Category Archives: Random Blogging

Ouch!

The most recent Bluegrass Poll has found that Mitch McConnell is slightly less popular than President Obama among Kentuckians. (To put that in perspective, in 2012, Obama lost Kentucky by nearly 23 points. This may look dismal, but it’s not so bad when you consider that Congress overall polls as less popular than either cockroaches or colonoscopies…)

It’s been a long time since a Senate leader lost a re-election bid, but independent polls have challenger Alison Lundgren Grimes leading McConnell by 4 points. There’s a lot of time until November, and McConnell will have a lot of money, but his predicament–and his vulnerability–illustrate an increasingly common dilemma for GOP candidates.

Republican candidates have moved so far to the right in order to avoid or defeat Tea Party challengers that they have compromised their appeal even to the less extreme members of their own party. One problem is that, in the age of the Internet, it is no longer possible for either Republicans or Democrats to pander on the “down low” to their respective party bases in order to win the primary and then do a quick pivot to the center for the general election. Every email, every Facebook post and tweet, is forever available to opposition researchers and casual “googlers” alike.

Furthermore, as important as money continues to be, thanks to the Internet, communicating your opponent’s voting history, indiscreet tweets and other political miscalculations is far less expensive than it used to be.

This is a dangerous time for all incumbents. Disgust with Washington is palpable. How citizens’ anger and fatigue will play out across the political landscape is anyone’s guess. Democrats, especially, need to remember the time-honored rule: you can’t beat somebody with nobody–defeating even unpopular incumbents requires a strong candidate. (Speaking of which, Democrats in Indianapolis need a strong mayoral candidate yesterday.)

In Kentucky, Ms. Grimes appears to be that strong candidate. And the “turtle man,” as Jon Stewart refers to McConnell, is definitely unpopular and struggling.

It remains to be seen whether 2014 will be the year that citizens decide they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore–but in Kentucky, at least, prospects for change are looking up.

Comments

Cause and Effect

One of the first rules of academic research is: don’t confuse correlation with causation. In other words, just because two things are related doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other.

Of course, sometimes there is correlation and causation; one thing did cause the other. In those cases, the trick is figuring out which is cause and which is effect.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, economics reporter Annie Lowery took a closer look at the conventional wisdom that marriage “lifts children and families out of poverty.” As she notes, no one disputes the fact that “where marriage is, poverty tends not to be.” There is a definite correlation between marriage and a whole host of positive outcomes for children and families.

That, however, doesn’t tell us that marriage cures poverty. Indeed, recent research suggests we’ve gotten the equation backwards. Living in poverty is a barrier to getting and staying married.  W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, puts the issue rather starkly: “Unless we improve the fortunes of poor working people, particularly poor working men, we aren’t going to see marriage coming back.”

The research strongly suggests that the biggest problem facing impoverished people isn’t the fact that they’re single. It’s–wait for it–not enough money. And until that problem is addressed, all the millions of dollars spent on programs offering “relationship counseling” and marriage promotion might just as well be flushed down the commode.

Maybe the millions of dollars going to the various providers of “faith-based” marital advice and middle-class “values” counseling might better be spent on ameliorating poverty. Love is grand, but food comes first.

Comments

Hollow Government

Media commentators are finally beginning to understand something that academics have been warning about for well over a decade: when government contracts out–“privatizes”–too aggressively, it loses critical capacity. In the memorable phrase of one researcher, it “hollows out” government’s ability to perform.

Steven Pearlstein, a respected business columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote

Two of the biggest news events of the past year have been the leaks about top-secret snooping by the NSA and the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. But in an important way, they are both manifestations of a story that has been unfolding for decades — that of a federal government that has outsourced too much of what it does to private contractors while allowing the quality of its own workforce to atrophy.

Much of the public debate about outsourcing has focused on the management challenges involved, the undeniable opportunities for favoritism and corruption, and confusion about when constitutional limits on government action should be applied to private contractors doing government’s work. Less attention has been paid to the danger Pearlstein addresses, although it has been highlighted by several scholars: government is losing its capacity to perform, and with it, the capacity to manage the performance of others.

Recognition of the problems caused by indiscriminate contracting have been mounting. The Office of Personnel Management recently announced that final quality reviews for background investigations will be conducted by government employees — not contractors.  According to Federal News Radio,

The news comes amid an employee’s whistleblower lawsuit, also joined by the Justice Department, alleging that the government’s largest background-check contractor, USIS, had improperly signed off on hundreds of thousands of background investigations that had never been properly vetted — a practice known as “flushing” or “dumping” records. 

Although he identifies market ideologues as largely responsible for the federal government’s excessive reliance on contracting, Pearlstein also places considerable blame on the need to “work around” outdated bureaucratic rules and intransigent public unions.

Not only are there caps on the number of government workers, but there are also caps on government pay that ignore the realities of the marketplace — and that, too, has driven the outsourcing trend…..

In the end, taxpayers are not only indirectly paying the higher salaries they refuse to pay directly to government employees — they also wind up paying for the contractors’ profit and the costs of winning and managing contracts.

Pearlstein notes that federal contracting grew from about $200 billion in 2000 to about $550 billion in 2011 before falling back to $450 billion last year, and that sixty percent of that was for services. By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are salaried government workers. As I have previously pointed out, we are not making government smaller–we are just making it less visible,  less efficient and less accountable.

[L]ong before the botched rollout of Obamacare, even the Professional Services Council, the leading trade association for federal contractors, was complaining publicly that too many agencies lacked skilled workforce to manage the contracting process — in particular, contracts for complex new computer systems.

Those who want to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub are evidently getting their wish. It should remind us to be careful what we wish for.

These Folks Aren’t Climate Denialists–They’re Worse

I recently read one of those blog posts you come across these days–the kind that is so ridiculous, so insane, you assume–usually correctly–that it’s another urban legend. But this one bothered me, so I investigated, and found confirmation in the very reputable Guardian.

Like many countries, Nigeria has already begun to see the effects of climate change. So the wealthy are building a new, privatized city that will be insulated from the effects of  the rising waters.

It’s a sight to behold. Just off Lagos, Nigeria’s coast, an artificial island is emerging from the sea. A foundation, built of sand dredged from the ocean floor, stretches over ten kilometres. Promotional videos depict what is to come: a city of soaring buildings, housing for 250,000 people, and a central boulevard to match Paris’ Champs-Élysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue. Privately constructed, it will also be privately administered and supplied with electricity, water, mass transit, sewage and security. It is the “future Hong Kong of Africa,” anticipates Nigeria’s World Bank director.

Welcome to Eko Atlantic, a city whose “whole purpose”, its developers say, is to “arrest the ocean’s encroachment.”

And who will occupy this new, privatized fortress against the elements? Certainly not the millions of poor Nigerians who will be left to fend for themselves–quite literally abandoned to the elements.

Those behind the project – a pair of politically connected Lebanese brothers who run a financial empire called the Chagoury Group, and a slew of African and international banks – give a picture of who will be catered to. Gilbert Chaougry was a close advisor to the notorious Nigerian dictatorship of the mid 1990s, helping the ultra-corrupt general Sani Abacha as he looted billions from public coffers. Abacha killed hundreds of demonstrators and executed environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who rose to fame protesting the despoiling of the country by Shell and other multinational oil corporations. Thus it’s fitting for whom the first 15-story office tower in Eko Atlantic is being built: a British oil and gas trading company. The city proposing to head off environmental devastation will be populated by those most responsible for it in the first place.

Evidently, once it is no longer possible to deny the reality of climate change, the self-identified “makers” of the world–in the US that would be folks like the members of ALEC, the managers and owners of energy companies, and of course the infamous Kochs and their ilk–will simply secede from the earth they’ve polluted.

Welcome to our dystopian future.

Comments

As Long as We’re Rhyming

The meme of the moment, which annoys the hell out of me, is “makers” and “takers”–a sneering dismissal of the plight of the less fortunate and a wholesale rejection of their labor and aspirations, not to mention their human dignity. The maker/taker formulation assumes that comfort and privilege are the result of merit and responsibility, and that need and/or misfortune is a sign of irresponsible behavior, sloth or “poor decisions.”

It is an utterly self-serving construct– a latter-day Calvinism that equates poverty with moral defect and success with evidence of God’s approval.

As long as we are labeling with a broad and unfair brush, let me offer another rhyme that “slices and dices” human society into easily caricatured categories: Thinkers and (Kool Aid) Drinkers.

Thinkers occupy a complicated world, where issues are often thorny and their solutions partial and/or nuanced. Thinkers try to make their assessments based upon the best available evidence; they employ reason and logic in arriving at their conclusions, and (in the best tradition of the scientific method) such conclusions as they reach are usually tentative and subject to revision if and when contrary evidence emerges.

Drinkers, on the other hand, have imbibed the Kool Aid. They don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, because God or Fox or Marx or whoever already told them what to believe. Every argument is tested against whatever bumper-sticker philosophy or religion they cling to; if the argument is consistent with what they already “know,” they accept it. If it isn’t, it isn’t even examined; it’s summarily rejected. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias;” exasperated Thinkers call it cherry-picking.

Every society has both Thinkers and Drinkers, but Drinkers proliferate in times of rapid social change and uncertainty. When the proportion gets out of whack–when we have way too many Drinkers (or worse, when we’ve elected too many of them)– our political institutions no longer function.

Social scientists spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make Drinkers think.

The prospects aren’t good.

I’ve recently come across some political psychology research that is extremely worrisome: when people who are invested in a belief– people who have “drunk the Kool Aid”–are presented with irrefutable evidence that the belief is false, they don’t abandon it. Instead, they cling to it even more tightly. They believe it more fervently. The “birthers” are a good, albeit extreme, example. (No birth certificate ever issued will convince them that the black guy in the White House is legitimate.) Creationists and climate-change deniers are others.

Most of us can come up with plenty of other examples, from the brother-in-law who sends those racist emails to the biblical literalists demanding that the legislature do (their version of) “God’s will,” to those who believe the world is composed of “makers” and “takers.”

Facts and evidence don’t move these folks. They don’t see shades of gray, and they are impervious to logic and reason. Show them mountains of data–most poor people work 40 hours a week, low taxes don’t create jobs, American health care ranks 37th in the world, not first– the Drinkers simply won’t believe you.

The Drinkers are driving me to drink.

Comments