The Issue is Ossification

Lawrence Summers has a straightforward account of why people don't trust government. What he would like is a similarly straightforward account of how to fix it.

...what should have been a routine maintenance project on the Anderson Memorial Bridge over the Charles River next to my office in Cambridge. Though the bridge took only 11 months to build in 1912, it will take close to five years to repair today at a huge cost in dollars and mass delays.

Investigating the reasons behind the bridge blunders have helped to illuminate an aspect of American sclerosis — a gaggle of regulators and veto players, each with the power to block or to delay, and each with their own parochial concerns. All the actors — the historical commission, the contractor, the environmental agencies, the advocacy groups, the state transportation department — are reasonable in their own terms, but the final result is wildly unreasonable.

...

More than questions of personality or even those of high policy, the question of how to escape this trap should be a central issue in this election year.

The person who can help you answer this question is Joseph Schumpeter. His insights on economics are relevant to government, too.

Our institutions are so large and so intricate in their approval chains that [our enemies have] a huge advantage in terms of how fast a decision can be made and acted upon for streamlined organizations. Putin just issues orders, after all. ISIS isn't very big. USEUCOM or USCENTCOM has to socialize a plan among all their staff sections, who reach down to subordinate commands for input and then hash out a plan among themselves before they present it to their general. Most likely, he will need to push that plan up to the Pentagon if it represents a radical change to existing strategy. They have their own process before an answer comes back down, and the easiest answer is to push the suspense for the decision to the right while we ask a few more people. If the change requires a change from an interagency partner, their bureaucracies have to get involved too.

Even if the President were replaced with someone with new-blood ideas and the will to enact them, the bureaucracy would still have to go through at least a basic staffing process to ensure that it carried out the decisions in an orderly fashion. Because the bureaucrats are part of the existing order, there will be many who drag their feet or otherwise resist firm leadership (remember the CIA's campaign of leaks to the press about Bush's programs?).

That's just what Summers is describing. Each process is fine on its own: the problem is that there are dozens of them. These dozens of bureaucracies are each interest groups, which makes them hard to eliminate. There are whole buildings, and large buildings, full of people whose living depends on things not being streamlined.

Ultimately, in economics, what happens when a corporation becomes this ossified is that new, smaller, leaner competitors eat it alive. They may not be able to do everything that the big monopoly does, and they lack its economies of scale, but they still outperform the giants because they can make decisions and act upon them quickly and cheaply. The giants may not die -- IBM's $8 billion loss from the 1990s didn't kill it, and it's still a major world corporation though it has shed a lot of the functions it performed in the 1980s. Still, IBM and similar tech giants now don't even try to compete with startups -- they just find the ones they want and fund them.

There is no similar governmental process. You aren't allowed to compete with the EPA, nor take over parts of its functions if you do a better job for less. That isn't to say that the private sector doesn't try: Delta just invented a better way of doing airport security because its business is being harmed by TSA incompetence. However, all Delta can do is try to help streamline the steps before the TSA bottleneck. They can't replace the TSA. They can't even compete with it, or offer an alternative to it.

In economics, the ossified bureaucracy full of rent-seekers is self-correcting because of competition. In government, the problem is much harder. We have to find the political will to disband much of the government in spite of entrenched interests with their hands on the levers of power. If we can't do that, government will just get more and more incompetent the older and more ossified it becomes.

Ballad of Ricky Washington

I have a certain fondness for this new RangerUp shirt.

'Shut Up, Kristof'

Conservatives have been talking about the lack of ideological diversity on campus for years -- maybe decades, at this point -- but the riotous shutting down of right-leaning voices has grown loud enough to have reached the ears of a major writer from the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof wrote about it, and now has penned a second column about the response to his first column.

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy, misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community into the academy.”

The price paid by liberals for this is that they are indeed blind to many things. Maybe twenty years ago, I was involved in a debate about the right response to gun violence. Now gun violence was very much worse twenty years ago, about twice as bad as it is now -- which is to say that it has been halved since then, during a period when the legal right to carry arms has vastly expanded and the number of firearms in private hands has increased sharply.

Listening to liberals talk about gun violence today, however, I can see that they're totally blind to the correlation. Indeed, mostly they're blind to the tremendous success we've had in reducing gun violence. About two-thirds of gun deaths now are suicides, and a right to suicide is generally supported by liberals as long as it's "doctor assisted." Almost all of those facts are opaque to liberals, on campus or in politics, who are discussing the issue today. Hillary Clinton talks as if there were an epidemic of gun violence in immediate need of addressing, for example, and none of these academics seem to correct her assumptions.

So in this debate twenty years ago, I was arguing the position that a plausible way to cut down on gun deaths was to educate people about how to use guns safely and accurately. We could have courses in riflemanship in the public schools, teaching along the way the overlapping, mutually-reinforcing "four rules" of gun safety. At least in that way we could plausibly eliminate most of the accidental deaths, and enable people who wanted to be part of the solution to crime by carrying guns to do so in a better way.

"No, no," the moderator said. "We're not even going to consider that."

A liberal friend of mine jumped in, though, and pointed out that the argument I was raising was exactly similar to the liberal argument for sex education in schools. Yes, it's risky to teach kids about sex. Yes, it violates a number of commonly-held sexual taboos (more so in those days -- American society has abandoned most of its sexual taboos since then). But it's also risky not to teach kids about a danger they are very likely to encounter. Empowering them with knowledge about how to protect themselves while engaging in the dangerous practice would cut down on negative results. Further, an empowered citizenry such as our form of government imagines ought to be educated, not 'kept away' from dangerous knowledge.

It was an insightful moment, but the moderator still shut down the discussion. He did acknowledge the parallel, however uncomfortably, but still ruled that guns were a bridge too far for education. It's an idea that simply could not be considered, not even though the parallel argument was a major platform piece for liberals in those days.

New Texts by Yahya ibn Adi Discovered

Yahya ibn Adi was, in his day, among the foremost philosophers in Medieval Baghdad. He was particularly renowned in Aristotelian circles. He wrote in Arabic.

Nevertheless, he was a Christian. At this period, which was the intellectual height of Islamic civilization, having a leading thinker in the heart of the Islamic world who was not Muslim was in no way threatening to the rulers. Ibn Adi engaged in an extended philosophical defense of the Trinity, and engaged both prominent Muslim and Jewish thinkers on philosophical and theological topics. No one thought to cut off his head. Rather, he both studied under and was allowed to teach Muslims as well as Christians.

Medieval Baghdad wasn't perfect, but it was better than Modern Baghdad. Oh, it didn't have electricity or access to the many scientific advances we have today. Yet it was a better place to live, to think, and to be a part of the community.

Start Even

Never dabbled in 'high society,'
Don't reckon I would if I could.
I'm a little too good for the bad folks,
And way too bad for the good.

Sing it, Tex.

'Child Care' is Bad for Your Children

Well, according to this study, at least.

We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores,” reads the abstract for the study.

“We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys.”

I can remember discussing this at the phase in my life when questions of child care were relevant. We thought, in those days, that it was good to send a child to child care for at least a few hours a week. The idea was that it would give them a chance to socialize, to get used to not being the most important person in the world and to taking turns with other children.

That's all quite intuitive, but maybe it's wrong. Intuitions often are. Maybe it's really good to your development to have that time of your life spent in safety and assurance. Maybe that's the ground for developing the kind of personality that can then learn to extend kindness to others -- not because you're made to do so, but because you're confident enough to do so freely.

Another View on the Hiroshima Speech

Richard Fernandez analyzes the speech in a different way from others, but one that I think is insightful.

In his view war is old. It was the Atomic Bomb which was new and therefore destabilizing. Those who brought this unregulated thing into the world thus assumed a huge responsibility. It's an interesting formulation, for at a stroke the great moral issues of World War 2 are reduced to a narrative in which everyone -- including militaristic Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia -- were alike victims of age old human passions enabled by revolutionary weaponry. No one is guilty. We are all just victims. But facts have to be faced Obama argued that since a "moral revolution" cannot be effected the great religions which falsely promise a pathway to love while offering only a license to kill then man is irredeemable without government.

Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. ... But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

So more government we will have up to any extent necessary to make safety mandatory. The moral drama of WW2 vanishes, leaving the Hiroshima speech as an unvarnished plea for an arms-control bureaucracy; the demand for a global safe space; a call for gun control on a planet-wide scale.

It's worth reading in full.

DB: Army Disastrously Tries To Copy "Fleet Week"

An Army attempt to copy the success of the Navy’s Fleet Week has resulted in seven casualties, $82 million in lost business revenue, and a near war with Canada, sources report. The senior service’s first attempt to demonstrate the finest land warfare traditions through patriotic demonstrations such as foot patrols, L-shaped ambushes and artillery barrages, created riots, widespread panic and a short-lived gang coalition.

That reminds me of the time that Irish-American veterans of the US Army invaded Canada.

Someday I May Ask You For A Favor

A small favor, such as good friends might ask of each other. Like maybe millions of dollars.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.” ...

Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

NPR Talks Range 15

You know you want to hear it.

Friday Night AMV

World turned upside down.

Gamblers Fallacy

If you'd asked me last summer, I'd have said that it was at least even money that Trump was a stalking horse for Clinton. Clearly that gamble would not have paid out:

What, Mr. Green asked, would the party look like in five years? “Love the question,” Mr. Trump replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.”

My impression on reading this was that Mr. Trump is seeing it as a party of regular people, as the Democratic Party was when I was a child and the Republican Party when I was a young woman.

This is the first thing I’ve seen that suggests Mr. Trump is ideologically conscious of what he’s doing. It’s not just ego and orange hair, he suggests, it’s politically intentional.

Voices in the Echo Chamber Are Particularly Loud...

...when you mute all of your opponents.

Obama Apologizes for Hiroshima

Apologizing for the bomb this close to Memorial Day is roughly equivalent to talking about the Queen again on Independence Day.

Bill Whittle reminds you that we'd have a whole lot more people to remember this Memorial Day if we hadn't used them. Maybe a million more. A lot more Japanese would have died in the event of a conquest of the mainland, too.

Also, that they were warned five days before the bombing. He has the text from the leaflets we dropped warning people to flee, and promising peace if they would remove the military government and pursue peaceful relationship with us.



It takes some gall for a President with as much blood on his hands as this one, through his acts of omission in Iraq and Syria and his acts of commission in Libya, to shame a President who saved as many lives as Truman.

UPDATE: See the comments for a link to the text of a speech, as well as a debate about whether or not this speech constitutes an apology. Our own MikeD rules that it was not, in his opinion.

"The Future of Men is Women"

Well, maybe, if you mean that for most men their future will be most flourishing and excellent if they find a good wife and have a family -- which might include daughters. In that case, yes, a man's future is going to be built around the women in his life. And that's good. It's good for him, and it's good for them, and it's the way things usually ought to be.

But that isn't what you mean at all, is it? Because then we'd have to say that there was something special about marriage -- "traditional" marriage, as opposed to "gay marriage" -- as an ideal for most. And while you mention men becoming better husbands and boyfriends for women, it's sort of by the way.

As a society we need to be more supportive of paternity leave, stay-at-home dads, and men entering traditionally “feminine” careers, such as nursing or teaching. Just as we encourage girls to be strong and confident, to enter STEM careers, and to be anything they want to be, we need to similarly encourage our sons to embrace female-dominated HEAL careers (health, education, administrative, literacy).

Oh, I see. The future of men is becoming women.

Somehow I suspect that this backlash you find so mystifying might be -- just might be -- driven by this very agenda you're promoting. It's as if there were something inside the young men rebelling against these role-models you're trying to set up for them. It's as if they had a nature, in other words, an internal principle of growth and motion that is driving them to be a particular thing and not anything else.

By the way, isn't literacy just a subset of education? You just stuck that in there to come up with a clever acronym, didn't you? Maybe you should have considered a more "masculine" career, like the military. You'd have fit in just fine at the Pentagon doing procurement.

The Stagirite at Rest

Archaeologists say that they are certain they have discovered the tomb of Aristotle.

The Slandering of Sanders Supporters Continues

Look, there's plenty to complain about that is valid.  A lot of these guys (and gals) are Marxists.  That's ample ground right there for conflict.  But the Democratic Party apparently doesn't criticize Marxism anymore, so instead we keep hearing that they are violent and sexist and, now, racist.

I am unpersuaded.  But let's review the evidence.

The Washington Post noted that at one point #MississippiBerning became a hashtag used by Sanders supporters on social media—a witty and clever turn of phrase unless of course you are a black American who hears the words “Mississippi burning” and immediately thinks of church bombings and lynchings....

Black writers and activists who have had the temerity to challenge Sanders’s record have been targeted by his supporters in ways that go against not just civility but even decency.

Follow that link and you will read an article by a writer who asserts that they have received unpleasant language in emails. "We could print the emails. But those of you who sent them know who you are and the horrendous things said."

The rest of the article is about the "MississippiBerning" hashtag. Put in context, it's clearly in very poor taste. But -- and I'm a generation older than most of these Bernie supporters -- I didn't know about the 1988 movie either. I'd only heard the phrase, and wouldn't have known the film had a racial context. I suppose one could say that, given the history, one should always assume that violence in Mississippi has some sort of racial component. But that assumption strikes me as just as much a prejudice as any other.

Let's face it: 1988 was before many of these Bernie supporters were even born. They're a bunch of kids. Marxist kids, but at their age that's the fault of their teachers.

The playbook has to play, I suppose. Opponents of whomever the leading Democrat is have to be motivated by racism, sexism, and hatred for the poor. Well, you can't stick Bernie with that last one, so you just have to double down on the first two.

By the way, as to the alleged violence and sexism that was raised as a charge in Nevada, a photograph of Sen Barbara Boxer 'fleeing in fear of the crowd.'  I'll put it below the fold so that no one is shocked by what they see.

World's Largest Extant Viking Ship Visits Rekjavik

Looks like a good time, although I imagine it's usually easy to find a good time in Iceland.

Always Remember that "Epi-" Is A Handwave

When someone tells you that a phenomenon is "epigenetic" -- or "epi-" anything else -- bear in mind just what "epi-" means.

The prefix epi, or ep if followed by a vowel or the letter "h", is derived from the Greek preposition ἐπί meaning: above, on, over, nearby, upon; outer; besides, in addition to; among; attached to; or toward.

Thus, when someone describes some phenomenon as being caused by "epi-*," it generally means "I am sure the cause is around * somewhere."

When someone tells you that something is "epigenetic," what they mean is, "I'm sure it's something to do with the genes, and while it isn't the genes themselves (or I'd say it was genetic, and be expected to prove I was right about that), I'm sure that the cause has got to be around the genetics somewhere."

 Very often this is a completely unproven assumption. It strikes people as plausible because (a) we don't fully understand how genes work, but (b) we do know that various factors seem to 'turn on' or 'turn off' their functionalities. The implication is meant to be that some factor -- we don't know what or how -- is acting on the genes somehow. But in fact, we often can't really say that the genes have anything to do with it.

With all that said, read this article.

Savchenko Released by Russia

Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko has been released by Russia in a prisoner exchange, though she had been sentenced to 22 years. We talked about her case last in March of this year.