Open Culture has links to a series of procrastination inducing archival footage from The Mike Wallace Interview.  The archive at the University of Texas has interviews with noteworthy people from the 1950’s.

This interview with Ayn Rand (every twenty year old’s favorite philosopher) is riveting.  As a regular attendee at my campus Objectivist Club as a freshman, it is fascinating to both see and hear Rand’s austere philosophy.   For those who arent’ familiar with objectivism, it’s an elevation (some would say fetishization) of rational self-interest and individualism to the level of virtue.  The philosophy suggests that other-directedness and altruism are forms of enslavement.

Looking back, I can see why this philosophy is so attractive to young people.  It has an empowering muscularity that serves as an intellectual scaffolding for a more emotion based will to power.  It provides an excuse for those who prefer not to engage in the messy business of other people’s emotions and desires.

I particularly love (sarcasm) the part where she discusses how people without “virtue” are not entitled to love.  Sounds like someone had some unresolved daddy issues…

The archive also has an interview with Salvador Dali.

It took over 150 days for the California Legislature to hammer out an agreement to fill a 40 plus billion dollar budget shortfall this year.  The agreement resulted in a set of ballot initiatives that must go before the voters that include diverting state lottery funds to address the shortfall and increases in the state sales tax, vehicle license fees and state personal income tax.

According to a new Public Policy Institute of California poll, the state’s voters aren’t down with the program.  The voters reject the proposed tax increases by whopping measures.   The Governor calls the ramifications of a potential defeat “disastrous.”

So the voters seem to want to play “chicken” with public services. There is an underlying belief among the California electorate that enough money exists to pay for the state’s essential services, but that a wildly incompetent state government is incapable of properly allocating resources. It doesn’t help that the Sacramento Bee ran an article on the proliferation of lobbying activity in the state during the last decade. It’s hard to blame voters for their intransigence when they get data like these in their Sunday paper:

In the past two decades, the amount spent on lobbying in California has increased with each two-year legislative session, rising from $193 million in 1989-90 to more than $550 million last session, state records show.

The number of groups hiring professional advocates has also grown, from 682 in 1975 to 2,365 at the start of the 2007-08 session.

It’s hard to blame voters for being wary of Scaramento’s excesses. It seems that we’re headed towards serious cutbacks in services. How will California voters respond when we get there? Will it take a “real crisis, i.e. deep cuts to services (police, fire, corrections, schools, etc.) to get the state to enact much needed reforms in how it collects and distributes revenue?

Huzzah! You tube has launched an academic channel! Now the masses will be exposed to the great ideas from Harvard, Berkeley, MIT and the University of Toledo? This comes two days after the launch of a site called Academic Earth that offers thousands of academic lecture in one convenient place.

Not sure what to make of this Dionysian Bacchanalia of knowlwedge at my fingertips. Let me play devil’s advocate to my own webtopian inclinations.  Does all this access to university lectures cheapen knowledge? If the years of accumulated knowledge required to give a careful, reflective treatment of the Civil War or The Origins of the Financial Crisis has no monetary value in the marketplace, will it provide a disincentive for people to acquire this knowledge to begin with? If I can get MIT lectures for free, what the point of MIT? Is academia facing the same dilemmas the music industry faces? Will it need to create a new business model to survive? If people get a taste of what MIT has to offer, will they’ll want to pay for more? Will the norm of putting public lectures on-line raise the bar so that all faculty have to bring their “A” game at all times (shudder)?

OK, the Internet provides citizens with new vehicles to get involved in the political process, but will people “walk through the portal”? We will soon find out. The WhiteHouse has created a site called “open for questions,” a Digg-like site where residents can submit questions and vote on their favorites. The president will answer some of the most popular questions at a Thursday town hall. Here’s a metric for how much desire there is to engage directly with the federal government — as of 6pm Eastern time on March 25th, 2009 33,040 people had submitted 34,090 questions and cast 1,226,081 votes. 32,000 out of over 300 million citizens is not much, but here’s what makes this so intriguing. Check out a random sampling of questions leading the “voting” so far:

“With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?”

“We have been forced to slowly liquidate my wife’s 401K to make our monthly mortgage payments. We dread the implications ahead when we have to file our 2009 federal tax returns. Do you foresee leniency on 401K liquidating for “qualified” candidates?”

“Will we ever see high speed passenger rail service in the U.S.?”

“I’m hard working, always make my mortgage payment on time, and bought a house I knew I could afford. My ARM is adjusting, and I’m not eligible for any great program. Why haven’t better loan options become available for the responsible middle class”

Compare these questions to those posed by the media at last nights press conference:

Apparently the demand for marijuana law reform is huge (insert Peter Tosh lyrics here). Now I’m not saying that marijuana laws should be at the top of the president’s agenda, but it’s significant that the Web 2.0 provide a new mechanism for agenda access. Rather than relying on institutions to “problematize” issues for the public agenda, individual citizens can throw their hat in the ring and potentially get a brief hearing. The serious test will be whether large numbers of people watch the Thursday morning town hall. If they do, the “on-line town hall” become a new avenue for policy entrepreneurs to reach the public agenda.

On the eve of the president’s second news conference, he might want to take a look at John Kingdon’s classic Agendas, Alterantives and Public Policy.  Along with setting the record for most mixed-metaphors in a book (garbage cans, primeval soup, policy streams, policy windows), the study provides a key insight for understanding policy change.  In a nutshell, Kingdon argues that if you can merge policy problems, the decision-making agenda, and policy solutions brought forth by policy entrepreneurs, a policy window opens up (I know, the high school English teacher in you is cringing), that allows you to realize a policy agenda.

Kingdon’s streams imply an order to the policy process…only a handful of problems and solutions can garner the attention of policy makers at any given point in time and only a certain set of solutions are acceptable to decision makers and the public. By contrast, the Obama administration’s new budget seems to be part of a “shock and awe” approach to the policy process…flood the public agenda with a number of simultaneous problems and solutions (health care, education, climate change, etc.) in the hope that the deluge will overwhelm members and result in mass policy change.

It’s an interesting and maybe unprecedented public policy strategy. If it works, it may signal a new approach to policy change, albeit one at which the framers would cringe. Personally, I’m skeptical that we’ll get a budget that looks anything like it currently does. The Senate is already putting the brakes on the process.

What do you think of a “shock and awe” approach to policy change?

There seems to be a consensus emerging that California’s initiative process is broken.   Access to the ballot is too easy (you need the signatures of 5% of the voters in the last gubernatorial election to get on the ballot).  The initiative process is vulnerable to unreflective emotional appeals (initiatives dealing with children do particularly well).  Many people blame the initiative process for initiating an era of ballot box budgeting where citizens appropriate public funds to specific policy areas through the initiative process.  Proposition 98, passed in 1988, calls for 40% o the state’s budget to go towards education.

At the same time, California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 which reduces property taxes and significantly raises the bar on the legislature’s ability to raise new revenue.  As a result of Proposition 13, the legislature requires 2/3ds of the California voters to agree on most tax increases.  The result, some would argue, is a state that has no restrictions on spending, but serious limits on the ability to raise revenue.

It’s easy to fault an “ignorant” electorate who doesn’t understand the broader implications of increasing spending but lowering taxes.  But recently I’ve been interested in the ideas of deliberation scholars like Diana Mutz and Cass Sunstien who argue the need for cross-cutting social networks in Democratic societies.    Cross-cutting networks allow people to engage in discussions where they are able to vet ideas and develop a broader sense of the possible unintended consequences of their policy positions.  The more we retreat to homogeneous ideological networks, the less likely we are to get this necessary check on our world view.

Sunstien argues that the Internet, particularly blogs and social networks, reinforce homogeneous groups that reinforce their pre-existing world view.  As we move our public conversations to what Anthony Downs refers to as “sought for” mediums of information like political blogs, listserves, and Facebook groups, we get less of our information from:

“unchosen serendipitous, sometimes disliked encounters with diverse ideas and topics,” as well as “shared communications experiences that unify people across differences.” Public spaces such as city parks and sidewalks provide the “architecture of serendipity” that fosters chance encounters with a “teeming diversity” of ideas.

So let me throw out a preliminary discussion question: functioning deliberative democratic systems are more likely to occur in places with a vibrant “architecture of serendipity.” In other words, the key to a vibrant functioning California is more places where people of different political orientations can have “accidental” conversations about politics.   Is our problem that the Interned allows up to retreat to our “warm corners of rectitude” where the correctness of our views can be mutually reinforced? If this is true, how to we encourage more “serendipitous” conversations about politics? Or should we just sit back and enjoy the polarization?  How do we encourage “serendipity” online?  StumbleUpon for everyone!

Discuss.

E-mail your member of Congress and urge him or her to pass my 3.55 trillion dollar budget plan.

The Obama campaign is betting that his giant e-mail database of 13 million supporters can be mobilized as a governance tool. Will it work? David Ploffe thinks:

In the next few weeks we’ll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign — talking directly to people in your communities about the President’s ideas for long-term prosperity.

This is the great test of the power of distributed democracy, will the instant gratification of being part of a movement and building towards a culminating event (presidential election) be matched by the tough slog of virtual arm twisting?

Thanks to King Politics for introducing me to a great article by Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic on the dominance of rational choice theory in political science. The use of econometric modeling over historical or interpretive methods has come to dominate the discipline in the last two decades. So much so that renegade Political Scientists created a Perestroika movement aimed at introducing more methodological pluralism into the discipline.

At its core, this debate is more than an abstract methodological argument. It’s really about whether we can we study the social world the same way we study the natural world. Or as Cohn puts it:

Whether this is good for the discipline depends in part on whether rational choice scholarship really succeeds on its own terms–whether it really helps us understand the elements of political behavior it purports to explain. But beneath that question lurks a second issue more important to those of us outside the academy: whether political scientists have an obligation to do work that is not merely interesting as an intellectual enterprise but also helps us govern ourselves.

To what extend should we be concerned with applying empirical approaches to addressing normative questions? If rational choice/econometric modeling can help us address poverty or human rights abuses, then I’m all for it. The key flaw, it seems to me, with a rational approach is that it pursues universality. it wants to model and test behavioral and institutional outcomes on a large scale. To make the leap from research to practical application requires a “thick” understanding of particular contexts.

My sympathies in this regard lie with post-positivst approaches like Charles Ragin’s fuzzy-set work. I’m also a fan of Bent Flyvberg’s Making Social Science Matter. Both in their own way advocate for a greater emphasis on context in empirical work. I personally would love a greater emphasis in social science on trying to discover when and where things fail and w succeed rather than trying to make universal declarations about what works and what fails.

From FlowingData, here’s a great find.. a bus bench in Amsterdam that displays the weight of the person who sits on the bench.

This is apparently an ad by a gym to increase membership, but one could see a government agency someday using the same device as a part of a public health campaign. What type of story is this ad telling about the people who sit on the bench?

Major League Soccer starts it’s 14th season on Thursday when Drew Carey’s Seattle Sounders (yes the Price is Right guy — he’s part owner of the team) plays the New York Red Bulls (yes, owned by the company that produces the energy drink). No other sport in the United States produces the angst and animosity that futbol seems to engender. It even makes academics go into a frothy rage about the socialist, collectivist, third-world, effete scourge of the world’s game. take for instance this polemic attempt at satire? by a Wabash College philosophy professor about the secret leftist-socialist plot to turn America into the La Rive Gauche.

The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.

While the article might have been intended as satire, the article is a compelling read, much in the the sentiments in the article, which some genuinely hold (here and here), remind me of Lyndon Larouche supporters who stand outside supermarkets yelling about the Queen of England being a heroin dealer are compelling.… what they’re saying is absolutely deranged (you must be very proud Wabash College!), but you’re dumbstruck wondering how they got to such a place. After thinking about it for far longer than I should, here’s what I think.

He’s right. The soccer bashers are right.

Not about the actual game being boring. There’s no way to objectively assess that. 1 billion fans worldwide can’t be wrong! Rather I think he’s right that soccer as it is organized throughout the world signals a shift in the American sportscape, and I argue, is very well suited to structural changes in global technology. American sports are corporate enterprises and players are marketed as larger than life to create a distance from the “fan,” much like a rockstar. One is supposed to idolize these figures, but in no way should they identify with them or hope to interact with them. Soccer globally is organized differently.

Globally, soccer teams are “clubs” with significant “fan” input into key decisions like the election of a club president, like shareholders of companies. This is true even for billion dollar clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain. Soccer “fans” are not considered “fans” at all but rather are referred to as “supporters.” A supporter connotes a different level of investment in the “club” than a “fan” has in a “team.” A supporter identifies with a team. A supporter is likely part of a “supporter’s group” that organizes pre and post game experiences. These groups become much more than a group of fans but a thick-tie network of friends who integrate the “club” into their core identities. As an example, here is a video of a rally at Portland city hall by the “supporters” for the Portland Timbers, a team that currently plays in the United Soccer Leagues (2nd division American Soccer). The team is working with the Portland city council to renovate a downtown stadium to attract a Major League Soccer franchise to the city.

These supporters perform many vital functions for soccer “clubs.” They add atmosphere and vitality to a “club” through cheers, chants and songs. Here are some examples from supporters groups in Major League Soccer:

Barra Brava (D.C. United)

Red Patch Boys (Toronto FC)

Texian Army and El Batallon (Houston Dynamo)

In the absence of mainstream media coverage of the sport in the United States, these groups provide supporters with information about club signings and practice reports through blogs like 3rd Degree (FC Dallas), United Mania (D.C. United), and others.

Finally, and most importantly, they serve as a basis of recruitment for clubs. The ongoing vitality of Major League Soccer in the United States is closely connected to the growth of supporters groups. The model is very much like Jonathan Zittrain’s description of the Internet as a generative system, a medium which allows users to innovate by tailoring the product to their individual needs. The success of the Obama campaign, according to this post by Zack Exley was the ability to convert a top-down fundraising model into a generative system where volunteers were empowered to “get creative” in recruiting new adherents to the movement while still maintaining a centralized structure.

Because of the European tradition of “clubs’ and “supporters,” Major League Soccer has a leg up on being a generative sport in the way Zittrain describes. There is a built in advantage to creating the types of identity attachments that can produce “open source” work on behalf of the team (atmosphere, recruitment, information spreading) in ways that conventional American sports are not set up to do. There are analogues at the professional level in the U.S., like fantasy leagues. And at the college level, the connection to a university provides the closest thing to “supporters” in the United States. But there is nothing quite like a supporters group.

There is a solidarity that emerges among supporters groups, but I take issue with the Wabash College professor’s characterization that it’s somehow effete and anti-competitive. It’s definitely not Foucault and Marcuse sipping Vermouth at a cafe and clapping politely at a nice cross. It’s open source, participatory, free culture, sports and if the MLS brass were smart, they’d be cultivating it an supporting it at every turn!!!

Oh, and if you’re interested in seeing what a supporter’s group looks like, tune in to ESPN2 at 9pm Eastern/ 6pm Pacific time this Thursday for the Sounders/Red Bulls. The new Seattle franchise even has a marching band…seen here: