I had dinner with some colleagues last night and we had a great conversation over beer/wine and bar-b-que over whether Weber’s Iron Cage critique of modernity ignores the various ways in which belief is practiced in modern society (actually it was something about IPods and authenticity, but I digress).

Paul Krugman’s latest column in the Times nicely complements this critique of Weber’s Iron Cage. Krugman argues that the banking industry has gone through distinct phases of “exciting” banking where regulation was lax and great profits and profligate risk taking were rewarded and “boring” banking where the sector was heavily regulated and profits/risk taking were minimized. He concludes by taking the Obama economic team to task for their reticence in returning us to a “boring” banking era (You’d think Krugman taught at Harvard instead of Princeton they way he goes after Larry Summers)!

To me, the scaffolding underlying “exciting” baking is a very un-rational, un-iron cage-like “enchantment” with capital accumulation and profit making. Matt Yglesias makes the point in reference to the Krugman article that our era of “exciting banking” reflects a larger inability in our culture to assert that greed is a vice and not a virtue. Yglesias characterizes reckless investment bakers as:

people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. These aren’t immigrants who walked through the desert from Mexico in order to earn more money by washing dishes in a San Diego hotel. They’re not 24 year-olds looking for a hefty salary in order to pay off student loans. They’re multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more.

This may be part of  Weber’s larger critique of modernity — means/end rationality replaces other more intrinsic and spiritual forms of rationality.  But the Krugman piece and Ygelsias’ response seems to blur the line between the rational and the emotional. It is possible to be enchanted by money, not for what it can provide, but as an icon in and of itself.   I think Ken gets at some of this in his post on what’s being taught in business schools.

It think it would benefit us to study the banking system as if it were a religious devotion. What are it’s creation myths? It’s rituals? It’s core texts? It’s iconography?  Are there any good anthropoligical works on the banking industry?

Can/should the crowd help determine historic places in a city? The City of Los Angeles’ Office of Historic Resources is embarking on a Getty funded project called Survey LA:

a citywide survey to identify and document historic resources representing significant themes in the city’s history. While Los Angeles has over 900 Historic-Cultural Monuments (local landmarks) and 24 Historic Preservation Overlay Zones (Historic Districts), to date only 15% of the city has been surveyed.

The initiative claims to be including broad community input. But the actual mechanisim for getting involved seems unnecessarily hazy. They are asking the community to participate in a pilot survey, but wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage citizens to create Google Map mashups where “the crowd” can submit candidates for “historic place” designation?

I wonder if any other cities have tried this approach?

Very cool for those of us who remember Blondie and the Talking Heads.

Insert pedagogical justification here.

HT: Open Culture

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, announced at the World Economic Fourm in 2005, generated a great deal of excitement at the possibility of a “wired world” where students can use new technology to develop their creative potential and analytical skills. Access to the tools provided by the project would be a boon to social and economic development in the Global South, providing kids with unprecendented developmental resources. Here’s the OLPC project’s mission statement

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community

But the best laid plans….

The initial aim of OLPC was to provide 150 million laptops to the world’s poorest children by the end of 2008. The program has fallen far short of its original goals, or even its more modest revised goals. As of September, 2008, there were about 660,000 confirmed orders.

What happenend? An interesting analysis of the One Laptop Per Child Project done by Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick and Prakul Sharma at the University of California, Irvine, points the finger at too much of an emphasis on technology and not enough emphasis on the business model:

the OLPC has been stymied by its own misunderstanding of the environment in which it is operating. First, it depended on financing and distribution by host country governments, particularly educational bureaucracies that had little experience with computers in education or resources to make such investments. Second, OLPC underestimated the competitiveness of the PC industry and its willingness to undermine or co-opt any innovation that it perceives as a threat to its business model.

The report finds that the OLPC project has fallen short of its distribution goals because other actors have stepped into the low-end laptop market to provide more attractive alternatives for developing nations. That’s all right with Nicholas Negroponte, the driving force behind the project:

From my point of view, if the world were to have 30 million laptops made by competitors in the hands of children at the end of next year, that to me would be a great success. My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.

But that might be a post-hoc rationalization of a larger failure. Initially, the operating system packaged with the OLPC systems were customized, open source-Linux based systems. The idea wasn’t intended to encourage more market activity in this area, it seems that it challenge the market model. Indeed the decision to adapt to market realities and produce OLPC systems with a Windows operating system led to the defection of a number of project members:

Some of OLPC team members like Walter Bender reportedly resigned because they believed that the inclusion of Windows was a shift away from education goals, while Krstic argued that open source purity had become more important than the educational mission to some.

The success, or lack thereof, of the $100 laptop raises interesting questions about the role open source, non-profit forms of social production play in a market economy. Should we best understand them as vehicles that identify market opportunities and then give way to the “big boys” who are motivated by market incentives? Or is there a space for an OLPC project if the logistics are handled correctly (proper integration with local cultures, distribution through non-bureaucratic channels, etc.)?

Outside the Beltway links to a new Rasmussen poll that finds the majority of Americans want to throw down over North Korea’s missile launch over the weekend.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of U.S. voters nationwide favor a military response to eliminate North Korea’s missile launching capability. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 15% of voters oppose a military response while 28% are not sure.

On its face, this is shudder inducing. The implications of an attack on North Korea has serious spillover implications for South Korea, Japan and puts us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis China. I though the public would have taken from the Iraq war that military action is fraught with complexity. It seems that the “Axis of Evil” framing is still deeply entrenched in the collective American psyche.

Of course this also highlights the limits of survey research. Here was Rasmussen’s question:

“If North Korea launches a long-range missile, should the United States take military action to eliminate North Korea’s ability to launch missiles?”

I’d submit that this question is priming a military response. It’s pretty logical to finish the sentence “North Korea launches a long-range missile” with “at us” rather than “that fell harmlessly into the ocean” or “into space” or wherever. It’s easy to draw a conclusion that the public is reactionary and incapable of informing foreign policy. However, without proper contextualization, who wouldn’t want the U.S. to intervene to prevent North Korea from launching a strike on the United States?

I’d like to see a poll that asks the question differently.

Here’s one I’ll put away in my ever expanding “future research project file.”

Via

Recently Google began selling location-specific advertising on its search pages. Nancy Scola at TechPresident blogs on what she calls ambient advertising the use of location-specific ads by the AFL-CIO in the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act

Google ads now has a location targeting option, allowing advertisers to either drop a pin on a map or type in an address, and then set a radius within which their ads runs. (Google doesn’t set a minimum circle of influence, but suggests drilling in no closer than 20 miles.)

Scloa notes that the ads have been targeting readers in Maine, the home of the Senators Olympia Snoew and Susan Collins (a.k.a the moderate wing of the Republican party) with passages like “78% of Americans support workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.”

My question is whether Internet advertising of this form is a medium that lends itself to formal political appeals. The theory would be that people who searched for something related to the legislation would already be cued into wanting to know more about the bill and would thus be predisposed to click on a link to content related to the bill. Makes sense, but we know little about the political behavior of this population of “potential ad link clickers.” Is the group that would break the divide between legitimate link and Google Ad the same as the group that would not link to a Google ad under any circumstances. Are “ad link clickers” more or less disposed to be politically active.

On it’s face, one would think not. But I suspect there are differences between those who reject direct political appeals (i.e. they won’t click on a banner ad) and those who see no distinction (will happily click a banner ad). I’m in the former category. Not exactly sure why, other than most of my friends in high school became car salesemen (as did I for a short time).

Like I said…one for the “to do” file.

Southern California’s unique settlement patterns makes it easier to concentrate the spillover effects of modern life, what economists call externalities, on low income communities. No where is this more apparent than with air quality. According to a study conducted for the united Church of Christ, who for some reason has become the driving force behind bringing this problem to light:

California has the nation’s highest concentration of minorities living near hazardous waste facilities, according to a newly released study. Greater Los Angeles tops the nation with 1.2 million people living less than two miles from 17 such facilities, and 91% of them, or 1.1 million, are minorities. Statewide the figure was 81%.

This figure is so staggering in part because low income communities are concentrated in valleys east of the 405 Freeway in the City of Angels. These valleys trap toxic emissions from the large volume of driving that occurs in this region.

How would you address this policy problem? Is it your responsibility as a Californian to do so?

I think I’m being converted.

For a good part of my intellectual life, I’ve been skpetical of Neo-Marxist understandings of power. As an urban politics student in graduate school, I rejected the views of urban scholars like Harvey Molotch, Ira Katznelson and David Harvey that claims that the dictates of capital proceeded unabated in urban space. The zeitgeist at the time was that urban power (an power in general) was a more open, fluid process. The capital accumulative class might have strong advantages in the U.S. policy process, but the process was open and by no means was the state simply a handmaiden of capital like neo-Marxists might presume. Policy was a contest, the outcome was not predetermined.

Then AIG happened.

Matt Taibi has a particularly effective and scathing piece in Rolling Stone that guides the reader through the impenetrable minefield of new terms that help us unpack the crisis we face: collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, The Glass-Steagall Act, Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Taibi lays the blame for the credit crisis on the combination of a lax regulatory system that allowed companies like AIG to become “too large to fail” and a risk-taking culture within the financial service industry that rewarded immediate profit above all else. As Taibi points out, the state could have stepped in a brought order to this chaos before it was too late, but they demurred:

There’s this notion that the regulators couldn’t do anything to stop AIG,” says a government official who was present during the bailout. “That’s bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, ‘You don’t exist anymore,’ and that’s basically that. They don’t even really need due process. The OTS could have said, ‘We’re going to pull your charter; we’re going to pull your license; we’re going to sue you.’ And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death.

All of this could simply mean the “capture” of the state by the financial system. A good public policy scholar would tell you that in the 1990 the financial regulatory system had been “captured” by an iron triangle of interest groups, congressional staff and bureaucrats that agreed on a laissez faire approach to the financial services industry. Not unusual…nothing to see here.

But a good public policy scholar would also tell you that that policy capture is not permanent. A good shock to the policy system, a punctuated equilibrium if you will, would re-open the policy space the include new actors and ideas. Once a major catastrophe happens, policy areas are subject to major shifts. The cessation of constructing nuclear power plants after the Three Mile Island accident is a classic example of a radical shift in the policy space.

So what happened with the financial services equivalent of Chernobyl…. Taibi calls it Paulsonism:

The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize “toxic” risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Rather than open up the policy space for a broader consideration of policy alternatives, our response to the financial crisis has been significant bailouts of investment firms with few strings attached. Sure there are some rumblings about the need for new regulation and overblows assessments of our current political climate, like Newsweek’s silly presumption that “We’re all Socialists Now.” But in the main, our policy discourse space remains firmly neo-liberal, even with a seemingly progressive president.

I don’t know about you, but I’m dusting off my Urban Fortunes and City Trenches Social Justice and the City. They have more to tell us that we’ve been willing to hear in urban studies and policy analysis for quite some time.

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident

Love or hate Bill Maher, but give him credit for pairing together people that you never ever see together. This last installment has Mos Def in a debate with Christopher Hitchens over Iran’s Nuclear Program. While Ta’ Nehisi at the Atlantic thought Mos Def came across looking paranoid and intellectually lazy, I think Hitchen’s comes off like an oaf, but I think he always comes off that way. While you won’t see Mos Def at the Oxford Union, he is posing questions that require answers.

Read Ta’ Nehisi’s post. Good food for thought.

Aside from my family (and reviewing journal articles), my two great passions are soccer and hip-hop. Both are languages spoken throughout the world with distinct accents, inflections and tones. Here’s an example of soccer’s universality

The Soccer Project from Rebekah Fergusson on Vimeo.

and hip-hop’s: