Ship to Shore

For the past week, I’ve been on a cruise ship in the Atlantic, mercifully isolated from local news—except for the few minutes in the morning when I allow myself to log on to the ship’s expensive internet. I check my email and post to my blog—then it’s off to read a good book, eat (and eat, and eat) and marvel at the advanced age of all the other passengers. (Seriously, the average age on board looks to be in the mid-80s. One fellow told us that all of his children are on Social Security. I’ve rarely felt so young….)

That said, several friends have forwarded articles about the FBI’s arrests in the City-County Building earlier this week. Others have forwarded Matt Tully’s acerbic column about Greg Ballard’s continued absence from those pesky executive responsibilities that are thought to accompany a mayor’s position. Still others have shared a post in which Paul Ogden pointed to the enabling effects of the Star’s lack of reporting—let alone investigative reporting—on matters at city hall.

I find all this depressing, but not surprising.

As many of the readers of this blog know, I served as Corporation Counsel and my husband served as Director of the Department of Metropolitan Development during the Hudnut Administration. No mayor is perfect, and Bill Hudnut certainly had his faults, but lack of oversight wasn’t one of them. Both he and my husband were well aware of DMD’s power, and the potential for its abuse, and both were vigilant overseers of the Department’s activities. (As were the four full time reporters who covered the City-Country Building at the time.)

But then, both of them were deeply immersed in municipal management issues; they were long-time students of urban politics and policy.

Then there’s Greg Ballard.

Ballard campaigned as an outsider who touted his lack of knowledge and experience as a virtue. His self-proclaimed “leadership” qualities (as set out in a self-published book on the subject) came from his experience as a Marine. He hadn’t even lived in Indianapolis during most of his career, and he certainly hadn’t been involved in municipal governance. His initial campaign website was replete with cringe-worthy statements that displayed a total lack of any background or knowledge that would make him fit to run a major city. A participant in his first interview with the Star editorial board told me he had been appalled by Ballard’s utter absence of depth or relevant knowledge.

The only thing worse than a chief executive who knows very little is a chief executive who knows very little but thinks he knows a lot.

We had a chance last year to replace Ballard with someone who actually knew what a city was, but for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to gender) we re-instated Mr. Clueless.

So we have a Mayor who is absent from the legislature when that body is debating issues of great importance to Indianapolis. We have a Mayor who sees no reason to communicate with the City-County Counsel (conveniently, his cronies in the General Assembly have now relieved him of that obligation).

We have a Mayor who relishes traveling with an outsized entourage but who can’t be bothered to supervise—or even understand—what city departments are doing.

We have a Mayor who hires people who are too young and inexperienced to know what they’re doing, or to recognize what their boss doesn’t understand.

We have a Mayor who insisted on controlling all public safety personnel, but then lost interest in the hard work of actually providing for the public’s safety–a child Mayor who has ignored a soaring crime rate while focusing on fanciful (and costly) projects like Cricket fields. (China Town didn’t pan out.)

We have a Mayor who is selling significant pieces of the City–making complicated deals with implications he clearly doesn’t understand—deals that benefit clients of cronies at the expense of taxpayers.

We have a Mayor who is not being held accountable for any of this, because local media is effectively AWOL.

So while Ballard sells the city off, unsupervised city employees are selling the city out.

Maybe I can just stay on this ship. At least I’m getting value for my dollar.

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High-Tech Boycotts

Yesterday, I blogged about research on the “Millennials”—the so-called DotCom generation.

I didn’t talk about one really fascinating finding: the tendency of DotCom’s to “vote” with their purchasing power, to boycott products when they disapprove of the company that makes them. As the authors noted, this behavior has not been studied—and it deserves attention.

This is a generation that has grown up in a commercialized environment, so it probably shouldn’t surprise us that so many of them are willing to “vote’ with their dollars. They see corporations as more powerful—and more dangerous—than government, and large numbers of them react by closing their pocketbooks to enterprises they disapprove of.

Now there is evidence that this mechanism for showing disapproval may be going to the next level.

The last couple of weeks, Facebook and other social media have been buzzing with news about a new “app” that will allow your smartphone to identify the company responsible for every item in your grocery basket. If it works, this is huge, because the labyrinthine nature of corporate ownership makes it very difficult to avoid enriching people you don’t like. (Who knew that the Koch brothers own companies that own other companies that produce  Bounce laundry softener sheets?)

File this one under “wait and see.” But it will certainly be interesting!

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Generations

I’ve been reading a book by several well-known scholars of civic engagement, “A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing America Citizen.” It has been interesting for a number of reasons: the authors compare and contrast four cohorts—the generation prior to the Baby Boomers, which they call “the Dutifuls,” the Boomers, GenX and the youngest cohort—the one we tend to refer to as Millennials, but they dubbed the DotComs.

There is a lot of interesting material about the differences in civic and political attitudes and skills among the four cohorts. The researchers note one in particular that I have noticed in my own students—unlike the Dutifuls and Boomers, the DotComs are far more likely to participate in civic life than in political activities. They haven’t opted out, as so many of the GenX generation has, but they have directed their energies to volunteerism and nonprofit activities rather than politics and government.

The authors attribute this political “opting out” in part to the fact that the DotCom generation was socialized at a time when anti-government rhetoric was ubiquitous—when Reagan’s “government is not the solution, government is the problem” had become an accepted axiom. Other attributes of the DotCom generation, however, fly in the face of this tidy conclusion. DotComs are far more supportive of government activities and programs than the generations that preceded them, for example. They are more likely to label themselves “liberal,” and not just on social issues. They are more likely to support affirmative action and other government efforts to ameliorate inequality, and more likely to support government-provided healthcare and other social safety-net programs.

The researchers cautioned that it is difficult to know what portion of the differences they saw are generational attributes that are likely to persist, and what portion are “life cycle;” that is, attitudes that will change as they grow older, establish households, have children, etc.

We have an advantage over the authors. The book was written in 2003, and the research was conducted in the two or three year period prior to that. In 2013, some of the open questions can be answered, at least tentatively. The authors worried, for example, that youth voting turnout would continue to decline; as we saw in 2008 and 20012, it has increased. The inclusive attitudes of the DotCom cohort are largely responsible for the profound changes in the politics of same-sex marriage, and the increasing pressure for immigration reform.

It is still the case that DotComs disproportionately invest their energies in civic rather than political causes, however. If that changes—if this generation ever devotes as much energy to the political system as it does to organizations working to save the environment, address community problems, and help the less fortunate—look out! Things will change, and in my opinion, those changes will be for the better.

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Houston, We Have A Problem

I remember having a conversation about some intellectually limited legislators with a friend a few years ago; she said (somewhat bitterly) “the problem with the legislature is that it’s representative.” Her point was that we elect people who represent all of us–informed and not-so-informed, bright and not-so-bright.

If things were bad when legislative bodies were representative, they’re appalling when only some of us are being represented.

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Before We Believe the Hype…

It’s always newsworthy when some survey or other identifies Indiana as a good  place to do business–the media jump on the announcement, and whatever administration is in power trumpets the result as evidence that its economic development policies are working. (Pay no attention to the data showing slow-to-no job growth and wages well below the national average–we’re awesome, I tell you!)

Typically, these “surveys” are conducted by organizations with, shall we say, points of view. But they are eagerly accepted, at least by those who share that particular ideological perspective. So it was interesting to read this column by Neil Pierce on a research study conducted by Good Jobs First, debunking the entire “survey” enterprise.

“If there’s one thing people need to take away from our study,” says Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, “is that there’s no such thing as a state business climate. Businesses’ needs for various kinds of services and facilities vary too much.”

LeRoy makes a point that should be obvious: cities are what matter.

States aren’t the important entity that businesses should be looking at anyway. The real theater of action is the metro area. Metro areas in a state differ, he notes, and sometimes differ dramatically – in local property tax levels, in skilled labor, quality of infrastructure, schools and colleges, transportation linkages, and proximity to customers and suppliers. Tally those real-world conditions, he suggests, and one sees more of the truly significant factors that qualified site-selection experts advising companies actually look for, but which the raw state rankings miss.

Peter Fisher is a researcher with the Iowa Policy Project. As he notes,

All the studies have major technical faults. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, for example, has a scale that gives states better scores for such features as low progressive tax rates, no state minimum wage, absence of family leave, fewer government employees, less government spending and no renewable energy mandates.

But as Fisher notes, the same scoring omits (and clearly fails to value) what’s likely to matter a lot more – the quality of public school and university programs, state investment in infrastructure, business incubators or entrepreneurship programs at public universities and state venture capital funding.

Whatever one may think businesses should value when making decisions about relocation, the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is in the results. When researchers compared the economic growth of states identified in the “good business climate” surveys with those not so identified, they found absolutely no difference in economic performance.

Evidently, a pro-business climate (as measured by these surveys) doesn’t translate into a state’s superior attractiveness to real businesses. It’s sort of like that gorgeous girl we all envied in high school, because we knew we couldn’t compete–all the guys would be drawn to her, like the moth to the flame. When we drag our husbands to the 25-year reunion, she’s still gorgeous–and still single.

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