The Whys of Bests and Worsts

At my age, everyday events/experiences can trigger all sorts of semi-philosophical questions. Yesterday was one of those days.

In the afternoon, I took my car in to Downtown Car Care to have them look at a funny noise. Downtown Car Care is one of those vanishing places where “customer service” isn’t a phrase shouted from the TV screen by a pitchman surrounded by a lot of chrome–it’s a couple of guys who really, actually know what they are doing. There’s nothing fancy–their dusty, messy office was the waiting room until a coffee shop opened across the street–but they know their customers, and take care of them, because they depend on repeat business. And honest? A few years ago my middle son was in town; his car’s front seat mechanism–the thing that allows the seat to adjust–hadn’t worked for several weeks. He’d taken it to the dealership, and they told him the entire mechanism had to be replaced, and that would cost 800+. I told him to take it to Downtown Car Care for a second opinion and they fixed it. For 39 dollars. Anyway, they found my noise, fixed it, and I went home.

Later that evening, Bob and I met a friend at the Old National parking lot (aka the Murat Center, aka Murat Temple), the site of a “food truck” event. This was a new event, and it was–as my friend put it–a really cool idea.  Food trucks are a relatively new part of the Indianapolis scene, and the idea was to bring a number of them to the parking lot, add music and sell wine. Great idea–terrible execution.

We got there about half an hour after it opened, paid for our $3 tickets and walked in past a cart selling jewelery. Don’t ask me why that was there. There were seven or eight food trucks parked along the Alabama street side of the lot, and two of those were ice-cream/desserts. A number of the best-known didn’t participate. There  weren’t many people there at that point—it may have picked up later, but I hadn’t seen any publicity about it beforehand. Mayor Ballard was there with his wife and ever-present bodyguard. (I was so tempted to ask him why, if crime is down as he keeps insisting, he needs to take a bodyguard or two everywhere he goes. But I digress.) A DJ was playing “music” (note quotes) at such an ear-splitting volume that it was actually uncomfortable. Several people covered their ears, and you couldn’t talk to the person next to you.

It was obvious that very little thought or preparation went into this event. There was inadequate promotion. There were far too few food trucks, and that was just for the scattered crowd in attendance–if a lot of people had come, lines would have been far too long. The choice and volume of music were particularly odd: since alcohol was available, no one under 21 was admitted; it was First Friday, so organizers should have anticipated drawing from the many art lovers drawn to the area, very few of whom were likely to appreciate the pulsing, screeching “music.” Perhaps the folks at Old National, which sponsored the event, belonged to the “just build the damn thing and they will come” school of thought.

When I was raising a houseful of kids, I used to give them the same sermon most of us deliver to our children: if you want to succeed, you need to study and learn everything about whatever job you ultimately take, so that you know what you are doing.  (After all, most jobs aren’t like politics.) If you want your clients or customers to keep coming back, you have to provide them with value for their dollars. That, after all, is what capitalism is supposed to be all about.

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Salience

Wednesday, Emmis Communication’s chief Jeff Smulyan came in to address my class in “Media and Public Affairs.” It was a wide-ranging discussion, focusing primarily upon current business  challenges posed by changing technologies, consolidation of ownership and the like, as well as the contemporary policy environment. When a student asked why it was so difficult to pass laws even when those measures were favored by significant majorities of the electorate, Jeff’s response pointed to the importance of salience.

Salience simply means the importance we attach to a particular issue. We have an excellent example of its importance here in Indiana; when Governor Daniels convened the Kernan-Shepard Commission to study government reorganization, one of its recommendations was elimination/consolodation of Indiana’s 1008 townships. Townships are an artifact of the days when travel to the county seat (by horseback) took half a day. Their responsibilities have steadily shrunk, and today they do little but run (some) fire departments and administer (with documented inefficiency) poor relief. Poll after poll confirmed that most Indiana voters agreed with the Commission. Abolishing townships should have been a no-brainer–except we still haven’t managed to do so.

Why? Salience, that’s why.

Although a large majority of voters agreed that townships should go–that they wasted money better used elsewhere–it was a rare individual for whom this was a burning issue. For the Township Trustees and members of their Advisory Boards, however, it was issue #1. Eliminating townships would eliminate the livliehoods of the Trustees (and the relatives many of them employ). It would eliminate the inflated fees paid to many Advisory Board members for attending three or four meetings a year. They focused like lasers on lawmakers, marshalling their forces, bringing in people to testify, hiring lobbyists and calling in political favors. For them, the issue was salient. And we still have townships.

In Washington, this same scenario plays over and over. Most of us disapprove of the special tax breaks that benefit Big Oil, but how many of us have written or called our Senators or Representatives about it? Spent money lobbying for repeal? Very few. But Big Oil (and Big Pharma and Big Banking, etc.) certainly have. It’s not unexpected that people will rally to defend their financial interests, but when those with lots of resources focus those resources on derailing a proposed bill, the likely result is that the bill will be derailed.

On those rare occasions when one of these issues becomes salient to a sizable number of voters, it’s possible to win these contests. The issue is: how do you make “good government” salient?

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Sticks and Stones

I largely agree with Matt Tully’s “take” on Andre Carson’s controversial words in this morning’s Star. As Tully notes, Carson has been a substantive, hard-working legislator who has steadily gained stature, and the language he employed was unnecessary to and a distraction from the points he was trying to make. “Why,” Tully asks, did Carson deviate from his usual civil demeanor?

I agree with Tully that this was out of character and unfortunate. I also have a possible answer to his question “why?”

If I were an African-American Congressman who’d been spit on, who had watched the country’s first black President demeaned from the first day he was elected, who had seen the racist emails, the “clever” signs with watermelon patches on the White House lawn, the posters at Tea Party gatherings showing Obama as a witch doctor–if I had heard colleagues on the floor of the U.S. House ask for “proof” that the President was born in the USA, and political figures supported by the Tea Party call for repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Rand Paul)–if I had heard Rep. Peter King compare a settlement of the discrimination lawsuit by black farmers to “reparations”…..well, I could go on, but I’ll stop there–I might address the motives of these people in less than civil language.

The Tea Party spokesmen who are demanding an “apology” insist that only a small fringe is responsible for the racist signs at their rallies. Perhaps they are right–but I must have missed their calls for those people to apologize.

A lot of people who are well-meaning and not racist will excuse the bile and excessive, irrational hatred of the President by comparing it to Bush hatred. The problem with that comparison is that most of us who came to detest Bush really were reacting to his behavior in office. Most of us were agnostic about him early in his tenure, as polling from that time reflects, and if you asked us why we were so angry with the administration, most of us could give you a long list of policy decisions with which we strongly disagreed . In contrast, the venom directed at this President began before he even assumed office.

I had a recent conversation with a woman who self-identified as a member of the Tea Party, and asked her why she hated Obama. “He’s a socialist,” she told me. Leaving aside the fact that Obama’s “socialism” would have placed him in the middle of the Republican party back when I ran as a Republican, I asked her for an example. “Obamacare,” she said. I asked her if she was aware that “Obamacare” was pretty much the same program advocated by Bob Dole and actually enacted in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. She refused to believe me. “Ok, what other evidence of Obama’s socialism is there?” No response. “What other proposals/policies has he advocated that you disagree with? “He’s a socialist, and he’s Muslim and he wasn’t even born in this country!”

I know there are Tea Party people who aren’t racist, aren’t hysterical, and who have genuine policy differences with the President that they can articulate. Unfortunately,they aren’t spending their time trying to weed out the folks carrying banners with the “N word” or those self-identified Tea Partiers who post to this blog (I spam them) to argue that Obama wants to give all “our” tax money to lazy drug-using mothers who have children so they can live on welfare.

None of this excuses the use of uncivil language. But it sure goes a long way toward explaining it.

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Learning from Experience

I know I have harped on the dismaying extent to which our policymakers legislate on the basis of ideology rather than evidence, but I want  to revisit that theme again today.

Several people have commented on my recent post/IBJ column about the drug war–and the enormous sums we continue to spend (in a time of austerity, no less) on a policy that everyone sentient knows has not only failed miserably, but in many ways has been counterproductive.

As a civil libertarian, I would have great qualms about the drug war even if it HAD been effective. But let me suggest another policy area where ideology has trumped experience.

It always seemed to me that the argument against confiscatory tax rates having a negative effect on job creation made sense. (Leave aside the question of what constitutes a “confiscatory” rate for now.) If I am a wealthy person, and I know that even a successful investment in a new factory or other job-creating enterprise will yield a minimal after-tax return, why should I take that risk? And even if lower tax rates leave me with more dollars in my pocket that I DON’T invest, filling my order for that fur coat and yacht creates jobs, too.

Unfortunately, experience has not supported that eminently logical proposition. As a number of economists have documented, job creation has actually IMPROVED after tax increases. Again, actual performance depends on how much of an increase, on what, and how steep the rate is following the increase. But increases in the general income tax rates have demonstrably NOT harmed job creation-quite the contrary.

There are many reasons why we have experienced this puzzling departure from theory. The most likely is that–contrary to the belief that people are  “rational actors,” humans are more complicated, and what constitutes a “reward” or “incentive” will vary widely from individual to individual. I can attest that many academics who could make much more money in the private sector work as hard for the recognition of their peers as many private-sector folks work for financial rewards. (As I so often tell my students, “it’s more complicated than that theory might suggest.”)

The real question, however, is not why a particular, perfectly reasonable, theory didn’t hold up. The real question is, why do so many people stubbornly cling to the theory and ignore the evidence provided by actual experience?

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Why We Need Two Responsible Political Parties

Many years ago, when I was a (Republican) member of the Hudnut Administration, the GOP consistently won elections in Marion County. All of them. Then as now, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans, but Republicans had a remarkable organization that routinely got out the vote, while the Democrats were–as the old joke has it–not members of an organized political party.

During that time, I was asked to speak to a Jewish women’s organization, and I still recall that speech. (Amazing, since these days, I barely remember my name…..) Many, if not most, of the members of that particular organization were Democrats, and my basic message to them was “get off your couches and reinvigorate your party, because every political subdivision works better when the party in power faces a responsible critic, a loyal opposition. No one has all the answers, unchecked power tends to corrupt, and we all benefit when two (or more) political organizations engage in serious, thoughtful debate over the merits of existing or proposed public policies. I believed that then, and I believe it now–but the operative words are “responsible,” “loyal opposition” and “serious, thoughtful debate.

Fast forward 30+ years, to a Republican Party so radicalized that it is impossible to apply those words to most of its members. Those who are serious and responsible are under attack (see: Lugar, Richard.) The behavior of Republicans in Congress has been so outrageous (I word I do not use lightly) that some commentators have actually suggested they are willing to destroy the economy if that is what it takes to destroy Obama. (See: debt ceiling debate). The most recent example of what passes for public policy among them these days is Rep. Paul Ryan’s insistence that no monies be spent for disaster relief unless and until there are offsetting budget cuts (preferably, in his view, from social programs. Evidently, we shouldn’t help one group of unfortunates unless we take the funds away from another group that depends upon our increasingly tattered social safety net). Between rejection of evolution, climate-change and science in general, manifest ignorance of basic economics,  an unseemly rush to support military interventions (and a disinclination to raise taxes to pay for them)…well, let’s just say there are a number of terms that might be applied to our current incarnations of the “know-nothings,” but “serious” and “responsible” aren’t among them.

As a business-school colleague of mine put it during a hallway chat yesterday, “I miss the real Republicans. Even when I didn’t agree with their arguments, the fact that they made thoughtful, rational criticisms made it necessary for me to justify my own policy preferences. I had to do my homework, and so did those who agreed with me. Substantive arguments on both sides results in better rules. That doesn’t work when the Democrats propose “Policy X” and the Republican response is “You’re a poo-poo head.”

Exactly.

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