Waiting for Wisconsin Results

I’ll be very interested in the results from today’s recall elections in Wisconsin. One of the many things those results will tell us is whether outrage lasts…at the time these lawmakers participated in passing legislation that elicited huge, angry demonstrations, the anger was palpable. Had recall elections been held then, or shortly thereafter, I think it is a given they would have been successful. But time has passed, and those targeted for recall have had the time (and money) to fire back (not always truthfully, if reports are to be believed). Tonight will tell us a lot about the attention span of the electorate, if nothing else.

Meanwhile, go read Doug Masson’s blog about a 7th Circuit decision allowing a case brought against Donald Rumsfeld for torture to proceed.

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Lock, Stock and Bottom of the Barrel

Like so many Americans, I’ve been waiting for that promised light at the end of the economic tunnel, but I’ve come to the conclusion that all we are going to see for the foreseeable future is the bottom of the economic barrel. Today’s massive stock market drop is, I am afraid, the sort of swing we will see more and more.

Unlike all the pundits, left and right, who know with absolute certainty just why we can’t shake off the recession, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is a tangled and complicated number of things, some of which we could control if we had political will, some of which is global in nature and difficult or impossible to manage, and some of which is structural. The structural elements can be ameliorated but not reversed.

The question that scares me is this: if, in fact, my suspicions are correct and the economic picture is going to be fairly bleak for several years, what effect will that have on our political and social systems? We don’t have a very good track record of dealing rationally with economic adversity.

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Trust and Transparency

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book titled “Distrust: American Style” in which I argued that much of our current social dysfunction and polarization results from a massive loss of trust in our common institutions–not just government, but also big business and even nonprofits. Think of Enron and World Com, think of the Red Cross scandals, think of doping sports stars.  Think of the Catholic Church cover-up scandal.

Things haven’t improved since I wrote the book. In the wake of the fiscal collapse triggered by big investment banks and too-cozy relationships with the people responsible for regulating them, there has been enough information to tarnish our confidence in a whole raft of financial and governmental institutions. Pre-eminent among them were the ratings agencies–the entities most of us had long trusted to serve as “grey eminences” protecting us from accounting shenanigans and other trickery by carefully examining the books of those issuing debt instruments. That they operated with little transparency was rarely noted. What we discovered after the proverbial shit hit the fan was that the ratings agencies–paid by the issuers–weren’t above looking the other way in order to collect their very handsome fees. Somehow, this very real conflict of interest had escaped everyone’s notice.

So I must agree with Senator Bernie Sanders, who issued the following statement when Standard and Poor downgraded U.S. debt this weekend:

“I find it interesting to see S&P so vigilant today in downgrading the U.S. credit rating. Where were they four years ago when they, and other credit rating agencies, helped cause this horrendous recession by providing AAA ratings to worthless sub-prime mortgage securities on behalf of Wall Street investment firms?  Where were they last December when Congress and the White House drove up the national debt by $700 billion by extending Bush’s tax breaks for the rich?”

Fair questions.

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The Value of Pontificating

I’ve been scanning the local news I missed during the past month, and duly noted coverage of a recent speech by Melina Kennedy on education. Kennedy (no relation–honest!) has focused her mayoral campaign on public safety, education and economic development, and has been delivering substantive proposals on those and related issues.

In her education speech, she criticized Greg Ballard for a lack of leadership in education, pointing out that he has done little other than continue the charter school initiative begun by Mayor Peterson. Asked for his response to the criticism, Ballard said that just because he hadn’t been “pontificating” about the subject didn’t mean he hadn’t been engaged.

Wrong.

The biggest problem faced by educators today isn’t whether a school is public or private. It isn’t whether reading instruction is via phonics or “whole word” methodology. It isn’t even discipline. The biggest problem is cultural: Americans today do not value education. If we do not change the culture, nothing else we do is going to work. And let me be VERY clear: I am not talking about the regrettable tendency of some inner-city black students to label peers getting good grades as “acting white.” I am talking about the broader American disdain for expertise of any sort–the widespread attitude that intellectuals are “elitists” to be scorned.

There is a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country, and it has clearly been on the ascendance for the past decade or more. The mere fact that anyone takes political figures like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann or Mike Pence seriously ought to be evidence enough that the American electorate prioritizes celebrity and pandering over substance. A terrifying percentage of the American public rejects science–whether the subject is global climate change or even something as basic and settled as evolution. Stephen Colbert has captured our current culture brilliantly in his riffs explaining why he elevates his “gut” over the exercise of reason.

This is the culture we need to change, and we cannot and will not change it unless those we elect make it their business to “pontificate” about the importance of education. Real leadership requires political figures who are willing to elevate the value of knowledge and expertise–who are willing to remind citizens that this country was a product of the Enlightenment, a philosophy that prioritized reason, evidence and intellect.

A Mayor who fails to use the bully pulpit on behalf of those values is not “pontificating.” S/he is leading.

Google That!

We’ve returned from vacation, and with reliable internet, blogging will once again become regular. In the meantime, here is my upcoming IBJ column.

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My husband and I just returned from a month visiting various parts of Europe–the sort of vacation that becomes possible only when your children are grown and gone. This trip afforded us the luxury of time for observation and reflection that shorter ones rarely did; I even had time to read some of the books I’d optimistically loaded on my IPad.

So what did I learn on my summer vacation?

One thing that immediately struck me was how homogenized citizens from western industrialized countries have become—how much we all look and dress alike. Thirty years ago, on our first trip to Europe, cultural differences expressed in clothing and mannerisms made it fairly easy to spot Americans. Over the intervening years, that has changed. Today, we dress alike, drive the same cars, watch the same television programs and listen to the same (mostly American) music. IPhones, IPods and IPads (and their various clones) are ubiquitous, as are Facebook and Google. Evidence of the globalization of culture—at least pop culture—is everywhere.

But beneath the surface similarities, there is evidence of quite a contrary trend; as Eli Pariser documents in his recent book, “The Filter Bubble,” the internet technology that promises (and delivers) so much is moving us into what he calls a “mediated future”—a future in which each of us exists in a personalized universe of our own construction.

In an effort to give each of us what we want, sites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are constantly refining their algorithms in order to deliver results that are “relevant” to each particular searcher, and they have more data about our individual likes and dislikes than we can imagine. As a result, two people googling “BP,” for example, will not necessarily get the same results, and certainly not in the same order. Someone whose search history suggests interest in investment information may get the company’s annual report, while someone with a history of environmental interests will get stories about the Gulf spill. Similarly, Facebook delivers the posts of friends and family that its algorithm suggests are most consistent with the member’s interests and beliefs, not everything those friends post.

Pariser calls this the “filter bubble,” and points out that—unlike choosing to listen to Fox rather than PBS, for example—the resulting bias is invisible to us.

Little by little, search by search, individuals are constructing different–and disparate–realities. At the same time, traditional news sources aimed at a general audience—the newspapers and broadcasts that required reporters to fact-check assertions, label opinion and aim for objectivity—are losing market share. How many will survive is anyone’s guess.

The implications of both these changes—globalization and individuation—will be especially profound for our political structures. We are already seeing the dysfunctions that result when we elect people with radically different views of reality.

At SPEA, where I work, our mission is to teach aspiring public managers how to govern. This used to mean classes in budgeting, in cost-benefit analysis, in urban policy and human resource management. Today, we face more daunting questions: How do public servants govern effectively when there is no commonly accepted role for government? How do public managers communicate with citizens who do not—in any meaningful way—occupy the same country (or in some cases, the same planet)? (We have just introduced a new major—Media and Public Affairs—in an effort to prepare our students for these unprecedented challenges.)

We’ve globalized commerce, and everyone wears tee-shirts and jeans. But personalization and social fragmentation is also global, and we can’t Google the future.