Neil Irwin at Wonkblog has an interview with Paul Volcker on his new ideas for governance.
One exchange led me to do a Google ngram, comparing the occurrences of "public service" and "bureaucrat". In American books the frequency for the two started out with "public service" more frequent and "bureaucrat" less, but the two lines cross about 1976 so we now think more of "bureaucrats" and less of "public service". "Public service" peaked in 1920 or so.
That's bad.
But I'd like to recognize a very good bureaucrat, Ginny Cooper, the retiring head of the DC public libraries. Among other things, in 7 years she tripled the number of books checked out. I remember using first the Mt. Vernon building, then the MLK building on G street a lot in my years in the city. Libraries to my mind are more important than schools--you know some of the students in the school are not interested, but you know all of the people in the library are interested. (Except for the homeless, which is a problem in Reston as well as DC.)
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