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’sMaking 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.
This will be one of two posts on urbanism by me. The other will involve urban renewal & Obama. I just found out that The Parkway theatre in Oakland is closing. It was divey, but you could get food and wine/beer and lounge on second-hand couches seeing films at the very tail end of their theatrical release. I can recall many a rainy wintry night seeing a film as a diversion during the week. I received this e-mail from the CEO and the President tonight:
“After more than twelve years of serving the great cultural crossroad of Oakland, the Parkway Speakeasy Theater will be closing at the end of business day this Sunday, March 22, 2009. From African Diaspora to Thrillville to lesbian fashion shows and educational porn, the Parkway has offered an eclectic array of movies and events. It was the first theater in California to offer food, beer and wine service in a lounge style movie theater. With a nudge or a push from the community, there was little programming the Parkway theater would not try in order to better be a community center and a safe haven for diverse ideas. The Parkway brought Baby Brigade for the shuttered and abandoned parents of newborns, the first international black gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender film festival and Sunday Salon, a free event for cultural and community enhancement. We, at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater, are deeply proud of the Parkway and will profoundly miss serving its community. Thank you for your patronage.”–Kyle & Catherine Fischer
(Sidenote: I missed the screenings of educational porn.) The Parkway is in a boundary zone in the San Antonio district of Oakland, east of Lake Merritt. It’s a diverse area, where Eastlake (with Southeast Asian immigrants) and the middle class Ivy Hill and Cleveland Heights neighborhoods converge. It’s quite far from the notorious San Antonio neighborhood known as the Twomps. I found The Parkway to be a reason to head to that corner of Oakland and this made me think of the impact on the neighborhood this closure will have.
“Theaters-especially those of historical significance (Elmwood is a landmark)-play a unique role in commercial districts, and their multiplier benefits are widely recognized. It was not surprising that merchants were willing to finance the purchase of the theater, given the research that has been done on the importance of theaters in commercial districts, plus their own experiences. The National Association of Theater Operators had shown that about half of evening moviegoers can be expected to have dinner at a restaurant located within blocks of the theater. Studies also showed that a high proportion of patrons also visit coffee houses and dessert establishments. Further, the volume of ATM transactions at a bank in the neighborhood surrounding the Elmwood declined by more than 1000 per month after the closing of the theater. It was evident to area businesses that it was in their self-interest to revive the theater as a main attraction in the neighborhood. Their investment is paying off.”
From my experiences, the more upscale Elmwood district with more shops and restaurants really benefits from the presence of the theater, despite parking being at a premium. My PO box is at the Elmwood station on College, I pay my Visa bill at the Wells Fargo, and I’ve frequented many restaurants in the area. Unfortunately, draconian zoning regs. caused an indie hardware store to close (a fave of mine), which was also a draw to the neighborhood.
The neighborhood surrounding The Parkway didn’t have a strong sense of community around it, as it was at the interstices of several neighborhoods. It was at the crossroads where the Merritt Café, the WAMU, the Albertsons, the Vietnamese pho place, the Church’s Fried Chicken, and the auto parts chain all resided, but the fact of the matter is it isn’t an inviting place to walk around and hang out. I’m interested in the interface between commerce and community, but I’m wary of too much top-down planning.
I wonder what are the requirements for community stabilization and what should be researched in this area?
I may have to see Revolutionary Road tomorrow at 7 for nostalgia’s sake.
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:
Norman Birnbaum has an enjoyable piece in The Nation about the publication of The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills a collection of Mills vast writings, edited by John Summers. I was struck by one particular passage in Birnbaum’s account of Mill’s view of the role of the intellectual in promoting societal transformation.
the new bearers of a project of social transformation were the intellectual vanguard. Allowed by society to think, but told not to think too much, they resented being denied autonomy–or ascribed the role of court jesters. In the American ’50s, Mills and others across the political spectrum were described not as social thinkers but as social critics. The implication was that the major structures of society would remain intact, no matter what was said.
While Mills might have been too sanguine about the prospects of a revolution by intellectuals (see Paris 1968), these words struck me, particularly combined with the discussion we’ve been having here about Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer on the Daily Show. it seems that we have an obligation to do more, but we hide behind a cloak of scientific objectivity. Others have written more eloquently than me about the rationalization of the academy, and I’m just as squeamish as the next guy about activist academics, but it seems to me there is a third way. We should be producting knowledge that is relevant, critical, and empirical at the same time. But more importantly, we should be more intentional about promoting that knowledge rather than allowing others to do so.
I recomment people read Harold Wilensky’s article in Contexts (I don’t just blog for the company, I”m also a client!) about the impediments to making one’s research policy relevant and the role that institutional structure plays in that process. Props to ASA for trying to move in that direction. In my discipline I think there exists a nagging belief that policy relevance means sacrificing empirical purity. I think I can have my empirical cake and eat policy relevance too (I’ve never understood what that expression means).
March 13th was Pink Friday in California. According to the official site, hundreds of thousands of teachers protested the issuance of 26,000 pink slips as a results of the state’s fiscal crisis. The state’s teachers hope California voters will support a pair of initiatives of the state ballot in late May designed to restore 8 billion dollars in budget cuts passed by the legislature last month.
meanwhile….
8,000 people attended a rally in Fullerton hosted by John and Ken, radio personalities at KFI. The hosts have been at the forefront a resurgent anti-tax movement in California and has been instrumental in pressuring legislators on the right to stand firm against taxes. The rally was intended to garner support for the defeat of California proposition 1A, a series of tax increases designed to fill the hole in the state’s budget.
José’s last post made me think of visualizing processes. Of late, I’ve been thinking about how Jim Cramer had his head handed to him by Jon Stewarton the Daily Show (link to 3/12 Cramer episode). Stewart mentioned how markets are two-tiered, one for the insiders and one for the rest of us. The warnings were out there that the system is broken. One Frontline from a few years ago, Dot Con (2002), talks about how during the dot com boom, initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock were rigged by the powers that be. Another,The Wall Street Fix (2003), discusses the circumstances that led to the World Com bubble that led to a meltdown and eventually a $1.4B settlement between regulators and 10 Wall Street firms.
Sociologists often view markets as social constructions. I tend to view markets as like sausage. You really don’t want to know too much about the details of production. An example of this is Google IPO in 2004, a novel approach which became riddled with turf wars involving the status quo. Google sought to price its initial offering of stock in a more fair and equitable manner, eschewing the “insider” bias typical of IPOs. A 2005 American Sociology Association presentation by Martin Barron noted Google’s intentions:
“Google’s IPO eschewed the traditional method for pricing and allocating shares for an unconventional auction format. This was an attempt to minimize the underpricing of its shares and allow a broader class of investor access to IPO shares. By pursuing this more equitable approach, however, Google threatened the enormous profits that IPOs had previously generated for entrenched Wall Street interests.” —The Google IPO
This NYTimes graphic tries to explain what Google intentions with a modified version of what is called a Dutch auction.
Personally, all you viz kids out there, I think the above is a horrible graphic. I reworked it, as I do for when I teach data visualizations and highlight my (ahem) mad Photoshop skillz:
In my graphic, I have price on the Y-axis & number of shares on the X-axis. Generally speaking, investors bid a given number of shares at a given price. Starting at the highest price, the number of shares bid for is tallied until all the outstanding shares are allocated. The price at which the last bid that allocates all shares becomes the offer price. So, even if you’re the highest bidder, you buy shares at the offer price .
I like the idea of markets actually moving towards satisfying the underlying assumptions that economists make. I feel the Dutch auction moves towards that by reducing the transaction costs that often go to the investment banks and increases fairness by not allowing insiders to buy at a deflated price, only to flip (dump) the stock just after it’s offered and reap huge profits.
Of course, there are consequences for countering Wall Street, as Barron notes:
“… far from passively accepting this challenge to the status quo, these interests actively worked to ensure that Google’s IPO—and hence the auction format—would be seen as a failure.” —The Google IPO
Lo and behold, look at how the business press framed the IPO, despite it being a “success” in Slate: “Four Ways Google Failed: How the IPO didn’t change Wall Street.” So, we arrive full circle to Jon Stewart who quipped that maybe the business press should be more than cheerleaders for the status quo. Perhaps business schools should consider this, as well.
The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S.
Does anyone really believe that there’s a great turning away from large-lot, big lawn, clu-de-sac street homes? We urbanists love to presume that the decline of the suburbs is just around the corner, but we simply don’t see that in consumer purchasing decisions. While there indeed is an urban renaissance, largely driven by twenty somethings and empty nesters seeking the energy and diversity of the city, that is not the mainstream American aspiration.
Here in Thousand Oaks, California, I see little evidence that the suburbs are dying. High end housing prices have fallen, but the market at the low and middle ends seem robust. You hear very little call for “infill development,” greater amenities, or better mass transit options. There still is a compulsion for personal/family isolation and the “capture” of social goods like public schools and crime prevention that many suburban areas provide.
From my own personal bubble, I’ll believe the decline of the suburbs thesis when large local employers like Amgen, Countrywide and Baxter pick up and leave because the amenity package my region provides is not interesting enough to retain knowledge workers. Richard Florida’s creative class thesis would presage this happening but it doesn’t appear to be happening. I’ll keep you posted.
This will be one of two posts on urbanism by me. The other will involve 
