the right thing seldom or never.  The President is handling his job poorly.  The Congress is disastrously bad.

A little over 80% of those polled said they were registered to vote.  About 40% of that 80% are going to vote in a Democratic primary.  That’s a little less than a third of the eligible voters by my calculation.  Another 32% of the 80% plan to vote in a Republican primary.  That’s another 26% of the eligible voters. 

That’s a lot of people.  You have to wonder why they bother.

Vituperation

It's hard to keep the notion of attributing a cause separate from the notion of casting blame.  That seems a shame.  The Latin, at least, is clear.  Casting blame can be fairly called "vituperation."  It's a combination of vitium, "fault" and parare, "to make or prepare." 

So "making a fault" falls on the "casting blame" side.  Causal attribution has nothing to do with fault.  It seems that it ought not to be as hard as it is to keep them separate.

Race Relations in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s

I just saw the movie, "The Help."  Who would have imagined you could pivot the entire plot of a movie on a single instance of scatophagy?

I'm the President, and I'm Mad as Hell

Barack Obama was elected president for two reasons. The first is that he did not rise in anger to the baiting of his opponents. Nor the baiting of his friends either, but that is a more complicated matter. The prospect of campaigning against an “angry young black man” was so attractive to various Republicans that they tried very hard to get him to say something angrily on television.

The second is that he promised bipartisanship. “There are not red states and blue states,” candidate Obama proclaimed several hundred times, “There is the United States of America.” Partisan gridlock in Congress was already a grievance to independent voters and campaigning against it was a really smart move.

That was then. This is now.

The New York Times editorialized this morning that President Obama is finally starting to do it right. He is on a bus tour in the Midwest and at every stop, he is showing his anger at the failure of the Congress to act responsibly and is blaming the Republicans for the current impasse. Maybe the Times thinks that Obama can afford to be the “angry young black man” now that he’s president. Maybe the Times is so angry and partisan that it can’t appreciate a president who is not as angry and partisan as they are. Maybe the Times thinks that the country is now hungry for an angry and partisan president.

I don’t know, but I’m partial to explanation number 2, myself.

CBS/New York Times Poll, August 2011

There has been so much hand-wringing about the debt-limit debate. All of it justified, in my opinion. A few posts ago, I compared it to a “game” of Russian roulette rather than the more common metaphor of a “game” of chicken.

Then I read the New York Times/CBS Poll for August 2 and 3 and it occurred to me that it is always possible that democracy might solve our problem this time. Maybe not. I’m not predicting anything. But I do want to pause briefly to talk about the much-maligned “responsible party model” (RPM).

Here’s the way I talk about it in PS 102. In Step 1, policy-oriented parties recruit candidates who will support those policies and fund their campaigns. If you want a policy-oriented national party, you can’t have yellow dog Democrats running in liberal districts and blue dog Democrats running in conservative districts—and then voting against each other in Congress. In Step 2, the parties run policy-oriented campaigns (rather than personality-oriented ones). The party that wins the majority now has an elected majority capable of fulfilling the party’s promises—more like the situation we expect in parliamentary systems. So in Step 3, the party in power enacts and approves the policies it campaigned on. Then, in Step 4, the crucial step, they return to their constituents with a record to talk about. Maybe even the beginnings of actual achievements based on their legislative stewardship. At that stage, the party says, “We did what we said. How do you like it? If you send us back, we’ll do more of it, so consider your policy desires carefully.”

It isn’t very realistic in modern American politics, but you can see why I like it, right? I like that last stage particularly because it is the only circumstance under which people can evaluate actual policy-generated outcomes and say whether they like them. Evaluating promises and intentions is uncertain work; evaluating outcomes is more the kind of thing it is fair to expect voters to do.

So what about the Times/CBS poll? Here are some results that caught my eye. Obama’s approval rating is at 48%. It hasn’t been above 60% since June 2009 and it hasn’t been about 50% since April 2010 except for a one poll spike in May of this year. That was bin Laden’s execution, I suppose.

People are not happy about the way “things are going in Washington.” Combining the two least approving columns gets you 84%. Combining the two most approving columns gets you 15%.

Since June of last year, the percentage of people who disapprove the way Congress is “handling its job” has been above 70%, but it has moved from 70% in June to 82% in August. Here are some relevant additional figures. Approve of John Boehner? Yes, 30%, No, 57%. The way Republicans in Congress have handled the recent negotiations? Approve 21%, Disapprove 72% Approve Democrats in Congress (same question)? Approve 28%, Disapprove 66%. Do “most members” of Congress deserve to be re-elected? No, 74%

I see anger, frustration, and pain there. The natives are restless.

Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation’s economy? Republicans in Congress, 33%; Barack Obama 47%. Is it better for the parties to compromise or stick to their positions? Compromise, 85%; hold fast, 12%. Who is mostly to blame? Here I’ll give you the current figure and the trend since the last poll. The Bush administration is to blame, 44%, up 3% since April; The Obama administration is to blame, 15% up 1% since April; the Congress is to blame, 15%, up 3% since April.

Who do you blame more of “the difficulties in reaching an agreement” on the debt ceiling? Republicans in Congress, 47%, Barack Obama and the Democrats 29%. Did the Republicans in Congress compromise too little? Yes, 52% (15% said “too much” and 32% said “the right amount.”) Did Barack Obama and the Democrats compromise too much? Yes, 26% (34% said too little and 32% the right amount.) Those percentages are roughly thirds; that’s very good for the Democrats. Are you optimistic about the ability of this Congress to deal with future issues? Yes, 12%, No 66%. Should taxes be increased above the $250,000 level to help balance the budget? Yes, 63%, No 34%.

So that’s how Americans were feeling earlier in the week. What if the RPM kicks in for the general elections in the fall of 2012? People who said they absolutely would not raise taxes run into an electorate two thirds of them disagrees with them and now these “candidates” are incumbents and they are presenting what they have done, not what they promised to do. That doesn’t seem a good prospect for Republicans in Congress who campaigned on holding firm and not compromising and who signed a no tax pledge.

If I were Barack Obama, I would make the campaign about whether you want actual adults in charge of the economy or adolescent zealots. I would NOT make the campaign about whether I had done a good job of managing the economy over my first term, but in trying to avoid that, I would be helped by the 44% who still blame the Bush administration for what is wrong with the economy.

If the voters react in 2012 by rewarding people who promise to compromise and to include more revenue in out “living within our means” issue, then democracy will have done what it is supposed to do. It will have registered the judgments of actual voters on actual outcomes. If the voters felt otherwise—if they felt, for instance, that the economy wasn’t all that bad in 2009 and that Obama should have fixed it by now—then democracy would work exactly the same way and the Democrats would be slaughtered by the new round of votes.

But I don’t think they will be.

Where Does This Issue Belong?

It’s an “issue,” as we say. It concerns a lot of people. Something ought to be done about it. Let’s imagine the easiest possible resolution. There are three leaders in this societal constellation: one of the polity, one for the economy, and one for the society Let’s call them tyrants—meaning nothing scurrilous by the term—so that we have three “areas” to consider and a tyrant for each.

All we have to do is to decide which tyrant gets to decide on this issue.

Well, that’s not entirely true. First we have to explain the diagram. The three colored figures are the polity (red rectangle), the economy (blue oval) and the society (green oval). Each figure has a core—the darker color marked A—and a periphery. The periphery—the lighter color marked B—is a kind of antechamber. B is where an issue is when it is on its way to being a part of the core or when it is on its way out of that figure entirely. An issue does not, in this figure, move directly from A in the polity to A in the economy. It would first move from A to B in the polity, then from B to A in the economy.

This possibility of issue mobility is a concern to the tyrants, of course. In most cases an “issue” belongs to me because it is something from which additional authority and additional revenue can be extracted. When someone says, “This is a problem for Superman!” Superman smiles. More heroics and more fame are in the offing. There are issues, on the other hand, which are dead losers. Sometimes they simply can’t be solved and whoever has the issue is “it” and will take the fall. Sometimes an issue can be dealt with, but it will cost more to solve it than you will gain in revenue. That’s a loser. Sometimes it can be dealt with, but the only successful ways of dealing with it will make you enduringly unpopular. That’s a loser too.

Such issues as these really belong somewhere else. It’s about those issues that Superman says, “You know, Batman is the right person to take this job on.” The tyrant of the economy says that each family ought to save more. The tyrant of the polity says that consumer spending ought to increase. The tyrant of the society says that the welfare of each family—not the aggregate demand or the aggregate savings—is the proper goal.

That much of an explanation will show why some potentially mobile issues—the ones in the B areas—are sought after while others are nearly pushed out the door. What remains is to consider why C is there; that oddly astrocyte-shaped blob. I wanted it irregular because problems that have not yet been placed as issues are…well…irregular. I wanted those odd little rays to look just a little like tentacles. I wanted the whole shape to strike you an inchoate and faintly menacing.

In C, an issue could belong anywhere. That’s a jump ball for all the people (and their tyrant) who want it. It is a live grenade to all the people (and their tyrant) who don’t want it. But if we are talking about new issues—and that’s why I developed this particular image—it isn’t an “issue” until it is a “problem” that is placed somewhere.

Problems are personal. Issues are public. It’s when someone in authority says, or when a lot of people who have no authority say, “Say, that’s really a job for ______” that it become an issue. It could be a job for the polity, a job for the economy, or a job for the society. It doesn’t “belong” anywhere, the way a lost wallet full of one hundred dollar bills and a credit card “belongs” to its owner. It “belongs” somewhere in the way a job belongs to the only person in the community who has the tools and the equipment to keep the river from flooding the town.

So by the time a problem is “socialized” as we say; by the time it has become an issue, there is still the question of where it can best be dealt with. If I am the tyrant of the economy and I can see that my ownership of this issue will benefit me, I do everything I can to claim it for myself and to render your claims—you other two tyrants—less attractive or plausible. If it looks to me like the kind of issue that will tar the hands of anyone who tries to manage it, they I will see it belonging properly to you. I might say you are responsible for it. I might say only you can deal with it. I can say that no one else has the necessary authority or popular support or access to resources to manage it properly. What I really mean is “Anyone But Me.”

A strong smoothly functioning society will have three powerful settings and a clear process for placing the right issue in the right place. Compared to those two things, nothing else matters much.

Dr. Obama's Bedside Manner Needs Work

It occurred to me recently, that back in the bad old days of medicine when there was very little you could actually do for a patient, people understood their job to be “being with” the patient and making him or her comfortable. The illness was going to what it was going to do. Before germ theory came along, everything was even more mysterious than it is now. The bedside manner emphasized “I’m here for you” rather than “Take two of these and call me in the morning.”

When “take two of these” works, I’m pretty happy with it and I am delighted in the great progress medicine has made since it discovered germs. But I didn’t have these little medical reflections for no reason at all. There was something going on that had those same contours and it took me a little while to catch just what it was.

It’s the economy. It’s in bad shape and it’s going to go on being in bad shape for quite a while. Dr. Obama would really like to be a “take two of these and call me in the morning” kind of president. It’s his style. But Dr. Obama doesn’t have access to anything, two of which will help his patient. The president will, of course, do a lot of Republican bashing over the next year—as he should—but he is still going to be held accountable for the bad economy and he doesn’t have any way to treat it.

Let’s consider some possibilities. Let’s give the banks a bunch of money so they can loan it to people who will do something productive with it. Dr. Obama can see to it that the banks get a bunch of money. He cannot require them to actually lend it to anyone. When the banks get the money, they will consult their own needs for reserves, for security, for high return loans and when they have considered all those, they will just sit on the money.

Let’s encourage companies to hire more workers. This would help with the unemployment problem, one would think. As the economy picks up, the companies really could use more workers, but they make more money by reducing workforces than they do by increasing them. The new economic situation, in other words, allows quite a few currently unemployed workers to get their jobs back, but it doesn’t require the companies to rehire them. The new “leaner” companies are going to be much more profitable, even as the economy continues to crawl along in low gear. Nothing the President can say will cause these companies to make less profit so that the economy will improve.

The President could always raise taxes on businesses, of course, and use the new revenues to invest in new technologies and more employment. But there’s this problem with the businesses. They get the same services from the U. S. government whether they pay taxes or not and a business that has an accounting department that does NOT know how to keep the profits safe in an off-shore bank has a very uncreative accounting department.

The President could always cut taxes on the rich, of course, allowing them to create new jobs as their market savvy allows them to. That has been prescribed many times and actually tried several times and it turns out that the rich have better things to do with their money than use it to increase production and therefore employment. Yachts and corporate jets come readily to mind, but I am sure there are lots of less visible things to spend the money one. The point is that they don’t spend it in ways that help the economy in any broad way.

Robert Reich argues persuasively in his book, Aftershock, that the fundamental problem of the American economy is that we don’t pay our workers enough to enable them to buy what we make. Consumer spending is two thirds of the Gross Domestic Product, I heard yesterday on the radio. Increasing what we pay the workers would enable them to spend more money—and they would spend it—which would increase demand, which would increase employment, etc. This is the well-known Henry Ford solution. It was Ford who scandalized the whole world of business by paying his assembly line workers enough money that they could buy Ford cars. He sold a lot of Ford cars that way, but Reich passes along some of the commentary that appeared in the Wall Street Journal when he did that. Scathing!

So that is a “treatment” that would work. There is nothing Dr. Obama can do, unfortunately, to get that prescription filled. Nothing. Actually, there isn’t anything in the whole “take two of these and call me in the morning” world that the President can do. And that’s why I think it is time for him to break out his bedside manner and get into the “I’m here for you” mode. This guy’s got the idea, I think.

Debt-Limit Chicken--And Worse

July 27, 2011. It is now less than a week until the United States of America tells the people who have loaned money to us that we were, after all, a bad risk. The debt limit confrontation has been pictured as a game of chicken between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, the only presiding official in the Congress who opposes him. Sen. McConnell will have to wait his turn.

So…a game of chicken. We drive our cars toward each other at high speeds. In the best outcome, you flinch and turn aside and I win. In the second best outcome, I flinch and you win. In the least good outcome, neither of us turns and we kill each other. But now that I have gone that I realize that there is an outcome even worse. We both flinch and turn into each other (that would be to the right for you and to the left for me—how very familiar that sounds!) and reveals ourselves not only as cowards but as incompetent cowards. That would be worse.
I’m not sure that chicken captures all the elements of this contest, however, so I would like to try several others. How about Russian Roulette? You spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. You have five chances out of six of surviving—if you do it one time. If you do it over and over—I’m not at all good at calculating cumulative probabilities—the odds get worse.

So let’s consider the roulette elements of the present situation. President Obama can’t control the Democratic votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers. Speaker Boehner can’t control the Republican votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers, which, until recently, was the same one the President preferred. The two parties are highly ideological. Votes which pitted 80% of Democrats voting one way against 80% of Republicans voting the other way were once unusual; now they are the commonest kind of vote. The new Tea Party-backed Republican House members believe they owe intransigence to their constituents—it is their sworn duty—and that intransigence has now been turned against the leader of their own party. This has led Eric Cantor, the Number 2 man in the House to tell them to “Grow up,” a sentiment also found on the lips of the President. How awkward is that?

This is highly unstable. Now we approach this brink over and over. The probability of hitting the live chamber, by this analogy, goes up radically as you do it over and over. Eventually, you will hit the live chamber—that would be the House in the present scenario—and you blow your brains out. Actually, that might have happened in the 2010 elections; it’s still too soon to tell.

The third scenario, one which captures yet another aspect of this impending disaster, is a champion battle. I’m thinking of David and Goliath as an example. I’m not really sure, now that I think of it, what was supposed to happen to the army of the defeated contestant. Were they supposed to be massacred? To be slaves? To be put in internment camps? I really don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter, because the notion of “champion” is all I need. Theoretically, if David wins, it is good news for the Israelites. If Goliath wins, it is good news for the Philistines. But fiscal default isn’t really like that. If we default, both David and Goliath lose. And all the people David and Goliath represent also lose. All of us are killed or enslaved or put in camps, or whatever. The cost to anyone of borrowing money for anything will go up, for instance. You don’t need to be on the losing side to suffer this defeat because both sides are the losing sides—not just the champions but the armies and not just the armies but the civilian populations. Everyone—litigators, bundlers of financial instruments and off-shore hiders of revenue and Chainsaw Al personnel departments—loses.

These three images together give us a fuller picture, I think, of what
we’re up against. This account sounds crude and contemporary to my ears,
however. This is how Lincoln put it.

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to
avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place,
devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and
divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them
would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

Small Government Odyssey (SGO) Creationism

This post continues my Small Government Odyssey (SGO), a series of reflections on what it would take to reduce the size of government on the one hand, while seeing to it that the legitimate needs of the citizens are met (by someone, but not by the national government) on the other.

The diagram shows economic, social, and political sectors. My argument is that to the extent that the needs of the citizens are met in the social sector (families, schools, neighborhoods, clubs, etc.) and in the economic sector (producers make money, consumers receive affordable goods and services, employees receive a living wage), there will no appeal to the political sector. The size of government, accordingly, will shrink. So will the proportion of the GNP it consumes and the power it gets from making authoritative decisions on the appeals made to it by dissidents in the economic and social sectors.

This view does not distinguish between legitimate dissidents and illegitimate ones. In the small government business, the focus is on reducing the appeals to the national government made by people who think they aren't being treated fairly in the social and economic sectors. It is what they think, not what a panel of fairminded citizens decide, that makes them want to invite government in.--an action we all pay for in higher taxes and fewer freedoms. You can do that by simple repression, of course, but repression gets expensive after a while, so that is self-defeating. You can do it by lowering expectations, but the principal commercial strategy involves raising expectations, so that isn't a sure thing either. You can do it by coopting resentment or by deflecting it to other targets, but whenver that fails, the federal government is there, looking for an invitation to substitute their judgment for yours.

In fact, school boards are governments, so they are part of the polity. The force of these questions, however, has to do with the national government, so for the purpose of this question, I am going to consider the school boards as part of society, rather than polity. If we want the national government to stop interfering with the preferences of local boards and the parents who elect them to office, what would we have to do?
Since the Constitution forbids any promiscuous mixing of religion and government, we would have to find that Creationism is not a “religious doctrine.” It is a theory, like any other, about the origins of our world and the species of plants and animals that have come to live on it. Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a theory and which theory is to be taught is to be at the discretion of the local voters. That would work. The national government does not intervene in local school district decisions to mandate balanced histories or any particular approach to art or any of several methods of teaching arithmetic. Under this scenario, biology would work the same way.
Once the political hysterics had quieted down, however, the professional side of the question would have a chance to emerge. Just as there are pharmacists who refuse, on personal grounds, to dispense drugs they disapprove of, so we might find some biologists who refuse, on professional grounds, to teach poorly supported theories in place of well-supported ones. Just as the voters who elected the judge must share their authority with the judge’s professional promises, so the school district voters would have to share their authority with the teacher’s professional promises. It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea if science teachers adopted “First, Do No Harm” as their professional motto.
If there were a professional certification by the Biology Teachers of America and if you couldn’t teach biology without a professional certificate, then schools would have to choose between certificated biologists—who would emphasize the value of well-supported over poorly supported theories—and noncertificated biologists, who would teach anything the school board demanded of them. Parents might gather at the home of a certificated science teacher who refused to teach Creationism in his biology class, but the teacher has his oath to protect him and the parents would have to choose between a well-prepared teacher for their children and an ill-prepared one.
Presumably, colleges and universities would not be forced to treat applications equally—those from school districts with professionally certificated teachers and those from districts without them. It would take action by the national government to require them to accept students who were, in the judgment of the university, ill-prepared for university work. We are trying to do without national government intervention and besides, there is the question of the grounds on which the government might intervene.
The Constitution requires the intervention of the national government in the affairs of the school districts IF Creationism is a religious doctrine.[1] If it is not a religious doctrine, then the present appeal to national government authority falls short and local preferences prevail. This provides a wonderful opportunity for biology professionals to decide what they are willing to do, as educators, and what they will need to refuse to do because of the harm it would cause.
For myself, I would rather see a conflict between a popularly elected school board, on the one hand, and professionally accountable biologists on the other than a conflict between a national government wielding the Constitution and local school boards wielding parent preference. I think it would be a more useful conflict and I am quite sure it would be more fun.
[1] It wouldn’t have to be religious. There are agnostic versions. “The earth and all subsequent living things were created at a single recent time, but the data now at hand provide us no way to say how that happened.” There are thousands of theistic versions. Nearly every culture, no matter how small or how isolated, has an account of how the god [name of local deity] or the gods [name of college of local deities] created the world and all that is therein. There could be a rotation of Creation myths, using each in turn.

SGO: Creationism

This post continues my Small Government Odyssey, a series of reflections on what it would take to reduce the size of government on the one hand, while seeing to it that the legitimate needs of the citizens are met (by someone) on the other. The diagram shows economic, social, and political sectors. My argument is that to the extent that the needs of the citizens are met in the social sector (families, schools, neighborhoods, clubs, etc.) and in the economic sector (producers make money, consumers receive affordable goods and services, employees receive a living wage), there will no appeal to the political sector. The size of government, accordingly, will shrink. So will the proportion of the GNP it consumes and the power it gets from making authoritative decisions on the appeals made to it by economic and social dissidents.


In fact, school boards are governments, so they are part of the polity. The force of these questions, however, has to do with the national government, so for the purpose of this question, I am going to consider the school boards as part of society, rather than polity. If we want the national government to stop interfering with the preferences of local boards and the parents who elect them to office, what would we have to do?


Since the Constitution forbids any promiscuous mixing of religion and government, we would have to find that Creationism is not a “religious doctrine.” It is a theory, like any other, about the origins of our world and the species of plants and animals that have come to live on it. Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a theory and which theory is to be taught is to be at the discretion of the local voters. That would work. The national government does not intervene in local school district decisions to mandate balanced histories or any particular approach to art or any of several methods of teaching arithmetic. Under this scenario, biology would work the same way.


Once the political hysterics had quieted down, however, the professional side of the question would have a chance to emerge. Just as there are pharmacists who refuse, on personal grounds, to dispense drugs they disapprove of, so we might find some biologists who refuse, on professional grounds, to teach poorly supported theories in place of well-supported ones. Just as the voters who elected the judge must share their authority with the judge’s professional promises, so the school district voters would have to share their authority with the teacher’s professional promises. It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea if science teachers adopted “First, Do No Harm” as their professional motto.


If there were a professional certification by the Biology Teachers of America and if you couldn’t teach biology without a professional certificate, then schools would have to choose between certificated biologists—who would emphasize the value of well-supported over poorly supported theories—and noncertificated biologists, who would teach anything the school board demanded of them. Parents might gather at the home of a certificated science teacher who refused to teach Creationism in his biology class, but the teacher has his oath to protect him and the parents would have to choose between a well-prepared teacher for their children and an ill-prepared one.


Presumably, colleges and universities would not be forced to treat applications equally—those from school districts with professionally certificated teachers and those from districts without them. It would take action by the national government to require them to accept students who were, in the judgment of the university, ill-prepared for university work. We are trying to do without national government intervention and besides, there is the question of the grounds on which the government might intervene.


The Constitution requires the intervention of the national government in the affairs of the school districts IF Creationism is a religious doctrine. If it is not a religious doctrine, then the present appeal to national government authority falls short and local preferences prevail. This provides a wonderful opportunity for biology professionals to decide what they are willing to do, as educators, and what they will need to refuse to do because of the harm it would cause.


For myself, I would rather see a conflict between a popularly elected school board, on the one hand, and professionally accountable biologists on the other than a conflict between a national government wielding the Constitution and local school boards wielding parent preference. I think it would be a more useful conflict and I am quite sure it would be more fun.

High Cost Students

I've been thinking about the 80/20 rule. An online group, about whom I know nothing at all (VentureLine.com) offers this description, of which the last line is the one that is most important to me.

80 - 20 RULE (Pareto Principle/Law) is a general rule of thumb in business that says that 20% of the items produce 80% of the activity, while 20% of the product line produces 80% of the sales, 20 % of the customers generate 80% of the complaints, and so on. In evaluating any business situation, look for the small group which produces the major portion of the transactions you are concerned with. This rule is not exactly accurate, but it reflects a general truth, nothing is evenly distributed.

Certainly it is true that, so far as the experience of teaching students in concerned, the costs are not evenly distributed. So let's say that my usual American government class of 60 or so has a 20% that cause most of the confusion, take most of the in-class organization time, most of the office hours time, etc. That give me 12 high cost students. Let's say four of them are trying to overcome very demanding obstacles of language and culture. Four of them are deeply risk avoidant. Four of them are just lazy. These 12 take up most of the time that would otherwise be spent teaching or working on academic questions during office hours. What to do?

Nothing is to be done about the first group. They need all the help they ask for and don't ask for more than they need. The response I should make to these high cost students is to pay the cost and be glad to have the privilege. The other two groups are a little more complicated.

There are two approaches to the risk avoiders. The first, and probably the preferable, approach is to reassure them. It's not so hard; you understood most of the assignment correctly; this is a mistake from which you can easily recover; you are a smart college-competent student; it'll all make more sense as we go on, and so on. If that works, all is well. If not, the other alternative is to raise the risk of trying to avoid risks. For the students who will try to take up ten minutes of class time making sure that they have done the assignment correctly or have understood the assignment correctly, or who do that same job in 30 minutes of office hours, they need to know that they will be losing points on the assignment by doing that. If there is an uncertainty, say what it is. That's free. If you want me to grade your paper as a preface to your handing it in so I can grade it, that will cost you.

It's crude, but the theory makes sense. If risk is what they are sensitive to, make bad student behavior more risky.

That leaves the remaining four students, the lazy ones. The goal of these students is to get me to do as much of their work as possible. They are confused; they want more specific instructions; perhaps an outline of their papers would help them grasp the assignment. These students hope to leave the office ready write a paper I have just constructed, outlined, and pre-graded. And they themselves have not yet done anything except show up and act helpless. But even in this sorry category, there are different kinds of students. Some of the students who "act lazy" are just doing what they have been taught to do. They have been taught to be helpless and to succeed as students by being parasitic. They need to know that we do it differently here at the university level. Or that, however they do it in the department of your major--that awkward phrasing keeps me from having to choose a poster child--we don't do it that way here in political science.

The remaining two students are accomplished parasites. They know what they are doing. They will take you for your last minute and despise you as a sucker when they leave the office. Your lack of the most basic defenses makes you the sucker in the stories they will tell their friends over a couple of beers that night. And the next night, and the next.

The most appropriate response to these two students, out of the class of 60, is to refuse to be a sucker. Turn the project back on them, so they can begin to learn how to do it. Not clear enough? Write a paper that illustrates your current understanding of the assignment and I will use it to help you move in a more profitable direction? Not specific enough? Let me remind you of the principles we covered; what examples come to your mind as illustrations of that principle? What ways of doing the assignment can profit from those illustrations?

There's no way not to have high cost students, but there are ways of understanding them that allow you to be generous to some, independence-granting to others, and savvy enough not to be a sucker for the remaining ones.

Are the Problems Too Big?

I start my course in political psychology by introducing "the problem." We start with "frictional" rather than "normative" problems. The friction is easy to describe: either you wanted something you couldn't have or do or something you didn't want was done. Those are frictions. "Wanting" seems a fundamental part of human motivation. It is the "willing" part of "willing and able." But the narrower condition that this leaves out is "wanting and in consequence, trying." For class purposes, the question is this: "Is just 'wanting' in the absence of any specific attempt to achieve the purported goal, useful evidence of an actual intention?" The conventional notation has been W = wanted to, b1 = because, but (D) = was not able to, b2, because. The first explanation (b) says why you wanted to; the second, why you were not able. But what if we changed it to I = intended to; to to T = tried to? "Tried to" captures the immediacy I am after. It screens out "I always wanted to live in Japan," which certainly needs to be screened out. "Intended to" is helpfully broader, but it raises the question of what ought to count as an "intention." It is more than wanting to but less than trying to.

Our Commitment to Justice

The American view of justice sounds familiar to me. In fact, it sounds just like us. It reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart's "definition" of obscenity, which was "I know it when I see it." Americans don't have a clear view of what "justice" is and as a result, our discussions among ourselves never end and never decide. We have a much clearer view of what "injustice" is. This is the difference, if I may just play with the words a little here, between Justice Stewart's lack of interest in defining "scenity" and his interest in defining "ob-scenity" clearly enough that it could actually be achieved. When we saw bad things happening to unresisting Negro protesters--if you are in my 101 class, the chances are that you will not remember "Negro protesters." They seemed so harmless and so ill-used and we saw it all on television. That is what made the civil rights movement popular among northern liberals and tolerable even among northern conservatives. All these pictures of "injustice" shoved in our faces. Surely we can't be asked to just stand by. Now we are seeing pictures of Khadafi (or Gaddafi) threatening the overwhelmed people of Benghazi, Libya and we think we surely can't be asked just to stand by. So we haven't. We have attacked Libyan air defense installations, then planes, then tanks, then concentrations of the Libyan army. Now CIA agents are on the ground for the purpose of "targeting" future airstrikes. Some positive notion of "justice," some sense of how it really could be for a society with Libya's current make up and recent history, would really help us. Do they need to be a national, rather than a tribal, society? If they insist on being Muslim, could they be secular Muslims? Do they need the civil institutions that will allow they to transcend the narrow loyalties that have sustained them to this point in their history? Whether they need those or not, those will not be--trust me, they will NOT be--the first projects they take on. Will we take them on, on their behalf? Will we be the teachers of "ultratribalism?" Will we formulate their civil institutions: impartial, impersonal, and fair? Will we offer our kind of religion, a distant, pale, buffet line kind of religion, in exchange for theirs? Are we, in other words, prepared to work toward some peculiarly Libyan incarnation of "justice?" Or do we just want to condemn and oppose "injustice?" We do, after all, have several other acknowledged wars going on and we have to judge our appetite for substantial investment in a society where our failure may safely be taken for granted.

Just How Bad is Colonel Kadafi?

I was living in Missoula, Montana in the summer of 2002. The U. S. was ratcheting up the war of words against Iraq. The American military was preparing for war there (note the active verb) and the American public was being prepared (note the passive verb) for war there. The First Presbyterian Church of Missoula held a series of midweek lectures that summer (lectures with discussion, it turned out) and one of the lectures had to do with this increasing bellicosity toward Iraq. The church membership was mostly conservative but some of its members were faculty at the University of Montana and they were mostly liberal.

I was there for the lecture on Iraq. It was given by a faculty member whose name I have forgotten, but I will never forget his pitch to the congregation. He was warning against the impending invasion of Iraq in the strongest terms. He was warning a gathering of his friends, nearly all of whom thought that removing Saddam Hussein, that “Hitler of the Middle East,” was our duty. The speaker made a good case against the war, but it was a pretty standard case. I could have made it, myself. But he got a hearing for his point, which I would not have been able to do, by talking about all the nights he and a lot of his fellow members stayed after meetings to finish washing up the dishes. He apologized to another section of the congregation whom he addressed as “my fishing buddies,” for the contentious nature of the argument he was making. He was wonderful. I understood why he was so well received in a church that had no ears at all for his message.

Afterwards, I had a conversation with an old man with a very heavy German accent. I am going to try to represent the accent in the way I spell the words because I want you to be able to “hear” what I heard. The old man said, “I know vere ziss iss goink. I haff heard all ziss before.”

My blood ran cold. I knew that he had heard it from Hermann Goering in the 1930s. He heard it over loudspeakers, and all the radio stations, and saw it on the “newsreels” in the theaters. This is the Goering who said:

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

This week, I have been feeling a little bit like that old German man. Muammar el-Qaddafi is getting more reprehensible by the day, following the path by which Sadaam Hussein got more deplorable by the day. For people who pay any attention at all to public affairs and who are old enough to remember the run-up to the Iraq War, this has got to sound familiar. We may be excused for feeling, “I haff heard all ziss before.”

So just how bad is Kadafi? We can’t know, of course, so I have another way of approaching the question. How bad do we need him to be? I think someone who knows more of the facts on the ground in Libya and on the proper floor of the Pentagon could work out a correspondence that would help us. I’m thinking of something like this.

1a. Kadafi is a pompous hypocrite.
1b. We are trying to draw that attention of potential allies to the need for some action against Libya.

2a. Kadafi is terrorist.
2b. We have begun efforts to isolate him diplomatically and economically

3a. Kadafi has unleashed the power of a brutal regime against his own people.
3b. We have decided to neutralize his air defenses and to ground or destroy his air force.

4a. Kadafi is a clear and present danger to everyone and has a stock of mustard gas that he will unleash on anyone he deems an enemy.
4b. We are about to begin bombing civilian targets in Tripoli and are making “surgical strikes” against buildings where Kadafi or his family might be hiding.

We could go on, of course. I am not saying that any particular charge about Kadafi is untrue. I don’t really know. My point is that if they are true, they were always true—he took over in 1969, when my 50 year-old daughter was not yet 10—and the information we can glean from which ones are trotted out is best treated as the information that will justify whatever we are preparing to do next.
I know that’s cynical and it may not be fair, but I haff heard all ziss before and I am deeply uncomfortable.

Footnotes:
1. I haven’t made a study of this, but my guess is that the spelling of his name is going to get stranger and more foreign-looking by the day. Imagine a time when we referred to him as “Uncle Mo-Mo” in the way we were taught to refer to “Uncle Joe” Stalin after the U.S.S.R. became out ally in World War II. He could then become “Colonel Kadafi,” which isn’t that bad since there are U. S. colonels as well. And maybe after a few references to that title, it might just be “the Colonel,” to call up the notion of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then we could go to the whole name, Moamar Kadafi—the pronunciations would vary, I am sure from NPR to Fox News—and get, eventually, to the form I say in the New York Times today, Moamar el-Qadaffi. Notice the –el (strange and foreign-sounding) and the substitution of Q for K as the first consonant. Short of “Adolf el-Qadafi,” I don’t know where else there is for us to go.
2. Should it become necessary, we can always begin referring to Libya by its official name, “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”

The Three Things You Need to Know

The Introduction to Public Policy has three emphases. The three are the three most important things to know about the course.

APP

Policy issues can be usefully analyzed into the topics on which positions will be taken and the positions themselves. This sequence of Axes, Positions, and Problems gives the emphasis the name APP. I call the topics axes, because more than one axis is involved as the alternatives are presented, thought some in the field call them “frames.” Each position can be usefully examined by constructing a problem (a problem is a violated norm and a causal statement which explains why it was violated) from the standpoint of someone who holds that position. Following naturally from the problem formulation are a) the solution, b) the tools appropriate to the solution, and c) the rationale which will place the solution within the rhetorical space of American politics. From a political standpoint, each position can be understood by looking at the allies it attracts and the constituents it serves. The former are elites who can help formulate, evaluate, and defend the position; the latter are the masses whose interests, either material or symbolic, will be advanced by this position.

Policy Process

The public policy process is the way issues that were not formerly thought appropriate to government action or that had not formerly required government action, are placed on the government’s action agenda. As you would expect from the problem table, issues are placed by constituents who desire a benefit, by ideologues, by policy entrepreneurs, or by the possessors of underutilized mechanisms, the use of which would validate the possessor. Most potential issues are retained by the social segment where they originated. I consider the society—including religious, racial, ethnic, educational, familial, and sexual—to be one such segment. I consider the economy—including all the employers, owners, and financiers at the top end and all the employees, borrowers, and consumers at the bottom end—to be another such segment. As conflicts “escape” (or are rescued from) these segments, they become the property of public controversy and are likely to become agenda.

Once government has acquired an issue, the process of development is more straightforward. A policy is formulated, funded, implemented, and evaluated. Then, commonly, it is reformulated with new implementation mechanisms and reevaluated. Occasionally, the issue goes away and, even less often, the institutional response to it goes away.

Conflict here has less to do with ideology that with partisanship. Sometimes those parties are the Democratic and Republican parties. Sometimes they are the In party and the Out party. The conflicts that were guaranteed by the Framers, giving every governmental body the means, the motive, and the opportunity to bring any policy initiative to a standstill, always have a home here.

The Policies Themselves.

Since every policy is a “solution,” or was claimed to be a solution at the time of its promulgation—the time of its “milking forward”—by a legislative, executive, or regulatory body. So every solution has an official “problem” to which it is a response. The natural context of such issues is the historical era, the values of the current elites, and the way the policy space has been shaped by previous attempts. Similarly, every problem has a constituency, whether economic, regional, social, or ideological.

Policies can be grouped by whether they related more closely to some outcome or to some process and by how deeply they penetrate into the economy or society, which was their home before “went public.” An administration that digs too deeply into the economy will, in the U. S., be called “socialist.” Digging too deeply into the society will elicit “Nanny State” as a protest.

What is a Mandate?

In the most often used setting, it is really hard to tell. Every party with a majority in one house of the legislature says it has a “mandate” to do what at least some of the candidates promised to do in their most recent campaigns. President Obama claimed he has a mandate to deal with the nation’s healthcare woes as a result of his victory in 2008.

That isn’t the clearest meaning of the term, certainly. The handily available Latin source is the verb mando, “to command.” The Congress, for instance, “commands the Environmental Protection Agency to start obeying the law and the EPA fights back, saying the Congress does not have the right to mandate such an action The Congress demands that certain states where minority voting has been suspiciously low actually register minority citizens and allow them to vote. The demand was specific and was backed up by the kind of penalties that catch the imagination. Those are mandates.

What do the voters “demand?” That’s harder. The EPA decision was 5-4. You could say that five justices demanded that the law be obeyed and four demanded that it not be obeyed. Both are mandates; one carries the prestige and power of the Court and the other does not.

Command, connotes, at the very least, that only one thing is being demanded, but in popular votes, contrary things are being demanded. The voters are apparently not of one mind.
But if they were of one mind, what would they be saying? One of the simplest divisions of the popular vote is among those who vote for a candidate, those who vote for a party, and those who vote for the candidate closest to the voter’s stand on some issue. Imagine, in that case, a unanimous vote for Barak Obama in 2008. That would be 69,498,215 votes for Obama. Now imagine that 23 million voted for him because he was black (a candidate-oriented vote); 23 million voted for him because he was a Democrat (a party-oriented vote); and 23 million voted for him because he promised to end the war in Iraq promptly. What is his mandate? Keep on being black? Continue being a Democrat?

In fact, I think things are more confusing than that. Many voters have a sense that there ought to be a balance in public policies and they feel, sometimes, that “things have gone too far.” I don’t want to have to be the one to say that things could not go too far, but it seems to me that “too far” requires a single policy axis. Most often, the political arguments are not made on a single policy axis. Take the current wariness about the necessary budget reductions, for instance. If the policy axis is “live within our means,” then people are overwhelmingly in favor of it. If the policy axis is “do without crucially important government services,” then people are overwhelmingly opposed to it. If the policy in question does both, how shall we determine a “mandate?”

I think this sense of “too far” is a little like the thermostat. We get to “too cold” and the thermostat kicks the furnace on. We get to “too warm” and it kicks the furnace off—or, in some homes, kicks the furnace off and the AC on. The thermostat works on what I call a single policy axis. It doesn’t have a setting for “using too much of the world’s resources.” It doesn’t have a setting that says, “Conservation is the same as a reduction in the demand for energy; get a sweater.” It’s just on and off.

But I think it’s worse than that. The thermostat doesn’t have a minority vote, so that it can kick the furnace on by 5-4 but the minority is large enough to keep the AC on as well. The thermostat doesn’t take reaching the “send a message to the furnace” temperature, decide enough is enough, and send a crew down to rip out the furnace. The public, operating as it does on multiple policy axes, doesn’t so much turn on and off the furnace, as send a crew down to tear out the furnace; then another crew to install a furnace, when it gets cold.

Of course, that would be more expensive, but the Framers didn’t give us democracy because it was efficient. They gave us a democracy because they had just fought a war against “efficient” and wanted to see how “inefficient” would suit us. I think they really nailed it. The government they designed was just perfect—for the 18th Century.

I have a dream

My dream is to have a member of this class hear an argument that goes like this and respond to it appropriately. The argument would be "We ought to be building a first-class workforce in our high schools, but we are not because we are not establishing high enough academic standards for our children." I have no criticism of that problem unless it is the only one available.

I would like you to stop and think a little. Then I would like for you to decide to respond or not as the situation requires and as you choose, bearing in mind that you can't fight all the wars at the same time. I'd like you to think: should we really be turning our high schools into workforce prep schools? Is that the best normative standard we can come up with? Is it better, for instance, than "help each child achieve his or her full potential as a citizen and a person as well as a worker?"

I'd like you to think: are we really not building a first-class workforce? Has it actually been studied or is this just bitching and moaning? Were the standards oriented toward innovation or toward skilled cheap labor? If the studies established the "smart and cheap" standard and what we really need is the "innovation" standard, then the FO doesn't follow at all. There is not, metaphorically speaking, "trash on the Park Blocks."

I'd like you to think: of all the available attributions, is this one the best? Will it lead to practical solutions? If "school-readiness" is the principal variable and the homes the principal resource, then "high standards" will simply further segregate the advantaged students from the disadvantaged, so maybe "high standards" will have externalities we don't want. If broad civic recognition of teachers as the heroes of learning--as "nation-builders" in President Obama's phrase--will solve about three quarters of our school problems, isn't that a better CA?

The "heroes of learning" standard, by the way, would plausibly allow much larger classes with much better achievement; much less administrative overhead; much more parental support; and much lower dropout rates because of the interpersonal attachments formed with the teachers, who are not high status figures. It isn't a slam dunk, but it is intriguing.

What I'd like is for you think all those things before you say anything at all. Then I want you to choose to enter the conversation or not and if you do, to choose an alternative that will have some hope of broadening out the policy discussion.

Sensible Government

Everyone wants it. And if everyone agreed about what was sensible, we'd have a pretty good chance of getting it. It's a democracy, right?

The New York Times this week had a really good piece on the politics of earmarks. You can see it here. It turns out that quite a few sincere politicians were elected by less sincere electorates to do away with earmarks. This has the possibility of ending the federal funding of projects that are crucially necessary to the district, but that were not valued very highly by the Office of Management and Budget.

This brings to the forefront a crucial distinction that everyone really knows, but that not everyone remembers in the biennial orgy of anti-government rhetoric--some earmarks are reasonable and necessary and others are frivolous and without merit. Hello? Project Control to Earth? Hello? Is anyone listening? Most elected officials will reliably choose frivolous projects that benefit their friends and neighbors over sensible projects that benefit only other districts. Why? Well, because the "let's apply the aggregate benefit test" candidates were defeated by the "if the money comes here, it's a good project" candidates. And now those have been defeated by the "anywhere the money goes is the wrong place if it is earmarked" candidates.

We did this to ourselves.

Many, perhaps most, antiabortion activists grant that in some particular instances, an abortion is the best thing for everyone concerned. It's sensible. But if you pass a law that allows discretion--the choice of abortion when it is the best thing but not when it is not the best thing--you will get indiscretion as well. People will make use of the new statutory latitude to do things that should not be done. Yes. They will. It's hard to tell, but, these activists are forced to argue, if we can't have sensible discretion, it is better to have no discretion at all. To ban sensible choices as the price of preventing unsensible choices.

Like the earmarks.

So even if everyone wants sensible government and even if there is a sizable area of agreement among the people about what is sensible and what is not, we can't have sensible government, because we won't elect people who will pass sensible earmarks and sensible abortion laws.

It's a conundrum.

Cool Pragmatism or Hot Populism

Some choice, huh? I saw that phrase in the February 7 New York Times and began to plan some place I could share it. The D and R leaders in the Senate are reaching an accord on the rules and may soon need only a majority vote to pass legislation. The President is speaking to the National Chamber of Commerce today hoping to suggest his openness to them and hoping to blunt their jihad against him.

Does anyone really want hot populism from the U. S. about what to do with the uprising in Egypt? On talks that could separate the Taliban in Afghanistan from al Qaeda? Or taking advantage of Raul Castro creeping moderation in Cuba?

The fact is that there are some things you get to say when you are running for office that could be really dangerous when you sit down behind the desk and have to decide to sign something or not. Nothing is better for getting elected that hot populism. For governing, not so much.

Centripetal Politics

Maybe it's because it's still football season, and will be until next Sunday evening, but I find my mind drifting in the direction of team ideas of freedom. It will not surprise anyone to notice that at any given level of individual engagement (low, medium, or high), the more freedom the team has, the less freedom any individual has.

I hope it will not become necessary to distinguish "freedom to act" from "freedom to decide," which I would call, "discretion" or "expertise" of "judgment" or something.

If I am the defensive coordinator, I call a defense and expect that everyone will go to the place on the field where he supposed to be and take on the responsibility he is supposed to have, whether he likes the assignment or not. If the players are free (to do what they want to do) then I am not free to call the defensive alignment.

But a football team is an institution, rather than a process. It is, in that way, like the U. S. Congress and unlike the information acquisition process or the value application process or the voting process. In the Congress, every representative feels the need to serve (at best) to placate (in the middle) or to distract (at worst) the voters in the district. I call that a centrifugal stress because it moves the rep away from the center of the institution--away, to follow the football example, from the defense that was called. Every representative needs to align himself or herself with the caucus position or pay the consequences, if any. I call that a centripetal stress, a "center-seeking stress." It emphasizes the exact performance of the defensive alignment I call.

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that each major branch of government--I divide them into four pieces, executive, judicial, administrative, and legislative--has a characteristic pattern of centrifugal and centripetal forces. It occurred to me this week that the process part--the politics rather than government part--also has a balance of the two. I will want to think quickly here of three of those.

Coming to Public Judgment is not about the range of opinions on issues or the rapidity of change of those opinions or any short run enthusiasm for them. It is about the stability of an opinion, even when the whole set of likely consequences is examined. It is easy to use a foreign war as an example. The reasons for undertaking a military conflict rarely take into account the cost in "blood and treasure," as they say and when the war has begun, those are the costs most likely to be present in the minds of voters. If, following the centrifugal stresses model, predominant opinion returns to the center and is stable and can weather increased costs, we say the public has, as Daniel Yankelovich calls it, "come to public judgment."

Coverage of Conditions is a centrifugal emphasis of the effects of the media. Lance Bennett says we are quite likely to treat a story as a narrative episode, dramatizing the human effects. Such a story says very little about the institutions, which are important over the long term; it is not likely to be analytical or historical, both of which help to sustain policy interest over the long run. News which emphasizes the elements of a policy and the predictable outcomes will help citizens decide whether to support it or to begin to push for something better. Stories that are only "up close and personal" will not help us make those decisions.

Responsible Party Model (RPM) is a very disciplined model of party competition. Currently, candidates freelance their candidacies, decide what they are for or against, and if they are elected, "vote their consciences." This amount of "player freedom" gets in the road of any "team freedom" at all. To return to the football metaphor, RPM would be a radical change in politics, but it is the taken for granted condition of a defensive coordinator. In the RPM, the party recruits and funds the candidates, insists on fidelity to the party platform, maintains strong inter-branch cooperation among members of the party, and has strong legislative caucuses. Because of all that personal freedom forgone, this party can come back to the electorate, taking responsibility for the outcomes of their policies, and ask the electorate the kind of question they are best equipped to answer, which is, "Here is what we did. How do you like it?"

Two things struck me as I brought these together today. The first was the applicability of centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in the policy process. Here it is in public opinion; and again in media coverage; and here again in party competition. The second in that in opting for centripetal forces in all these areas, is there a substantial loss in the range of policies that can be considered? Yes, probably so. Is it worth it? Give me a little time on that one.

What to argue about

I have been teaching public policy here at PSU for almost fifteen years. During all that time, I have thought that making the distinction between a) what political actors are arguing about and b) what position each takes on the question they are arguing about, was "one of the major elements of the course." I am wondering today if it is THE major element of the course. Why would that be?

Is it counterintuitive? It's hard to think so. I am opposing you in the courtroom and you want to talk about how horribly heinous the crime was of which my client is accused. I want to talk about whether the evidence that he was involved at all, which was beaten out of him at the police station, is admissible in court. That seems clear enough, doesn't it? If I agree with the other attorney that the heinousness of the crime is the right thing to be talking about and my position is that the crime really wasn't all that heinous, I am going to lose and so is my client--his life, possibly. Unless he argues for an appeal on the grounds that his counsel was incompetent, which would certainly be the case.

My students want to argue aspects of the policy that they cannot possibly win. I want to teach them to look at the various kinds of arguments that are possible (I call the possibilities "axes," some call them "policy frames" or "problem formulations.'). If they know which ones are best for them and choose, let's say on moral grounds, that they want to argue the part of the issue that they will lose, I am fine with that in my role as a teacher. Teaching them the concept of "axis" and showing them how to separate one from another and how to tell which one will be best for them--or, in practice, for any political actor we might study--is my job. Which one they actually choose is their job.

But I'm not actually getting my job done. We are midway through the fifth week and I really believe that I could propose that the amount of work necessary to succeed in the course should be doubled because it would make them more competent students and engage most of them in a debate about whether it would or would not make them more competent. Let's pass by, for right now, what a silly thing that would be for me to propose. Let's talk, instead, about how silly it would be for them to accept "competence" as the right subject for debate. Any one of them might propose that we talk instead about a) the aggregate workload of university students or about b) the ethics of a professor suddenly doubling the amount of work required or about c) my responsibility to the syllabus, which specified the kinds of work to be done as well as the amount. They would win any of those three arguments, if...

...if they could see them. If they understood they can propose the axis they choose. If they can distinguish the course of the argument once the axis is established, and if they know what their own interests are.

The more likely it is that I could have the argument I choose and win it, the more evidence there is that I have not accomplished my goal as a professor and half the course is already gone. If some bright and capable students insisted that axis c), above, is the only really relevant axis, I would know right then that I would lose the argument. I'm entirely fine with that. It would also mean that I had taught them a crucially important skill in policy analysis and I'm fine with that, too.

PS 414

My approach to the study of public policy divides the work to be done into three parts. The first could be called something like "policy skills" or "conflict structure" of "seeing the underlying premise." I don't know anyone else who offers this and I think it is a very valuable skill--at least it has been valuable to me.

The second emphasis is on the policy process. How do new ideas or new versions of old ideas get into the institutional mix? That is what "politicizing social issues" is all about and there is a need to dramatize the need for new approaches to international organizations, to pick one end of the scale and for new approaches to cyberbullying to pick the other end. The policy process begins with these new ideas, it processes them, passes them implements them, and evaluates their effectiveness. Every now and then, the just pull the plug on a program.

The third has to so with the public policies themselves. What are policies good for? What effects to they have. On Wildwood Trail, in Forest Park, they try to keeps unleashed dogs off the trail in two ways. They post a sign citing the relevant city code and promise both jailtime and a fine. The second is a much prettier sign asking people PLEASE to staff off the grass. If I took a dog to the trail to run, I'd find that confusing. what is the effect of putting "If you do that, you'll pay"on a post next to "We really wish you wouldn't. Please?"

So how can you offer policy incentives and disincentives that will help clean all that up. That's what we do in 414.

The first third of the course is involved with the mechanics. The second part with process. the third part with the study of the policy documents themselves. It's kind of a sloppy course. The pace varies depending oh just who in understanding what and how soon they can be made ready go on.

Is President Obama Sincere?

Probably he is. Sure. Why wouldn't he be?

I've been reading analyses of what the President intends to say for several weeks now. The New York Times today reported that a video "previewing themes" had been sent out. The video "made plain that his speech would be geared more broadly toward the political center, to independent voters and business owners and executives alienated by the expansion of government and the partisan legislative fights of the past two years."

So we don't know yet what he is going to say, but we know who he is going to effect and what state he thinks they are in (alienated). It's hard for me to see how anyone can give a speech and expect to be really heard when we know already the effect he hopes to achieve.

So I got to thinking how that would work on a date. I've had to do some dating recently and it's still fresh in my mind. Ordinarily, you might think I want to know how my date is feeling, what has been happening in her life, what she wants to eat or drink, what she has read recently that has interested her, and maybe whether she'd like to go to a movie with me. That sounds pretty ordinary, doesn't it?

Now imagine that she has an earpiece and a hidden microphone and a girlfriend sitting at another table. The girlfriend gives me the treatment the press is giving the President, i.e., she says what effect I am trying to achieve by saying what I am saying. So my questions, in order, might look like this. He is trying to represent himself as genuinely interested in your welfare. He's trying to establish that you haven't been dating much or working too much. He's looking for a chance to buy you something hoping that you will have to sit here until you are done with it no matter how badly things are going. He's trying to imply that he is a cultured person--a reader of books--and checking on your reading choices at the same time. He's trying to get a commitment to a later date before you have a chance to assess this one.

The girlfriend didn't give me credit for much; she is wary on her friend's behalf. But the real damage is done, not by her implications that I am up to something sinister, but by presuming that my words have no meaning in themselves. What I am saying ought not be judged by what I actually said, but by what I probably meant. Everything I say is an attempt to achieve some goal or leverage that can be used to achieve a goal. It is useless, apparently, to assume that I actually mean what I say.

That will be a very tough first date, but I think public officials--not just President Obama--get that all the time. What they say they mean is routinely set aside in favor of what the reported thinks the speaker is trying to achieve. I'm sure that makes the reported seem knowledgeable, but it makes the speaker look like a charlatan. If the speaker really does mean what he is saying, which I think we ought to admit is possible, it is a shame that so little attention will be paid to it.

Liberals and Conservatives: the other two metaphors

The Bad Classroom and the Challenge of Achievement

I am in the process of exploring what useful ideas about liberalism and conservatism can be derived from three metaphors. In the previous post, I explored public goods and private goods. Private goods aren't good for broad benefits. Whether that is a regrettable lapse or a catastrophe depends on the benefits we are talking about. Public goods aren't good for personal motivation and incremental learning. Again, how bad that is depends on what we are talking about.

The second metaphor imagines a classroom with twenty desks. The room as a whole holds eighty students, sixty of whom stand at the back. The other twenty stand in the hallways and hear whatever they can hear.

Presuming that all these students are paid up customers, liberals will want to ask what nutcase admitted a hundred students to a course being held in a classroom that has only twenty desks. The classroom is inadequate to meet the needs of the students and liberals will suspect that if you look at the standing students, you will find darker skins and poorer educational backgrounds. Conservatives are not at all inclined to talk about the needs of the students and the way the university has met them. If a conservative has one of the desks, he is interested in finding out how he can keep it for himself; if he does not, he will be interested in finding out what he has to do to get one.

Notice that everything in the perspective of the conservative student is oriented toward making things better for himself. It is a perspective that has a lot of respect for competition and it is likely to see the seated students as the winners of the competition than as somehow unfairly privileged. This perspective pays a lot of attention to personal responsibility for outcomes, so it is a very good motivational view. It is a "healthy" view as well, because it highlights the relationships among aspiration, achievement, and reward.

But it isn't very good for systemic questions. If you were outfitting an oceangoing vessel, you would want a liberal planning the supply of lifeboats because a conservative would be interested only in what he would have to do to be in one of the boats. The liberal would want to be sure there were enough boats for everyone. The liberal perspective matches aggregate need with aggregate supply. It is more interested in seeing that everyone's needs are met than assuring that his own needs are met. Liberals are deeply suspicious that when choices have to be made so that some are included and some excluded, it will be the same people--the systematically marginalized--who will be excluded.

In this scenario as in all the others, the better scenario is the one that highlights what you want to highlight. The conservative question is a really good question for some things. The liberal question is a really good question for other things. You really can't ask them both. When you do, you wind up with forty desks instead of twenty and no demand that the university provide the services for which it has already received the money.

Dramatis Personae

The third metaphor has to do with the relationship between the economy and the polity; between the market and politics. When you read a liberal account, you will nearly always see that the government "intervenes" in situation to protect "citizens." When you read a conservative account, you will find that the government "interferes" in the normal operations of the market and everyone loses as a result. Why "intervenes" and "interferes?"

It comes down to the dramatis personae. Who are the actors in this drama? The conservative perspective has two actors. The first is "everyone participating in the market." That means employers, investors, and producers at one end and employees and consumers at the other. "The market" is Adam Smith's notion of intelligent design. It allocates goods and costs precisely under most circumstances and it benefits all participants, though not equally. Most importantly, it is "self-correcting." When prices are too high, the market forces them down; when goods are scarce, the market supplies more of them.

Since the market is "self-correcting," it does not need to be "corrected" by governments. That is why government actions are called "interference." Liberals who don't like the way the market distributes incomes, for instance, have no foothold at all on this argument. If something is wrong, the market will correct it if it is left alone. Besides that, government doesn't intervene adroitly and the effects of its clumsiness are reduced production and higher costs for everyone.

Liberals, it goes without saying, see it differently. Did you notice that there are no citizens in the conservative list of characters? Liberals see citizens and taxpayers in the bottom part of the market where conservatives see consumers and employees. They take the corporate greed and overwhelming power of the largest businesses as weapons that can, at any moment, be unleashed against the people they, the liberals, have sworn an oath to protect.

An active government is, as a matter of fact, all that stands between the citizen and the most abject wage slavery. Without government protections, the U. S. economy would be one huge "company town," where the company controlled what wages you got and what your groceries cost and when you fell behind, you could never leave town. Oh and by the way, marginalized workers don't even need to apply for work.

It is this picture that gives meaning to "intervene." In this context, it sounds more like "protect and serve," which you might see on a police car. If the companies can band together, then the workers can band together. Fair is fair. If a product is unsafe or ineffective, the companies selling it won't care and if the government doesn't intervene, the citizens will be victimized over and over. The market has no conception at all of "the public good" so it really can't be trusted. There is no democratic control by consumers, so it can't be "corrected," if by that term we will mean that it will be brought back to meeting the needs of the people.

So conservatives see the market and a marvelous machine and the government as a hapless and dangerous tinkerer. Liberals see the market as a device for the systematic abuse of the citizenry and the corporations as conscienceless ghouls. And again, the best question is this: "What is each of these perspectives good for?" If liberalism is a screwdriver and conservatism a hammer, the one thing you need to know is whether the dilemma facing you is more like a screw or more like a nail. And it is not "your view" or "their view" that is finally of most importance. It is "our view." That's why we have governments and that's why we don't let them do whatever they want.

How Are Liberals Different From Conservatives?

This question does not presuppose that it is important to wonder whether they really are. It does not imagine that the differences are so slight that recognizing them at all will require video review. The question I have in mind is really how best to catalog the differences so they can be used on the fly.

Last year, in the 2010 version of P.S. 102, I relied mostly on policy differences. Liberals want to stabilize and extend Social Security, for instance, and conservatives would like to privatize at least part of it. Conservatives want to cover our increased spending by borrowing and liberals want to cover our increased spending by increased taxes. If you are looking for realistic proposals for decreasing spending at the federal level, you can keep on looking. Call me when you find anything interesting.

This year, I am pushing the policy differences back a little and putting some more fundamental considerations first. I have three pictures that I hope will do the job. The first contrasts a community getting its potable water from a reservoir from a community getting it from the kitchen faucet. In the first instance, the water has gone through a purification process so that it is all safe to drink. In the second, the water is not treated at the common site, but people buy and install filters on the kitchen faucets in order to make their water safe to drink.

The point of this comparison is that it costs the government a lot of money to make all the available water safe to drink and a lot of that water is going to be used to wash cars and water lawns. On the other hand, no one is going to get sick from drinking the water. Relying on faucets to do the purification job doesn't cost the government anything. In fact, it supports a brisk business in kitchen faucet filters, which are purchased by everyone who really cares about pure drinking water and who has the resources to purchase and maintain the filters. It is true that some people will get sick from drinking the water, but that will cause a good deal more careful management of the problem as people learn to avoid these bad outcomes by drinking only water they have treated themselves.

This contrasts the high tax, universal benefit, low personal responsibility model with the low tax, selective benefit, high personal responsibility model.

That was supposed to be the first of three examples and--eventually--it will be. But I'm out of time for now. The second will involve a 100 person classroom with only 20 chairs. The third will involve the fundamental characters in the politics v. economics debate.

Guns don't kill people, People kill people

I think I'll add this to the Pro-life/Pro-choice example I have used so often. If the purpose of distinguishing these two conceptual priorities from each other is to ban the "bad" part, then we are offered the choice between banning guns or banning people. Not a very attractive choice.

On the other hand, what everyone knows--everyone from the most enthusiastic gun enthusiast to the most ardent pacifist--is that guns make it easier to kill people. There is a gradient. At the "unlikely to commit a homicide" end of the scale are personal, physical, time-consuming ways of killing. Let's say, just to have something vivid, that at this end, the favored way of killing is to shove a knitting needle through the victim's eye and into the brain. It would still be possible to say, "People don't kill people; knitting needles kill people." On the other hand, there would be very very few homicides using that method.

At the other end of the scale is carrying a small loader rapid-fire handgun around. It isn't personal; it isn't physical; it isn't time-consuming. It makes it possible for an act to be performed during a brief moment of anger or despair. I believe I recall that a small child somewhere in the Pacific Northwest recently shot and killed his mother because he was angry that she made him carry in some firewood. It is impossible to imagine that if he had been limited to knitting needles, that he would have killed his mother that day. Or to strangling; or to slitting her throat, or to beating her to death with a baseball bat. Very likely, picking up a loaded gun in a moment of anger is the only way he would have managed to kill his mother over a household chore.

The policy debate--leaving aside the Supreme Court's current views on whether the Constitution guarantees the right to own muskets--would be about how close to the moment of anger killings we want to be. It is clear to me that making it less convenient to commit homicides would cut down on the number of homicides.

Israel as an American "cause" or a U. S. "interest"

The puzzle of the right relationship of the United States with the state of Israel has been a puzzle for a long time. As the costs of the relationship continue to escalate, it has become a more irritating puzzle. As the prospect seems more and more to be perpetual stalemate, the irritation is continually aggravated.

The cost is now so high and the likelihood of a satisfactory outcome so low, that it time to say that if sustaining Israel as an independent democratic nation in the Middle East is a “cause, “ then it is time to catch our breath and prepare ourselves to do whatever it takes. If it an “interest,” it is time to look more closely at the cost-benefit analysis. What do we get from continuing to do what we have been doing?
The U. S. government has not yet made either case. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has, of course, made both cases, but as the time drags on and the costs rise, this is a case we need to hear from the President. President Obama, so far, has done what all of his predecessors, reaching back in my memory to Truman, have done. He has invested a substantial part of our foreign aid budget in Israel’s ability to defend itself and he has invested a substantial part of his diplomatic attention in a “peace process.” The peace process is the most important part because it is the only thing that prevents some judgment from being made about what our interests are and what to do to further them. The "peace process" is a political snooze button.

Let’s look at the situation, then at the options.

Israel now has secure borders. “Borders,” of course, do not project the civilian population from rockets lobbed into Israel from Gaza; they do prevent any foreseeable land invasion. But Israel is not secure and will never be secure so long as there are neighbors—and I am not talking just about the governments of the neighboring states—capable of attacking Israel. The attackers will call them “reprisals,” of course, but the conflict has gone on so long that anything done by either side can now justly be called a “reprisal.” [Map of Israel and surrounding territories here]

But “Israel,”—I’ll come in a minute to why that word is in italics—wants two things it is not likely to get and at the moment, feels that the current level of conflict is preferable to giving them up. One is complete control of the entire city of Jerusalem, including the Muslim part. The second is a continually expanding eastern frontier, so more and more of Palestine comes under the control of the government of Israel. This second goal is probably not going to be acceptable either, but it has, in addition a “poison pill” provision. If Israel simply annexed the West Bank, a majority of her “residents” would not be Jews and the prospect would loom of a free and fair election putting in place a Muslim government. I call it a “prospect” only because that is where the population numbers lead and that is where the comparative birth rates lead as well.

Now are these two things "what Israel demands?" Yes and no. That is why I put “Israel” in quotes above. Israel currently has a conservative government. The coalition Benjamin Netanyahu leads is a majority because it has a number of far right parties included in it. They can pull the plug on his government any time they want to and they have not been shy about reminding him of that. A move to deal with Jerusalem by dividing it or sharing it or internationalizing it would bring about the end of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. Similarly, an Israeli commitment to forbid further settlement in the West Bank—these settlements are in a foreign country—much less to dismantle the settlements already built there, would also bring about an end of his government. So it doesn’t really matter whether these are things he wants to do. He couldn’t do them even if he did want to.

Similarly “Palestine,” (again, note the quotes) can neither recognize Israel diplomatically nor prevent attacks on Israel from its territory. Hamas is the legitimate government of Gaza, but it doesn’t control the ability of militants to attack Israel from Gaza. This is true, again, even if they wanted to and their desire to do so comes and goes. Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party control the West Bank, but he is powerless to make “peace process commitments” as well. He cannot prevent Israel from continuing to take land in the West Bank and he cannot prevent militants from attacking Israel from the West Bank.

It is for this collection of reasons that I say the process has no foreseeable end. Any step toward peace will remove from authority the leader who takes that step. Should normal political processes prove inadequate, there is always assassination, which has proved effective in the past. So things are going to keep going the way they are going.

That means that the President needs to decide how long he is going to support this process. I will pass over the domestic political attractions to remaining “a friend of Israel.” If supporting Israel—at the moment, that means supporting Israeli practices that Jimmy Carter called “apartheid,”—is a moral commitment, then we need to prepare our citizens to continue paying the price. The price in American lives and American dollars continues to escalate. It is now so far out of hand that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, are talking about it in public. Those remarks are really important if we are looking at our relationship with Israel in a cost-benefit framework. Otherwise, not so much.

Either way, President Obama needs to say what is going to happen and how we are going to participate in it and why and for how long. He has not said any of those things and I have been listening really hard.