An Economist article from May of last year entitled Counting Every Moment invites us into the world of self-quantification.  The practice of “self-tracking” our daily activities using technology.  Let me start by saying “I’m a  big fan.”  I have a strange compulsion to self quantify.  Maybe it has something to do with the sense of control one gets from believing they can change through logic and reason.  Those extra five pounds can come off if one meticulously tracks every bite. 

I’m a sucker for new apps or websites that help you keep track of yourself.  My Evernote account has notes for daily writing, meals, and Crossfit sessions.  While my self quantification benefits me, particularly when I’ve gotten off track in some key area of life.  But at what point do we get so caught up in the quantifying that we ignore the underlying dynamics that impact behavior.  We can’t quantify impulses.  I myself can get frustrated at my inability to meet goals, particularly when I’ve “quantified” myself.  How much does our obsessive quantification lead us to disappointment when rationality proves inadequate to conquer or more complex and mysterious demons.

Teaching students to become good citizens is in-style learning objective at many universities (mine included).   It is a personal drive of mine, particularly in courses that are comprised of mostly non-majors who will not go on to become political-junkies (sniffle, sniffle).  But as a political scientist, I’ve seldom made my classroom a truly participatory space.  Sure they get to “speak their mind” but they have had no input into the construction of the course (readings, assignments, rules etc.)

Part of me things this is as it should be.  I am the expert.  I convinced a committee of scholars to give me a piece of paper with the words “Doctor of Philosophy” on it.  I know what they need to know about politics.  They do not know what they do not know.

But there is this other part of me that believes that what I know about political science is secondary to their learning.  What matters is how they access what I know.   What I don’t “know” is the quickly evolving student culture.  What my students bring to the table  is local knowledge or the unique particulars of a community that affect norms and behavior.

As such, I approached this year from a participatory framework.  I use Archon Fung’s great book on Chicago’s participatory processes Empowered Participation when I teach my policy courses.  The great insight of this book is that citizen involvement works best when it is tempered by expert feedback and oversight.  This article details efforts at participatory budgeting in New York city.

There are countless examples of citizens taking their civic responsibility seriously when given real decision making opportunities, or even when placed in a structure that engages them in deliberation.   The purpose isn’t to let the “inmates run the asylum” but rather to help those entrusted with civic leadership in arriving at better solutions.  An additional benefit is letting citizens into the process of public decision-making.

So I decided to enact a form of participatory budgeting in my two courses this year.  I opened up the syllabus and asked them to think carefully about what types of assignments they wanted to produce, what subjects they cared most about and how they wanted to classroom to be run.  The result was a productive dialogue with my students on the use of laptops in class, the best pedagogical strategies, the utility of in-class exams and mandatory attendance policies.   I incorporated their feedback and completely revamped my syllabus for the year.

This approach is fraught with dangers.  It’s easy with this paradigm to present higher education as another service-based, market institution.  I stressed to them that I was not a Walmart greeter.  I wasn’t trying to figure out how to “serve the customer” but instead I was asking them to be part of a process of co-creation where together we figured out how to structure the course in the most optimal way for their learning needs.

This might still go horrible wrong.  We’re in week two of my semester and the syllabus isn’t finalized.  I am incorporating new technology without the requisite summer “beta testing” period — here’s a tip: the Google+ “communities” feature is a breeze to create but a nightmare to populate.  I’m letting students in one class create their own experiential learning portfolios but I haven’t figured out the rubrics or how to assess this yet.  I might get overwhelmed and find myself in the position on having a bunch of portfolios with no criteria on which to grade them.

But for now, I’m willing to put up with this uncertainty (however terrifying).  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Dylan Matthews on Ezra Klein’s blog offers up this great visual from his Washington Post on changes in tax rates in the US over the last century and leads us into a fascinating discussion on what “optimal” tax rates should be (I suggest you read it for the details).

What these wild shifts in tax policy suggest is that our determination of how much we should tax our wealthiest is not based on any pragmatic assessment of what would result in the best policy outcome, but is rather guided by foundational assumptions about what is fair. If you begin with premise that one has an ethical claim to their “property” if earned legally, then a lower rate seems appropriate. If instead you see taxation as a mechanism for calibrating the distribution of “property” in a way that is optimal for society as a whole, then you can argue, as these economists do, for a much higher rate. These economists disagree.  It reflects how ideas matter in policy making.  The drift in the last three decades towards neo-liberal assumptions has guided a lower rate, not any inherent sense that our current rate is “better” or “worse” in any tangible sense than it was in the 1950’s.

What do you think is a fair number for the top income bracket? 31%? 39? 73%?

Great piece in the New York Review of Books by Kwame Appiah reviewing two books on the Obama administration, the latter of which Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal makes a spirited defense of the Obama stimulus bill. Here’s a passage where Grunwald lays out how the simiulus bill delivered on Obama’s promise to invest in a wide range of necessary and far reaching infrastructure projects.

the bill laid the groundwork for many important programs that made good on the “new foundation for growth” promised in the president’s inaugural address:

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

As Grunwald points out, every item on this list appeared in the Recovery Act:

roads and bridges (Title XII), transmission lines (Secs. 301, 401, 1705), and broadband lines (Titles I, II), scientific research (Titles II, III, IV, VIII), electronic medical records (Title XIII), solar and wind power (over a dozen provisions), biofuel refineries (Title IV), electric cars (Sec. 1141), green manufacturing (Sec. 1302), and education reform (Sec. 14005).

As someone sympathetic to the president’s politics, I’m puzzled by his inability to cogently defend what he’s done in office. Malik says it better than I could when he compares Obama’s to Romney’s alleged tendency to “run away from his record”:

But something similar could be said of Obama, whose opponents have made the Recovery Act, as well as the Affordable Care Act, into a political tar baby. When Mitt Romney scoffed in the first debate that half of the green energy companies supported by the federal government had failed, anyone who had read The New New Deal would have wondered where the governor was getting his facts from. They might have been less surprised that the president did not rise to the program’s defense. Something in the president’s personality may be getting in the way of his persuading the people, inside and outside Washington, whom it’s his job to persuade. That, at least, is one reading of the inkblots.

My suspicion is that the campaign has field tested these messages and not liked what they have heard. Fair enough. But when you opponent is pummeling you at least have to hit back with something. it would seem that the campaign has decided that rather than try to defend a “long game” investment approach to economic stimulus, they’ll wait out the clock and run against their opponent. That might work. Conceivably, it is better to keep a necessarily pork-laden stimulus out of the public discussion in the hopes that the opposition won’t nit pick it to death. But if the Romney-surge, to the extent it exists, is based on a view that the president has “done nothing” in office, the president should have had a better “elevator pitch” for why his has been a very productive four years (at least as far as progressives are concerned). If he loses, I think it will be because he didn’t/couldn’t do this. Maybe Appiah is right that the president has a quirk in his personality wherein he eschews back-slapping. If so, he may be looking for a different line of work soon.

In a previous post, I lament the abject laziness of the pundit class this election cycle. As ThickCulture contributor Ken Kambara noted in a comment to my post “I think there’s an irony in our culture that sports get better analyses than the Presidential debates.”

He’s absolutely right! Any football fan is accustomed to serious, detailed analysis of personnel decisions, lineups, formations, etc. Ron Jaworrski’s detailing of how the Saints played a “cover-two” defense against the Rams is standard parlance for an NFL football fan. If a quarterback gets sacked 15 times in a game, pundits don’t blame the quarterback along for the failings of the offensive line. Good football analysts, of which there are many, don’t only talk about the in-the-moment game but they talk about the broader context that informs what is driving performance on the field.

Which brings me to the shameful flabbiness of modern political punditry (elite media included). The choices that the parties and branches are making today is based upon years of tactical maneuvering on the part of both sides that should be make clear to those watching and listening to political shows. If the president isn’t defending his stimulus bill, analysis as to why should be provided.

The Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a longstanding game of chess. Republicans confident that they have the party discipline in the Senate embarked upon an unprecedented, clever and seemingly very effective Congressional obstructionism strategy. This is a longstanding tactic in American politics and as Megan McCardle writes in the Atlantic, a tactic Democrats were able to use to block Herbert Hoover’s agenda.

Obstructionism seldom works as a tactic however because parties are seldom disciplined enough to enforce a complete “blockage” strategy. Individual members are pulled by the dynamics within their own districts to peel-away from their party. In addition, Senators have had a long standing reverence for the institution and its norms. But when you have institutions as polarized as those we currently have (these McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal chart illustrates this well), you can hold a 40+ member coalition together to block any and all efforts at legislation.

With no ideological overlap between Republicans and Democrats, the possibility of getting anything done is remote.

This chart highlights the almost complete uniformity among Republicans in both actual votes and percieved ideology. This is what has allowed this Republican Congress to take the historically sporadic use of the filibuster and make it a permanent practice.

If you read no other article this year before the election, make sure you check out this Romano and Klaidman piece in the Daily Beast. They detail the tactical maneuvering between the Congress and the Executive that set the context for the current election. On one hand, the Republicans have implemented their effective “bunker-strategy.” To wit:

In the last three sessions of Congress, Republicans have threatened to filibuster on 385 separate occasions—equaling, in five short years, the total number of filibuster threats to seize the Senate during the seven decades from the start of World War I until the end of Reagan administration. A recent study showed that post-2007, with Republicans in the minority, threatened or actual filibusters have affected 70 percent of major legislation. In the 1980s, that number was 27 percent. In the 1960s, it was 8 percent. “This level of obstruction is extremely unusual,” says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “And the core of the problem is the GOP.”

In response, the President made a tactical shift in 2011 after the decline of the apparent debt negotiation deal between he and Speaker Boehner. From 2011 forward, the President decided to engage on a unilateral domestic strategy that has stretched the role of the executive. On issues like the Dream Act, the Defense of Marriage Act, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, the President has moved forward using the executive’s administrative rule make and enforcement powers to implement a progressive agenda. This passage notes the President’s shift in strategy:

By Oct. 24, Obama was standing beneath a “We Can’t Wait” banner outside the Bonilla family’s home in Las Vegas—the president’s spontaneous remark had become the White House’s new slogan—and announcing a new, unilateral program designed to help homeowners refinance their underwater mortgages. Two days later, the president was flying to Denver and unveiling a multipart plan to ease terms on student loans. Over the next few months, the president became even bolder, issuing the controversial welfare waivers and making a handful of recess appointments while the Senate was still technically in session. In truth, Obama had been bypassing Congress, on occasion, ever since Republicans took over the House in January. But these isolated gambits—which included the president’s decision to take military action in Libya without congressional authorization—now seemed united under the umbrella of his new governing (and messaging) strategy: if a legislative proposal fails, find an executive order or administrative directive to replace it.

This is the lens through which the President should be evaluated. Either he is an impatient ideologue engaged in an executive power grab or he is a shrewd, tactical politician who responded to unprecedented obstructionism with an unprecedented expansion of executive power. But the media who can’t be bothered to care about actual governing is much more content with having the campaigns spoon feed them messages and are more comfortable talking about dumb affect issues “why was the president asleep”? “Mitt Romney looked presidential”!

This is the biggest disservice to the nation. Politicians are going to seek access to power. That is what they do. It is up to the press and the citizenry to deconstruct what they are doing. So kudos to Romano and Klaidman for letting me know that there are at least a few folks out there who are actually doing their jobs!

Regardless of the outcome, this campaign has dimmed my enthusiasm for the presidential election. Not because of the campaign itself, which is pretty much how campaigns go. My political dyspepsia comes from the across the board laziness of the commentary I usually rely on to better understand the issues surrounding elections. My expectations that news media will actually use the airwaves to inform and educate has gotten even lower. I’ve come to expect that the three cable news networks will present me with nothing of value after debates. What I am discouraged and frustrated about is the absolute lack of Presidential debate contextualization provided by what has traditionally been my “go to” content for news and analysis.

NPR shows like On Point and the Diane Rheem show have stood out for me as good solid sources of information about policy and politics. But their debate wrap-up shows have evidenced a spread of “horse-raceism” from the cable news networks to what have been more substantive sources. On both shows, the analysis was restricted to how effective messages sounded and who candidates were trying to appeal to rather than examining whether the claims made during the debate were accurate or providing a context for the numbers bandied about.

What’s even worse that lazy “punditry” is self-righteous, lazy punditry. I listened to the Slate Political Gabfest after the second debate to hear the panelists lamenting that “the candidates didn’t say anything substantive” without providing any context or analysis as why they might have been calculating in their answers. In none of these podcasts did I hear anyone mention Congress, the Euro Zone or any other institution which might help listeners frame the presidential debates.

As far as I can tell from listening to these “elite media” sources, here is what I’ve “learned”

1) the president is King of the world and his ability to affect world events is completely dependent upon his own demeanor which should be aggressive but not too aggressive because that “turns off swing voters.”

2) Congress and political parties in the United States have apparently been abolished and have no impact on the president’s ability to realize an agenda or any impact on how candidates shape messages.

3) Political polarization and the minority party’s ability to maintain complete discipline within its ranks that allows it to use tools like the filibuster to block the president at every turn has no effect on policy outcomes.

4) Longstanding historical trends in the global economy or current global economic conditions have no impact on decision making. Our economy is entirely self contained.

5) The information that is pertinent to citizens in determining the best course of action for the future is which candidate engaged in the most “zingers” or which candidate flubbed by akwardly referencing “binders.”

6) Politicians are naturally evasive and fail to answer questions because of their own personal lack of character.

TED talks have revolutionized our expectations for how information should be delivered. As college faculty, the straight lecture will not do. Ideas have to be packaged in more convenient boxes.

Here are the top 20 most viewed TED talks of all time. Sir Ken Robinson’s talk has over 13 million views. If you haven’t already, watch one of these talks and tell me why it is so compelling (at least why millions of people have watched them).

Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, it’s useful to read Freidrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, even if only to know where the libertarian impulses of Republican party thought leaders emerge. But lots of people discuss the idea of freedom without much thought to what Hayek actually said. here’s a passage:

Everybody desires, of course, that we should handle our common problems with as much foresight as possible. Hence the popularity of “planning.” The dispute between the modern planners and the liberals is not on whether we ought to employ systematic thinking in planning our affairs. It is a dispute whether we should create conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals are given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully; or whether all economic activities should conform to a “blue-print” written by powerful planners.

It is important not to confuse opposition against centralist planning with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude. The liberal argument is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It emphasizes that in order to make competition work beneficially a carefully thought-out legal framework is required. Competition is not only the most efficient method known, it is also the only method which does not require the coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. It dispenses with social control and gives individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages connected with it.

The successful use of competition does not preclude some types of government interference. For instance, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements. There are, too, certain fields where the system of competition is impracticable. An extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. For example, the harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question. But a few exceptions do not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function. To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies – these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.

I put the social services bit in bold, because it strikes me that we can have a conversation about policies like the Affordable Care Act within these parameters. Is “centralizing” health care like the ACA does part of the “extensive system of social services” that enhances competition, or is it part of the “central planning” that Hayek associated with the path to Facism and Nazism. You can argue either side. On one hand, the demand for health care is inelastic. When you need that surgery, you need it and will pay whatever you can for it. You aren’t going to comparison shop. So perhaps competition in the marketplace isn’t really going to produce the best delivery of care. On the other hand, mandating to employers with over 50 employees that they need to provide coverage to their workers might be the “socialist planning” that Hayek warned about.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could actually debate these things rather than focus on gaffes and polls. I’d give $20 for a question in one of the upcoming debates where the moderator started with… In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek said… Well, one can dream 🙂

Mitt Romney has had what could be argued as the worst three weeks of any presidential campaign in recent history. First, he (or his chief strategists) decides to give a valuable Thursday prime time speaking role during the RNC to let an actor improv with a chair for 15 minutes. Then the candidate makes truly vile remarks questioning the President’s patriotism during an on-going attack on American personnel (if anyone had any evidence of a presidential candidate ever doing this, I’d love to know about it). Finally, Mother Jones magazine releases a video of the candidate at a fundraiser claiming that the 47% of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes are all Obama supporters. These supporters are “victims” that refuse to take responsibility for themselves and as such, Governor Romney feels he doesn’t have to worry about them.

The punditocracy is apoplectic. Claiming that the election is over and marveling at that profound boneheadedness of each individual gaffe. But while the “experts” can signal the end of the Romney campaign, the campaign itself can point to the scoreboard. Look at Gallup’s tracking poll today. Through out this week of gaffes, Obama’s lead has gone from 50%-43% at the start of last week to 47%-46% today. So if you’re a Republican Romney supporter, it would seem that you want your candidate to be committing more of these “gaffes”?

What gives? Well, it appears that these might not be gaffes at all. If you look at this chart from Talking Points Memo, you’ll note that the Democratic party is must more multi-racial/multi-ethnic/multi-cultural in terms of its supporters than the Republican party. As such, an appeal that emphasizes the dangers of multiculturalism (appeasement with external threats, seeing redistribution as welfare clientelism rather than civic obligation) might stick with undecided voters who might be a bit squeemish about the “big picture” shifts in both US and global demographics.

While I don’t think any of these moves were done on-purpose, the Romney campaign may have stumbled on a new campaign strategy – abandon framing the election about economy and have a debate about how to respond to “the other” without and within. Romney can cast himself as the stern, take no quarter, dad who handles global threats the way you would a disobedient, self-indulgent child — you “talk tough” and “pull out the belt” if you need to. Domestically, you “take away the toys” from self indulgent children who need to learn self-respect and manners. It’s an appealing narrative (whatever the social and policy costs), and I wouldn’t discount it’s effectiveness. Granted, I still think the president will win, particularly because I’m not sure this approach works will in swing states. But on
Intrade, Romney chances of winning the election are at 32%… if I were a betting man, I might put down a buck or two with those odds.

I might be officially transitioning into the “old fuddy duddy” stage of life, but this article on the English Gentelman by Andrew Gimson in Standpoint struck a chord. All legitimate post-colonial, feminist critiques aside, Gimson paints an egalitarian and progressive notion of 19th century English gentlemanliness. Gimson references a 1982 book called The English Gentleman to describe the institution:

The idea of a gentleman was a more inclusive one than it sounds to modern ears. One of its greatest advantages was that you could define it so as to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman, without possessing any of the social attributes which a gentleman might have: there was no need to possess a coat of arms, or a country estate, or engage in field sports, or wear evening dress

For me, the concept always smacked of privilege, sanctimony, hypocrisy and conformity. Seared in my mind as an exemplar of “the gentleman” is Ted Knight’s opus to pompousness as Judge Smales in the 1980 movie Caddyshack. One of the more memorable scenes is Ted Knight response to Rodney Dangerfield’s disparagement of his wife’s chastity. In response to the query “wanna earn 14 bucks the hard way”? Smales responds indignantly, “you, you’re no gentelman”!

When I was 13, I wanted to be the Rodney Dangerfield character, who responds “yeah, and I ain’t no doorknob either.” Of course I would, why wouldn’t I. In the movie, Judge Smales is a racist, pompous, sanctimonious jerk. In the movies I grew up with, gentlemanliness was rightly exposed as a bright line to reinforce privilege and as a cudgel to asset moral and cultural superiority.

But that was 32 years ago. What does that leave us with culturally. What is particularly striking about Gimson’s article is his connecting the concept of gentlemanliness to progressive politics:

It influenced their system of education; it made them endow new public schools and raise the status of old grammar schools. It inspired the lesser landed gentry as well as the professional and middle classes to give their children an upbringing of which the object was to make them ladies and gentlemen, even if only a few of them also became scholars.

Where is this impulse in our politics to “do the right thing”? This all strikes me as I watched Mitt Romney, what one would presume would be the poster boy for gentlemanliness, disgrace his party yesterday by criticizing a sitting president while a foreign policy crisis was developing in Libya. This was a move that is more characteristic of an oaf than of gentleman (more Rodney Dengerfield than Cary Grant). Sociologist Ricahrd Sennett talked eloquently about all of this in his 1974 book, The Fall of the Public Man. But it seems that the idea of the “gentleman” public servant is becoming more and more anachronistic in our politics.

But what is hopeful is that the public still seems to look for “the gentleman” in American politics. Fred Kaplan had a good anecdote in Slate yesterday where he imagined what Romney could have done differently:

Imagine if Romney had called President Obama, asked how he could be of assistance in this time of crisis, offered to appear at his side at a press conference to demonstrate that, when American lives are at risk, politics stop at the water’s edge—and then had his staff put out the word that he’d done these things, which would have made him look noble and might have made Obama look like the petty one if he’d waved away these offers. But none of this is in Romney. He imagined a chink in Obama’s armor, an opening for a political assault on the president’s strength and leadership, and so he dashed to the barricades without a moment of reflection, a nod to propriety, or a smidgen of good strategy.

It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, the jury is still out on whether it would have been the politically smart thing to do.