Legends, Myths, and Truth

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. Snopes.com does a debunk on this:

"Before Super Bowl XXII in 1988, a reporter asked Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams, 'How long have you been a black quarterback?'

Humans value a good story over good facts.

DC Government More Efficient Than Private Business

Steven Pearlstein writes in the Post about his problems with bureaucracies, particularly Verizon. But he includes this nugget:

"While on this vacation, I discovered at 6:30 one morning that my wallet had been lost or stolen. Normally, this would have ruined my day. But by 8:30, using the hotel's Internet access and dialing some 800 numbers, I was able to order up three new credit cards, a new bank card and a new driver's license. When I returned home two days later, I found the replacement license from the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles in the mailbox. (Honest!) All the other cards arrived within the next two business days."

Back to Verizon--his wife was sold a one-stop solution for phones and Internet, but there wasn't good communication within Verizon on the different pieces. Pearlstein rightfully complains, but as a bureaucrat that's what you have to expect. It's much easier to present one face to the customer if the face is really a mask than to reengineer the reality.

Partisan Thought Is an Oxymoron--II

Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy
passes on a Cass Sunstein report of an experiment on the effect of discussion on political views. The bottom line is that, when liberals talk to liberals and conservatives to conservatives, both groups get more extreme.

Cat People, This Administration??? No, Really

Who woulda thunk it?

Ready Kids, From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Definitions Matter--a War is a War is a War

Via Washington Monthly James Carroll writes in the Boston Globe challenging the idea we're at war:

Is America actually in a state of war? "Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault."

I don't agree with everything he says, but I emphatically agree that determining whether the current state of affairs is a "war" is crucial. My answer is "no"--this is not a war, not a war between states, not a war of armies whose leader can be convinced to surrender. It may be a war as in the "war on organized crime" or the "war on cancer". But precision of language is vital.

My main concern about Guantanamo is the idea we're at war. It's inhuman to sentence prisoners when we can't define the conditions under which the sentence would end.

My doubt as to the "war" also underlies my position on NSA wiretapping. If we were at "war", as Judge Posner posits in the TNR (registration required), I'd be more comfortable with Bush's position. Bush does have historical precedents for his position. We Americans do accept Presidential excess in times of crisis--look particularly at the Civil War. In my case, and perhaps the case of many liberals, the fact is that we disagree with Bush's analysis of the current situation: we don't call this "war".

Hirschmann and KIPP Schools

Jay Mathews writes about the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schoools in DC in High Scores Fail to Clear Obstacles to KIPP Growth. KIPP has done well at the middle school level, but is having problems as they try to go up. As I read it I was reminded again of Hirschman's book on exit and voice.

As an economist, he was aware of Milton Friedman's proposal for school vouchers as a measure to increase competition. The proposal had been floated by 1969 but not implemented and Hirschman was dubious of its effectiveness. He compared it to the Big Three automakers, where "competition" wasn't really effective. He suggested that private schools would drain the public system of those parents who would fight for reform, so the public school establishment would be happy to see them go and would not react by improving their systems. From the Mathews article:

"Craig Jerald, a D.C.-based school achievement consultant who has watched KIPP's growth, said much of the response to the program has been tepid at best. He said Feinberg once told him that 'opening a KIPP school in every big city would embarrass or inspire urban districts to do better for their kids.

'I think we all underestimated how dismissive these systems can be.'"

The article also hints that KIPP may be having problems with maintenance as I blogged earlier. KIPP has succeeded in capturing the idealism and energy of the young, but the iron law of building is, the more you build, the more there is to maintain. Unfortunately, maintenance doesn't have the sex appeal of building.

Creation and Maintenance

A piece in the Washington Times today--White House eyes billions for Iraq maintenance Newspaper:

"The Bush administration is considering asking Congress later this year for at least $2 billion in new reconstruction money, primarily for maintaining completed Iraqi facilities.
Administration officials say the additional funding is needed to prevent completed projects in Iraq from falling into disrepair while the new government tries to establish a steady flow of revenue from oil and other sources to sustain the nation's infrastructure. "

The Bush administration is learning some home truths: time and decay happens to everything and that new ideas/facilities/organizations need to make connections to survive. It's rather like rooting a cutting. A cut flower may look beautiful, but will wither and die. If you can root a cutting, you've got a plant that can survive. That encapsulates one problem with "nation building" and "development aid". We can build facilities, whether roads in Afghanistan or water treatment plants in Iraq, but without rooting them they won't last. We have only to look at the history of many of the facilities colonial powers built across the world.

What do I mean by "rooting"? First is the knowledge. If Americans did the work, then Americans have the knowledge of how to repair and maintain the facility. It may be faster and more efficient to import equipment and the expertise to build a facility, but it's short-sighted in the long run. Second is the system--who is responsible for maintenance? Someone has to "own" the facility (or idea), someone who's going to be there year in and year out. And third is the money--is there a tax system in the case of Afghan highways or a fee system in the case of Iraqi water plants to get the money needed to make repairs? Knowledge, responsibility, and money all go together--it's difficult to have one without the other.

In short, you need a bureaucracy that works.

Naderism, A Gift That Keeps on Giving

Dana Milbank in the Post writes today about the antiwar Democrats in Tasting Victory, Liberals Instead Have a Food Fight. It's even more depressing than the approach of my 65th birthday.

"Cindy for the Senate!' called out moderator Kevin Zeese, a Ralph Nader acolyte. 'It's important for us to stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and break out of this two-party straitjacket,' argued Zeese, a third-party candidate for Senate in Maryland."

Does Mr. Zeese remember that Naderism gave us George W. and Iraq, Roberts and Alito, all as one gift-wrapped package?

Exit, Voice, Loyalty; Maria Full of Grace; Samburu

Watched "Maria, Full of Grace" this weekend, the very good movie on a Columbian drug mule. Also continued reading Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty--see this summary at Wikipedia. And finally read this piece in the NYTimes magazine on American missionaries to the Samburu tribe in Kenya. What do they have in common?

Not much, except provoking thought on the boundaries of human loyalties and experiences. With the Samburu, the missionaries hope to bring Christianity to the tribe and eliminate female circumcision from its culture. But the tribal members seem satisfied with their religion and culture, even the females. The tribe is not in decline; members are neither exiting nor voicing discontent. Does one go along, or is there a moral obligation to change it?

The movie shows exit--Maria leaves the drug running and leaves Colombia. But one of Hirschman's points recapitulates the old "safety-valve" theory of American history: to the extent that the discontented are able to leave a human organization/group, the strength of voice--the expression of discontent and the working for change from within an organization--is weakened. (Part of the old "frontier theory" was the idea that "free land" in the West drained the cities of their poor and malcontents. Think of Horace Greeley's "go West, young man". My understanding is, while the idea seems valid, historians couldn't find many people who actually moved from cities to farms.) Anyhow, the director's commentary on Maria says 10 percent of Colombians live in the U.S., often the better educated. Does that mean that the forces of democracy in Colombia have been weakened? Do our open borders hurt the cause?

Dog Bites Man, Ben Stein Bites Management

I realize it's not fair to say Ben Stein is always pro-business, but his column today, When You Fly in First Class, It's Easy to Forget the Dots - New York Times, on United Airlines surprised me.

"So here it is in a nutshell: employees are goaded into investing a big chunk of their wages and benefits in UAL stock. They lose that. Then they lose big parts of their pay and pensions. They become peons of UAL. Management gets $480 million, more or less. 'Creative destruction?' Or looting?"