all a farce

Civic Start-Ups That Can, Should, and Must Exist

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:56:00 -0700

The Code For America Accelerator program is a fantastic opportunity: $25,000, mentoring by savvy, connected folks, and networking among that rarefied class pursuing the golden apple of bringing to public goods the behemoth transformations we’ve witnessed in the past decade in the private sector, transformations made possible by the big changes in the underlying technological costs and bounds.

(I should not forget to mention the chance to meet Aneesh Chopra, which truly is the wonk-geek equivalent of finding out Arrested Development was coming back.)

Now, I’m a big fan of the idea of sharing as a business model. There are just too many possibilities for transformative change to be hoarding them for a reason as silly as cupidity. These are things I’d love to build, but even if I execute on one of them, who has the bandwidth to do all of them? (Not I.)

But someone can and should build these things.

1. Hack Eligibility and Enrollment

If you’ve ever worked closely with social safety net programs, you understand that determining eligibility and facilitating enrollment are among the most difficult implementation details out there.

On the back end, you face complex eligibility criteria and decision trees, many of which are changing year-to-year (particularly in this budget-slashing environment). Sometimes, you’re also faced with relatively strict audit requirements that, if unmet, will jeopardize the program, but, if implemented haphazardly, can deny people access to your services for minor technical reasons.

On the front end, you have users with highly variable capacity to deal with enrollment. Barriers like language, literacy, and access are huge, and often concentrated among the core population a program’s intending to serve. (How does someone working 70 hours a week with kids find time to go to a social services office with limited hours? Or a library with 30-minute limits on computer use, even for people who can barely navigate within a browser?)

Right now, the best out there are clunky web forms, and the worst are paper forms where you, more or less, require a social worker conversant in the specific requirements of the program to fill it out.

This could change. The specs - while daunting - are fundamentally things we know how to pull off:

A single data model and API, flexible enough to accommodate real-time changes in requirements (which the program users can do in an admin interface), and allowing for any of a number of user interface options
Multiple user interfaces (cell phone, web form, paper form) with responsive UX attuned to user needs, preferably grounded in rigorous user testing among the target populations (or intermediaries like social workers)

I’d start with a small program with specific requirements, so you really hit the user acceptance threshold. But abstract the code enough to build a platform that accommodates the broader E&E requirements of the gamut of programs.

(Also, anyone involved in health reform knows what a massive issue this is. Google some RFPs.)

2. A Mint for Municipal Budgeting

Cities, counties, and other municipalities often have anachronistic budget systems. Very often we’re really talking an Excel spreadsheet on some Windows 98 box (okay, fine; that may be hyperbole, but not far off the mark). It’s hard to implement effective budgeting methods like performance-based systems. But it’s even harder when you’re hobbled by your tools.

And municipal budgets matter! It’s a truism that local governments affect a given citizen’s life the most. Now, for a problem that is structurally the same across tens of thousands of customers (cities, counties, etc.) across the country, there doesn’t seem to be very many cutting-edge tools out there. And even the good ones don’t take advantage of the powerful capabilities that SaaS design (trivial update process) and automated BI/analytics that have almost become commodified in the private sector.

I’d start this by pairing up with some real municipal budget wonks (comptrollers, consulting firms) and figuring out just where their ERP systems fall short. Read Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs), city council budget reports and meeting minutes, and bring a techie’s eye to the use cases.

Then I’d go to a small municipality that’s willing to work closely with you and take the chance on something new: build, get feedback, refine, iterate. Pretty soon you’ve got something most of us budget wonks in localities would die for. And in this budget environment, if you can make a value proposition with net savings, that’s a powerful pitch, even with risk aversion out there.

Heck, once you built this, you could even build a public interface that would make transparency (and, hopefully, more informed public dialogue) dead-easy.

3. Networks to facilitate Jefferson’s democratic laboratories

One of the primary motivating ideas for federalism was that different states (and cities, and counties) could experiment with varied approaches to structurally-similar problems and, collectively, could learn and improve policies through trial-and-error.

There are ample groups that try to facilitate this knowledge dissemination (NCSL, NACO, NLC, etc.), but the infrastructure for sharing and learning is still very basic: policy wonks at these orgs and think tanks write issue briefs, people speak at conferences, yada yada.

But organizing this information in a structured way, so it’s trivially easy for a policy staffer to understand the whole landscape of experiences around a specific policy issue. There is a mildly awesome version of this for policymakers implementing health reform set up by the National Academy for State Health Policy called StateReforum.

Social network-style sites that organize and structure this kind of experiential policy knowledge to streamline the process of getting actionable info on your issue could be hugely impactful. So I say: carpe eventus.*

(* Google says this means “seize experience”; YMMV)

4. Hack the stakeholder process

A major issue, in both the development of legislation and the process of implementing through regulation and programmatic management, is how to effectively utilize the knowledge of affected groups like businesses, advocacy organizations, and other stakeholders who often know a specific issue at a much more granular level of detail than the people tasked with governance.

Improving the process of soliciting comment, navigating and processing input, and responding could be valuable across an array of situations. I imagine a web app that’s essentially a shared document you can mark up, a la Word - but with much more robust capabilities designed around the use cases of policy formation.

For public comment, even just being able to quickly hone in on all the comments made on one provision - rather than in lengthy letters (generally not mapped section-to-provision) - would be great. You could even get quick analysis of which sparked the most comment or controversy, and automatically review different groups’ input on that specific issue side-by-side, structuring and streamlining the comment review.

For more “sensitive” policy formation (legislative), one could limit to only privately-invited entities to review and edit draft text. You could even let them respond to one another’s comments and not have to be the middleman.

And on the “private” side, there’s a larger potential consumer base among interest groups, law and consulting firms, and others who want to be able to effectively manage internal discussion and mark-up of such documents, but keep that input private. This could subsidize what may be a free/low-margin product offered to policymakers without big budgets.

The Federal Register already provides their publications (including proposed rules, comments/responses, and final regulations) in XML, and increasingly such information comes in this or other structured formats.

Rounding Up

What do these ideas have in common? Two primary things:

I, as potential a user, would just love for them to exist. That’s the first (and most critical) acceptance test to me.
They’re not really the traditional political/transparency-oriented ideas you often see out there among techies wanting to make a difference. Instead they’re focused on the bottlenecks of governance itself: the things that are high-impact, at the OS-level of governance, even if they’re not sexy.

I’m still toying with whether to apply to the Accelerator with another geek friend. But quitting day jobs is tough, despite my love for geeking out on Python. So maybe, just maybe, I’ll use one of these ideas in its infancy.

But the truth is I’d be just as happy for someone else to build any or all of these, because we in the wonk community would kill for them.

And in a world of scarce and diminishing resources, imagine what increasing the underlying productivity of governance by 10% would mean for the people served by government services? Think on that.

(If you’re interested in this kind of stuff and have thoughts you don’t want to leave in a comment, feel free to shoot me an e-mail.)

[Edit: 4:32 ET - minor grammar fix]

"When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash Chang” on his..."

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:32:31 -0800

“When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash Chang” on his tennis opponents, he was referring to China’s onetime strongman and thereafter Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kaishek, leader of the Nationalist Party, the man who had largely reunified China in the 1920s with his army’s “Northern Expedition,” lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, and then taken refuge with his Guomindang party cadres on Taiwan. After the start of the Korean War, the American 7th Fleet protected Chiang (and Taiwan) from Mao’s People’s Liberation Army. Republican wingnuts, however, pretended that the 7th Fleet actually protected Mao’s Communists (who had, after all, won the Chinese Civil War) from Chiang’s Nationalists (who had, after all, lost it) by keeping Chiang Kaishek leashed. They periodically called for the U.S. to “unleash Chiang Kaishek”—so that Chiang, you see, could invade and conquer the Chinese mainland. When George H. W. Bush, playing tennis (and losing) in the 1970s and 1980s, would threaten to “unleash Chiang,” he was mocking the right-wing nuts of his generation. But George H. W. Bush’s sons—even the smart one, Jeb—never got the joke. They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to know who Chiang Kaishek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant. Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kaishek was a “mystical warrior… who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.””

- Brad DeLong: Hoisted from the Archives: Unleash Chiang Kai-Shek!!

George Saunders, "Tenth of December"

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:43:09 -0800

George Saunders, "Tenth of December"

"Imagine for a moment a world where all of the Repair shops and Automobile Mechanics in the country..."

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:34:51 -0800

“

Imagine for a moment a world where all of the Repair shops and Automobile Mechanics in the country formed an association. As part of that union, they all agreed that no one would work on any vehicle unless the car owner signed an arbitration agreement. Same goes for the hiring of mechanics — they had to sign as well.

Now imagine when you had a dispute over a repair, you went to the Repair Garage & Automobile Mechanics Arbitration Association. How do you think that would turn out? That is the FINRA arbitration system, only instead of disputes over $600 repairs, its $100,000 of losses — in some cases millions of dollars. What are the odds you will get a fair hearing in this private, opaque, non transparent, literally Wall Street owned system. Its a national embarrassment, a legal sham.

Welcome to the Kangaroo Court of Wall Street.

”

- The Kangaroo Court of Wall Street | The Big Picture

"Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing. Discovering the proliferation of websites where student..."

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:57:30 -0800

“Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing. Discovering the proliferation of websites where student plagiarists could copy essays, I wrote a Trojan horse paper about the Magna Carta and seeded it on a few plagiarism sites. The essay is basically wrong from beginning to end. Amongst other silliness, it claims that King John’s titles included Duke of Hazzard, and observes that “peasants were reduced to eating burage and socage.” It also invents a fictitious war against Flanders Fland (a region on the coast of Luxembourg) and cites such scholarly tomes as Bollock and Maidenhead’s classicInterminable History of the English Law.”

- College Misery: Henchminion Sends In the Tale of “The Magna Carta Essay!”

"…like a gambler admitting the fiction of a pack of cards, a corruptible paradise of two-headed..."

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:04:23 -0800

“…like a gambler admitting the fiction of a pack of cards, a corruptible paradise of two-headed people.”

- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Art of Verbal Abuse”

"In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue..."

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:55:17 -0800

“

In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop. Why? Because if you’re trying to maximize any sort of aggregate welfare measure, it’s clear that a marginal dollar of income makes very little difference to the welfare of the wealthy, as compared with the difference it makes to the welfare of the poor and middle class. So to a first approximation policy should soak the rich for the maximum amount — not out of envy or a desire to punish, but simply to raise as much money as possible for other purposes.

Now, this doesn’t imply a 100% tax rate, because there are going to be behavioral responses – high earners will generate at least somewhat less taxable income in the face of a high tax rate, either by actually working less or by pushing their earnings underground. Using parameters based on the literature, D&S suggest that the optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%.

”

- http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/taxing-job-creators/

The incomplete logic of the American marketplace today

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:32:00 -0800

There’s an enabling logic in contemporary American capitalism that has put us where we are today. It goes like this: as a highly-skilled, well-educated member of society, there is in fact an ethical mandate to embrace cupidity and maximize profit to the exclusion of other goals. For, as you’ve been taught, when the most capable members of society are competing against one another in a marketplace with that single-minded purpose, society collectively benefits: consumer prices are lower, investors receive the highest return (meaning the highest retirement income for pensioners and 401k-holders), and technological innovation progresses at the fastest possible clip. By embracing profit, you are helping navigate the ship of humanity with maximal efficiency toward its Enlightenment-style singularity.

But this logic is incomplete. A market that produces these social outcomes is of a very particular structure: it is genuinely competitive. It is the second-order effects of that competitive pressure — the price reduction wars between competing managers, and concomitant cost-squeezing that entails — which actually produce these social outcomes, rather than profit maximization in isolation. Where profit maximization is not accompanied by competition, the social welfare is very simply not served by it.

And the key omitted element of this logic is that a competitive market requires two external forces: (1) effective contract-enforcement in all cases; and, (2) public-minded regulators in most cases. The first nearly goes without saying, but requires a legal system that values the general commercial concern over the specific. The second is derived from the fact that most goods in and of themselves are not of a structure conducive (without some set of external rules) to competition. A well-governed market ruleset that prevents severe dips into such disequilibria as monopoly is required to make competition work for the common good.

It is on this count that we’ve gone horribly off course. When policy influence and regulatory arbitrage became legitimized tools of competition — pursued to the exclusion of cost-cutting, of price reduction — we severed the link between profit maximization and social benefit. When changing the rules of the game became easier than improving under those rules, the market’s utility as social tool failed.

But the incomplete, enabling logic has calcified into ethos for too many. The map from profit maximization to social benefit is a powerful, counterintuitive insight. But at such a very high level of abstraction, it is simply not very useful or accurate. A more transparently absurd analogy would be saying that the big takeaway from medicine is that avoiding medical care will lead to better long-term health. There’s a kernel of truth here: if a person engages in healthy behavior that prevents illness and obviates the need for acute care, then they are more likely to be healthier in the long run. But you can see how this heuristic is terribly unhelpful for guiding the actual decisions people would confront. It’s too general; it doesn’t elaborate upon any of the causal nuances required to actually guide people toward the aim of better health. And the enabling logic of American capitalism today is equally dangerous.

I do not have some tangible policy prescription here, because I think such policies require a very basic level of political buy-in at the ideological level that isn’t feasible until we collectively agree to some very basic points:

- Collective social benefit is the aim of any type of societal enterprise.

- Markets and profit are means to the end of social benefit, not ends themselves.

- Profit itself does not make an activity socially beneficial.

- The burden of proof for social benefit is on those profiting, not society.

- When profit and social benefit are clearly at odds, social benefit should hold primacy.

Putting the cart back behind the horse, I think we just might have a starting point to make capitalism work again in America. And, if we actually put social benefit ahead of profit-as-evidence-of-benefit, who knows? Maybe some engineers and scientists just might get off Wall Street and back to playing the positive-sum games of society.

Most of economics can be done on the back of a napkin, but most things done on the back of a napkin...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:56:34 -0700

Most of economics can be done on the back of a napkin, but most things done on the back of a napkin are not economics.

(Alternately: fuck you, Arthur Laffer.)

"Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s..."

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:51:59 -0700

“Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s leading machine, he was expected to appear on The Tonight Show to promote it. En route he experienced a familiar impulse—the impulse to do something out of the ordinary. “I just thought, This will freak everyone out,” he says. “It’ll be so funny. I’ll announce that I am running. I told Leno I was running. And two months later I was governor.” He looks over at me, pedaling as fast as I can to keep up with him, and laughs. “What the fuck is that? ””

- California and Bust | Business | Vanity Fair

I voted for Bustamante.

"@Nouriel Nouriel Roubini: US/EZ/UK sinking in a recession.Issue is no longer double-dip or not:..."

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:40:51 -0700

“@Nouriel Nouriel Roubini: US/EZ/UK sinking in a recession.Issue is no longer double-dip or not: rather whether mild 1 or a severe 1 with a new global financial crisis 4 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®”

- Nouriel Roubini Calls the Double Dip

"Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality...."

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:15:55 -0700

“

Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

”

- The rise and rise of the cognitive elite | The Economist

Notes Toward an Understanding of Obama's Economic Policymaking

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:23:31 -0700

Notes Toward an Understanding of Obama's Economic Policymaking:

Brad DeLong excerpts (and analyzes) Ron Suskind on the economic policymaking regime of the Obama Administration.

"The problem starts somewhere around the mid-20s, when we get thrown out into the world to do..."

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:13:24 -0700

“The problem starts somewhere around the mid-20s, when we get thrown out into the world to do “whatever we want to” and we realize that the majority of that time will be spent surviving and helping others to survive.”

- 80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives | How To Split An Atom

"If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much..."

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:50:58 -0700

“If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811…By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already “longer” than the whole of the 17th century…Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010…”

- Quantifying history: Two thousand years in one chart | The Economist

"Listening to the graduating students… Those majoring in peace and conflict studies,..."

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:38:28 -0700

“Listening to the graduating students… Those majoring in peace and conflict studies, development studies, and rhetoric… It seems, reading through the lines of what they say, that the modal teacher in those programs approaches their educational mission as though they have a dire and urgent need to deprogram young minds that have been enslaved to the harsh market-ueber-alles doctrines of neoliberal capitalism and classical economics. The problem is that these nineteen year olds are from the upper-middle class of twenty-first century California and are at base do-gooder meritocrats deeply suspicious of large greedy corporations that repeatedly and recurrently try to sell them junk that they don’t really need. They have not only not been programmed by the ideologies of neoliberal market capitalism and classical economics, they barely know that they exist at an ideological level. So their teachers come off, much of the time, as people who look like they are engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle with a vicious antagonist—but one who is not only invisible but who isn’t really there—and so they come off as unbalanced themselves… If you are going to turn every class into a wrestle with the ghosts of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, you will look silly unless you first make sure your students know who you are wrestling with, and why your struggle is such a desperate one—why their arguments have force and power…”

- Note to Self: Stray Thoughts on Some Undergraduate Majors Here at Berkeley that I Do Not Influence at All…

"Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I took a lot of..."

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:29:09 -0700

“Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I took a lot of psychology and political science, literature. Classes where everything was fuzzy and abstract and open to interpretation and then those interpretations were open to still more interpretations. I used to write my class papers on the typewriter the day they were due and usually I got some type of B with ‘Interesting in places’ or ‘Not too bad!’ written underneath the grade as an instructional comment. The whole thing was just going through the motions; it didn’t mean anything—even the whole point of the classes themselves was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable. Except, of course, there was no argument about the fact that you had to turn in the papers, you had to go through the motions themselves, although nobody ever explained just why, what your ultimate motivation was supposed to be.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (§22)

"I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:16:36 -0700

“I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from material things. I’m talking about something more mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I’ve now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it’s not.”

- Paul Graham, “Stuff” http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

"Progressives tend to be enthusiastic about sticking it to every available Man other than the one who..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:31:27 -0700

“Progressives tend to be enthusiastic about sticking it to every available Man other than the one who conferred their prized college degree. People who are born with an abundance of genetic, financial, and social advantages are least susceptible to the profound academic and managerial shortcomings of higher education. It’s the marginal students who get hurt when costs rise and teaching is neglected. But those people tend not to work for legislatures, think tanks, and magazines.”

- Kevin Carey, Education Sector: http://www.educationsector.org/publications/rick-perry-higher-education-visionary-seriously-0

"Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people—those with less than $1.25 a day—live in middle-income..."

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:51:48 -0700

“Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people—those with less than $1.25 a day—live in middle-income countries, such as India, which increasingly are donors as well as recipients.”

- Official development assistance: Aid 2.0 | The Economist