Public Policy and Governance – Page 230

Labels Aren’t Analyses

Not long ago, in response to one of my periodic posts decrying policies that ignore evidence in favor of ideology, I got an email from Peter Germanis, who writes as “Peter the Citizen” and takes the unusual approach of evaluating policies on the basis of whether they actually work, rather than whether they are labeled conservative or liberal.

Peter attached an exchange from Poverty and Public Policy that reproduced three of his articles on poverty and welfare.

Peter’s background certainly entitles him to his chosen label, which is conservative: between 1986 and 1996, he helped President Reagan develop and implement his welfare reform policies, and he has worked with the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, both of which are very conservative advocacy and research organizations.

Here are some of the things Peter says about TANF, the much-ballyhooed “bipartisan welfare reform” that is considered a great success by Paul Ryan and others intent upon reducing expenditures on social welfare.

The suggestion that TANF helps people out of poverty is–by any objective analysis–wrong.
TANF is not welfare reform; it is welfare to states, not the needy.
TANF is really revenue sharing; states use a considerable share of TANF funds to supplant state expenditures.

Peter points to Texas as an example of how TANF actually works. He notes that in 2014, for every 100 poor families with children, only five received TANF cash assistance, and the state invests little of its TANF block grant to provide education, training or work supports for the working poor. In fiscal year 2014, Texas used just 20% of its TANF funds to provide what Peter designates as “core welfare reform activities”–basic assistance, work activities and child care.”

In the wake of the election, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans plan to apply TANF’s “success” to other social welfare programs, and they have issued a proposal along those lines titled “A Better Way.” As Peter writes,

The Task Force’s Report for reforming the safety net is a seriously flawed document–it would not solve problems, it would add to them…As described above TANF is not “welfare reform”; it is not a “success” it is Truly a National Failure (TANF). The fact that conservatives do not understand this suggests that they do not have “A Better Way”–they have “The Wrong Way.”

Conservatives like Peter the Citizen represent a once-vibrant and now-dwindling strand of intellectually honest conservatism, and the recognition that the labels we employ–liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist–are frequently short-hand for categorizing and discarding (or embracing) policies without bothering to evaluate them. More of his work can be accessed at this link.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I think there is one other difference between the bygone conservatism of people like Peter and what passes for conservatism today. The conservatives who used to be engaged with poverty policy genuinely wanted to help poor people. They might disagree with liberals about the best way to go about it, but the shared goal was to enable impoverished Americans to become self-sufficient. Today’s “conservatives” aren’t simply uninterested in honest analysis; they are uninterested in actually helping poor people. Their idea of “success” is spending less money on social welfare so that they can reduce taxes on the wealthy.

Because after all, poor people don’t vote, don’t contribute and don’t employ lobbyists.

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Speaking of White Privilege….

In the wake of the election, there has been a renewed call to get rid of the Electoral College–or at least modify its operation via the National Popular Vote Project to require electors to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote.

The Electoral College was originally a concession to the slave states, allowing them to “count” their slaves (albeit at a discount). Today, it has all sorts of pernicious and undemocratic effects. Not long ago, Jamin Raskin, who teaches Constitutional law at George Washington University, summed up a number of those effects in a post to the American Constitution Society’s blog. Raskin noted that,

in the absence of the Electoral College, it would no longer make strategic sense to “turn off the lights and fly over 40 states – from California to New York, Texas to Vermont, Georgia to Mississippi, Hawaii to Alaska, South Dakota to Montana, and so on.” And he disputed the argument that the rest of the electorate “should be content to be long-distance spectators because the voters of Virginia or Arizona or Florida are just like us and are effectively acting as proxies for our interests and our values.”

This was precisely the argument that was rejected in the American Revolution.

The British tried to convince the American colonists that they didn’t need their own elections and representatives in Parliament because they were “virtually represented” by members back home representing Englishmen of similar views. The colonists rebelled against this insulting doctrine of “virtual representation,” which they treated as an assault on political liberty and authentic democracy rooted in the politics of place. Roughly 140 years later, we similarly rejected claims that women didn’t need the vote because they were adequately represented by men.

Every citizen’s vote should count equally in presidential elections, as in elections for governor or mayor. But the current regime makes votes in swing states hugely valuable while rendering votes in non-competitive states virtually meaningless. This weird lottery, as we have seen, dramatically increases incentives for strategic partisan mischief and electoral corruption in states like Florida and Ohio. You can swing a whole election by suppressing, deterring, rejecting and disqualifying just a few thousand votes.

My own biggest “gripe” is, as I have previously written, the extra weight the system gives to votes from rural areas. In effect, urban votes count less and rural preferences count more–an anti-democratic result. But an analysis by Vox has confirmed that it isn’t only voters from more thinly populated areas who are privileged by the system. The Electoral College also privileges the votes of white Americans.

The probability of one person’s vote being decisive, we found, ranged from roughly one in a million for a resident of New Hampshire — a swing state with a relatively small population — to less than one in one billion in states that are reliably “red” or “blue,” such as New York, California, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

We can use a similar approach to show how the Electoral College increases not just the weight of voters in swing states but the weight of voters of certain ethnicities — based on their distribution across the states. We find that, based on the current distribution of voters of different ethnicities across states, and particularly within swing states, the Electoral College amplifies the power of white voters by a substantial amount….

After running the numbers, we estimate that, per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category.

I’m sure that analysis warms the cockles of Bill O’Reilly’s heart. (I assume he does have one. Somewhere.) It doesn’t do much for mine.

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Big Tobacco’s Poisonous Legacy

Lung cancer is not the only legacy of Big Tobacco, and arguably not even the worst.

In the years when tobacco companies were fighting emerging medical evidence of the links between smoking and deleterious health consequences, including cancer, they developed a diabolically effective strategy; rather than arguing that the science was wrong, they claimed it was inconclusive, that no one really knew whether cigarettes were the cause of people’s illnesses. The research was inconclusive.

That tactic worked for a long time, and as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse recently wrote, it has been the playbook for efforts by fossil fuel interests to delegitimize scientific consensus about climate change. In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, Whitehouse called upon universities to confront the tactic.

The threat is simple. The fossil fuel industry has adopted and powered up infrastructure and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science. That effort has coalesced into a large, adaptive and well-camouflaged apparatus that aspires to mimic and rival legitimate science. The science that universities support now has an unprecedented and unprincipled new adversary…

The science-denial machinery is an industrial-strength adversary, and it has big advantages over real science. First, it does not need to win its disputes with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion of a dispute. Then industry’s political forces can be put into play to stop any efforts to address whatever problem science had disclosed, since now it is “disputed science.” Hence the infamous phrase from the tobacco-era science denial operation — “Doubt is our product.”

Doubt is aided and abetted by the absence of universally trusted news sources (Where have you gone, Walter Cronkite? A nation turns its weary eyes to you…), increasingly sophisticated propaganda purveyors, and the very human tendency to engage in confirmation bias.

As Whitehouse says, the fossil-fuel apologists and climate-change deniers don’t waste their time in peer-reviewed forums. Instead, they go directly to Fox News and talk radio, to committee hearings and editorial pages. “Their work is, at its heart, PR dressed up as science but not actual science. So they go directly to their audience — and the more uninformed the audience, the better.”

Our universities and other organizations engaged in the enterprise of science struggle for funding. Not so for the science-denial forces. You may think maintaining this complex science-denial apparatus sounds like a lot of effort. So consider the stakes for the fossil fuel industry. The International Monetary Fund — made up of smart people, with no apparent conflict of interest — has calculated the subsidy fossil fuels receive in the United States to be $700 billion annually. That subsidy is mostly what economists call “externalities” — costs the public has to bear from the product’s harm that should be, under market theory, in the price of the product. These $700-billion-per-year stakes mean that the funding available to the science-denial enterprise is virtually unlimited… Make no mistake: in every dispute that this denial machinery manufactures with real science, it is determined to see real science fail. That is its purpose.

As Whitehouse points out, given the strong connections between the incoming Trump Administration and the fossil fuel industry, we can no longer depend on government to be an honest broker and a defender of legitimate science. Hence his plea to universities and other scientific organizations — to join together and step up a common defense.

Sometimes, it all seems like a bad dream…..

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Dissing Science

I’m hardly going out on a limb with the prediction that the next few years will be tumultuous. A manifestly unqualified candidate who lagged the “loser” by nearly 3 million votes will occupy the Oval Office, and he has sent daily signals that he intends to dismantle important institutions of American government and pursue policies that most of us will bitterly oppose.

Our government hasn’t been working properly for some time; hopefully, once the fever breaks–assuming our utterly clueless “Commander in Chief” hasn’t destroyed us all in a nuclear war– this unfortunate election is likely to precipitate a crisis that will force us to make long-needed repairs to our civic infrastructure.

Of course, in the interim, if Trump and the Republican Congress follow through on their threats to shred the social safety net, a lot of people are likely to suffer and die before the damage can be undone.

The two biggest dangers we face under a mentally unstable President and a cabinet filled with know-nothings, however, will not be “fixable” at some saner future time. One is the prospect that Trump actually will use nuclear weapons in response to some provocation; the other is that his administration will set back efforts to abate climate change until it is too late to ameliorate much of the damage.

I understand climate change denial from people like the Koch brothers, whose economic interests are tied to fossil fuels. I’m at a loss to understand the success of their cynical disinformation campaign with people who should know better.

A recent New Yorker article quoted George Orwell,

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not just that we’re easily misled. It’s that, by “impudently twisting the facts,” we can convince ourselves of “things which we know to be untrue.” A whole society, he wrote, can deceive itself “for an indefinite time,” and the only check on that mass delusion is that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” Science is one source of that solid reality. The Trump Administration seems determined to keep it at bay, and the consequences for society and the environment will be profound.

Case in point: Myron Ebell–who heads the EPA transition team.

In the aughts, as a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, he worked to kill a cap-and-trade bill proposed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman; in 2012, when the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a meeting about the economics of a possible carbon tax, he asked donors to defund it. It’s possible, of course, to oppose cap-and-trade or carbon taxes in good faith—and yet, in recent years, Ebell’s work has come to center on lies about science and scientists. Today, as the leader of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-climate-science group, Ebell denies the veracity and methodology of science itself. He dismisses complex computer models that have been developed by hundreds of researchers by saying that they “don’t even pass the laugh test.” If Ebell’s methods seem similar to those used by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse health effects of smoking in the nineteen-nineties, that’s because he worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry.

When Ebell’s appointment was announced, Jeremy Symons, of the Environmental Defense Fund, said, “I got a sick feeling in my gut. . . . I can’t believe we got to the point when someone who is as unqualified and intellectually dishonest as Myron Ebell has been put in a position of trust for the future of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate we are going to leave our kids.”

We can eventually fix the damage a Betsy DeVos will do to public education; we can (probably) repair the damage to civil rights likely to be done by Jeff Sessions, and the sorts of unfortunate measures likely to be taken by others in the cast of inexperienced and unqualified characters being nominated for cabinet positions.

But if major portions of the earth become uninhabitable–and millions of people die or are forced to migrate as a result–a return to sanity and respect for science and “solid reality” will come too late to repair the damage.

As someone once said, elections have consequences.

Tomorrow is Christmas; I’ll try to be more cheerful….

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The Business of Government

Americans like to believe that government should be run like a business. That belief–pernicious and naive– helped elect Donald Trump, and its persistence is evidence (as if any additional evidence is needed) of the public’s profound lack of civic literacy.

Should government be run in a businesslike fashion? Of course. Is managing a government agency “just like” managing a business? Not at all.

A former colleague recently shared an article addressing the differences between business and government. Addressing the “myth” that anyone who can run a successful business can manage government, the author noted

This is not a 21st-century — or even a 20th-century — phenomenon. In a classic 1887 article, Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Princeton University, maintained that there was a “science of administration” — arguing, in effect, that there were principles of management that transcended the context in which they were applied. “The field of administration is a field of business,” wrote Wilson. “It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics.”

Later observers and scholars of public administration thoroughly discredited this notion. The pithiest statement on the topic came from Wallace Sayre of Columbia University, who argued in 1958 that “public and private management [were] fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects.” In 1979, Graham Allison, then dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, used Sayre’s comment as a launching point from which to examine similarities and differences. He noted that both private firms and governments must set objectives, develop plans to achieve those objectives, hire people and direct them toward the achievement of objectives, and manage external environments. But he observed that the way in which these things occur is often fundamentally different from one sector to another.

The article lists some of the important ways in which private enterprises differ from public ones.

Government is about this thing called the “public interest.” There is no such animal in the private sector. Private firms care about their stakeholders and customers; they do not generally care about people who do not invest in their businesses or buy things from them. Thus, accountability is by necessity much broader in government; it is much more difficult to ignore particular groups or people.

Private-sector performance is measured by profitability, while performance measurement in government needs to focus on the achievement of outcomes.

Compromise is fundamental to success in the public sector. No one owns a controlling share of the government…. The notion of a separation of powers can be anathema to effective private management. It is central to the design of government, at least in the United States.

Government must constantly confront competing values. The most efficient solution may disadvantage certain groups or trample on individual or constitutional rights. In the private sector, efficiency is value number one; in government, it is just one of many values.

Government has a shorter time horizon. In government, the long term may describe the period between now and the next election. Thus there is a strong incentive to show relatively immediate impact.

Government actions take place in public, with much scrutiny from the press and the public. There is no equivalent of C-SPAN showing how decisions are made in the corporate boardroom. Corporate leaders do not find it necessary to explain their every decision to reporters.

When corporate executives are elected to run cities or states, they often expect to operate as they did in their companies, where they made the decisions and others obediently carried them out. But legislative bodies–even those dominated by the political party of the chief executive–are not “minions.” They too are elected officials, and they bristle (rightly) when a mayor or governor or president presumes to issue orders. Successful relations between the legislative and executive branch require negotiation, diplomacy and compromise–and those aren’t management skills generally found among corporate CEOs.

Trump and most of his cabinet nominees lack any government experience. Most also lack any education relevant to the missions or operations of the agencies they have been tapped to lead. They don’t know what they don’t know.

And it has become quite obvious that the concept of “the public interest” will be new to all of them….

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