The deal is this—and I am drawn to it because it mirrors exactly my own half-century journey and rant: Namely “planners,” especially “master planners,” more or less believe that the plan is the thing—and that the messy process of implementation on the ground will take care of itself if The Plan is “right.” (Reminiscent of Iraq, eh?) In The White Man’s Burden, Easterly describes “planners” and “searchers.” While planners treat the plan as holy writ, searchers live by rapid trial and error and learn through constant experimentation and adjustment. To wit:
“In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. … A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors; a Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions; a Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.”
Category: Politics
A Conversation with Kip Hawley, TSA Administrator
In April, Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), invited me to Washington for a meeting. Despite some serious trepidation, I accepted. And it was a good meeting. Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image. I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that. He did enjoy writing a guest blog post for Aviation Daily, but having a blog himself didn’t work within the bureaucracy. What else could he do?
This interview, conducted in May and June via e-mail, was one of my suggestions.
Madison Ron Paul Supporter Sighting
Ron Paul has been getting some attention lately:
- The Economist:
Paul the Apostate.
Is this would-be president brave or crazy?
RON PAUL, a libertarian Republican congressman from Texas, likes to say what he thinks. And among the things he thinks is that the census is a violation of privacy. He has opted out of the congressional pension programme. He claims never to have voted for a tax increase, or for an unbalanced budget, or for a congressional pay rise and never to have gone on a congressional junket. He wants to return to the gold standard. Most notably, he strongly opposes the Iraq war and has from the beginning.
Mr Paul is running for president. And according to the latest report from the Federal Election Commission, he is in better financial shape than John McCain, once the front-runner. Mr Paul raised $2.4m in the second quarter of the year, has roughly that much on hand, and has no debts. Mr McCain raised far more money but spent it just as fast, ending the quarter with $3.2m on hand but with $1.8m in debt. - Christopher Caldwell, writing in the NYT Magazine:
Paul’s opposition to the war in Iraq did not come out of nowhere. He was against the first gulf war, the war in Kosovo and the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which he called a “declaration of virtual war.” Although he voted after Sept. 11 to approve the use of force in Afghanistan and spend $40 billion in emergency appropriations, he has sounded less thrilled with those votes as time has passed. “I voted for the authority and the money,” he now says. “I thought it was misused.”
There is something homespun about Paul, reminiscent of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” He communicates with his constituents through birthday cards, August barbecues and the cookbooks his wife puts together every election season, which mix photos of grandchildren, Gospel passages and neighbors’ recipes for Velveeta cheese fudge and Cherry Coke salad. He is listed in the phone book, and his constituents call him at home. But there is also something cosmopolitan and radical about him; his speeches can bring to mind the World Social Forum or the French international-affairs periodical Le Monde Diplomatique. Paul is surely the only congressman who would cite the assertion of the left-leaning Chennai-based daily The Hindu that “the world is being asked today, in reality, to side with the U.S. as it seeks to strengthen its economic hegemony.” The word “empire” crops up a lot in his speeches.
NH Rejects Real ID Law
New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch last week signed into law a bill that forbids New Hampshire government agencies from complying with the controversial federal national identification act, or Real ID bill.
The New Hampshire Legislature had overwhelming passed the bill this past spring and handed it off to Lynch, who signed it on June 27.
“Real ID is intended to make us all safer, which I think we can all agree is a laudable goal,” said Lynch in a statement. “However, I strongly believe Real ID’s proposed haphazard implementation and onerous provisions would have the exact opposite effect. The federal government obviously did not think this burdensome system through and that is why we in New Hampshire are right to reject it.”
Sarkozy’s “Lesson for America”
Interesting words from Newt Gingrich:
The country is at a crossroads, a different kind of place from where we’ve been before. The special interests seem more reactionary and entrenched than ever, the bureaucracies much larger. We need to marshal the courage to change, and we need to understand what needs changing.
Two books guide my thoughts these days. One is ” Testimony: France in the Twenty-first Century,” by the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The second is American: ” The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” by Amity Shlaes. Together they form a map for the crossroads.
France has a reputation as a country averse to change. But President Sarkozy translated his general exhortation about the need to change and the importance of work into a simple and direct policy proposal: All overtime will be tax-free.
When Public Records are Too Public
But then there’s another set of personal details that have made their way online, and these documents are much more worrisome. Property deeds, marriage and divorce records, court files, motor-vehicle information and tax documents are increasingly being digitized, and contain a wealth of information that few of us would want online: Social Security numbers, birth dates, maiden names and images of our signatures. Local governments have rushed to put those documents online for a decade or so, often without scrubbing them of such information. And that’s made them potentially fertile ground for busybodies, stalkers and identity thieves.
Betty “BJ” Ostergren, a 58-year-old from outside Richmond, Va., has made it her mission to alert people to the dangers of public records online. Ms. Ostergren is feisty bordering on ferocious: Her tactics include mailing letters to people alerting them that their personal information is online and posting copies of public documents (or links to them) displaying the personal information of circuit-court clerks and other politicians, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. (See her Web site, the Virginia Watchdog, here; this Washington Post profile of her is also a good read.)
Eliminate Agriculture Subsidies?
Mr. Kind, a six-term congressman, has introduced legislation that would drastically reduce farm subsidies while pouring more money into land conservation programs and rural development. He gathered 200 votes for a similar bill in 2002 and says he believes he has additional momentum this time around.
“There are so many reasons to do it,” Mr. Kind said, ticking off high crop prices and increasing pressure from foreign trading partners as two reasons to curb subsidies. “Now we are going to see if this Congress has the stomach for meaningful reform.”
To no one’s surprise, Mr. Kind’s crusade has raised the hackles of the powerful farm lobby and its supporters in Congress, who describe his proposal as naïve, ill conceived and even dangerous.
The Next 10 Years: Focusing on Corruption
Lessig chooses an excellent new direction:
The bottom line: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues. Why and what are explained in the extended entry below.
Three people I admire greatly are responsible for at least inspiring this decision.
…..
Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea — both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?
The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a “corruption” of the political process. I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.
AT&T: Sticking it to us Yet Again
AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.
The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.
The nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers.
As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company’s top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.
“We do recognize that a lot of our future business depends on exciting and interesting content,” he said.
But critics say the company is going to be fighting a losing battle and angering its own customers, and it should focus instead on developing incentives for users to pay for all the content they want.
AT&T’s complicity in domestic surveillance via an EFF lawsuit.
Duncan Riley offers up a name change: American Tracking & Takedown. David Weinberger notes that AT&T is going to “exit the internet”.
It is disappointing to see our local politicians carrying the water for AT&T.
There’s a Difference Between Politic Support for (Big and Small) Business
A friend recently remarked over lunch that the Bush Administration was decidedly pro-busines. I quickly corrected him by pointing out the the Administration is pro “BIG” business. There’s a difference. Case in point – Microsoft’s political power within the Bush Justice Department (here’s another example: 5.25% offshore corporate tax rate – supported by our Senators Feingold & Kohl):
Stephen Labaton:
Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the recent rejection of a complaint by Google.
In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by Google that is tied to a consent decree that monitors Microsoft’s behavior. Google has accused Microsoft of designing its latest operating system, Vista, to discourage the use of Google’s desktop search program, lawyers involved in the case said.
The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.
Mr. Barnett’s memo dismissing Google’s claims, sent to state attorneys general around the nation, alarmed many of them, they and other lawyers from five states said. Some state officials said they believed that Google’s complaint had merit. They also said that they could not recall receiving a request by any head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division to drop any inquiry.