The Wheel of Political Fortune Keeps Spinning
Democrats may be ascendant now, but don’t expect permanence. One recent study gives them about 13 years in power.
By: Lee Drutman
It was not so long ago that GOP strategist Karl Rove talked boldly of creating a “permanent Republican majority.” As it turned out, it was an elusive dream.
Of course, had he paid attention to American political history, he should have known better. No party ever holds power forever. It’s just a matter of how long.
But how long has long been a matter of debate. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once famously suggested that American politics oscillated between liberal and conservative poles in predictable 30-year cycles. One recent study of American electoral political history suggests Schlesinger may have been on to something.
In order to test his prediction, Samuel Merrill III (a professor of mathematics and computer science at Wilkes University), Bernard Grofman (a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine) and Thomas L. Brunell (a professor of political science at the University of Texas, Dallas) analyzed the Democratic seats from every U.S. House and Senate election since 1854, as well as the Democratic vote share of every presidential election since 1854.
Clear up-and-down patterns emerge. And when subjected to something called a spectral analysis (a statistical technique designed to decompose a time series into cycles of different lengths, similar to what scientists use to decompose white light into colors), the professors found the data have a clear peak around 13 periods — meaning that the U.S. government completes a full Democrat-to-Republican-to-Democrat cycle roughly every 26 years.
“It’s interesting that what we came up with really fit the Schlesinger predictions very well,” Merrill said. “But a lot of it is just gradual change, change that follows more like a sine curve than something abrupt. You have a cycling where the two are out of phase, each one affecting the other. You get a cycling that continues for a long time, not an equilibrium.”
A finding of gradual change goes against the “critical elections” theory of American politics — that is, that there are occasional crucial “realigning” elections that dramatically rewrite the electoral map for a generation to come, sort of like periodic earthquakes. (This theory, once prominent among scholars of American politics, is increasingly out of fashion — but perhaps there are cycles for theories, too.)
Rather than plate tectonics, Merrill and colleagues see more of a pendulum, in which centripetal and centrifugal forces pull the country and its political institutions back and forth along the political spectrum.
In an academic article describing their findings, they explain this in terms of a “Voter-Party Interaction Model.” The basic argument is that public opinion is centrist. But once a party gets into power, its leaders tend to push it to political extremes because they have more extreme policy agendas than the centrist public (hence, the centrifugal force).
But as years of polling show, the public responds to this. Public opinion almost always tends to move against the party in power. “Voters just seem to react more when something negative happens than when something positive happens, and negative things can accumulate,” Merrill said. “They take their toll after a period of time.”
Or as another Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., once put it, “Disappointment (is) a basic spring of political change.”
This, then, creates an opportunity for the minority party. It can move to the center to pick up enough public support to win back majority status (hence, the centripetal force). And then the minority party becomes the majority party, and the cycle begins anew.
But while Merrill and colleagues see things following a roughly consistent pattern, others are not so sure.
“I don’t think there are well-defined cycles,” said Edward G. Carmines, a professor of political science at Indiana University who has written about party alignments. “There are rough approximations of what might be called cycles … but not in a strict kind of 30-year pattern. I don’t think they’re highly predictable.”
Carmines instead sees a largely random element in the changing fortunes of the parties — essentially, driven new issues that periodically arise and split the electorate in new ways. “The things that make a party successful in a given era and in a given set of circumstances tend to lessen and erode,” Carmines said. “And the other party, wanting to be competitive, finds ways, sometimes through new issue conflicts, of gaining the upper hand.”
In Carmines’ view, the current Republican decline largely reflects a shift from Republican-friendly issues, with the war especially working against the GOP. In the view of Merrill and colleagues, the Republican downfall was the inevitable result of a period of the kind of creeping extremism and accumulating scandals that always happens to parties in power (though shifting issues may play a role as well).
Either way, opinion polls clearly show that after a period of Republican dominance, public opinion is currently moving in a liberal direction. According to studies by James A. Stimson, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, “liberal mood” peaked in 1990, hit a trough in 2001 and is currently on its way back up. That Democrats won control of the U.S. House in 2006 after 12 years of Republican control neatly conforms to the 13-year half-cycle predicted by Merrill and colleagues — then again, that was after 40 years of Democratic control of the House.
Merrill and colleagues are now beginning to investigate whether cycles also occur in Britain. Merrill said their preliminary analysis suggests that there also seems to be cycling back and forth between liberal and conservative poles on roughly 26 or 28 year cycles going back to 1830, though there is more work to be done on the question.
For all parties concerned, the apparently inexorable wheel of political fortune offers important lessons. For the party in power, “They’d better take advantage of it,” Merrill said. “Their time will come, and it probably won’t be that long.” In other words, no use getting arrogant and thinking that there has been a permanent reordering of the political map. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Better to take advantage of the fleeting power to get things done.
And for the party out of power: patience. It’s only a matter of time before the party in power overreaches and before a new issue comes up that can turn the tables.
For those who value stability, all of this suggests that American democracy may be in good health after all, oscillating back and forth as it does around Schlesinger’s vital center.
“In a way, I feel better about American politics having done this,” Merrill said, “that there’s not going to be one party that stays in power forever.”
Monday, July 28, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
E-mails to Congress Add Up, But to What? - Miller-McCune
E-mails to Congress Add Up, But to What?
The percentage of citizens contacting their members of Congress has more than doubled, but both groups view each other with "mutual skepticism." What should be done?
By: Lee Drutman | July 08, 2008 |
If you're like most Web-oriented people, chances are you've come across an invitation to "contact your member of Congress" about some issue or other. You click through, and before you know it, you've added your name and participated in the great democratic process. As if nothing could be easier.
Add it up, and Congress is now receiving far more input than ever before. According to a new report by the Congressional Management Foundation, almost half (44 percent) of Americans say they've contacted a U.S. senator or representative over the last five years - a remarkable number, considering that in 2004, the American National Election Studies found that only 18 percent of Americans had expressed their views.
"People are not tuning out, they are tuning in," said Beverly Bell, executive director of the CMF. "There is a lot more public participation in the democratic process."
The reason appears pretty simple. As the report and those involved with it are quick to note, the Internet has made everything easier, from learning about the issues to effortlessly registering opinions about them.
"There is a new medium with which we can communicate with our representatives," said Dino Christenson, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Ohio State University who consulted extensively with the CMF in producing the report. "And it is quite possibly the medium that requires the very least amount of work on our part."
"And this makes a lot of sense given what we know about political participation," Christenson added. "People would be fine giving their opinion, but they're unlikely to do so given the amount of work it takes and the belief that doing so won't result in a change. But if you get an online petition, and it's as simple as filling in your name and clicking submit, then you're off to go."
And, mostly, it is opinions (not complaints) that citizens are generously sharing. Of those surveyed, 91 percent said the reason they contacted their member was "to voice my opinion on an issue before Congress." Only 13 percent were interested the more traditional constituent service and said that they wanted "to get help with a problem."
So how many e-mails does this add up to? According an earlier CMF report, Congress received 200 million communications in 2004 (about 90 percent through the Internet), as compared with 50 million in 1995. That number is probably even higher today.
But is that too much? Congressional staffs, after all, are no bigger than they were three decades ago, even as the amount of incoming communication has grown exponentially. And the report does note that congressional offices are growing increasingly skeptical as to how much of the unsolicited advice actually represents heartfelt concern from constituents, given how cheaply it can be generated. In the last few years, a growing number of congressional offices have even taken steps to create extra hurdles to being contacted via the Internet.
But Bell is quick to highlight the finding that 91 percent of respondents say they contacted Congress because they "care deeply about an issue," a figure she hopes will dispel some of the concern about this just being an explosion of ersatz e-pinions, "These are not just sheep doing something because somebody sent them an e-mail," she said.
From the perspectives of the citizens, the alleged contempt with which congressional offices view constituent opinion appears to be no secret. More than 3 in 5 respondents (62 percent) who contacted Congress said they didn't think that their senators and representatives were interested in what they had to say.
Part of this may be because members of Congress are not doing a particularly attentive job of responding.
Only 63 percent of respondents who contacted their members said they could remember getting a reply. Of those, only 47 percent said they were satisfied with it. Overall, only 30 percent of respondents who contacted Congress received a satisfactory response. The top two reasons for being dissatisfied? "Did not address concerns" (64 percent) and "Too politically biased" (51 percent).
But amid what she calls "mutual skepticism," Bell sees an opportunity. Citizens who are contacting Congress are actually very eager to learn more about what is going on in Washington (74 percent said they want to know more about their members' views and activities). And congressional offices could tap into that interest with a little bit of effort — putting more information about members' positions online, making more creative use of e-mail as a way of keeping constituents informed and also engaging active citizens more directly.
Unfortunately, CMF's 2007 "Golden Mouse" report rated 42 percent of Congressional Web sites as either substandard (23 percent received a grade of "D") or outright failing (19 percent received a grade of "F"). This suggests that a lot of congressional offices are missing out on an easy way to fill what appears to be a real demand for information about Washington.
But Congress' slowness to modernize is no surprise to Thomas T. Holyoke, a professor of political science at California State University, Fresno who also consulted on the report. "Capitol Hill has always had a reluctance to make changes in the way things are done," Holyoke said. "You've got members who have been there a while, and they feel like they've hit on magical formula to ensure electoral success, Capitol Hill didn't even really computerize until the mid-90s."
Another key finding is the crucial role that interest groups are playing in facilitating this communication. According to the report, 82 percent of those who contacted Capitol Hill did so at the request of a third-party group.
"The American public is looking to third parties for information and also to be alerted," Bell said. "They want them to be a first line of defense to let them know when something's coming up. Advocacy groups have moved into a very important niche in the democratic process."
But this makes Holyoke a little uneasy. He worries that interest groups make it "almost too easy perhaps" to participate — but only for those citizens who happen to share the opinions of the most well-organized groups. "You're emphasizing only one part of a member's constituency," he said. "What a member hears is a distorted sense of opinion in the district."
Despite the concerns, Bell said that the increased participation is generally a good thing, and that "overall, it's a positive report, and there are positive messages to take away." But she added that both citizens and congressional offices need to stop being so skeptical about each other's intentions. "Each side needs to give each other the benefit of the doubt," she said "There needs to be a change of mind-set that no tool can overcome."
The percentage of citizens contacting their members of Congress has more than doubled, but both groups view each other with "mutual skepticism." What should be done?
By: Lee Drutman | July 08, 2008 |
If you're like most Web-oriented people, chances are you've come across an invitation to "contact your member of Congress" about some issue or other. You click through, and before you know it, you've added your name and participated in the great democratic process. As if nothing could be easier.
Add it up, and Congress is now receiving far more input than ever before. According to a new report by the Congressional Management Foundation, almost half (44 percent) of Americans say they've contacted a U.S. senator or representative over the last five years - a remarkable number, considering that in 2004, the American National Election Studies found that only 18 percent of Americans had expressed their views.
"People are not tuning out, they are tuning in," said Beverly Bell, executive director of the CMF. "There is a lot more public participation in the democratic process."
The reason appears pretty simple. As the report and those involved with it are quick to note, the Internet has made everything easier, from learning about the issues to effortlessly registering opinions about them.
"There is a new medium with which we can communicate with our representatives," said Dino Christenson, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Ohio State University who consulted extensively with the CMF in producing the report. "And it is quite possibly the medium that requires the very least amount of work on our part."
"And this makes a lot of sense given what we know about political participation," Christenson added. "People would be fine giving their opinion, but they're unlikely to do so given the amount of work it takes and the belief that doing so won't result in a change. But if you get an online petition, and it's as simple as filling in your name and clicking submit, then you're off to go."
And, mostly, it is opinions (not complaints) that citizens are generously sharing. Of those surveyed, 91 percent said the reason they contacted their member was "to voice my opinion on an issue before Congress." Only 13 percent were interested the more traditional constituent service and said that they wanted "to get help with a problem."
So how many e-mails does this add up to? According an earlier CMF report, Congress received 200 million communications in 2004 (about 90 percent through the Internet), as compared with 50 million in 1995. That number is probably even higher today.
But is that too much? Congressional staffs, after all, are no bigger than they were three decades ago, even as the amount of incoming communication has grown exponentially. And the report does note that congressional offices are growing increasingly skeptical as to how much of the unsolicited advice actually represents heartfelt concern from constituents, given how cheaply it can be generated. In the last few years, a growing number of congressional offices have even taken steps to create extra hurdles to being contacted via the Internet.
But Bell is quick to highlight the finding that 91 percent of respondents say they contacted Congress because they "care deeply about an issue," a figure she hopes will dispel some of the concern about this just being an explosion of ersatz e-pinions, "These are not just sheep doing something because somebody sent them an e-mail," she said.
From the perspectives of the citizens, the alleged contempt with which congressional offices view constituent opinion appears to be no secret. More than 3 in 5 respondents (62 percent) who contacted Congress said they didn't think that their senators and representatives were interested in what they had to say.
Part of this may be because members of Congress are not doing a particularly attentive job of responding.
Only 63 percent of respondents who contacted their members said they could remember getting a reply. Of those, only 47 percent said they were satisfied with it. Overall, only 30 percent of respondents who contacted Congress received a satisfactory response. The top two reasons for being dissatisfied? "Did not address concerns" (64 percent) and "Too politically biased" (51 percent).
But amid what she calls "mutual skepticism," Bell sees an opportunity. Citizens who are contacting Congress are actually very eager to learn more about what is going on in Washington (74 percent said they want to know more about their members' views and activities). And congressional offices could tap into that interest with a little bit of effort — putting more information about members' positions online, making more creative use of e-mail as a way of keeping constituents informed and also engaging active citizens more directly.
Unfortunately, CMF's 2007 "Golden Mouse" report rated 42 percent of Congressional Web sites as either substandard (23 percent received a grade of "D") or outright failing (19 percent received a grade of "F"). This suggests that a lot of congressional offices are missing out on an easy way to fill what appears to be a real demand for information about Washington.
But Congress' slowness to modernize is no surprise to Thomas T. Holyoke, a professor of political science at California State University, Fresno who also consulted on the report. "Capitol Hill has always had a reluctance to make changes in the way things are done," Holyoke said. "You've got members who have been there a while, and they feel like they've hit on magical formula to ensure electoral success, Capitol Hill didn't even really computerize until the mid-90s."
Another key finding is the crucial role that interest groups are playing in facilitating this communication. According to the report, 82 percent of those who contacted Capitol Hill did so at the request of a third-party group.
"The American public is looking to third parties for information and also to be alerted," Bell said. "They want them to be a first line of defense to let them know when something's coming up. Advocacy groups have moved into a very important niche in the democratic process."
But this makes Holyoke a little uneasy. He worries that interest groups make it "almost too easy perhaps" to participate — but only for those citizens who happen to share the opinions of the most well-organized groups. "You're emphasizing only one part of a member's constituency," he said. "What a member hears is a distorted sense of opinion in the district."
Despite the concerns, Bell said that the increased participation is generally a good thing, and that "overall, it's a positive report, and there are positive messages to take away." But she added that both citizens and congressional offices need to stop being so skeptical about each other's intentions. "Each side needs to give each other the benefit of the doubt," she said "There needs to be a change of mind-set that no tool can overcome."
Sunday, July 06, 2008
The Dumbest Generation -- LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,3980465.story
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein
How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
July 5, 2008
In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.
The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."
Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."
And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.
At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."
But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.
The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
The Dumbest Generation
How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 Mark Bauerlein
Tarcher/Penguin: 272 pp., $24.95
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein
How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
July 5, 2008
In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.
The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."
Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."
And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.
At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."
But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.
The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
The Dumbest Generation
How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 Mark Bauerlein
Tarcher/Penguin: 272 pp., $24.95
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Three Fixes For Our Lobbyist Problem
Three Fixes For Our Lobbyist Problem
Forget money, lobbyists' real power comes from information. Here's three ideas that would reduce their influence on Congress and strengthen our democracy.
LEE DRUTMAN | June 5, 2008 | web only
In recent weeks, John McCain and Barack Obama have sparred over the role of lobbyists in their campaigns. While both are eager to position themselves as the candidate of reform, neither has proposed a plan that tackles the real sources of lobbyists' power. Real lobbying reform must start by acknowledging that control of information is as central to lobbyists' power as control of money.
To be sure, the fact that lobbyists contribute to campaigns and even help run them is important in building valuable relationships and goodwill. But relationships and goodwill only go so far. They may lead to improved access, but access is hardly an exclusive quantity these days and far, far from a guarantee of victory.
Lobbyists are influential because, as the main providers of policy information and expertise to policymakers, they increasingly define the terms of political debate. Even if we funded all elections publicly and banned lobbyists from running campaigns, they would still play a major role in the legislative processes for a simple reason: They know a lot of stuff. Increasingly, it is even lobbyists who are drafting the laws. Lobbyists like to say that Washington couldn't function without them. They may be right.
Policymaking, after all, is complicated business these days. Understanding most issues, especially those affecting business, now requires a level of expertise that, as generalists by necessity, few members of Congress possess. Even their staffers typically cover far too much ground to develop substantive expertise on anything in particular and rarely stay in one position long enough to overcome this handicap.
Staffers are also generally paid poorly to work long hours. As a result, once a staffer has developed some real proficiency in an area, the lobbying firms who inevitably come calling can offer triple or quadruple his or her salary for fewer hours of work. It's a hard offer to resist, especially for staffers who are feeling a little burnt out and trying to start a family,
And so, everywhere you turn on Capitol Hill, there are now large smiling teams of industry lobbyists committed to making themselves as "helpful" as possible -- providing information and research to policymakers and staffers (often the lobbyists' former colleagues), making sure that key decision-makers know all about the potential "unintended consequences" of an unwelcome piece of legislation, and explaining how to draft "win-win" laws. To a young and inexperienced staffer (and there are many), facts and figures on demand are a godsend, especially when time is short (as it almost always is). And even better if the lobbyist used to work just down the hall.
But what if Congress began to pay staffers more, hired more of them, and made it possible for them to work better, more family-friendly hours? Surely, they would be more likely stick around longer, becoming savvier customers of information with each passing year. They would be less likely to turn to lobbyists to make sense of the complexities of policy-making and also less likely to turn into lobbyists themselves, thus taking their knowledge of those complexities with them. Higher salaries and better working conditions would also mean Congress would be able to draw on a larger and more diverse talent pool in filling positions.
Additionally, Congress could bolster its independence from lobbyists by increasing the funding for the Congressional Research Service and Government Accountability Office, which turn out reports and investigate a wide range of policy issues. Again, the more information and expertise there is readily available from neutral sources, the less need members of Congress and their staffers will have for relying on private lobbyists.
It is also important to recognize that the advantage that big business enjoys in is nothing new. It has existed for as long as there have been lobbyists (though the extent of it has varied over the years), and it will remain as long as businesses can raise far more money for their lobbying groups than their opponents.
Consider an example: If big energy companies want to get together to fight new pollution regulations, it's very easy for a couple of CEOs who have everything at stake to take a few million dollars each from their multi-billion dollar general budget and spend it on lobbying. It's much harder for an environmental group to raise a similar amount of money from the millions of people who might each be only very slightly affected by the fate of the pollution regulations, and each of whom also probably figures somebody else out there will contribute to the environmental cause -- so why should they?
Social scientists call this the "collective action problem," and it helps to explain why roughly half the organizations in Washington represent business, while less than five percent could be classified as public interest groups (regardless of ideology).
One way to counter this seemingly inevitable law of biased representation would be for the government to support a cadre of public-interest lobbyists. These lobbyists would be available to represent any group that represents a sizeable diffuse public interest that is not being adequately represented in a policy debate.
There are a number of ways this might work. Groups could petition an office of public lobbying and get support for their causes based on the number of signatures above a certain threshold. The government could also do periodic issue polling on legislation under consideration, and if it found, say 25 percent or more support for a side that is not being represented, that side would get a public lobbyist. Causes would also have to prove that they are being outspent by more than, say, a 2-to-1 margin. Government could allocate assistance in proportion to both the public support of the cause and the resources being allocated on the other side.
Understandably, Americans are frustrated with the expanded role that lobbyists play in Washington, and they have good reason to be. Lobbyists overwhelmingly represent the narrow interests of the largest and most powerful corporations, and the policy outcomes they help shape often reflect that. But lobbyists also exist to solve a real need for expertise on the Hill. That is the real scandal about lobbying.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=three_fixes_for_our__lobbyist_problem
Forget money, lobbyists' real power comes from information. Here's three ideas that would reduce their influence on Congress and strengthen our democracy.
LEE DRUTMAN | June 5, 2008 | web only
In recent weeks, John McCain and Barack Obama have sparred over the role of lobbyists in their campaigns. While both are eager to position themselves as the candidate of reform, neither has proposed a plan that tackles the real sources of lobbyists' power. Real lobbying reform must start by acknowledging that control of information is as central to lobbyists' power as control of money.
To be sure, the fact that lobbyists contribute to campaigns and even help run them is important in building valuable relationships and goodwill. But relationships and goodwill only go so far. They may lead to improved access, but access is hardly an exclusive quantity these days and far, far from a guarantee of victory.
Lobbyists are influential because, as the main providers of policy information and expertise to policymakers, they increasingly define the terms of political debate. Even if we funded all elections publicly and banned lobbyists from running campaigns, they would still play a major role in the legislative processes for a simple reason: They know a lot of stuff. Increasingly, it is even lobbyists who are drafting the laws. Lobbyists like to say that Washington couldn't function without them. They may be right.
Policymaking, after all, is complicated business these days. Understanding most issues, especially those affecting business, now requires a level of expertise that, as generalists by necessity, few members of Congress possess. Even their staffers typically cover far too much ground to develop substantive expertise on anything in particular and rarely stay in one position long enough to overcome this handicap.
Staffers are also generally paid poorly to work long hours. As a result, once a staffer has developed some real proficiency in an area, the lobbying firms who inevitably come calling can offer triple or quadruple his or her salary for fewer hours of work. It's a hard offer to resist, especially for staffers who are feeling a little burnt out and trying to start a family,
And so, everywhere you turn on Capitol Hill, there are now large smiling teams of industry lobbyists committed to making themselves as "helpful" as possible -- providing information and research to policymakers and staffers (often the lobbyists' former colleagues), making sure that key decision-makers know all about the potential "unintended consequences" of an unwelcome piece of legislation, and explaining how to draft "win-win" laws. To a young and inexperienced staffer (and there are many), facts and figures on demand are a godsend, especially when time is short (as it almost always is). And even better if the lobbyist used to work just down the hall.
But what if Congress began to pay staffers more, hired more of them, and made it possible for them to work better, more family-friendly hours? Surely, they would be more likely stick around longer, becoming savvier customers of information with each passing year. They would be less likely to turn to lobbyists to make sense of the complexities of policy-making and also less likely to turn into lobbyists themselves, thus taking their knowledge of those complexities with them. Higher salaries and better working conditions would also mean Congress would be able to draw on a larger and more diverse talent pool in filling positions.
Additionally, Congress could bolster its independence from lobbyists by increasing the funding for the Congressional Research Service and Government Accountability Office, which turn out reports and investigate a wide range of policy issues. Again, the more information and expertise there is readily available from neutral sources, the less need members of Congress and their staffers will have for relying on private lobbyists.
It is also important to recognize that the advantage that big business enjoys in is nothing new. It has existed for as long as there have been lobbyists (though the extent of it has varied over the years), and it will remain as long as businesses can raise far more money for their lobbying groups than their opponents.
Consider an example: If big energy companies want to get together to fight new pollution regulations, it's very easy for a couple of CEOs who have everything at stake to take a few million dollars each from their multi-billion dollar general budget and spend it on lobbying. It's much harder for an environmental group to raise a similar amount of money from the millions of people who might each be only very slightly affected by the fate of the pollution regulations, and each of whom also probably figures somebody else out there will contribute to the environmental cause -- so why should they?
Social scientists call this the "collective action problem," and it helps to explain why roughly half the organizations in Washington represent business, while less than five percent could be classified as public interest groups (regardless of ideology).
One way to counter this seemingly inevitable law of biased representation would be for the government to support a cadre of public-interest lobbyists. These lobbyists would be available to represent any group that represents a sizeable diffuse public interest that is not being adequately represented in a policy debate.
There are a number of ways this might work. Groups could petition an office of public lobbying and get support for their causes based on the number of signatures above a certain threshold. The government could also do periodic issue polling on legislation under consideration, and if it found, say 25 percent or more support for a side that is not being represented, that side would get a public lobbyist. Causes would also have to prove that they are being outspent by more than, say, a 2-to-1 margin. Government could allocate assistance in proportion to both the public support of the cause and the resources being allocated on the other side.
Understandably, Americans are frustrated with the expanded role that lobbyists play in Washington, and they have good reason to be. Lobbyists overwhelmingly represent the narrow interests of the largest and most powerful corporations, and the policy outcomes they help shape often reflect that. But lobbyists also exist to solve a real need for expertise on the Hill. That is the real scandal about lobbying.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=three_fixes_for_our__lobbyist_problem
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Is the House of Representatives Too Small? - Miller-McCune
For the first 13 decades of its history, the U.S. House of Representatives was an ever-expanding institution. From 65 members in its vintage 1789 configuration, the lower chamber grew steadily with each new census count, accommodating the growing population of the country.
But a bigger House also meant a more unwieldy House. And so in 1911, Congress somewhat arbitrarily decided that 435 was enough already and set the number down in a statute. The House had gotten as big as it was going to be.
And so it has been ever since, even as the country has more than tripled in size. The average U.S. congressional district now contains roughly 640,000 citizens, as opposed to about 200,000 in 1911.
With so many people to keep up with, do relationships between the representatives and their constituents inevitably begin to fray? And if so, does this mean that the so-called "people's house" isn't really living up to its name anymore?
Brian Frederick, a professor of political science at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, thinks that things are heading that way. His research shows that as districts get bigger in population, constituents are less likely to report that they had contact with their member of Congress, less likely to think their member would be helpful, and less likely to favorably evaluate their member of Congress (and more likely to see their member as out of touch with the district).
These findings confirm what most theory on representation already suggests: Members from larger districts should have a harder time connecting with and thus representing their constituents. But until Frederick combined National Election Survey data with district and member characteristics, there was no solid empirical evidence to back it up.
Based on such findings, Frederick said he is now convinced that increasing the size of the U.S. House would, on balance, be a good idea. "It would make it easier for members to serve fewer constituents and a more homogenous constituency," he said. "It would allow for smaller geographic areas. There is something to be said for that kind of connection between members and their constituents."
It would also likely lead to better minority representation in Congress, Frederick noted, because it would create more majority-minority districts. (The representation of minorities lags behind their percentage of the general population. The U.S. population is 12.8 percent black and 14.4 percent Latino, but 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the U.S. House, respectively.)
But if the U.S. House were to add seats, how many should it have? Arend Lijphart, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a comparative scholar of democratic institutions, has argued for 650 seats.
That figure is based on the so-called "cube root law" of Rein Taagepera, who figured out that taking the cube root of a nation's population provided a remarkably good predictor of the size of that nation's lower house. By that logic, the U.S. was an outlier on the low side, with a House of 435 instead of the 669 that would now be expected given the U.S. population of 300 million. (Lijphart made his 650-seat recommendation in 1998, when the U.S. population was at 275 million.)
"When one looks at democracies around the world," Lijphart said, "there is a tendency for larger countries to have larger legislatures and smaller countries to have smaller legislatures. But we have a lower house with 435 members, which is less than both the British House of Commons and the German Bundestag, and Germany has 80 million people and Britain has 60 million people." (The Bundestag has 613 members; the House of Commons has 646 members and is slated to grow to 650 by the next election.)
On the other hand, the bigger the institution, the less smoothly it often operates. Generally, in larger institutions it becomes more challenging for members to get to know and trust each other, which in turn makes it more difficult to build the coalitions and consensus essential for smooth functioning.
"There is a fundamental trade-off," Frederick explained. "If you cap a representative institution at a number, you are sacrificing representation to some extent. Ideally everybody in a democratic society would represent themselves, but we know that's impractical. From an efficiency standpoint, it would be easiest to have one person make all the decisions. So we're trying to find some balance between that impossible dichotomy."
Among political reformers, meanwhile, pushing to increase the size of the House is a "sleeper of an issue," according to Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a national voting rights and democracy reform group. "People just haven't realized it can be changed."
Richie says he frequently uses the size of the House as an example of institutional inertia, and to show that there are some things that we just don't stop to think about. But with the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting coming up soon, Richie said that his organization plans to try to increase the profile of the issue.
The issue has been raised in Congress on occasion. Frederick said that what initially piqued his interest in the subject was hearing Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., complain how hard it was to represent 600,000 people. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has regularly introduced legislation to create a committee to study the size of the House, as did former Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., though such legislation never really gained much momentum.
Public opinion also isn't particularly gung-ho on this reform. Frederick has done his own polling on the issue, and he found that only about 20 percent support increasing the size of the House, whereas 60 percent favor keeping it the same and 20 percent favor decreasing the size.
However, if people are asked if they'd support increasing the House so that no state would lose a seat following a census count (as frequently happens), support for the proposition goes up to 33 percent. And if people are asked whether they would support increasing the House to improve representation of minorities and women and create more open seats generally, support goes up to 48 percent, though almost all the support comes from Democrats, women and African Americans.
"You're asking people to support more politicians, to pay more salary, and to many people that may not be an easy cost to bear," Frederick said.
In other words, don't expect to see a mass popular uprising demanding a bigger House anytime soon. But as members themselves come under more and more strain from representing larger and larger districts, and as good government groups perhaps take a second look at this issue in advance of the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting, perhaps, for the first time in a century, this country will be ready for a serious discussion about whether the House of Representatives can still be the "people's house" when districts are as big as they are today.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/376
But a bigger House also meant a more unwieldy House. And so in 1911, Congress somewhat arbitrarily decided that 435 was enough already and set the number down in a statute. The House had gotten as big as it was going to be.
And so it has been ever since, even as the country has more than tripled in size. The average U.S. congressional district now contains roughly 640,000 citizens, as opposed to about 200,000 in 1911.
With so many people to keep up with, do relationships between the representatives and their constituents inevitably begin to fray? And if so, does this mean that the so-called "people's house" isn't really living up to its name anymore?
Brian Frederick, a professor of political science at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, thinks that things are heading that way. His research shows that as districts get bigger in population, constituents are less likely to report that they had contact with their member of Congress, less likely to think their member would be helpful, and less likely to favorably evaluate their member of Congress (and more likely to see their member as out of touch with the district).
These findings confirm what most theory on representation already suggests: Members from larger districts should have a harder time connecting with and thus representing their constituents. But until Frederick combined National Election Survey data with district and member characteristics, there was no solid empirical evidence to back it up.
Based on such findings, Frederick said he is now convinced that increasing the size of the U.S. House would, on balance, be a good idea. "It would make it easier for members to serve fewer constituents and a more homogenous constituency," he said. "It would allow for smaller geographic areas. There is something to be said for that kind of connection between members and their constituents."
It would also likely lead to better minority representation in Congress, Frederick noted, because it would create more majority-minority districts. (The representation of minorities lags behind their percentage of the general population. The U.S. population is 12.8 percent black and 14.4 percent Latino, but 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the U.S. House, respectively.)
But if the U.S. House were to add seats, how many should it have? Arend Lijphart, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a comparative scholar of democratic institutions, has argued for 650 seats.
That figure is based on the so-called "cube root law" of Rein Taagepera, who figured out that taking the cube root of a nation's population provided a remarkably good predictor of the size of that nation's lower house. By that logic, the U.S. was an outlier on the low side, with a House of 435 instead of the 669 that would now be expected given the U.S. population of 300 million. (Lijphart made his 650-seat recommendation in 1998, when the U.S. population was at 275 million.)
"When one looks at democracies around the world," Lijphart said, "there is a tendency for larger countries to have larger legislatures and smaller countries to have smaller legislatures. But we have a lower house with 435 members, which is less than both the British House of Commons and the German Bundestag, and Germany has 80 million people and Britain has 60 million people." (The Bundestag has 613 members; the House of Commons has 646 members and is slated to grow to 650 by the next election.)
On the other hand, the bigger the institution, the less smoothly it often operates. Generally, in larger institutions it becomes more challenging for members to get to know and trust each other, which in turn makes it more difficult to build the coalitions and consensus essential for smooth functioning.
"There is a fundamental trade-off," Frederick explained. "If you cap a representative institution at a number, you are sacrificing representation to some extent. Ideally everybody in a democratic society would represent themselves, but we know that's impractical. From an efficiency standpoint, it would be easiest to have one person make all the decisions. So we're trying to find some balance between that impossible dichotomy."
Among political reformers, meanwhile, pushing to increase the size of the House is a "sleeper of an issue," according to Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a national voting rights and democracy reform group. "People just haven't realized it can be changed."
Richie says he frequently uses the size of the House as an example of institutional inertia, and to show that there are some things that we just don't stop to think about. But with the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting coming up soon, Richie said that his organization plans to try to increase the profile of the issue.
The issue has been raised in Congress on occasion. Frederick said that what initially piqued his interest in the subject was hearing Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., complain how hard it was to represent 600,000 people. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has regularly introduced legislation to create a committee to study the size of the House, as did former Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., though such legislation never really gained much momentum.
Public opinion also isn't particularly gung-ho on this reform. Frederick has done his own polling on the issue, and he found that only about 20 percent support increasing the size of the House, whereas 60 percent favor keeping it the same and 20 percent favor decreasing the size.
However, if people are asked if they'd support increasing the House so that no state would lose a seat following a census count (as frequently happens), support for the proposition goes up to 33 percent. And if people are asked whether they would support increasing the House to improve representation of minorities and women and create more open seats generally, support goes up to 48 percent, though almost all the support comes from Democrats, women and African Americans.
"You're asking people to support more politicians, to pay more salary, and to many people that may not be an easy cost to bear," Frederick said.
In other words, don't expect to see a mass popular uprising demanding a bigger House anytime soon. But as members themselves come under more and more strain from representing larger and larger districts, and as good government groups perhaps take a second look at this issue in advance of the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting, perhaps, for the first time in a century, this country will be ready for a serious discussion about whether the House of Representatives can still be the "people's house" when districts are as big as they are today.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/376
Friday, May 16, 2008
CEOs fly closer to the golden sun - Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: CEOs fly closer to the golden sun
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
THOSE WACKY CEOs are at it again. Why look, there’s “crazy” Kenneth Chenault at American Express, raking in $46.23 million, even as the company’s stock fell 13 percent for the year. And there’s “rich” Richard Fuld Jr., of Lehman Brothers, bringing home 40 million in baco-bits while the company’s stock dipped 14 percent for the year. And don’t forget about Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, whose money train delivered a $78.52 million package, despite a 41-percent tumble in the company’s stock. And so on and so forth, a parade of designer suits whose lack of modesty is only outdone by their lack of modesty.
You might think that a down economy and the continued public outrage that CEOs make roughly 400 times the average worker and that new disclosure rules make it harder to hide perks and that shareholders have become more active in going after excessive pay have some impact, that it might at least put even a small dent in the golden cufflinks atop corporate America.
But alas. The new pay disclosures for 2007 are now public, and depending on whose analysis you like, CEO salaries at large publicly held companies are up between 5 and 12 percent, to between $11 million and $12 million, on average. Nobody, however, disputes the gravity-defying hot air keeping corporate executives soaring high, high in the sky.
So how does this keep happening? One reason seems to be that up in the rarified stratosphere that CEOs and their boards inhabit, a very special logic prevails. Worth reading on this subject is a book called The Myths and Realities of Executive Pay, by Ira T. Kay and Steven Van Putten, a pair of executive-pay consultants for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. (These are the guys whom companies hire to advise them on how much to pay the CEO — nice work if you can get it!) They reveal the self-serving claims that inspire such generous compensation: 1) the right CEO makes all the difference (forget anybody else in the company); 2) the pool of talent for executive leadership is exquisitely tiny (and remember the old saw about supply and demand); and 3) CEOs can only perform at full Apollo-like capacity if they are given a gazillion shares of company stock (incentives, incentives, incentives!).
Yet, too often the reality of these CEO pay packages is that they tend to overflow with the kinds of tails-you-win, heads-you-win-even-more incentives that insulate corporate leaders from the stakes of actually running a large company. Consider the case of KB Home CEO Jeffrey Metzger, who despite presiding over a $929 million loss (on $6.4 billion in revenue) still got a $6 million cash bonus for meeting “objectives.”
Or even better, take Bear Stearns, whose wanton foray into the wild world of mortgage speculation ended in a quite spectacular implosion. Pity CEO James Cayne. He had to trade in his stock for a mere $61 million, instead of the $1 billion he might have made had he been smart enough to sell it all at right time.
But don’t worry. Cayne, a 10-time national bridge champion, will be okay. He already has about $1 billion to his name. Perhaps, then, this was just for thrills. Why not gamble big and see if you can make it $2 billion? After all, beyond a few million, money becomes more a way of keeping score than anything else. Might as well go for the gold. Keep the hot air pumping! Closer, closer to the golden sun!
Meanwhile, back on the ground, the poor specs are struggling. According to the Economic Policy Institute, over the last 20 years, while the top 5 percent of America’s families have seen a 60 percent jump in their wealth, the bottom 20 percent have seen just an 11 percent rise (and if you control for inflation, 1 percent). The divide is growing, and if/when we are in a recession, we know who is going to have a harder time getting through it. We know which homeowners are being foreclosed on now and which get to keep their penthouse apartments.
The disconnect is obviously troubling, but it is at least historically accurate. At the top of the economy, there are always those who have figured out the game, so that no matter what else happens, they win. Problem is, it never lasts forever. Simple economics: If working-class Americans owe everything to the banks, they can’t keep buying new computers to keep the economy growing. Today’s levels of American inequality were last reached in 1928. And we all know what happened in 1929.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former writer for The Providence Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
THOSE WACKY CEOs are at it again. Why look, there’s “crazy” Kenneth Chenault at American Express, raking in $46.23 million, even as the company’s stock fell 13 percent for the year. And there’s “rich” Richard Fuld Jr., of Lehman Brothers, bringing home 40 million in baco-bits while the company’s stock dipped 14 percent for the year. And don’t forget about Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, whose money train delivered a $78.52 million package, despite a 41-percent tumble in the company’s stock. And so on and so forth, a parade of designer suits whose lack of modesty is only outdone by their lack of modesty.
You might think that a down economy and the continued public outrage that CEOs make roughly 400 times the average worker and that new disclosure rules make it harder to hide perks and that shareholders have become more active in going after excessive pay have some impact, that it might at least put even a small dent in the golden cufflinks atop corporate America.
But alas. The new pay disclosures for 2007 are now public, and depending on whose analysis you like, CEO salaries at large publicly held companies are up between 5 and 12 percent, to between $11 million and $12 million, on average. Nobody, however, disputes the gravity-defying hot air keeping corporate executives soaring high, high in the sky.
So how does this keep happening? One reason seems to be that up in the rarified stratosphere that CEOs and their boards inhabit, a very special logic prevails. Worth reading on this subject is a book called The Myths and Realities of Executive Pay, by Ira T. Kay and Steven Van Putten, a pair of executive-pay consultants for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. (These are the guys whom companies hire to advise them on how much to pay the CEO — nice work if you can get it!) They reveal the self-serving claims that inspire such generous compensation: 1) the right CEO makes all the difference (forget anybody else in the company); 2) the pool of talent for executive leadership is exquisitely tiny (and remember the old saw about supply and demand); and 3) CEOs can only perform at full Apollo-like capacity if they are given a gazillion shares of company stock (incentives, incentives, incentives!).
Yet, too often the reality of these CEO pay packages is that they tend to overflow with the kinds of tails-you-win, heads-you-win-even-more incentives that insulate corporate leaders from the stakes of actually running a large company. Consider the case of KB Home CEO Jeffrey Metzger, who despite presiding over a $929 million loss (on $6.4 billion in revenue) still got a $6 million cash bonus for meeting “objectives.”
Or even better, take Bear Stearns, whose wanton foray into the wild world of mortgage speculation ended in a quite spectacular implosion. Pity CEO James Cayne. He had to trade in his stock for a mere $61 million, instead of the $1 billion he might have made had he been smart enough to sell it all at right time.
But don’t worry. Cayne, a 10-time national bridge champion, will be okay. He already has about $1 billion to his name. Perhaps, then, this was just for thrills. Why not gamble big and see if you can make it $2 billion? After all, beyond a few million, money becomes more a way of keeping score than anything else. Might as well go for the gold. Keep the hot air pumping! Closer, closer to the golden sun!
Meanwhile, back on the ground, the poor specs are struggling. According to the Economic Policy Institute, over the last 20 years, while the top 5 percent of America’s families have seen a 60 percent jump in their wealth, the bottom 20 percent have seen just an 11 percent rise (and if you control for inflation, 1 percent). The divide is growing, and if/when we are in a recession, we know who is going to have a harder time getting through it. We know which homeowners are being foreclosed on now and which get to keep their penthouse apartments.
The disconnect is obviously troubling, but it is at least historically accurate. At the top of the economy, there are always those who have figured out the game, so that no matter what else happens, they win. Problem is, it never lasts forever. Simple economics: If working-class Americans owe everything to the banks, they can’t keep buying new computers to keep the economy growing. Today’s levels of American inequality were last reached in 1928. And we all know what happened in 1929.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former writer for The Providence Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Minority Legislative Gap - MillerMcCune.com
POLITICS
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
The Minority Legislative Gap - MillerMcCune.com
POLITICS
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The bathos of the Blogosphere -- Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: The bathos of the Blogosphere
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutman15_04-15-08_7A9NFH4_v19.39d4902.html#
APPARENTLY, if you spend too much time at home churning out non-stop verbiage for the insatiable World Wide Web, you may die of it. So warns a recent New York Times article, which, upon the unexpected deaths of two middle-aged bloggers in one week, connects the dots and declares blogging a “digital-era sweatshop.” (“They work long hours, often to exhaustion,” the article begins. “Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts.”)
At long last, the dark underbelly of the Internet revealed! An army of pallid content-mules chained to their computers (no fresh air for them!), typing away furiously at all hours so that somebody, somewhere, will have yet another thing to read.
But, caricatures and health issues aside, there is something troubling about this increasingly non-stop go-go-go blogging world, this odd pressure to be able to throw up an immediate response to every new development, regardless of one’s understanding of the subject, and far in excess of what anyone wants to read (even if some of us feel compelled to try to read it all just to remain “in the know”). Such appears to be logic of the 24/7/365 global knowledge economy: If you don’t put up that quarter-baked bon mot right away, somebody else probably will. And then there go your unique page views, and with them the trickle of advertising that just barely pays the rent and puts ramen on the table.
Now, it is often said that this new world of blogging is good for democracy, because it broadens the conversation and lets more people participate. I don’t know. I’ve read the message boards on these blogs. It seems to me more like any angry shouting match than a conversation worthy of Deweyan deliberative democracy.
And as University of Chicago Law Prof. Cass Sunstein has noted, the Internet makes it that much easier to inhabit an insular intellectual environment in which one’s ideas are rarely seriously challenged, the sad result being that “deliberation” leads mostly to a kind of extremism in which the same basic talking points are over time masticated into an unshakable worldview. Here, the metaphor of never leaving one’s apartment is too good to resist.
Moreover, in the few years that blogging has exploded, a few particularly prolific bloggers seem to have emerged as the new Internet power elite, and the distribution of influence in the blogosphere can hardly be said to be democratic anymore, if it ever was. But these new gatekeepers have even more arbitrary qualifications than the old gatekeepers, who at least had to work their way up the proving grounds of the editorial ladder over decades.
But the biggest problem is that instant-comment pressures inherent in the Blogosphere sweatshop generate a reflexive (as opposed to thoughtful) political discourse. It’s not so hard to pull a few generic talking points off the shelf, throw in a few clever turns of phrase, and link to the latest Washington Post article on the war or the election, all in a matter of minutes. The problem is it’s the same talking points over and over again, and so round and round we go, from the bed to the computer and back to the bed again, never going for a contemplative walk in the fresh air, perhaps to come across new insights and observations.
In such a world, the perambulating scholar and essayist is out of luck. The day belongs to the caffeinated neophyte who has yet to be slowed down by the twin demons of doubt and nuance. Read one book on a subject, and you can become an authority. But read 10, and you’ve missed your chance.
Surely, the exigencies of the Internet economy are against me. Thoughtful restraint does not seem to generate Web traffic. And perhaps the wild rocket-paced world of blogging is simply endemic in our instant-gratification culture, on which an otherwise appropriate tilting at windmills allusion would be lost anyway.
After all, who has time to sit down to a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books anymore? Or, heaven forbid, a whole book? What could possibly be worth thinking about for that long!? Besides, the two-sentence sound bite is so much easier to digest, with none of that uncomfortable nuance that comes with actual detail, and so much easier to move onto the next new new thing (even if it is just the old thing repackaged as something new).
But always being onto the new new thing sure is stressful, and for what? All this rush to make the same carping comments on the same never-ending political horse races, to point out the same obvious flaws in the latest New York Times story, and all before someone else does. Entertaining? Occasionally. Edifying? Rarely. Unhealthy? Yes, both for the body and the body politic.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutman15_04-15-08_7A9NFH4_v19.39d4902.html#
APPARENTLY, if you spend too much time at home churning out non-stop verbiage for the insatiable World Wide Web, you may die of it. So warns a recent New York Times article, which, upon the unexpected deaths of two middle-aged bloggers in one week, connects the dots and declares blogging a “digital-era sweatshop.” (“They work long hours, often to exhaustion,” the article begins. “Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts.”)
At long last, the dark underbelly of the Internet revealed! An army of pallid content-mules chained to their computers (no fresh air for them!), typing away furiously at all hours so that somebody, somewhere, will have yet another thing to read.
But, caricatures and health issues aside, there is something troubling about this increasingly non-stop go-go-go blogging world, this odd pressure to be able to throw up an immediate response to every new development, regardless of one’s understanding of the subject, and far in excess of what anyone wants to read (even if some of us feel compelled to try to read it all just to remain “in the know”). Such appears to be logic of the 24/7/365 global knowledge economy: If you don’t put up that quarter-baked bon mot right away, somebody else probably will. And then there go your unique page views, and with them the trickle of advertising that just barely pays the rent and puts ramen on the table.
Now, it is often said that this new world of blogging is good for democracy, because it broadens the conversation and lets more people participate. I don’t know. I’ve read the message boards on these blogs. It seems to me more like any angry shouting match than a conversation worthy of Deweyan deliberative democracy.
And as University of Chicago Law Prof. Cass Sunstein has noted, the Internet makes it that much easier to inhabit an insular intellectual environment in which one’s ideas are rarely seriously challenged, the sad result being that “deliberation” leads mostly to a kind of extremism in which the same basic talking points are over time masticated into an unshakable worldview. Here, the metaphor of never leaving one’s apartment is too good to resist.
Moreover, in the few years that blogging has exploded, a few particularly prolific bloggers seem to have emerged as the new Internet power elite, and the distribution of influence in the blogosphere can hardly be said to be democratic anymore, if it ever was. But these new gatekeepers have even more arbitrary qualifications than the old gatekeepers, who at least had to work their way up the proving grounds of the editorial ladder over decades.
But the biggest problem is that instant-comment pressures inherent in the Blogosphere sweatshop generate a reflexive (as opposed to thoughtful) political discourse. It’s not so hard to pull a few generic talking points off the shelf, throw in a few clever turns of phrase, and link to the latest Washington Post article on the war or the election, all in a matter of minutes. The problem is it’s the same talking points over and over again, and so round and round we go, from the bed to the computer and back to the bed again, never going for a contemplative walk in the fresh air, perhaps to come across new insights and observations.
In such a world, the perambulating scholar and essayist is out of luck. The day belongs to the caffeinated neophyte who has yet to be slowed down by the twin demons of doubt and nuance. Read one book on a subject, and you can become an authority. But read 10, and you’ve missed your chance.
Surely, the exigencies of the Internet economy are against me. Thoughtful restraint does not seem to generate Web traffic. And perhaps the wild rocket-paced world of blogging is simply endemic in our instant-gratification culture, on which an otherwise appropriate tilting at windmills allusion would be lost anyway.
After all, who has time to sit down to a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books anymore? Or, heaven forbid, a whole book? What could possibly be worth thinking about for that long!? Besides, the two-sentence sound bite is so much easier to digest, with none of that uncomfortable nuance that comes with actual detail, and so much easier to move onto the next new new thing (even if it is just the old thing repackaged as something new).
But always being onto the new new thing sure is stressful, and for what? All this rush to make the same carping comments on the same never-ending political horse races, to point out the same obvious flaws in the latest New York Times story, and all before someone else does. Entertaining? Occasionally. Edifying? Rarely. Unhealthy? Yes, both for the body and the body politic.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Simple Ways to Increase Voter Turnout - Miller-McCune
POLITICS
Simple Ways to Increase Voter Turnout
By: Lee Drutman | March 31, 2008 | 08:59 AM (PDT) | Comments
Two political science experiments suggest that a prick of social pressure and a dash of old-fashioned Election Day partying could go a long way toward getting America voting again.
It’s often said that we live in an era of civic decline. Where Have All the Voters Gone? asks one recent book. Another chronicles The Vanishing Voter. Academics and social commentators shake their heads at the cynicism and apathy and wonder, as another book title puts it, Does American Democracy Still Work?
How, then, to get America voting again? Maybe all it takes is a return to the good old-fashioned idea of elections as community events — just like they were in the late 19th century, when upwards of 90 percent of eligible American voters participated. At least, that’s what two recent political science experiments point toward.
One experiment shows that just holding Election Day poll parties would notably increase turnout. But more-significant results come from another experiment, in which a piece of direct mail informed voters that their participation was a matter of public record and that their neighbors would know whether or not they voted.
This prick of social pressure increased voting rates by eight percentage points over the baseline rate, a finding that surprised even the professors behind it — Yale political scientists Donald C. Green and Alan S. Gerber (University of Northern Iowa assistant professor of political science Christopher W. Larimer also worked on the experiment). After all, scholars and campaigns had already studied direct mail extensively and found that it didn’t matter how colorful the mailing was or what it said — nobody could find an effect of more than a percentage point.
But they hadn’t studied social pressure.
“We analyzed it for a week to see if there was some mistake or something was missing,” Green said. “Nothing changed.”
The experiment worked like this: During the 2006 Michigan primary elections, about 200,000 voters got no mailing. This control group voted at a rate of 29.7 percent.
Then came the four mailings, each to 38,000 voters. Group 1 was told, “Do your civic duty and vote!” This increased turnout to 31.5 percent. Group 2 also got the civic duty reminder and then was told, “You are being studied!” (Members of Group 2 were informed that researchers would be watching them, though the results would remain confidential). This increased turnout to 32.2 percent.
Group 3 got the civic duty reminder as well, plus information on whether they voted in the past election. They were also told, “Who votes is public information.” This increased turnout to 34.5 percent.
Finally, and most notably, Group 4 received the civic duty reminder, plus a list of their neighbors’ voting histories — all public information. They were asked: “What if your neighbors knew whether you voted?” This group voted at a rate of 37.8 percent — almost 8 percent more than the control group.
A good part of the explanation seems to lie in the power of social norms. “It’s possible that people simply felt that they were a little more attuned to their civic duty norm of participation once they had the sense they were compiling a track record, and I think that probably had a pretty substantial effect on their incentive,” Gerber said, suggesting that these mailings “might prick the civic conscience of a voter.”
Green called the technique “lightning in a bottle” but warned, “You gotta be very careful. If campaign exerts social pressure, there could be quite a backlash.”
For those who prefer a more carrotlike approach, another set of experiments suggests that hosting an Election Day celebration can also increase turnout — mostly because it gives people another reason to get to the polls, tipping their cost-benefit analysis in favor of participation.
In the spring of 2005, Green, along with James M. Glaser, dean of undergraduate education and a political science professor at Tufts, and Elizabeth M. Addonizio, a political science doctorate student at Yale, organized an “Election Day Poll Party” in a randomly chosen precinct in the quiet town of Hooksett, N.H., during its municipal elections. The event wasn’t anything fancy — some free sandwiches, a cotton-candy machine and a professional DJ playing “upbeat” music, all on the lawn of the local middle school that doubled as a polling place.
But it worked.
Turnout went up.
The trio also sponsored parties in the New Haven, Conn., municipal elections that spring and inspired Working Assets, a long-distance phone company that supports progressive causes, to conduct similar festivals in several cities in 2006. And sure enough, these events brought more people to the polls than otherwise expected. Controlling for past turnout rates, the researchers calculated that a simple poll party in a precinct where 50 percent of voters typically turn out would increase turnout by 6.5 percent — a highly significant result.
“I think we did the best we could with limited resources,” said Glaser. “But if you get this idea to catch on and get some significant funding possible to do this on bigger scale, with the parties being more of a draw, there is a lot of room for this to grow.”
Making politics fun is largely uncharted territory. In part, the professors say, it’s because analysts and academics have been fixated on the idea that the reason people didn’t vote was mostly the costs of voting (i.e., the time and effort it takes), as opposed to the benefits.
“When I was in graduate school, the talk of the town was increasing voter turnout by making it easier for people to register,” said Green, who earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. “There were policy innovations of the sort that extended voting during weekends and increased absentee ballots. But right now the sense is the most recent wave of extended voting and mail voting has not even had a 1 percent impact on voter turnout.”
Green is now convinced that the cost side of the voting equation is pretty minimal. “It’s really much more the motivation side, the benefits side, that is a large part of why people go off and vote,” he said.
Making politics fun also goes against the lingering Progressive-era view that elections should be serious, sober affairs, where informed and independent voters come to rational choices — as opposed to the raucous cash- and booze-infused elections that dominated the Gilded Age. But while progressives succeeded in making elections less corrupt, they also squeezed out the excitement, leaving behind what Green called a “morguelike experience.”
“There are other places that celebrate voting in ways that we don’t,” said Glaser. “There are Latin-American countries where Election Day is much more celebratory. And there is reason to celebrate if you’re living in a healthy democracy. I don’t think we’re calling for a return to beer taverns and crookedness of old systems. We are trying to say, ‘Here’s a creative idea about how to promote participation and promote community and put these things together.’”
All the scholars note that these results are preliminary. They expect campaigns, nonprofit groups and other researchers to begin experimenting further with these approaches, just as they did when Green and Gerber published research in 2000 that found that door-to-door canvassing was significantly more effective than phone calls or direct mail. “It’s gonna be darn interesting,” Green said.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/265
Simple Ways to Increase Voter Turnout
By: Lee Drutman | March 31, 2008 | 08:59 AM (PDT) | Comments
Two political science experiments suggest that a prick of social pressure and a dash of old-fashioned Election Day partying could go a long way toward getting America voting again.
It’s often said that we live in an era of civic decline. Where Have All the Voters Gone? asks one recent book. Another chronicles The Vanishing Voter. Academics and social commentators shake their heads at the cynicism and apathy and wonder, as another book title puts it, Does American Democracy Still Work?
How, then, to get America voting again? Maybe all it takes is a return to the good old-fashioned idea of elections as community events — just like they were in the late 19th century, when upwards of 90 percent of eligible American voters participated. At least, that’s what two recent political science experiments point toward.
One experiment shows that just holding Election Day poll parties would notably increase turnout. But more-significant results come from another experiment, in which a piece of direct mail informed voters that their participation was a matter of public record and that their neighbors would know whether or not they voted.
This prick of social pressure increased voting rates by eight percentage points over the baseline rate, a finding that surprised even the professors behind it — Yale political scientists Donald C. Green and Alan S. Gerber (University of Northern Iowa assistant professor of political science Christopher W. Larimer also worked on the experiment). After all, scholars and campaigns had already studied direct mail extensively and found that it didn’t matter how colorful the mailing was or what it said — nobody could find an effect of more than a percentage point.
But they hadn’t studied social pressure.
“We analyzed it for a week to see if there was some mistake or something was missing,” Green said. “Nothing changed.”
The experiment worked like this: During the 2006 Michigan primary elections, about 200,000 voters got no mailing. This control group voted at a rate of 29.7 percent.
Then came the four mailings, each to 38,000 voters. Group 1 was told, “Do your civic duty and vote!” This increased turnout to 31.5 percent. Group 2 also got the civic duty reminder and then was told, “You are being studied!” (Members of Group 2 were informed that researchers would be watching them, though the results would remain confidential). This increased turnout to 32.2 percent.
Group 3 got the civic duty reminder as well, plus information on whether they voted in the past election. They were also told, “Who votes is public information.” This increased turnout to 34.5 percent.
Finally, and most notably, Group 4 received the civic duty reminder, plus a list of their neighbors’ voting histories — all public information. They were asked: “What if your neighbors knew whether you voted?” This group voted at a rate of 37.8 percent — almost 8 percent more than the control group.
A good part of the explanation seems to lie in the power of social norms. “It’s possible that people simply felt that they were a little more attuned to their civic duty norm of participation once they had the sense they were compiling a track record, and I think that probably had a pretty substantial effect on their incentive,” Gerber said, suggesting that these mailings “might prick the civic conscience of a voter.”
Green called the technique “lightning in a bottle” but warned, “You gotta be very careful. If campaign exerts social pressure, there could be quite a backlash.”
For those who prefer a more carrotlike approach, another set of experiments suggests that hosting an Election Day celebration can also increase turnout — mostly because it gives people another reason to get to the polls, tipping their cost-benefit analysis in favor of participation.
In the spring of 2005, Green, along with James M. Glaser, dean of undergraduate education and a political science professor at Tufts, and Elizabeth M. Addonizio, a political science doctorate student at Yale, organized an “Election Day Poll Party” in a randomly chosen precinct in the quiet town of Hooksett, N.H., during its municipal elections. The event wasn’t anything fancy — some free sandwiches, a cotton-candy machine and a professional DJ playing “upbeat” music, all on the lawn of the local middle school that doubled as a polling place.
But it worked.
Turnout went up.
The trio also sponsored parties in the New Haven, Conn., municipal elections that spring and inspired Working Assets, a long-distance phone company that supports progressive causes, to conduct similar festivals in several cities in 2006. And sure enough, these events brought more people to the polls than otherwise expected. Controlling for past turnout rates, the researchers calculated that a simple poll party in a precinct where 50 percent of voters typically turn out would increase turnout by 6.5 percent — a highly significant result.
“I think we did the best we could with limited resources,” said Glaser. “But if you get this idea to catch on and get some significant funding possible to do this on bigger scale, with the parties being more of a draw, there is a lot of room for this to grow.”
Making politics fun is largely uncharted territory. In part, the professors say, it’s because analysts and academics have been fixated on the idea that the reason people didn’t vote was mostly the costs of voting (i.e., the time and effort it takes), as opposed to the benefits.
“When I was in graduate school, the talk of the town was increasing voter turnout by making it easier for people to register,” said Green, who earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. “There were policy innovations of the sort that extended voting during weekends and increased absentee ballots. But right now the sense is the most recent wave of extended voting and mail voting has not even had a 1 percent impact on voter turnout.”
Green is now convinced that the cost side of the voting equation is pretty minimal. “It’s really much more the motivation side, the benefits side, that is a large part of why people go off and vote,” he said.
Making politics fun also goes against the lingering Progressive-era view that elections should be serious, sober affairs, where informed and independent voters come to rational choices — as opposed to the raucous cash- and booze-infused elections that dominated the Gilded Age. But while progressives succeeded in making elections less corrupt, they also squeezed out the excitement, leaving behind what Green called a “morguelike experience.”
“There are other places that celebrate voting in ways that we don’t,” said Glaser. “There are Latin-American countries where Election Day is much more celebratory. And there is reason to celebrate if you’re living in a healthy democracy. I don’t think we’re calling for a return to beer taverns and crookedness of old systems. We are trying to say, ‘Here’s a creative idea about how to promote participation and promote community and put these things together.’”
All the scholars note that these results are preliminary. They expect campaigns, nonprofit groups and other researchers to begin experimenting further with these approaches, just as they did when Green and Gerber published research in 2000 that found that door-to-door canvassing was significantly more effective than phone calls or direct mail. “It’s gonna be darn interesting,” Green said.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/265
Friday, January 25, 2008
'The Mind of the Market'
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-book25jan25,0,1722562.story
BOOK REVIEW
'The Mind of the Market' by Michael Shermer
Man's true nature meets market economics.
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
January 25, 2008
BACK in the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers typically began political treatises with an exploration into the "state of nature," the premise being that the ideal form of governance should follow logically from mankind's true condition. But what is mankind's true nature? Good or bad? Thomas Hobbes took a famously dour view: Life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," at least without the rule of a Leviathan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, justified direct democracy by claiming that man is naturally compassionate, "born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Oh, pity these thinkers! For they were writing before armies of social scientists learned to coax subjects into rooms with half-silvered mirrors and into high-tech brain-scanning machines, generating reams of data on what people are "really" like.
But would any of this have changed our dead philosophers' minds about human nature? After all, the evidence remains decidedly mixed -- at best, we are a wondrously complicated mess of contradictions and stunningly silly tendencies. And one of those silly tendencies is the "confirmation bias" -- that is, people tend to believe only the evidence that confirms what they already think.
Such is the pleasure and frustration of the new book "The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics." On one hand, we have author Michael Shermer, founder and director of the Skeptics Society, captivating raconteur of all the greatest hits of behavioral, evolutionary and neuropsychology, provider of wonderful cocktail party material, like the one about 50% of an audience challenged to count the number of completed basketball passes failing to notice the gorilla walking across the crowded court. But we also have Shermer, the tendentious libertarian, doing logical back-flips unbecoming a self-proclaimed skeptic to marshal human nature's unruly contradictions into a political program of minimal government and extreme market capitalism.
Interestingly, Shermer's first target is the very neoclassical economics on which so much free market fundamentalism has been built. He has a legitimate beef with the discipline's fundamental assumption that people can be reduced to nothing more than rational, self-interested utility maximizers. Rather, he contends, whether we are selfish or altruistic depends on the context: "We evolved to display within-group amity and between-group enmity."
But it's more than just a matter of intention, he says: It's in our genes. Or, more colorfully: "We cooperate for the same reason we copulate -- because it feels good." Even trust is a chemical reaction brought on by close contact, which triggers the release of the hormone oxytocin in all but the 2% of us who are classified as sociopaths. And "mirror neurons" in our brain help us feel empathy. This makes sense evolutionarily too, Shermer argues, because "more often than not the most adaptable thing you can do to survive and reproduce is to be cooperative and altruistic."
So what about the bad traits? Fear and anger, Shermer asserts, evolved to help us to avoid and defend against danger. Only in the wrong environment, like, say, the corporate culture of Enron, does evil actually proliferate. But, he insists, Enron is the exception, not the rule, and that if most people behaved this way, market capitalism "would have collapsed centuries ago." (In fact, the modern invention of market capitalism has almost collapsed multiple times and would have but for repeated interventions by governments.) Citing research showing that autonomy and self-reliance make people happiest, clearly, he concludes, "if you want happiness and freedom, you have to minimize government interference." (Conveniently, since people are naturally altruistic, there's no need for government interference anyway!)
So why doesn't everyone see this as clearly? Well, that's easy, Shermer says: It's because "our brains evolved to deal with a world that bears only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in the modern marketplace." As he entertainingly recounts, experiments show that humans are irrationally risk-averse, terrible at making guesses and remembering things properly, highly susceptible to group-think and so on, until it's clear: Yup, we're really dumb. And, wouldn't you know it? We also have this vestigial "folk economic propensity" to think anything as complex as capitalism must be run by a government acting as God. And so any trade protectionism we feel is just a lingering byproduct of "our evolved social psychology of group loyalty."
Wait a second! Isn't this the same psychology of group loyalty on which Shermer has built his whole people-are-basically-good foundation that justifies minimal government? This group loyalty is now bad because it undermines trade and support for a market economy? Which is it?
Call it Shermer's paradox -- a helpful reminder of just how challenging and quixotic it remains to build a coherent political philosophy upon the sands of our conflicted and chimerical natures, even with all the great advances we have made in fascinating cocktail party tidbits.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
BOOK REVIEW
'The Mind of the Market' by Michael Shermer
Man's true nature meets market economics.
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
January 25, 2008
BACK in the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers typically began political treatises with an exploration into the "state of nature," the premise being that the ideal form of governance should follow logically from mankind's true condition. But what is mankind's true nature? Good or bad? Thomas Hobbes took a famously dour view: Life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," at least without the rule of a Leviathan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, justified direct democracy by claiming that man is naturally compassionate, "born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Oh, pity these thinkers! For they were writing before armies of social scientists learned to coax subjects into rooms with half-silvered mirrors and into high-tech brain-scanning machines, generating reams of data on what people are "really" like.
But would any of this have changed our dead philosophers' minds about human nature? After all, the evidence remains decidedly mixed -- at best, we are a wondrously complicated mess of contradictions and stunningly silly tendencies. And one of those silly tendencies is the "confirmation bias" -- that is, people tend to believe only the evidence that confirms what they already think.
Such is the pleasure and frustration of the new book "The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics." On one hand, we have author Michael Shermer, founder and director of the Skeptics Society, captivating raconteur of all the greatest hits of behavioral, evolutionary and neuropsychology, provider of wonderful cocktail party material, like the one about 50% of an audience challenged to count the number of completed basketball passes failing to notice the gorilla walking across the crowded court. But we also have Shermer, the tendentious libertarian, doing logical back-flips unbecoming a self-proclaimed skeptic to marshal human nature's unruly contradictions into a political program of minimal government and extreme market capitalism.
Interestingly, Shermer's first target is the very neoclassical economics on which so much free market fundamentalism has been built. He has a legitimate beef with the discipline's fundamental assumption that people can be reduced to nothing more than rational, self-interested utility maximizers. Rather, he contends, whether we are selfish or altruistic depends on the context: "We evolved to display within-group amity and between-group enmity."
But it's more than just a matter of intention, he says: It's in our genes. Or, more colorfully: "We cooperate for the same reason we copulate -- because it feels good." Even trust is a chemical reaction brought on by close contact, which triggers the release of the hormone oxytocin in all but the 2% of us who are classified as sociopaths. And "mirror neurons" in our brain help us feel empathy. This makes sense evolutionarily too, Shermer argues, because "more often than not the most adaptable thing you can do to survive and reproduce is to be cooperative and altruistic."
So what about the bad traits? Fear and anger, Shermer asserts, evolved to help us to avoid and defend against danger. Only in the wrong environment, like, say, the corporate culture of Enron, does evil actually proliferate. But, he insists, Enron is the exception, not the rule, and that if most people behaved this way, market capitalism "would have collapsed centuries ago." (In fact, the modern invention of market capitalism has almost collapsed multiple times and would have but for repeated interventions by governments.) Citing research showing that autonomy and self-reliance make people happiest, clearly, he concludes, "if you want happiness and freedom, you have to minimize government interference." (Conveniently, since people are naturally altruistic, there's no need for government interference anyway!)
So why doesn't everyone see this as clearly? Well, that's easy, Shermer says: It's because "our brains evolved to deal with a world that bears only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in the modern marketplace." As he entertainingly recounts, experiments show that humans are irrationally risk-averse, terrible at making guesses and remembering things properly, highly susceptible to group-think and so on, until it's clear: Yup, we're really dumb. And, wouldn't you know it? We also have this vestigial "folk economic propensity" to think anything as complex as capitalism must be run by a government acting as God. And so any trade protectionism we feel is just a lingering byproduct of "our evolved social psychology of group loyalty."
Wait a second! Isn't this the same psychology of group loyalty on which Shermer has built his whole people-are-basically-good foundation that justifies minimal government? This group loyalty is now bad because it undermines trade and support for a market economy? Which is it?
Call it Shermer's paradox -- a helpful reminder of just how challenging and quixotic it remains to build a coherent political philosophy upon the sands of our conflicted and chimerical natures, even with all the great advances we have made in fascinating cocktail party tidbits.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
Monday, December 10, 2007
Blame the system, not a greedy Trent Lott -- Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: Blame the system, not a greedy Trent Lott
01:00 AM EST on Monday, December 10, 2007
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
SO, TRENT LOTT, the Mississippi senator who had served as the Republican majority leader, has decided he no longer wants to be an elected official. Barely a year into his fourth term, he announced last month he is retiring with no definite plans. But everybody in Washington pretty much knows that he is going to become a lobbyist.
And why not? Instead of the measly $165,200 he earns now to represent the good people of Mississippi, he can earn probably 10 times that by representing the private interests that are capable of paying him some ridiculously high fee, though one that just may actually be worth it, given Mr. Lott’s relationships and skills as a political tactician.
The obvious response is to criticize Senator Lott for his greed (this is certainly the modal response in the news media). But it’s not as though Lott has been some brilliant champion of the people who is suddenly selling out to the almighty dollar. If he is going to serve wealthy special interests (as he often has during his legislative career), he might as well get better compensated for it.
To Senator Lott’s credit, he has spent 34 years in public service, which is a very long career. During this time, he has watched many of his colleagues retire and then go make millions in private lobbying. He is 66, and being a senator is an exhausting job. He has a large family to provide for. Leaving mid-term is actually a pretty rational decision.
What’s truly remarkable is that more congressmen and senators don’t do it. Sure, plenty of former senators and representatives have gone on to become lobbyists upon retiring. According to Public Citizen, since 1998, 43 percent of retiring lawmakers subsequently registered to lobby (and some in quite outrageous ways, such as Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin (D), who became head of PhRMA , the drug companies’ lobbying organization, after helping to shepherd the pharmaceutical gift basket better known as the Medicare Prescription Drug Act through Congress). But Lott is the first to resign mid-term to do it (and also the first U.S. senator to resign with no definite announced plans and no major scandal).
So why is the money so good? Maybe because every year, there are more and more companies, universities, foreign governments and other high-paying clients active in Washington. Ten years ago, you could still find some major companies without any real D.C. presence. Now you can’t. And as lobbying becomes more competitive, somebody as savvy and super-connected as a Trent Lott becomes that much more valuable.
Which is a tremendous problem. In an ideal pluralist democracy, lots of groups would petition their government for redress of grievances (as guaranteed by the First Amendment), and in doing so, would ensure that a wide spectrum of interests are represented in the policy-making process. But what if only a handful of those groups can afford to pay for super-connected people like Trent Lott? As the costs of the most connected lobbyists continue to escalate, the representation divide between the haves and have-nots grows worse.
Meanwhile, what’s happening at the lawmaker level is much worse at the staffer level. It is now increasingly common practice in Washington for a young staffer to spend a few years on the Hill, develop some expertise and build some connections, and then go make three times the salary as a lobbyist (and again — why not!? Better money, better hours, and the chance to finally take credit for your own work). But the consequence is that Congress has an increasingly difficult time building its own expertise. As soon as a staffer develops some substantial knowledge about some policy area, he or she is off to make more money in the service of someone with far more parochial use for that knowledge.
The challenge then is two-fold. One is to figure out ways to make public service more of a career in itself and less of the stepping-stone it is increasingly becoming. This may mean such things as better salaries, better benefits and better hours. The other challenge is to find a way that more groups can get adequate representation in Washington, not just those who can afford to hire the megaphone of an über-connected Trent Lott type. This is much harder.
Perhaps it is time to think about regulating the prices that lobbyists can charge for their services (ideally to achieve some rough parity with government). Doing so would not only provide a more level playing field for different outside groups. It would also help to depress the salaries of lobbyists, and thus reduce the lure of lobbying to public servants. This is, of course, a radical solution. But perhaps drastic times call for drastic measures.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutlott10_12-10-07_92846D9_v12.2a718ec.html#
01:00 AM EST on Monday, December 10, 2007
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
SO, TRENT LOTT, the Mississippi senator who had served as the Republican majority leader, has decided he no longer wants to be an elected official. Barely a year into his fourth term, he announced last month he is retiring with no definite plans. But everybody in Washington pretty much knows that he is going to become a lobbyist.
And why not? Instead of the measly $165,200 he earns now to represent the good people of Mississippi, he can earn probably 10 times that by representing the private interests that are capable of paying him some ridiculously high fee, though one that just may actually be worth it, given Mr. Lott’s relationships and skills as a political tactician.
The obvious response is to criticize Senator Lott for his greed (this is certainly the modal response in the news media). But it’s not as though Lott has been some brilliant champion of the people who is suddenly selling out to the almighty dollar. If he is going to serve wealthy special interests (as he often has during his legislative career), he might as well get better compensated for it.
To Senator Lott’s credit, he has spent 34 years in public service, which is a very long career. During this time, he has watched many of his colleagues retire and then go make millions in private lobbying. He is 66, and being a senator is an exhausting job. He has a large family to provide for. Leaving mid-term is actually a pretty rational decision.
What’s truly remarkable is that more congressmen and senators don’t do it. Sure, plenty of former senators and representatives have gone on to become lobbyists upon retiring. According to Public Citizen, since 1998, 43 percent of retiring lawmakers subsequently registered to lobby (and some in quite outrageous ways, such as Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin (D), who became head of PhRMA , the drug companies’ lobbying organization, after helping to shepherd the pharmaceutical gift basket better known as the Medicare Prescription Drug Act through Congress). But Lott is the first to resign mid-term to do it (and also the first U.S. senator to resign with no definite announced plans and no major scandal).
So why is the money so good? Maybe because every year, there are more and more companies, universities, foreign governments and other high-paying clients active in Washington. Ten years ago, you could still find some major companies without any real D.C. presence. Now you can’t. And as lobbying becomes more competitive, somebody as savvy and super-connected as a Trent Lott becomes that much more valuable.
Which is a tremendous problem. In an ideal pluralist democracy, lots of groups would petition their government for redress of grievances (as guaranteed by the First Amendment), and in doing so, would ensure that a wide spectrum of interests are represented in the policy-making process. But what if only a handful of those groups can afford to pay for super-connected people like Trent Lott? As the costs of the most connected lobbyists continue to escalate, the representation divide between the haves and have-nots grows worse.
Meanwhile, what’s happening at the lawmaker level is much worse at the staffer level. It is now increasingly common practice in Washington for a young staffer to spend a few years on the Hill, develop some expertise and build some connections, and then go make three times the salary as a lobbyist (and again — why not!? Better money, better hours, and the chance to finally take credit for your own work). But the consequence is that Congress has an increasingly difficult time building its own expertise. As soon as a staffer develops some substantial knowledge about some policy area, he or she is off to make more money in the service of someone with far more parochial use for that knowledge.
The challenge then is two-fold. One is to figure out ways to make public service more of a career in itself and less of the stepping-stone it is increasingly becoming. This may mean such things as better salaries, better benefits and better hours. The other challenge is to find a way that more groups can get adequate representation in Washington, not just those who can afford to hire the megaphone of an über-connected Trent Lott type. This is much harder.
Perhaps it is time to think about regulating the prices that lobbyists can charge for their services (ideally to achieve some rough parity with government). Doing so would not only provide a more level playing field for different outside groups. It would also help to depress the salaries of lobbyists, and thus reduce the lure of lobbying to public servants. This is, of course, a radical solution. But perhaps drastic times call for drastic measures.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutlott10_12-10-07_92846D9_v12.2a718ec.html#
Monday, December 03, 2007
A better way to evaluate candidates - Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: A better way to evaluate candidates
WRITING BACK IN 1962, historian Daniel J. Boorstin mused on the ridiculousness of the famous 1960 Kennedy-Nixon TV debates: “A man’s ability, while standing under klieg lights, without notes, to answer in two and a half minutes a question kept secret until that moment, had only the most dubious relevance — if any at all — to his real qualifications to make deliberative presidential decisions on long-standing public questions after being instructed by a corps of advisers.”
It’s amazing how little has changed. For those who have been paying attention to the presidential-primary season, it has been debate after silly debate. The candidates line up under the lights. They try hard to smile, to look relaxed and happy (but presidential). Then Tim Russert (or some other establishment journalist) provides his unhelpful barrage of gotcha-style questions, to which the candidates typically respond with some well-rehearsed talking point that has nothing to do with the original question (“I’m glad you asked, Tim, because I’m in favor of helping make life better for everybody”). Occasionally, they will attack each other’s positions, but this always feels a bit like poking at Jell-O. In the end, everybody races to claim victory, as if such a thing could or should be claimed based on the preceding farce.
What a stupid way to evaluate a presidential candidate. There is nothing in the presidential job description that is at all like the glib pop quizzes of the debates. Being a good president requires the ability to be deliberative, to be thoughtful, to be able to respond to a complicated world that doesn’t conform to the canned nostrums of campaign-speak. It also requires the ability to work with Congress and to navigate the complexities of Washington. If only there were some way to improve this selection process.
How about, just for once, instead of a short-answer debate, we let our candidates take a long-essay test where we get to see the quality of their actual decision-making? The format could work like this: The candidates show up, and they each get an office with a computer, hooked up to the Internet, and a phone. They also get a full scenario. For example, What would they do if radical Islamists staged a coup in Pakistan and began initiating military action in Kashmir? How would they respond if China’s economy went into a tailspin and Asia began following? How would they respond if a particularly virulent flu started showing up in the United States? What would they do if a group claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaida blew up a bus in Chicago?
Then they get an hour to craft a response. They can call whomever they like, do what research they like, and talk to the scenario experts as much as they like. But every move is recorded on video, so we can see how they approach a problem. At the end, they each get 10 minutes in their office to explain how and why they would respond (this way they do not get to hear what other candidates have said).
This would be different. But it would be serious. It would give onlookers a chance to see how the candidates think through a situation, what questions they ask, and how they present a solution, given time to think about it. After all, we want a creative problem-solver in the Oval Office, not a mere regurgitator of rehearsed pabulum.
A second recommendation: Being an effective president also requires being able to work with people in Washington. A president can get very little done without the support of Congress and the executive-branch bureaucracy (witness Jimmy Carter). So why not send out an anonymous survey to all members of Congress and their staffs, plus the top-level career bureaucrats in the executive branch, and ask them what they think of the candidates and how they would feel about working with them? Voters could disregard this information if they like, but if I were choosing a candidate for a job, I’d sure want to know what people who have worked with and will work with that person honestly think.
Choosing the president of the United States is a serious thing. It’s a shame the process that we have emphasizes the trivial — the charades and parades that have no apparent correlation with the ability to lead the executive branch of a naturally fractious government of a nation of 300 million people. Surely, we can do better.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
WRITING BACK IN 1962, historian Daniel J. Boorstin mused on the ridiculousness of the famous 1960 Kennedy-Nixon TV debates: “A man’s ability, while standing under klieg lights, without notes, to answer in two and a half minutes a question kept secret until that moment, had only the most dubious relevance — if any at all — to his real qualifications to make deliberative presidential decisions on long-standing public questions after being instructed by a corps of advisers.”
It’s amazing how little has changed. For those who have been paying attention to the presidential-primary season, it has been debate after silly debate. The candidates line up under the lights. They try hard to smile, to look relaxed and happy (but presidential). Then Tim Russert (or some other establishment journalist) provides his unhelpful barrage of gotcha-style questions, to which the candidates typically respond with some well-rehearsed talking point that has nothing to do with the original question (“I’m glad you asked, Tim, because I’m in favor of helping make life better for everybody”). Occasionally, they will attack each other’s positions, but this always feels a bit like poking at Jell-O. In the end, everybody races to claim victory, as if such a thing could or should be claimed based on the preceding farce.
What a stupid way to evaluate a presidential candidate. There is nothing in the presidential job description that is at all like the glib pop quizzes of the debates. Being a good president requires the ability to be deliberative, to be thoughtful, to be able to respond to a complicated world that doesn’t conform to the canned nostrums of campaign-speak. It also requires the ability to work with Congress and to navigate the complexities of Washington. If only there were some way to improve this selection process.
How about, just for once, instead of a short-answer debate, we let our candidates take a long-essay test where we get to see the quality of their actual decision-making? The format could work like this: The candidates show up, and they each get an office with a computer, hooked up to the Internet, and a phone. They also get a full scenario. For example, What would they do if radical Islamists staged a coup in Pakistan and began initiating military action in Kashmir? How would they respond if China’s economy went into a tailspin and Asia began following? How would they respond if a particularly virulent flu started showing up in the United States? What would they do if a group claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaida blew up a bus in Chicago?
Then they get an hour to craft a response. They can call whomever they like, do what research they like, and talk to the scenario experts as much as they like. But every move is recorded on video, so we can see how they approach a problem. At the end, they each get 10 minutes in their office to explain how and why they would respond (this way they do not get to hear what other candidates have said).
This would be different. But it would be serious. It would give onlookers a chance to see how the candidates think through a situation, what questions they ask, and how they present a solution, given time to think about it. After all, we want a creative problem-solver in the Oval Office, not a mere regurgitator of rehearsed pabulum.
A second recommendation: Being an effective president also requires being able to work with people in Washington. A president can get very little done without the support of Congress and the executive-branch bureaucracy (witness Jimmy Carter). So why not send out an anonymous survey to all members of Congress and their staffs, plus the top-level career bureaucrats in the executive branch, and ask them what they think of the candidates and how they would feel about working with them? Voters could disregard this information if they like, but if I were choosing a candidate for a job, I’d sure want to know what people who have worked with and will work with that person honestly think.
Choosing the president of the United States is a serious thing. It’s a shame the process that we have emphasizes the trivial — the charades and parades that have no apparent correlation with the ability to lead the executive branch of a naturally fractious government of a nation of 300 million people. Surely, we can do better.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Of market failure and Blackwater - Providence Journal
WASHINGTON
IN THE WEEKS since employees of private security firm Blackwater set off a scandal by killing 17 Iraqi civilians for little apparent reason, there has been much sniping here in Washington about what to do. The conclusions seem to be as follows: The shootings were troubling, and the State Department will implement new policies of oversight so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. But troubling as the situation may be, it appears that State is in no position to fire Blackwater — we actually really need the services they provide, our military already being so thinly stretched and all.
What a strange situation to be in. The most powerful military force in the world, reliant on a handful of private contractors to handle basic security duty, and then unable (or unwilling) to monitor these contracts to make sure that these hired hands don’t entirely undermine the mission by shooting first and asking questions later.
Who ever thought this was a good idea? And what were they thinking?
Hop into the time machine and set it for 1992, and we can find one Dick Cheney starring as secretary of defense, pushing for a leaner military and promising that much of what the military does could be done more effectively if it were outsourced to private contractors. After all, a report prepared for him by Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root had promised great cost savings by turning over logistics support to the private sector.
But, easy as it sometimes seems these days to blame all evil on Mr. Cheney, let us remember that the downsizing and the privatization of the military was merely one part of a logic that has been swirling around Washington for the better part of three decades now — that big government (bureaucratic and inefficient) is the problem, and the private sector (nimble and cost-effective) is the solution. Therefore, we should keep cutting government and keep turning key functions over to private companies, who will always do it better. Clinton did this plenty, and George W. Bush has done it even more.
But let’s examine this thinking for a second. Economics 101 tells us that markets work because they are competitive. If you want to, say, hire someone to clean your rugs, you look up local rug-cleaning services, and you’ll find several choices. Because there is competition among sellers and enough buyers to discipline those sellers, the market generally works — people comparison shop, and cleaning services that charge too much or do a bad job go out of business.
But what happens if you are the only rug owner in town, but you own a lot of rugs? Well, anybody who is going to start a rug-cleaning service better be darn sure that you are going to hire them, or else they will soon be out of business. So, they’ll work hard to be your friend, and spend a lot of time cementing that relationship (as opposed to perfecting their cleaning services). But the reality is that with one customer, there won’t be many rug cleaning services around to chose from. (Economists call this troubling single-buyer condition “monopsony.”)
And what if the service does a bad job? Since there’s nobody else to choose from, you’ll have to monitor them closely to make sure they are actually cleaning and not smoking a cigarette. But that requires time and effort, and at that point, well, what’s the point of paying somebody to do it if you have to watch them all the time? You might as well just do it yourself in the first place, since you have all the incentives to do it cheaply and efficiently, while they have every incentive to be slow and costly.
Private contracting in Iraq isn’t rug-cleaning, but the problems are similar to the example. Because this is specialized work, there aren’t many companies that have the expertise and infrastructure to do it. And yet, because the military has intentionally reduced its capabilities over the years, it is now at the mercy of these companies to perform important security functions. Moreover these companies spend a lot of extra time making sure that they have friends in high places to protect them. All of this creates the antithesis of an efficient market (which would be competitive and atomistic), and hence explains the steady stream of cost overruns, no-bid contracts, and now this latest Blackwater brouhaha.
So, now there will be more oversight of contractors. Well . . . good. But remember oversight is an additional cost, and it begs the question: why outsource in the first place, if you have to spend all this time and money making sure the people you hire don’t mess up? The deeper lesson to be learned is not just about accountability, but also about economics. If policymakers want to harness the power of markets, they need to make sure they actually understand the basic theoretical principles behind markets. Failure do so can only result in more stupid policy.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
IN THE WEEKS since employees of private security firm Blackwater set off a scandal by killing 17 Iraqi civilians for little apparent reason, there has been much sniping here in Washington about what to do. The conclusions seem to be as follows: The shootings were troubling, and the State Department will implement new policies of oversight so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. But troubling as the situation may be, it appears that State is in no position to fire Blackwater — we actually really need the services they provide, our military already being so thinly stretched and all.
What a strange situation to be in. The most powerful military force in the world, reliant on a handful of private contractors to handle basic security duty, and then unable (or unwilling) to monitor these contracts to make sure that these hired hands don’t entirely undermine the mission by shooting first and asking questions later.
Who ever thought this was a good idea? And what were they thinking?
Hop into the time machine and set it for 1992, and we can find one Dick Cheney starring as secretary of defense, pushing for a leaner military and promising that much of what the military does could be done more effectively if it were outsourced to private contractors. After all, a report prepared for him by Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root had promised great cost savings by turning over logistics support to the private sector.
But, easy as it sometimes seems these days to blame all evil on Mr. Cheney, let us remember that the downsizing and the privatization of the military was merely one part of a logic that has been swirling around Washington for the better part of three decades now — that big government (bureaucratic and inefficient) is the problem, and the private sector (nimble and cost-effective) is the solution. Therefore, we should keep cutting government and keep turning key functions over to private companies, who will always do it better. Clinton did this plenty, and George W. Bush has done it even more.
But let’s examine this thinking for a second. Economics 101 tells us that markets work because they are competitive. If you want to, say, hire someone to clean your rugs, you look up local rug-cleaning services, and you’ll find several choices. Because there is competition among sellers and enough buyers to discipline those sellers, the market generally works — people comparison shop, and cleaning services that charge too much or do a bad job go out of business.
But what happens if you are the only rug owner in town, but you own a lot of rugs? Well, anybody who is going to start a rug-cleaning service better be darn sure that you are going to hire them, or else they will soon be out of business. So, they’ll work hard to be your friend, and spend a lot of time cementing that relationship (as opposed to perfecting their cleaning services). But the reality is that with one customer, there won’t be many rug cleaning services around to chose from. (Economists call this troubling single-buyer condition “monopsony.”)
And what if the service does a bad job? Since there’s nobody else to choose from, you’ll have to monitor them closely to make sure they are actually cleaning and not smoking a cigarette. But that requires time and effort, and at that point, well, what’s the point of paying somebody to do it if you have to watch them all the time? You might as well just do it yourself in the first place, since you have all the incentives to do it cheaply and efficiently, while they have every incentive to be slow and costly.
Private contracting in Iraq isn’t rug-cleaning, but the problems are similar to the example. Because this is specialized work, there aren’t many companies that have the expertise and infrastructure to do it. And yet, because the military has intentionally reduced its capabilities over the years, it is now at the mercy of these companies to perform important security functions. Moreover these companies spend a lot of extra time making sure that they have friends in high places to protect them. All of this creates the antithesis of an efficient market (which would be competitive and atomistic), and hence explains the steady stream of cost overruns, no-bid contracts, and now this latest Blackwater brouhaha.
So, now there will be more oversight of contractors. Well . . . good. But remember oversight is an additional cost, and it begs the question: why outsource in the first place, if you have to spend all this time and money making sure the people you hire don’t mess up? The deeper lesson to be learned is not just about accountability, but also about economics. If policymakers want to harness the power of markets, they need to make sure they actually understand the basic theoretical principles behind markets. Failure do so can only result in more stupid policy.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Our disastrous national traffic jam -- Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: Our disastrous national traffic jam
09:09 AM EDT on Thursday, October 4, 2007
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
ONE OF THESE DAYS (and it will surely be soon), a major American metropolitan city will come to a screeching halt during rush hour. There will simply be too many cars, trying to get too many places, all at once, and too little pavement to accommodate all this automotive ambition. Such is the logical conclusion of all the trends.
Recently, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) released its annual Urban Mobility Report. The short of it is this: Congestion just keeps getting worse. More people are spending more time in traffic than ever before, across more cities. In the 437 United States urban areas, the average individual traveler loses 38 hours a year to congestion, and 26 gallons of gasoline. Nationwide, that is 4.2 billion hours, and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel, and $78 billion dollars. Which is about three times worse than it was in 1982, when the TTI first started putting out these reports. (Providence commuters lose a combined 19.5 million hours a year and waste 11.6 million gallons of gas in traffic, ranking Providence 37th and 38th in the nation, respectively; Boston commuters lose 93.4 million hours and 62.5 million gallons of gas, ranking Boston 12th and 13th in the nation, respectively).
But that’s just the hard numbers. How do you measure the emotional strain of sitting there, helplessly pounding the steering wheel, watching your life waste away in a bizarre pile of steel and exhaust, with nothing even worth listening to on the radio (just commercial after commercial telling us about all the great sales events we need to drive to). Then add in the time lost to recovering from the excruciating commute, all the anger and hostility that now needs to be defused (or taken out on somebody), and, of course, the heart attacks (according to the New England Journal of Medicine, being stuck in a traffic jam more than doubles the risk of a heart attack in the ensuing hour), and you begin to wonder: So this is what all our prosperity has brought us, then? More three-car pile-ups? Choking on our own affluence, are we?
In many ways, our modern traffic dilemma is a perfect triumph of individual rationality over collective rationality. Sure, many of us in urban areas could take public transportation to work, but the bus doesn’t come that often, and it takes longer, and worse, you are then stuck sitting with the great unwashed masses. To relinquish the car is to relinquish control, freedom, and all those other cherished values that made this country great. Of course, if everybody took the bus, the buses would run more often, and be nicer, and get there faster (because there would be less car traffic). But who goes first?
And what of the other solutions? Carpooling? Four out of five commuters now go it alone, up from three out of four just a few years ago. Who can spare the time it takes to pick up an extra person? And besides, who wants to give up that valuable alone time. Telecommuting? Never became acceptable. Living closer to work? Great if you can afford to live somewhere nice downtown, but what about the schools, and the peace and quiet? And what if your spouse works somewhere else? Shopping locally? But can you really get everything you’ve come to expect, and all the best deals?
And so it goes. We know what we should be doing, but pity the local politician who tells people how to live their lives, and punishes them with heavy fines if they don’t comply. After all, what could be worse than sitting in traffic? Why, having the mayor suddenly tell you that if you want to drive into the city by yourself during peak traffic time, well, that will be $100, please.
And yet, how else will this traffic problem solve itself without some courage on behalf of our public leaders? The incentives are all misaligned. Even if the traffic is bad, the other options are still worse for most people. So slap on some congestion pricing, as Michael Bloomberg is proposing to do in New York City. And use that money to improve public transportation, and to subsidize urban redevelopment so more people can afford to live closer to work. But pity the politician.
This does not happen overnight. But the situation we are in did not happen overnight either. Sixty years ago, federal lending policies encouraged mass suburbanization by basically making financing a home in an urban area untenable. General Motors bought out trolley lines in almost 50 cities so it could rip them up and then sell more cars and buses. And all that wonderful propaganda about the American dream on half-acre lots. . . .
So, here are the consequences: suburban snarl. And what comes of global competitiveness, when we can’t even get to work without getting an ulcer anymore? Maybe we ought to try this for global competitiveness: maybe someday soon, Los Angeles can compete with Lagos for the most congested city in the world.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
09:09 AM EDT on Thursday, October 4, 2007
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
ONE OF THESE DAYS (and it will surely be soon), a major American metropolitan city will come to a screeching halt during rush hour. There will simply be too many cars, trying to get too many places, all at once, and too little pavement to accommodate all this automotive ambition. Such is the logical conclusion of all the trends.
Recently, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) released its annual Urban Mobility Report. The short of it is this: Congestion just keeps getting worse. More people are spending more time in traffic than ever before, across more cities. In the 437 United States urban areas, the average individual traveler loses 38 hours a year to congestion, and 26 gallons of gasoline. Nationwide, that is 4.2 billion hours, and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel, and $78 billion dollars. Which is about three times worse than it was in 1982, when the TTI first started putting out these reports. (Providence commuters lose a combined 19.5 million hours a year and waste 11.6 million gallons of gas in traffic, ranking Providence 37th and 38th in the nation, respectively; Boston commuters lose 93.4 million hours and 62.5 million gallons of gas, ranking Boston 12th and 13th in the nation, respectively).
But that’s just the hard numbers. How do you measure the emotional strain of sitting there, helplessly pounding the steering wheel, watching your life waste away in a bizarre pile of steel and exhaust, with nothing even worth listening to on the radio (just commercial after commercial telling us about all the great sales events we need to drive to). Then add in the time lost to recovering from the excruciating commute, all the anger and hostility that now needs to be defused (or taken out on somebody), and, of course, the heart attacks (according to the New England Journal of Medicine, being stuck in a traffic jam more than doubles the risk of a heart attack in the ensuing hour), and you begin to wonder: So this is what all our prosperity has brought us, then? More three-car pile-ups? Choking on our own affluence, are we?
In many ways, our modern traffic dilemma is a perfect triumph of individual rationality over collective rationality. Sure, many of us in urban areas could take public transportation to work, but the bus doesn’t come that often, and it takes longer, and worse, you are then stuck sitting with the great unwashed masses. To relinquish the car is to relinquish control, freedom, and all those other cherished values that made this country great. Of course, if everybody took the bus, the buses would run more often, and be nicer, and get there faster (because there would be less car traffic). But who goes first?
And what of the other solutions? Carpooling? Four out of five commuters now go it alone, up from three out of four just a few years ago. Who can spare the time it takes to pick up an extra person? And besides, who wants to give up that valuable alone time. Telecommuting? Never became acceptable. Living closer to work? Great if you can afford to live somewhere nice downtown, but what about the schools, and the peace and quiet? And what if your spouse works somewhere else? Shopping locally? But can you really get everything you’ve come to expect, and all the best deals?
And so it goes. We know what we should be doing, but pity the local politician who tells people how to live their lives, and punishes them with heavy fines if they don’t comply. After all, what could be worse than sitting in traffic? Why, having the mayor suddenly tell you that if you want to drive into the city by yourself during peak traffic time, well, that will be $100, please.
And yet, how else will this traffic problem solve itself without some courage on behalf of our public leaders? The incentives are all misaligned. Even if the traffic is bad, the other options are still worse for most people. So slap on some congestion pricing, as Michael Bloomberg is proposing to do in New York City. And use that money to improve public transportation, and to subsidize urban redevelopment so more people can afford to live closer to work. But pity the politician.
This does not happen overnight. But the situation we are in did not happen overnight either. Sixty years ago, federal lending policies encouraged mass suburbanization by basically making financing a home in an urban area untenable. General Motors bought out trolley lines in almost 50 cities so it could rip them up and then sell more cars and buses. And all that wonderful propaganda about the American dream on half-acre lots. . . .
So, here are the consequences: suburban snarl. And what comes of global competitiveness, when we can’t even get to work without getting an ulcer anymore? Maybe we ought to try this for global competitiveness: maybe someday soon, Los Angeles can compete with Lagos for the most congested city in the world.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Corrupt lobbyists remain triumphant -- Providence Journal
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drut20_09-20-07_JB75ES1.1f8ebf7.html
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
SO, AT LONG LAST, and with the begrudging signature of the president of the United States, the so-called lobbying- and ethics-reform bill is now law. Well, hip, hip, hooray.
“A great day it is indeed,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) said at a press conference. “Democrats in Washington are draining the swamp to make this the most honest Congress in history.” Take that, culture of corruption!
Oh, if only the world of Washington influence-peddling were so simple that a little bit of new fundraising disclosure here, a well-meaning ban on junkets there, and a sprinkling of earmark disclosure all around, and bam, presto, shazam! The most honest Congress in history! In history!
Lest we get too cynical, though, there is some good here. Disclosure, for example, is a helpful, knowledge being power and all that. Now, thanks to this new bill, we the public will know more about what lobbyists are giving to whom, and how they are bundling contributions. We will know more about “earmarks.” And soon, we will be treated to a steady stream of reports from the good-natured numbers crunchers at various public-interest watchdogs around town, each nourishing our sense of outrage at how much money is sloshing around. Each full of sound and fury, signifying . . .
But then, come election time, our beloved member of Congress will arrive at the local pancake breakfast, cheerfully telling us how he got this federal funding for a regional biotechnology center that is creating jobs (an earmark), this federal grant for a new cancer ward at the city hospital (an earmark), and that federal grant to keep a cherished museum afloat (an earmark). Then he will offer the usual nostrums about the awful corruption in Washington that he (tirelessly, and mostly on his own) is working to fix, and we will think: What a great guy. I’m voting for him!
As for the ban on meals and free corporate travel and other tasteless gifts to lawmakers, it only means that lobbyists will just have to spend even more time at $1,000-a-plate fundraisers, which members of Congress, in their infinite wisdom, never considered banning lobbyists from attending. But the lobbyists will be okay. More regulations mean more specialized and valuable expertise to navigate the process. Sure, they have might more paperwork now, but they are getting well paid for their time.
The big question, of course, is what is lobby and ethics reform trying to change? Is it the “culture of corruption,” the supposed mechanistic quid-quo-pro graft and bribery that Jack Abramoff came to symbolize? If so, there’s no need for new laws. Just enforce the existing ones, as the Justice Department ultimately did. Remember, Jack Abramoff is in jail now. The need is for better people. But that has been the need since Day One.
Still, you have to be pretty cynical about politicians to think that they are such ciphers that their unconditional support can be secured for a prime rib or a prime seat at a Nationals game. Sure, there are bad apples, and instances of what we know as corruption. But from a perspective of representative democracy, the problem is not that it is a venal swamp in need of draining, but simply that a minority of interests with the majority of financial resources hire the majority of the lobbyists, who in turn convince the majority of the elected representatives what the “right thing” to do is. And they are darn persuasive about it. For example, why would a pharmaceutical company risk bribing a congressman when it can just bring in sick patient after sick patient to beg politely for continued full Medicare drug reimbursements? The media like to focus on the scandals. But most lobbying happens above board. What really matters is the quantity of it.
So, what is to be done? Well, for one, pay congressional staffers better so they’ll stick around longer, developing independent expertise on issues instead of going off to work as lobbyists as soon as they turn 26 or 27. Give Congress more independent sources of information so they don’t have to depend on lobbyists so much to know what’s going on with an issue. And enact public financing of federal elections so lawmakers don’t feel any extra pressure to keep those with the most money the most happy. But, most importantly, let’s have a real conversation about the ways in which the current lobbying system does or does not represent the public at large instead of overblowing a few instances of corruption that were punishable under existing laws.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
SO, AT LONG LAST, and with the begrudging signature of the president of the United States, the so-called lobbying- and ethics-reform bill is now law. Well, hip, hip, hooray.
“A great day it is indeed,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) said at a press conference. “Democrats in Washington are draining the swamp to make this the most honest Congress in history.” Take that, culture of corruption!
Oh, if only the world of Washington influence-peddling were so simple that a little bit of new fundraising disclosure here, a well-meaning ban on junkets there, and a sprinkling of earmark disclosure all around, and bam, presto, shazam! The most honest Congress in history! In history!
Lest we get too cynical, though, there is some good here. Disclosure, for example, is a helpful, knowledge being power and all that. Now, thanks to this new bill, we the public will know more about what lobbyists are giving to whom, and how they are bundling contributions. We will know more about “earmarks.” And soon, we will be treated to a steady stream of reports from the good-natured numbers crunchers at various public-interest watchdogs around town, each nourishing our sense of outrage at how much money is sloshing around. Each full of sound and fury, signifying . . .
But then, come election time, our beloved member of Congress will arrive at the local pancake breakfast, cheerfully telling us how he got this federal funding for a regional biotechnology center that is creating jobs (an earmark), this federal grant for a new cancer ward at the city hospital (an earmark), and that federal grant to keep a cherished museum afloat (an earmark). Then he will offer the usual nostrums about the awful corruption in Washington that he (tirelessly, and mostly on his own) is working to fix, and we will think: What a great guy. I’m voting for him!
As for the ban on meals and free corporate travel and other tasteless gifts to lawmakers, it only means that lobbyists will just have to spend even more time at $1,000-a-plate fundraisers, which members of Congress, in their infinite wisdom, never considered banning lobbyists from attending. But the lobbyists will be okay. More regulations mean more specialized and valuable expertise to navigate the process. Sure, they have might more paperwork now, but they are getting well paid for their time.
The big question, of course, is what is lobby and ethics reform trying to change? Is it the “culture of corruption,” the supposed mechanistic quid-quo-pro graft and bribery that Jack Abramoff came to symbolize? If so, there’s no need for new laws. Just enforce the existing ones, as the Justice Department ultimately did. Remember, Jack Abramoff is in jail now. The need is for better people. But that has been the need since Day One.
Still, you have to be pretty cynical about politicians to think that they are such ciphers that their unconditional support can be secured for a prime rib or a prime seat at a Nationals game. Sure, there are bad apples, and instances of what we know as corruption. But from a perspective of representative democracy, the problem is not that it is a venal swamp in need of draining, but simply that a minority of interests with the majority of financial resources hire the majority of the lobbyists, who in turn convince the majority of the elected representatives what the “right thing” to do is. And they are darn persuasive about it. For example, why would a pharmaceutical company risk bribing a congressman when it can just bring in sick patient after sick patient to beg politely for continued full Medicare drug reimbursements? The media like to focus on the scandals. But most lobbying happens above board. What really matters is the quantity of it.
So, what is to be done? Well, for one, pay congressional staffers better so they’ll stick around longer, developing independent expertise on issues instead of going off to work as lobbyists as soon as they turn 26 or 27. Give Congress more independent sources of information so they don’t have to depend on lobbyists so much to know what’s going on with an issue. And enact public financing of federal elections so lawmakers don’t feel any extra pressure to keep those with the most money the most happy. But, most importantly, let’s have a real conversation about the ways in which the current lobbying system does or does not represent the public at large instead of overblowing a few instances of corruption that were punishable under existing laws.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
The challenge of the narcissistic CEO -- Providence Journal
WHY DOES THE PAY of American chief executive officers surge year after year, no matter how well their companies are doing? Maybe it’s just plain old narcissism — pathologically self-important executives who can never get enough external validation, and so they have to keep paying themselves more and more as a salve for their wobbly egos. Of course, they do this with the acceptance of the boards of directors they so assiduously cultivate.
If so, do companies that keep indulging their CEOs in their Sisyphean pay-raise chases only make their narcissism worse? And if they do, what are the consequences? Don’t narcissists become more psychologically unstable over time, taking more ever more extreme and ill-advised actions in pursuit of some elusive psychological self-justification? And can that really be a good thing for the economy?
In psychiatric parlance, one is said to have “narcissistic personality disorder” (NPD) when he/she makes exaggerated claims about talents and abilities, needs constant admiration from others and has a hard time feeling empathy for others.
Not surprisingly, those who score high on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) test do things we generally frown on as a society. They cheat, they take more than their share and hoard it, they value material goods excessively, and they spend way too much time looking at themselves in the mirror. They also tend to gravitate to high-profile, high-paying positions of leadership — such as corporate executive.
In upcoming issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, two professors from Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of business, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick, examine the impacts of CEO narcissism on company performance. Their study, intriguingly titled “It’s All About Me: Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance,” suggests that the more narcissistic the CEO, the more the company tends to pursue big, high-risk strategies. More acquisitions, more frequent big changes in direction, more fluctuations in just about everything. But “although narcissists tend to generate more extreme and volatile performance than non-narcissists, they do not generate systematically better or worse performance.” (The study is based on 111 CEOs in the computer and software industry; the researchers measured narcissism by seeing how much the CEOs got paid relative to others in the company, how much they spoke about their company in the first-person singular, and how prominently they were featured in company materials.)
Other research, however, does suggest that overly narcissistic leaders are actually quite destructive in the long-term. For example, Roy Lubit’s work (“The Long-Term Organizational Impact of Destructively Narcissistic Managers”) makes a convincing case that, over time, narcissism leads to recklessness, and eventually, big trouble. It also alienates and drives away the most talented people in the company. Or, as management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’”
Psychologists have no real cure for narcissism, though it can be dampened through humbling life experience. Conversely, the more one is allowed to indulge in narcissism, the worse all the symptoms generally get — the never-ceasing quest for self-importance and approval that leads to more outrageous and unreasonable attempts to reach the slippery heights of feeling okay with yourself. So maybe paying CEOs more and more with each passing year is only fueling their narcissism, which leads them to pursue grander but more outrageous moves, until one day — Wham! Bam! Crash!
Sure money motivates. And sure a little bit of narcissism is probably a condition for the risk-taking that our economy thrives on. But eventually, the money itself becomes meaningless. It is merely status, and there will always be somebody with more. Likewise, beyond a certain level, risk-taking just becomes idiotic thrill-seeking for its own sake. And worse, it’s reckless thrill-seeking with thousands of employees and investors along for the ride.
It’s hard to say exactly where healthy incentive turns into harmful addiction, where productive drive turns into damaging disorder. But with each passing year, as CEO pay reaches ever higher stratospheres while average worker pay stagnates (the ratio is now on the order of 400-to-1 — truly remarkable since all other industrialized nations have kept the ratio around 20-to-1), it seems more and more like a line is being crossed. And as a general rule, it’s probably not good policy to indulge and encourage the potentially destructive psychological disorders of those who have the power. It can only lead to no good eventually.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy ( ldrutman@gmail.com).
If so, do companies that keep indulging their CEOs in their Sisyphean pay-raise chases only make their narcissism worse? And if they do, what are the consequences? Don’t narcissists become more psychologically unstable over time, taking more ever more extreme and ill-advised actions in pursuit of some elusive psychological self-justification? And can that really be a good thing for the economy?
In psychiatric parlance, one is said to have “narcissistic personality disorder” (NPD) when he/she makes exaggerated claims about talents and abilities, needs constant admiration from others and has a hard time feeling empathy for others.
Not surprisingly, those who score high on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) test do things we generally frown on as a society. They cheat, they take more than their share and hoard it, they value material goods excessively, and they spend way too much time looking at themselves in the mirror. They also tend to gravitate to high-profile, high-paying positions of leadership — such as corporate executive.
In upcoming issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, two professors from Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of business, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick, examine the impacts of CEO narcissism on company performance. Their study, intriguingly titled “It’s All About Me: Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance,” suggests that the more narcissistic the CEO, the more the company tends to pursue big, high-risk strategies. More acquisitions, more frequent big changes in direction, more fluctuations in just about everything. But “although narcissists tend to generate more extreme and volatile performance than non-narcissists, they do not generate systematically better or worse performance.” (The study is based on 111 CEOs in the computer and software industry; the researchers measured narcissism by seeing how much the CEOs got paid relative to others in the company, how much they spoke about their company in the first-person singular, and how prominently they were featured in company materials.)
Other research, however, does suggest that overly narcissistic leaders are actually quite destructive in the long-term. For example, Roy Lubit’s work (“The Long-Term Organizational Impact of Destructively Narcissistic Managers”) makes a convincing case that, over time, narcissism leads to recklessness, and eventually, big trouble. It also alienates and drives away the most talented people in the company. Or, as management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’”
Psychologists have no real cure for narcissism, though it can be dampened through humbling life experience. Conversely, the more one is allowed to indulge in narcissism, the worse all the symptoms generally get — the never-ceasing quest for self-importance and approval that leads to more outrageous and unreasonable attempts to reach the slippery heights of feeling okay with yourself. So maybe paying CEOs more and more with each passing year is only fueling their narcissism, which leads them to pursue grander but more outrageous moves, until one day — Wham! Bam! Crash!
Sure money motivates. And sure a little bit of narcissism is probably a condition for the risk-taking that our economy thrives on. But eventually, the money itself becomes meaningless. It is merely status, and there will always be somebody with more. Likewise, beyond a certain level, risk-taking just becomes idiotic thrill-seeking for its own sake. And worse, it’s reckless thrill-seeking with thousands of employees and investors along for the ride.
It’s hard to say exactly where healthy incentive turns into harmful addiction, where productive drive turns into damaging disorder. But with each passing year, as CEO pay reaches ever higher stratospheres while average worker pay stagnates (the ratio is now on the order of 400-to-1 — truly remarkable since all other industrialized nations have kept the ratio around 20-to-1), it seems more and more like a line is being crossed. And as a general rule, it’s probably not good policy to indulge and encourage the potentially destructive psychological disorders of those who have the power. It can only lead to no good eventually.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy ( ldrutman@gmail.com).
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