... Mr. Bush said Mr. Kerry had been rated "the most liberal member of the United States Senate." "And he chose a fellow lawyer who is the fourth-most liberal member of the United States Senate," Mr. Bush went on. ...
-- New York Times
Piffle!
This illustration shows one dot for each senator in the current Senate. The blue dots are democrats, the red dots are republicans. There is one green dot toward the left for the one independent senator. The dots are sorted left to right to illustrate their ranking liberal to conservative. The data is from the gold standard in such ranking.
Edwards score on this chart is 19.5; Kerry's is 24.5; and Bush isn't a lawyer only because the University of Texas declined to admit him.
"Groupthink" appeared a lot in the coverage of the recent congresional commission reports. I hadn't heard that term for 20 years; which sent me off to see from whence it came. Irving Janis's work on fiascos and decision making apparently. Why did it fall out of common usage? Why's it making a return appearance?
My insta-theory for it's disappearance is that Americans don't like to admit that groups have any control over our behavior and we particularly don't like to admit that this control might be unconscious and unspoken. For example, if you suggest that people are sometimes manipulated by cults most people will argue either that it was the controlling abusive influence of the cult leaders or that the victims were weak and/or willing.
Janis tries to avoid studying the fiascos that come out of totalitarian or other highly controlled groups. It's obvious that such groups would easily fall victim to narrow minded problem solving. That the resulting blind spots would lead to fiascos is no surprise.
He is looking at the much more interesting case: a group of well meaning capable people where there emerges a highly controlling suite of behavior patterns out of thin air. Well, out of their collective behavior.
It's amusing to contrast this with the work on how complex behavior emerges from the combination of simple bits and pieces. The behavior piles of sand, or groups of insects, or simplistic electrical networks. These days we have dozens of examples of systems where seemingly globally coordinated behavior emerges from surprisingly primitive individual players. For example: that a field of fireflies can synch their flashes with only a few neurons. An entire national electric grid can collapse given the failure of a handful of elements.
It's not a pretty thought and hence people decline to embrace the idea that such coordinated behavior might arise in human groups - arise unconsciously. It's not an empowering idea. If nobody is conscious of it then who do we blame?
This kind of model is very popular in one scenario though. After the fiasco, when the group writes the report that explains what went wrong. It's no surprise that the Iraq commission brought up diagnosis. It offers the chance to avoid blaming anybody.
Consider Janis's model of the antecedents of group think.
- Illusion of invunablity, shared by most or all the members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages taking extreme risks;
- collective efforts to rationalize in order to discount warnings which might lead the members to reconsider their assumptions before they recommit themselves to their past policy decisions;
- an unquestioned belief in the the group's inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions;
- sterotyped views of enemy leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate, or as too weak and stupid to counter whatever risky attempts are make to defeat their purposes.
- direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group's stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that this type of dissent is contrary to what is expected of loyal members;
- self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member's inclination to minimize to himself the importance of his doubts and counter arguments;
- a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent);
- the emergence of self-appointed mindguards - members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.
Fits the Iraq fiasco like a glove doesn't it!
Research like this can be empowering. Once you identify the ailment then you can begin to look for symptoms, treatments, cures.
Laying the blame at the feet of groupthink just doesn't cut it. Sure, groupthink is a failure mode of decision making groups. There are plenty of those! A laundry list in fact. For example overreacting to one constraint in the problem space and thus becoming blind to all the other constraints.
Competent people know how to reduce the severity of these failure modes. That's what you get when you put "proven executives" in charge. While you can't expect each and every person in a group to have this kind of expert knowledge on how to reach effective practical decisions is it too much to ask of the groups assembled to tackle the top few problems facing the nation?
From John Robb's weblog:
On Point. Anonymous (the CIA agent who wrote "Imperial Hubris") speaks. Major points he made:
- Al Qaeda isn't a terrorist organization. If it was, we would have destroyed it several times over by now (NOTE: this supports my term Global Guerrillas).
- Al Qaeda and its ilk represent a national security threat to the US. This is war and it is going to last a long time.
- The tempo of attacks and activity within al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist organizations is increasing.
- We are losing the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fallujah was an important defeat.
- Polls in the Islamic world indicate that our policies are opposed by 80-90% of the people (not our way of life). This is the basis of al Qaeda's support.
- The policies opposed: Our military presence in Saudi Arabia. Our support for appostate regimes in the Islamic world (Egypt and Saudi Arabia). Our unqualified support for Israel. Pressure to maintain low oil prices. Support for regimes that surppress muslims (India and China).
- These policies cannot be debated within the US political system.
- Democracy can't be exported.
- The solution is to revise our policies to meet the needs of the Islamic world because it is in our interest -- or -- if we can't do that, we should be ruthless in our use of military power.
- Our military posture is defensive. It should be aggressive. Our generals have become bureaucrats. To win this militarily, it is going to require a high body count.
- No single official will be faulted in the 9/11 report (and therefore nobody will be fired), despite substantial failures.
- No basis for optimism.
The audio is very interesting. Two points additional points I found interesting.
- Our countries organizational blindness
- The sense of duty and professionalism of a civil servant.
- "We" are precieved of occupying the three top holly sites of Islam.
- Our policies that the Muslim world see as offensive are not under discussion here - at all.
- Totally lost the battle for hearts and minds.
But most disturbing is his general read of the situation. That given our deep structural inability to reframe the situation we will play the only card in our hand. Military power. Which is going to kill a hell of a lot more people on both sides. That, of course, will polarize things yet more.
"Master of the Senate" is about LBJ's rise to power in the Senate during the 1950s. It is an amazing story. Johnson was a methodical and calculating ass licker and sadist. It's is difficult to understate that story. He would enter a community, figure out who were the powerful old men, particularly the lonely ones, in that community and then proceed to suck up to them until they gave him power. Then he would turn around and use that power to demand that those below he brown their noses.
Johnson wasn't a man of high principle; but he was one of strong low principles. He was enthusiastic about to using the weaknesses and principles of others to manipulate them. The 1950s were an excellent time to do just that. The old racists were looking for somebody to hand off the flag to. The young liberals were looking for somebody in the south they could talk to.
There have always been two powerful dialectics in American politics: race and commercial regulatory power. While Master of the Senate would be a better book if it had something to say about the second dynamic the issue of race is the interesting story of that period.
The single most significant shift in American politics of the last 50 years was the realignment of the race card. Entering this period the Republicans were on the side of large economic entities and against the smaller economic entities; in particular labor. Meanwhile the Democrats drew much of their power from the south and the southern democrats were racists. Exiting this period the flag of anti-civil; the fear that "others" would destroy one's sacred culture had passed to the Republicans and the Democrats had lost the South. Johnson rode on the power released by that realignment.
If you don't want to believe that the Republicans now carry the racist flag then you should suffer thru this TV Ad from a Republican cantidate for congress in today's election. It is a horrible classic example of how leaders use hate speech to sharpen the boundries around their group. The kind of speech that leads over time to violence.
Johnson played the power inherent in that dialectic to a T. First he convinced the old racist democratic senate chairs that they were to him "like a daddy." They handed him the power to run the Senate. Meanwhile he convinced the northern liberal senators that he was one of them, that he was their best hope to get something, anything, that would finally bring the vote to southern blacks.
When it became clear that no Southerner would ever be president without making progress on civil rights Johnson turned on his patrons. Over the next decade the power of the federal goverment was used to deliver a modicum of civil rights to the southern blacks and the Democrats lost the South. No wonder Walmart came out of Arkansas. No wonder "For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor’s degrees."
I was quite disappointed by the apology that appeared recently in the New York Times. This version by their "public editor" is better." I certainly hope they aren't finished with this soul searching. I might prescribe some bleeding, drain the noxious humors from the corporate body.
I think they got it right. Mostly.
Mostly?
One of the easy moves when doing PR damage control is to identify a scape goat; pile as much of the responsiblity as possible on his shoulders and then kick him out. If your lucky; the outraged public will then take a deep breadth and give you time to do something more substanative; or better yet they will just wander off and stop bothering you.
Obviously Rumsfeld should go. But it would be a huge mistake to pretend that the cancer who's symptoms those photos reveal will go with him. It's going to take some very serious surgery to cut that cancer out. Not until we as a nation suffer that operation will there be any hope of reclaiming our historical role in the room of nations.
I am afraid we will never reclaim that honorable position. Damn them. Damn them all. Have they no honor? Have they no conscious? Apparently they have no ideas what they have done to our nation.
I see that Kevin Drum is reenforcing the hair-on-fire meme around Richard Clarke's testimony. He stoops to suggesting Clarke is suffering from "monomania." Kevin even signs on to the "clinton-bush-same-policy" meme.
How can Bush and Clinton have had the same policy if Al Quida was the #1 or #2 foreign priority of the Clinton administration while the Bush administration didn't manage to have a meeting about it until September? How can they be the same policy when Rice's essays on what is and isn't important leading into up to their take over barely even mention terrorism and when they do it's only in the context of state sponsors.
The hair-on-fire meme is the most serious accusation, but it's only one of many so far. So far, the opponents of Mr. Clarke have suggested he's gay, and that he's picking on a black woman, that he's a lier, a opportunist, ... we could go on. So possibly we shouldn't be too concerned if the mud that sticks is that he is a "true believer," a man with a mission. But I think that terribly misses the point.
I've been thinking recently that one aspect of this story is how a liberal organization v.s. a conservative one responds when a guy enters the room and announces there is a huge unrecognized problem. For a liberal organization the response is "Sigh, another constituency. Ok, tell me your story and we will see what we can do." For a conservative organization the reaction is "Calm down my son. Your problem is covered in our model, which has worked for years and will endure for many more."
So it's entirely consistent that Clarke was able to get a hearing and make his case in the Clinton administration. In the Bush administration he was considered just another one of those people with their hair on fire.
When ever any large institution changes course the social network of the people involve will have people out in front of the change and people that lag far behind and cling to the old ways. The folks out in front are always characterized as being over the top. Recall that enthusiasm was, until recently, a sin: to believe yourself full of the breadth of the lord. What distinguishes a healthy organization from a stagnant one is that it manages to filter thru the various enthusiasms and integrate in the ones that it must.
Institutions that fail to adapt act progressively more and more dysfunctional as the world around them changes and they don't. At first this dysfunction is indistinguishable from all the usual background noise of the real world. In time it becomes sharper as the mismatch becomes more severe. Finally it is fatal.
It is clear that the Clinton administration was adapting and it's clear that the Bush administration was not. Further it's clear that as the signals from the real world became stronger the Bush administration retreated into their classic old models of how to address the problem.
There was a failure of the Bush administration to pick up the ball from the Clinton administration. Worse yet when they finally found the ball on fire on their front door they reacted by heading off in entirely the wrong direction. Feeding the supply chain of the terrorist networks with huge pool of outraged young men.
Ok so now we have a guy, Clarke, who was one of the folks on the fore front of trying to get the institution to change. He labors for years to help the ship of state change course. He makes significant progress. He suffers a set back when the new administration arrives. Over the months it becomes clear that he's not getting thru to these people. They are deeply loyal to their model of the world and he's not managing to get their attention.
Then the horrible day. No longer is his hair on fire, now the lawn out front's on fire. What do they do? They go in entirely the wrong direction.
What would you do at that point? He did exactly what any well practices organizational specialist would do. He engaged in "object shift." He looked for a different venue in which to make the case. This time he shifted the discussion to the public sphere. Is that excessive enthusiasm, monomania? No that's effective workman like organizational grunt work.
We owe this guy a huge debt. To engage in projection and suggest that he's suffering from narrow minded religious passions is the worst kind of insult. It paints him with the same brush we might appropriately select to paint religious terrorists, the oklahoma bombers, and possibly even the neo-cons.
This is outrageous.
"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."
Please! Read the entire thing.
"But these figures do seem to seriously undermine the slur that the Spaniards lost their bottle after the bombs and decided to cave into Bin Laden."
What a great insult: 'Ah, you've lost your bottle." I assume it's origin is in a sentence like "Oh, poor baby! Did baby lose her bottle. Here here, let me help you."
It would be sad if my blog became entirely political over the next few months, we shall see.
A friend of mine (Hi Claude!) points out that the Bush national security policy that holds that we can't wait for a clear unambigous signal that X is a threat before we apply a can of preemptive wop-ass to X clearly leads to the conclusion that now is the time to get down and dirty on Global warming.
I suspect that this only goes to show that the current national security policy is missing the footnote explaining that these rules of engagement only apply if the experts happen to agree with our preconceived notions on the topic at hand. Actually I'm not sure that experts are required, just notions.
The picture at right shows the increase in vegitation over the last 20 years in the area north of the latitude 30 degrees north.
I do hope that nobody models the example presented by the terror and election in Spain. While it seems implausible that anybody could have predicted before hand the consequence of the terrorist act upon the election. Now that we have one example people maybe tempted to over generalize.
I wonder if there are procedures that could be introduced to buffer an election from such attempts to manipulate it. I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Bleck.
Here’s something I found very thought provoking:
“So far as I can determine, no demonstration ever occurred anywhere in the world prior to 1760.”
That’s from Tilly’s book on violence; he goes on to say that the demonstration quickly spread as a common form of political action in the following century.
So it appears the demonstration is an invention that emerged in tandem with the modern democratic state. Which makes perfect sense in Tilly’s model of violence. I.e. that only high functioning democratic states can sustain a large range of political activities while at the same time avoiding contentious violence emerging from those activities. Of course a strong state that’s not democratic proscribes such activities – in fact in some points in history the authorities would have to officially set aside the law against assembly on market days. A weak democratic state might allow them; but they run a much higher risk of that they will turn violent.
In Tilly’s model any society hosts assorted affecting changes to the status quo while it forbids other ways.
- Forbidden - for example just taking what you want.
- Tolerated - making a petition to the king.
- Contentious – public debate, violent demonstrations
- Proscribed - for example the electoral process is highly proscribed.
Contrast these to two aspects of state structure. It's ablity to regulate and how democratic it is. His term for it's regulatory strength is capacity.
A state that lacks the capacity to regulate things will find that it has to tolerate a large range of activities, can proscribe only a few things and sadly it will host lots of highly contentious activities. A democratic state will strive to tolerate more and it will tend to provide a larger range of alternative, but proscribed, means of achieving your ends. Thus it appears that only as high functioning reasonably democratic states began to emerge that demonstrations became tolerated, and the means to proscribe them emerged that could avoid their becoming highly contentious.
It helps to think about example like Iraq, India, China, Massachusetts. For example I'm very impressed by the response in Spain to the recent bombings.
The demonstration is kind of a hybrid of the procession and the petition. He provides a nice concise definition of the beast: A) Gathering deliberately in a public, visible, and often-symbolic place, that B) displays membership in a politically relevant constituency so as to c) presenting a position on an issue; typically via voice, words, and symbolic objects; in a manner that d) proves by acting in a disciplined manner the group’s determination, and coordination (hence the marching).
He even provides a scorecard: Worthiness, Unity, Numbers, and Commitment to get a sense of the scale of a demonstration. “Five prisoners rhythmically beat their cups on the lunch room table before desert was served.” just isn’t as awe inspiring as “Four thousand veterans marched on the capital to spend the week lobbying.”
There are 115 million households in the United States, and the per household share of the deficit is $67 thousand dollars each; in December 2000 the per household share was $29 thousand. About $9.5 thousand a year; how big was your household's tax cut?
It is bogus; i.e. the report that senators make more money in their stock trading than the rest of us.
Yesterday evening I had to listen to a long peice on NPR about the recent propoganda that Senators do better with their investments than regular folks followed by a long unappolegetic slander along the lines of where their's smoke theres fire.
There is a disturbing meme in the culture these days that nobody could possibly do anything except for reasons of self interest and greed. This creates contempt for our public institutions, encourages their distruction, and models a very bad behavior. Be careful what you wish for. If you announce that everybody in trade X is a crook pretty soon the crooks will all go into that trade.
The rational choice (aka greed) is not the only cause of human action. Maybe some people are talented.
Tune stuck in my head this morning.
The water is wide I cannot cross over And neither have I wings to fly Build me a boat that will carry two And both shall row My love and I
Hard to coordinate the creation of public goods.
Modern life has too many questionaires. Marketing is always trying to "listen" to the customer voice and give the impression that they are somehow democratic. The hotel has a questionaire; as does the new tv; the car dealer; the magazine; the conference; the speaker; the employeer. I'm thinking of handing one out to my children. These are full of question where you are asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 5 how your feeling about the product or the experiance.
Strategic voting is somewhat disparaging term for votes that serve the long term agenda of the voter but might not reveal his actual feelings. For example if three cantidates are running and you are far to the right you might be tempted vote for the most far right cantidate; but you best strategic vote is to vote for the middle cantidate so as to temper the chance the far left cantidate will win.
So looking at these all these damn questionaires I find myself thinking that I have two choices. I could vote strategically or I could reveal my true feelings. For example the hotel form says "Do you like the minibar." Now I would prefer that there isn't a minibar, but it doesn't particularly bother me. So I could check of 3. But if I actually want anything to happen then my strategic best choice is to vote the maximium.
In a sense each of those votes from 1-5 is a small vector force on actions that might be taken by other people. If I know what action I want them to take why would i ever not vote for either the minimum or the maximum?
Of course one reason would be if I know they have limited resources. For example if I know they will only work on one of the items then I should pick that one set the maximum vote, and then set all the other votes to their minimum.
Sometimes I get the results of surveys like this delivered to me. One thing I notice in that situation is that some people just vote their favorite number. I.e. they will go down the form and check off the #4 in every box. Since what happens with these surveys is that they are immediately fed into statistical analysis a vote like that just sifts the median of the population. Since the decisions about what to work are based on picking out the outliers it's proably best if you try to get the maximum dynamic range in your votes.
I can't see why it would be unethical to engage in strategic voting in these situations. I've noticed that people always seem to react to the discovery that some voters are doing it with distain. For example I worked on a conference once were the jury for papers had six members. Only one of them clearly understood that he should maximize his dynamic range and individual votes. The result was that the papers he wanted to have presented mostly got onto the agenda.
The world is just never as simple as it looks, but I'm not talking to anybody who votes for Nader in the next election.
Bush's top two contributors? Enron and MBNA. Shooting Fish in a barrel indeed.
Felton Earls' term for the single most important determinant of a neighborhood's violent crime rate is "Collective Efficacy:" "Trust, reciprocity, and a willingness among people to look out for one another."
"Our national ideology gets spun off in the direction of individualism," says Earls. "But maybe the survival of our country demands that we balance that strong ethic with the admission that we're in it together."
It's nice when $50+ Million of public health research returns something that's solidly useful (example article: Science (pdf)}. "It is far and away the most important [crime] research insight in the last decade," said Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice from 1994 to 2000. "I think it will shape policy for the next generation."
This same research program has finally shown the Broken Windows to be just a bunch of fuzzy thinking. Broken Windows was a very popular hypothisis that crime arises from disorder; for example the unrepaired broken window. It's popular with authoritarians since it licenses them to demand that other people clean their desks and gives them an excuse to arrest the shabby or homeless. It confounds cause and effect.
This nice peice of research (pdf) both fails to substantiate the silly idea but also demonstrates that collective efficacy is a much more valuable predictive variable. Meanwhile the research is delightful because they collected so much data so very carefully.
(See also this:NY Time's Article).
One of the textbook examples of a network effect is the ATM network. The more ATMs in your network the more value your customers will perceive in opening a bank account with your bank. All else being equal customers will pick a bank with a larger network of free ATMs. For very small banks, those with only a hand full of offices, this became a serious competitive problem about a decade ago. To solve the problem these banks formed branded ATM networks. In my region, for example, a large number of very small banks formed a network known as SUM. The SUM network allows me to bank with a small bank but get the advantage of a large free ATM network.
So yesterday I stopped to get money and the ATM machine announced that the bank I was in had withdrawn from the SUM network. My first reaction to the bank’s withdrawal was ‘traitor.’ The question arises why would a bank decide to “go it alone.” The small banks are locked into the alliance in common cause against the large banks. Presumably Citizen’s Bank, the one that withdrew has decided it’s now a large bank and can compete own it’s own. I presume that the costs of participating in the alliance of small banks have now risen above the benefits of remaining in the alliance.
This is, of course, the same question as why California or New York remains part of the federal union. California, like all the industrialized states, sends more resources into the federal union than it get’s back.
This is also much like the problem that faces the very rich. Since they can “go it alone” they have less incentive to continue to support the common cause of public schools, public transportation, public recreation, public policing. As they come to have their own schools, transportation, recreation, police the incentive to contribute to the commonwealth declines.
The choice to “go it alone” does not arise because one is rich in absolute terms, but because one is rich in relative terms. For example, they have very luxurious school buses in the town a friend of my resides in. In that down the citizens can maintain their commitment to public transportation and education because their wealth is relatively uniformly distributed. Common cause is much easier when the parties are homogenous.
Meanwhile I have a friend who lives in a large cooperative apartment building. They have trouble agreeing to spend the money to spruce up the lobby because some owners purchased their units at a time when real estate prices were extremely depressed (these folks are merely middleclass) while other people purchased their units when prices were extremely inflated (these folks are very upper-class). The result is that for year the lobby stagnated until a tenant showed up who could negotiate a solution to the resulting coordination problem, i.e. had political skills.
In the case of California, or the citizens of a town, or the residents of a Coop; leaving the alliance is hard. You can call that lack of mobility, sticky, or loyalty. In the bank example I find myself wondering how the SUM network’s governance documents were framed. Should they have been written to make it harder for Citizen’s Bank to exit?
| Average/Year | President |
|---|---|
| 32 | Reagan |
| 58 | George H.W. Bush |
| 65 | Clinton |
| none! | Bush |
The Endangered Species Act was signed 30 years ago. President Bush is the only president to refuse to list a single species. I guess we are done.
Meanwhile: a third of all species, extinct in 50 years.
History, Ismael Reed once said, is the story of warfare between secret societies. I'm not ready to go that far, but I think it's fair to say the history of U.S. foreign policy over the past forty years has been the story of the war between two not-so-secret societies: the neoconservatives and the realists. And it now seems the realists have won another battle -- although perhaps not the war.
...
The neocons may be down, but they're not out -- and aren't likely to be, not as long they continue to enjoy the support of the ultras: the Christian conservatives, Sunbelt demagogues, Arab haters and hyperpatriots that constitute the Republican Party's popular base. The realists may be the ones who have a clue about how to run a foreign policy, but the neocons are still the ones with the political juice.
common themes that are generally identified with the neocons: contempt for international organizations and the concept of multilateralism; impatience with traditional balance-of-power diplomacy; a cultish devotion to the use of military power; an outspoken belief in the superiority of Western culture and political institutions; a messianic vision of America's mission to "civilize" the world, which at times (Max Boot) makes them sound like caricatures of old-fashioned European imperialists. And of course: an intense identification with the state of Israel, and a willingness, even eagerness, to use American power to protect and further Israeli security interests.
Matthew Yglesias writting in response to Fareed Zakaria says:
This idea that if a project wasn't worth doing it is worth abandonning halfway through certainly isn't true as a general proposition. Say the government allocated a few million dollars to build a wasteful bridge, and now it's almost done but before it can be opened they need $50 more in order to paint the lines on the road. It would be pretty silly not to support the additional money at that point, since not opening the bridge isn't going to get you your money back.
The topic at hand is what reasonable people's position ought to be regarding our commitment to Iraq - Do we stay, do we go?
This is a discussion that ought to be had, more carefully, more calmly. This comming year is going to be a lousy time for calm analysis though.
I like the bridge metaphore, in part because I use to help think about exchange standards. Exchange standards lower the transaction costs for two parties to move back and forth betwix each other. They create network effects the players on both sides of the bridge get locked into the habits of using the standard; i.e. the players climb the experiance curve. Complementary products and services pile on to make areas around the bridge more valuable. Thus London grows to complement to London Bridge.
London Bridge - tourist attraction in Arizona
Of course it's silly to even paint the lines on the bridge if the bridge doesn't go anywhere.
So one part of the challenge in thinking about the cost of finishing the project in Iraq is figuring out what the upside is. Those that lead the charge into theis enterprise hoped it would create the hub around which the entire gulf and the middle east could be reframed. That's a delightful, if hegemonic, goal. But does anyone believe that anymore? Few I think.
Lacking that clear benefit we seem reduced to more prosaic benefits. An unthreating, reasonably peaceful, and prosperous Iraq that provides a good example for others in the region - for example.
The problem with bridge building, standards creation, and other organized public goods is that it's extremely hard. Many voices have to be convinced to sing the same song. That can only happen if you have reasonably strong leadership that people respect and follow and you can demonstrate clear benefits to all parties so they expend the effort to get there.
We seem to lack all these. In particular we pissed off whatever chance we had of grabing the reins of leadership going into the project thru our arrogant behavior. Of course if you can demonstrate sufficent cost/benefit people will follow even arrogant leaders. The tough nut is that nobody in this debate is currently providing a credible story that generates substantail cost/benefit. Mostly all we get are benefits that require far too much faith coupled with a general undercurrent of denial about the costs.
I gather that some people think the distinction between a liberal and a leftist is that liberals believe that goverance demands the balance of many interest groups, while a leftist believes that discussion must be framed in terms of power. I guess that makes me a bit more of a leftist than a liberal.
I'm surprised that the recent problems that the European Union has had deciding on voting rules to embed in their constitution hasn't given rise to more discussion around the blogging community. It's a classic hard problem. How do your translate existing power and institutions into the voting power of new institutions? In the US we carry the legacy of that same debate in the disproportionate power of low population states in the senate. Which in turn is only reason our interstate highway are more grid than scale free network while our cities lack robust public transportation and good schools.
Meanwhile the Repulicans are revisiting the meme: "ownership society". That's such a transparent argument for voting rules based on wealth vs citizenship. People fall for that?
The IRS is getting prepared: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8302.pdf
This map of bloggers revealed place on the political spectrum is very analogous to this statistical model of politics that I find just fascinating.
From Stuart Robinson's blog two contrasting posts. One about an absurdist satirical web site who's maker has now disappeared after the Chinese authorities came to visit. One about how weblogs and email are giving the folks back home an upclose and personal window into the Iraq war. That reminds me how TV news did the same for the Vietnam war. Let's not forget: the forces which be found a ways to defang TV news.
I have a particular beef with the so called "broken windows" theory of policing. In brief it's the theory that when the rich man abandons or fails maintain his property the police should round up the homeless and throw them in jail.
So I noted this quote: 'Ali Omer, a young writer in Baghdad, commented, "I discovered the draw-back of democracy, it dirties the walls!"' from the Utne Reader
As well as this one from the New York Times (which has a very obnoxious tendency to move their articles inside their walled garden). The "I" in this quote is Frank Gehry, the architect.
I have my own version of the "broken windows" theory of urban decline. It's called the "cheap glass" hypothesis. Both concepts deal with the power of small causes to produce big effects. The broken-windows theory, which got great play in the Giuliani administration, states that when smashed panes aren't quickly repaired, it signals neglect and decline. Neighborhoods become targets for burglars, who beget drug dealers, prostitutes, muggers, murderers.
The cheap-glass theory states that when so-called "value engineers" are hired to reduce building costs, mirror glass quickly follows. Mirror glass induces low self-esteem, depression, poor citizen morale, reduced productivity, strained personal relationships and ultimately broken windows of the soul. This is not the way to go.
Brad's mystery is solved, and by the entertainment industry no less.
Reading elsewhere "We are at war." ... "When the Islamist butchers are dead, it will be over." I am reminded that "we" do not know who we are at war with.
There are plenty of individuals and groups confident that they know, but there is no consensus.
Possibly we are war with rich angry young men like those who lead Al Queda. Possibly we at war with the vast soup of poor angry young men who's most sophisticed source of learning is the local religious school. Possibly we at war with the problem of societies who's civic structure is so weak they can offer no better alternative than that. Possibly we are at war with the ease with which a lone actor, or small group of actors can create terror and destruction far beyond thier size. If that's a war against the way technology give ever increasing leverage to individuals. Maybe we at war with pirates. Maybe we are at war with authoritarian tyrants like Sadam Huessen or Iraq or Joesph Smith of Nigeria. Maybe we are at war with religous cults. Maybe we at war with those who demonize and polarize. Maybe we are war with problem of goverments so tenous, so weak that they tollerate terrorists or 'harbor' terrorists.
Possibly we are war with those who would use terror to drive people out of the middle ground and into the simple minded fringes. A place where the retoric is colorful, emotional, and wrong.
In the paper today is an article about a currenlty popular approach to dealing with bing drinking on college campuses. It contains this wonderful quote: '''Part of the enthusiasm about social norming is that so little has worked in the past,'' Wood said. ''Practicewise, it's extremely popular. Sciencewise, it's a little preliminary.'''
My son and I enjoyed an amusing conversation about a thick book he's reading about the British Empire, the Middle East, and all that. He says: "They didn't know what they were doing." I say: "Good lesson there, one rarely does ... though there is some comfort in pretending." He say: "Oh they were quite confident they knew what they were doing." I say: "Probably a general rule there. Given that nobody knows diddly, and a large population of possible actors, the sorting hat will see to it that those who are arrogant enough to pretend they know what they are doing will rise to the top and do something." Since everybody around them will be pointing out that we really don't know what we are doing they will become more and more arrogant and better and better at dismissing everybody else as useless irritants. Once you get rid of all those generators of negativity you can then get down to maximizing on your own self interest.
I'm glad that modern empire builders don't suffer from this syndrome.
A lovely example of Bruce Sterling's hypothisis that the implosion of privacy will make it very very hard for the elites to maintain any sort of reputation.
The ever interesting Josh Mashall writes early today about the various colors of lying that folks are trotting out in an attempt to comprehend or forgive the misleading evidence used to justify that war in Iraq was necessary urgently, now, immediately, with no time to build a concensus.
These folks are bullies. They bullied our allies. They bullied the intelegence community. Thy bullied the military planners. They bullied the congress. Given the oportunity they bullied everyone who asked a question.
To me, the question of "did they lie" vs. "were they victums of a massive self delusion" misses the point entirely. Lies and delusions are the direct result of encouraging bullies.
We need to be clear about this.
Raising the debt ceiling: $1,000,000,000,000.00.
My nation: 300,000,000 people
Added debt:$33,000 per person
My town: 42,000 people
Our share: $1,400,000,000.00
Our tax override: $4,000,000.00
If we passed one override every single day for a year: $1,460,000,000.00
Wonder were all that money from the rising debt is going!
Respectfully represent unto your Honorable Board the undersigned, that they are inhabitants of the Town of Arlington, in the County of Middlesex, in said Commonwealth, and residents of that portion thereof known as the Winter Street District; that one Richard M. Johnson is occupying or using certain buildings and premises in said Arlington for the purpose of carrying on and exercizing the trade, occupation or business of collecting, storing in pits and vaults, carting, selling, delivering in various other ways, exposing on said premises on said Winter Street the articles commercially and commonly designated "night-soil;" that said trade, occupation or business is a noxious and offensive trade and occupation, is a nuisance, is hurtful to the inhabitants; is dangerous to the public health; that the exercize is attended by noisome and injurious odors, offensive smells and exhalations, and is otherwise hurtful and dangerous to the neighborhood.
That your petitioners have applied to the Board of Selectmen of said Town, acting as Board of Health, to prohibit said Johnson from the use of said premises for the exercize of said trade, occupation or business, and to cause said nuisance to be abated, removed and prevented.
That said Board of Selectmen have failed to effectually remove said nuisance and prevent the exercize of said trade on said premises.
Wherefore your petitioners humbly pray that said Johnson may be prohibited from the further use of said premises for the exercize of said trade, occupation or business, and that said nuisance may be abated, removed and prevented.
Petition signed by Wm. A. Fitzpatrick and 29 others
From the facinating newspaper abstracts site.
In the early 1970s as we pulled out of Vietnam, Richard Nixon went insane in the whitehouse, and Albert O. Hirshman wrote an facinating short book called Exit, Voice and Loyality: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States.
Hirshman, an economist, noticed that members of an organization have three broad choices about how to respond when the organization goes into decline.
- Exit - They can leave.
- Voice - They can argue for change.
- Loyality - They can remain silent and loyal.
Different situations demand different mixes of these three. One is far more likely to use voice and loyality to tackle a problem at home, say with your children. The bias is toward using exit to tackle a problem in the marketplace, say a problem with the television show your watching.
I'm sure that recently many of us have wished we could change the channel and stop watching the war show. Politics is not the marketplace, it's where you live.
Yesterday I listened on the radio to the impassioned plea of a man that now was a time for the nation to draw together. A time for loyality to our troups, to our President. A time for solidarity against the threat our nation faces. A threat that 9/11 so vividly illuminated.
Hirshman points out that there are situations where exit becomes extremely difficult - citizenship for example - and where then only voice and loyality remain as choices. He goes on to point out that in some such situations - criminal gangs, totalitarian regimes for example - voice maybe eliminated entirely.
Yesterday a number of people spoke out against the today's war, and a number of other people told them to shut up. When exit isn't an option telling people to shut up is a very dangerous move.
It is thinking like this that leads: to loyality tests, to paranoia about outsiders, to interment camps.
Here's a perfect example of how that reflex uncoils. The other day Richard Perle, one of the leaders of the neoconservative movement that advocates kicking some butt to make the world a better place called a famous and respected reporter a terrorist because he wrote an article pointing out some linkages between Perle's business dealings and wealthy Saudi businessmen.
Or consider what the president said in during his only recent press conference speaking first about Mexico not getting onboard with the his war plans: "I don't expect there to be significant retribution from the government (what's significant?), but there might be a reaction like the interesting phenomena taking place here in America about the French, a backlash against the French, not stirred up by anybody except the people." For those who oppose the United States, "there will be a certain sense of discipline."
This kind of "your loyal or your out" is a big stick to pull out when people can't exit. Mexico isn't able to stop being our neighbor. The American population of people who look a bit like they might have come from Mexico can't all up and leave. And here we find our President threating them all with "discipline"? It is offensive.
Those who are leading us into war are playing the loyality card. They are playing it to silence the voices of the rest of us. They should be more careful. They should be ashamed.
My nation is going back to Iraq. I am deeply ashamed of my nation today. I am afraid of my nation today.
Iraqi solder, last Gulf War
I spend some amount of my time working on the problem of identity systems for the Internet. It is a complex problem with Citizens, and Firms, and Goverments, and Non-profits, and Criminals, and Platform vendors, and Incompetent people all messing about.
All those parties are attempting to find solutions in the face of very powerful forces. Forces making storage, computing, and communication rush toward vanishingly cheap. Forces that are dragging more an more info about your personal, employement, financial, travel, etc. etc. life out onto the web - in a rush to make things more efficent for you and the organizations you interact with.
Bad guys can do bad things with that data, and it's getting easier and easier for them to search it out. Most systems protect the data by demanding that you provide a little info about yourself to prove to them your who you claim to be (or at least somebody who knows you well). For example they might ask for your birthday or your social security number, maybe your place of birth. It's just random personal stuff and as privacy breaks down that stuff becomes easier for a bad guy to figure out.
For example the University of Texas had a web site which let you get access to your info by providing a little info - in this case your social security number. Well that was a mistake. A bad guy proceeded to try one number at a time. Searching the entire space of social security numbers? With 9 digits in the social security number that's a billion tests - a pretty big number even today for trying one at a time over the web.
Lucky bad guy! Turns out the social security numbers handed out in one geographic region come from the same block of numbers. So he focused his attention on the Texas blocks.
A sad irony that "social security" is creating one of the more common ways to create insecurity for people's identity.
This is a hard problem. It's going to be very hard to fix!
As the mayor of New York comes clean on his membership in the hyper-upperclass he oil'd the water: 'we should get over it.' We? Well he did distributed 2% of the wealth (i.e. 100Million dollars) to charity; but since his wealth rose by 400 Million he appears to be falling behind.
Maybe this would be a good time for Mitt Romney, my Governer, came clean as well. That would be a good step before he follows thru on his plan to sell the state university system to private developers.
Crooked politics on the left pay their supporters with jobs, crooked ones on the right sell off public assets to their friends.
There is a lovely pattern that arises in science from time to time. You measure something, notice something, fit a model to it and discover something you really didn't know before. It's hard to believe that such a thing could happen in Political Science. But now it has.
Some years ago it became popular to wisely opine that there was no difference between the two political parties in the United States. The dangerous consquence of this line: "Why bother voting."
Can we prove this argument true or false? Yes.
Some years ago Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal asked a surprisingly simple question. Can we reduce all politics to a single number? Such a number might, for example, measure how liberal-conservative our elected officials are.
This is a satistical question: e.g. given that model how well does the data fit? A computer problem. You write, or acquire, a computer program that chews on the data and tells you how well it fits your model.
So they set out to see if they could assign a senator or congressman a number and then use that single number to predict how they would vote on any given bill.
My sense is that when Poole and Rosenthal first asked this question they assumed that awnser would be a "no, not really." I think they hoped that later when they added a few more numbers to measure a representative's belief system then they would start to get better models. Models that fits better and better.
Of course any student of political science knows a laundry list of reasons why representatives vote in ways that are not well alignmented with their core beliefs. Just a few examples: log rolling (voting in one period to get something in a later period), party loyality (voting with the party to gain the benefits of loyality), pork barrel (voting to benefit your region), bribery (voting to benefit those who paid for your campaign), etc. etc.
Poole and Rosenthal took the historical record of votes in the Senate and tried to fit their very simple model to it. The idea was that every representative would get a number and every bill they voted upon would too. The bill's number would slice thru space of Senators and those on one side would vote for it, and those on the other side would vote against it.
For example Senator Lefty might have be assigned -2, and Senator Righty might get asigned +3. If a bill was slightly to the right at 1, then Senator Right would vote for it and Senator Lefty wouldn't. But a bill that was extremely leftish, say nationalize the computer operating system business might be at -4 and niether of them would vote for it. Pretty dumb model huh?
The statistical problem, the one they handed over to the computer program they wrote, is to find the best numbers for all Senators and all the bills. The model that generates the fewest errors. If you get a lot errors the model is crummy, if you get a few then the model's pretty good.
You want it to find the best definition of left/right. When doing this you don't want to bias the program's output. Notice that if you have 50 senators and you want to put them in order from left to right there are N!/2 possible orderings, or around 10 with 64 zeros following it, that's a big space to search. Between 1789 and 1985 the Senate held around 40 thousand roll call votes. That's around 2.3 million times some Senator maked a decision. This must have been a fun program to write.
One reason they started with such a lame model was that the problem is so huge. The second reason they did the project was they were offered time on a big computer and they were looking for a Political Science problem to tackle.
What Pool and Rosenthal found was that they could use a single number to explain around 82% of the votes. They must have been amazed.
Here's an example. This chart (taken from this paper) shows the distribution of representatives in the congress in 1997-98.
You can also plot the data over time, as shown in this graph (take from this paper) of where the median of each party's represenatative is from 1945 thru 1995.
Later when computers got bigger they were able to try two and three numbers. They are very slightly better. Adding a second dimension only improves the model's fit by 2%, but it adds a lot to our understanding of the what these numbers mean.
Here is a chart (taken from
Of course to design your bill you'd need to know what the axis mean. The computer won't really tell you that. It just found a model that fits. What do they mean? Some guesses might include: liberal/conservative, north/south, black/white, poor/rich, democrat/republican, urban/rural. Clearly we could go on and on!
Well it turns out that the horizontal axis is about the regulation of commerical activity. Goverment does many things that structure the markets that commerical activity takes place within. Setting standards, printing currency, writing the regulations. The key to the left/right axis is the extent such regulations serve small vs large players in the economic arena.
Consider a bill that regulates industry to make the workplace safer. When crafting the bill we could decide to have the bill effect all companies with more than 100 employees, or alternatively all companies with more than 20 employees. The representatives on the left will prefer more worker safety, the ones toward the right will prefer less industrial regulation.
It turns out that for most of American history the vertical axis is about race. The southern Democrats on that chart are were once called "dixicrats", they supported regulating commerical activity, but they didn't have much enthusiasm for voting rights for black citizens.
I can not even begin to enumerate how amazing this work is. For example there are numerous widely known models of how politics is played in this country. Models that this data allow you to check. For example it's widely assumed that representatives on a given committee don't represent the position of the congress at large because they have special interest in the work of the committee. The model show that's not true. For example it's widely assumed that representatives shift their positions over time as the opinions of the general population shift - that's absolutely not the case. In fact it appears there is really nothing as consistent as a representative.
The hardest idea to get your head around that this model implies is that any issue, the environment, for example must be projected into this model before the vote takes place. There is no such thing as a highly pro-enviromental right wing representative!
The model also allows them to watch the congress evolve over the centuries. To see when there were significant shifts in the population of representatives; and hence upheavals. You can see periods when the two parties overlap; and periods when they are highly partisan. For example the parties grew very partisan running up to the civil war, and we are currently living in a period that is the most partisan since that time.
The book is not for the casual reader. Someday soon, hopefully, a more accessible popular version of this will come out. To get a taste for how the book reads you can read this article about the recent mess that Senator Trent Lott got himself into.
A few new nieghbors showed up in the last 24 hours, and one notices that Amazon will give you a window into what they know about you by going this link.
This Amusing Rant provides food for thought when thinking about the Bush administration's rush to hand over the keys to various Goverment assets to their friends. Me? I've diversified some of my retirement savings into Euro denominated investments.
Bertrand and Mullainathan's paper showing how a white sounding name vs. a black sounding one is far more likely to get called back when submitted on a resume just won't get out of my head!
Table 2, on page 30 of this paper has a table I just can't stop thinking about. It reports that if Brad submits a hundred resumes he will get 16 calls, while Rasheed can expect to get 3.
People like to talk about how hard working and dedicated immigrants are. Well now we know why Rasheed's so hard working. He's scared! He's going to have to work five times harder than Brad to find a new job if he looses the one he's got.
It suggests something about why there seem to be so few participants of non-european ancestry involved in Open Source. They are common in Silicon Valley. Just maybe they don't want to take the risk.
Back in the late 1970s I worked for an venerable research firm. BBN, a lot of smart folks doing interesting work. The firm was generally profitable. It never managed to make any big money.
That firm was wiped out in what Fligstein in Architecture of Markets describes as a shift in how we as a society conceptualized firms. In 1970s firms were measured by how effectively they leveraged their assets. In the late 1970s that model was thrown into chaos by high inflation rates.
Chaos often results in changes of self concept, and so it was with society's model of firms. Two complementary ideas arose in the early 1980s. One was that the right measure of a firm was 'shareholder value'; i.e. the amount of money a firm returns to it's investors. The second was the creation of a siginificantly more fluid market for the control of firms (e.g. Regean era reductions anti-trust enforcement, and reduced corporate taxes).
BBN thrashed around for a while after that. Finally it got senior management that understood the new rules; even if the smart guys never did. Finally it sold out to a telecomm company. The shareholders made some money and the firm was destroyed.
Today in my inbox I have email from the alumni mailing list of BBN. One of the last remaining bits of the firm recently went bankrupt. Some of those smart folks are now losing thier health insurance. Cobra coverage is one of those pesky liablities a bankrupt firm can shed.
The recent news stories, reporting the arrest of some crooks who apparently stole the identities of tens of thousands of people, pull my cord. There are three aspects to this story I feel are not getting sufficently reported.
First. The victims have no effect way to recover their lives. Once your identity is stolen repairing it is nearly impossible. This is a horrific breakdown that is entirely the fault of the financial industry and it's partners in state and federal goverments responsible for regulating the industry.
Second. Consider a principle of property law. A property owner need not take particular care to protect trespassers from injury on his property, but the so called "attractive nuisance doctrine" is the exception. If the property "invites" the trespasser by virtue of its attractive nature then the owner become libel. Children (and the stupid) are the part of the public the law is attempting to protect with this doctrine. This is why we put fences around swimming pools and why we don't leave guns in the bed side table. It would be a crime not to.
Most of the reports about this crime point the finger of blame at the crooks. I think if you: pour gasoline all over a room, leave matches on the table, and then let a few million people wander thru. I find it very hard to argue that the idiot who lights the match for the resulting fire.
Third. $60.00 each. That's all the crooks got when they sold each person's identity. That's it. That's all your identity is worth in the open market.
The crime here was a failure to regulate this industry. A failure to work with the financial industry to keep a lid on this mess. A nearly total lack of effort to temper the misery it inflicts on innocent people.
The polls have been closed here for 40 minutes. When does the Supreme Court tell us who won?
Groups with a common interest have an extremely difficult time coordinating their behavior. Even if coordinated behavior would reap a significant common benefit.
For example there are numerous tragic stories of neighboring towns standing by while fires distroyed a village or city because previously their fire departments failed to coordinate the size of their hose fittings.
Coordinating behavior for common gain is particularly difficult in competitive environments, like the marketplace. One thing that will drive the players in a market to pay the coordinating cost is a common threat to their survival. A common foe.
Here's a facinating example. The hyper-competitive Whitehouse reporters banded together against their common foe, the president's press secretary.
That kind of event sometimes is the precursor of standard setting.
I wonder if the term "projection" first arose in psycology or in mathematics. In math it is used to describe the process of mapping the members of one set say {north, south} into another set say {rich, poor}. In psycology it is the name of a syndrome where the individual projects his own world view onto others. For example if I am greedy I presume that others are greedy. Projection is a thrifty ways of looking at problems. You take something you have a rich model for and you project it on some other problem your not familar with.
Doing this rewards you with a comfortable model you can work with in the new domain. For example if we have our {north, south} -> {rich, poor} mapping in hand then we can start making all kinds of silly inferences. The north is cold, so the rich are cold. The south is humid so the poor are wet. The north has seasons so there is a business cycle. It's all a little silly; but yet somehow plausible. Project gives you good stories to tell and allows you to seem fluent in domains about which you know little.
Projection of one's beliefs on others is common. For example when the right wing accuses the left of dominating the press they do so because they expend so much energy doing just that. They announce that the supreme court is dominated by liberal justices because they have labored long and hard to see to that it isn't. So this is why the right's accusations about liberal ideas seem so bizzare at first blush. They are not statements about liberal ideas they are about the right's ideas.
With that in mind look at this amazing, but incomplete, list of " what conservatives really believe". No wonder they accuse liberals of being pessimistic.
I need to ask my sci-fi reading friends if this plot twist has been used yet. It's obvious once you think of it. In the corporate police state of the future when the police will round up suspects and interogate them they will call it market research. Welcome to Florida.
And should that fail to be sufficently bizzare for you: guess who's building the detention camp in that place outside of all international law - Guantanamo Bay? Go on guess first, then take a look.
It would be bad to become paranoid.
Manichaeism: A dualistic philosophy dividing the world
between good and evil principles or regarding matter as intrinsically
evil and mind as intrinsically good.
Simple models are a big help in reasoning about stuff. They help you visualization. They generate analogies. They are easy to teach. They give course work an outline. Often they can be tested. They provide a coloring book that the scholar or student can then fill in.
The simplest models are the Boolean ones, the dialectics: good and evil, black and white, rich and poor, north and south, left and right. These are great for debating clubs. They are much easier to project into each other: good, black, poor, south? Of course projection can be dangerously simplistic. While models are good for graduate seminars dialectics are good for PR messaging.
That said this is a thought provoking essay by Robert Kagan on the growing culture gap between the United States and Europe. There is little doubt which overly simplistic dialect he's projecting this into.
The title is "Power and Weakness". I'd rather that he'd called the essay "Muscle or Speech".
Kagan is a conservative who edited the book "Present Dangers". A very crude caricature of which is that America must not fail to take up the white man's burden for should we fall to who will create the foundation upon which liberal democracies may thrive? Carry a big stick, and use it.
The dialectic Kagan's essay chews on is that the Americans are more drawn to the use of their superpowers. In the military sphere the our power seems mind boggling disproportionate to the rest of the planet. Europeans are drawn to using multinational negotiation to tackle hard problems. They have had a lot of practice including two world wars where they choose to try muscle rather than speech. This dialectic arises from fundamental differences about which tools the two camps have at hand. We have a powerful military; they have deep talents at multinational negotiation.
The dialectic also arises out of an even more fundamental aspect of how power operates. If the power is distributed disproportionately to a very few those few have little trouble coordinating it's application. If, on the otherhand, power is spread out a little more uniformly amoung the players then then to get stuff done the players need to coordinate actions to achieve goals that benefit them. Concentrated power has the luxury of authoritarianism, a diverse middle class must use the tedious tools of a liberal democracy.
Those with the power to act can and usually do. By necessity those in the second tier must be more skilled at coordinating their actions if they wish to have 'similar power'. But then, usually in these kinds of power struggles the second teir find a new form of power, something that goes around the "The Maginot Line" of the old power.
What I think Kagan misses is that the Europeans are only just beginning to figure out how to use the power that their unification brings them. That when they do that power will be different in character than American power. That difference will make it hard for American's understand.
It is a classic story amoung your business school crowd. Upstart with alternate model of how to go about a business displaces existing player that has become muscle bound. Don't fight the last war. We live in interesting times.
The Republican Party in New Mexico tried to bribe the Green Party there to run cantidates. No need for the Republican party chairman to resign - he was just acting as a messenger for an unidentified source in Washington, D.C.
I don't have much sympathy for third parties. We have a two party system here and third parties are very disruptive. If you want change then you have to change one of the parties.
The Republicans were buying a far left cantidate with two purposes in mind. First: the Democrat would lose votes on his left. Second: if he moved toward the left in an attempting recapture those votes he would lose votes on his right.
This is what George Wallace did on the right during the civil rights era and what Nader did on the left in the last election.
Assorted reviews of Kevin Phillips's book WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY: A Political History of the American Rich.
A review in New York Review of Books by Jeff Madrick. "the fabulous personal fortunes of the 1980s and 1990s now rival and in some ways even exceed the mythical fortunes of the Gilded Age."
"Phillips then goes on to argue that such excesses of wealth and greed and inequity have helped bring down--or may even have been the chief cause in bringing down--virtually all flourishing great powers in the past" Yale historian Paul Kennedy writing in the LA Times
Phillips writing in a Q&A sidebar to that article: "Conservatives tried to make class conflict something to frown on in 1896 and 1932, but without great luck. The turning point came when the success of the New Deal greatly reduced the share of wealth and income going to the top 1%, and as democracy and a middle-class ethos carried into the 1950s and 1960s, "plutocracy" began to seem like an old threat that no longer existed. Now the concept of an economic "over-class" is as relevant again as it was in 1896."
Bruce Reed's review from Washington Montly "... a funny thing happened on the way to the class war: The rich won."
From Princeton economist Paul Krugman's editorial in the New York Times "an influential body of opinion has reacted to global warming and the emergence of an American plutocracy the same way: 'It's not true, it's not true, it's not true, nothing can be done about it.'"
Kevin Phillips, "Market Extremists Amok," The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 13, July 15, 2002. Kevin sure can write a full scale rant. "Extreme politics, in this new form as in others before it, has a distinct regional home. As much as the ideological excesses of the left in the 1960s evoked Berkeley, and the militia groups on the right were a Rocky Mountain phenomenon, the market mania of the last two decades has centered on Texas -- economic Lone Ranger country, where market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism have joined to create a uniquely strident culture."
Paul Magnusson's review review in Business Week. "Phillips compares the U.S., post-September 11, to Holland in the early 1700s and Britain in the 20th century, when each nation, at the peak of its economic power, expended its energy and treasure in a burst of warfare."
Phillips quoted from the transcript of Bill Moyers' interview on PBS: "a dynasty is a dynasty is a dynasty and these problems are there, and this incredible amount of money is ... is just staring this country's historical role in the face "
NPR interview (real audio) "a ten fold increase in wealth in seven years" for the top 400 in the nation; never before.
Audio interview (real audio) from Radio Nation. 47% of the nations wealth is in 1% of the population's hands.
Amazon Editorial Reviews, Customer Reviews
Joe Conason's review in New York Observer writes: "What makes Mr. Phillips’ analysis so radical is his insistence on examining the roots of the great fortunes—and revealing the state power that underwrote so many of them."
Price compairson: addall and abebooks. The author's web site for the book.
Interview on Minnesota public radio.
Chapter One appeared in the Denver Post.
Diane Rehm's interview from WAMU in DC.
KCET - Life & Times Town Hall SpecialTranscript. "In 1981, the average of the ten highest compensated corporate executives was $3.45 million. In 1988, the average of the ten highest compensated was $22 million. In 2001, the average of the ten highest compensated was $155 million. You know, that's a 45-fold increase." or "Middle fifth, the average household cash income in the middle fifth, sort of your medium household, $31,700 in 1979, $32,600 in 1989, $33,200 in 1997. Now we got to the top one percent, $256,000 in 1979, $507,000 in 1989, $644,000 in 1997."
Article from LA times by Kevin Philips circa 2000. "In the 2000s, just as in the 1970s, the 1930s and the 1890s, a tough bear market and its aftermath could be what brings about an economic, governmental and regulatory overhaul. A serious stock-market decline always serves as a political as well as financial indicator. Brother bear--the Ursa Major of economic disillusionment--has been the power behind populist and progressive booms from William Jennings Bryan through Franklin D. Roosevelt."
July 8th 2002 Article from The Nation Dynasties! by Kevin Phillips. "Only at first blush is there silliness to the idea of the United States--the nation of the Minutemen, John and Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson--becoming a hereditary economic aristocracy."
Review by Scott London. 'The growing ineffectiveness of American government is part of a larger "reversal of fortune" where political and economic influence has shifted from the grassroots of America to a new "guardian class" in Washington.'
Atlantic Monthly: A wordy dialog between James Fallows and Kevin Phillips.
Audio interview and call-in on The Connection, a radio program on NPR. "The top 10% of about 80% of the publicly traded stock."
Kevin Phillip's is one client of the Leigh Bureau. Here is his biography from their speaker's catalog.