Rationality and Public Policy Making

It's week 2, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8 issue of the New York Review of Books has a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the NYROB won't let me attach a link to Easterly's article because it is premium content.

So here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Life Imitates Art--Yet Again

It never ceases to amaze me how often--and usually, how eloquently--the daily newspaper expresses ideas that have been explicated at a high level of abstraction by certified intellectuals. It happened again today.

Last week, students in the Washington Academic Internship Program read and discussed two classic works of political science. The first, James Madison's Tenth Federalist, argues that one of the chief virtues of our "pluralistic" political system inheres in the many points of access offered to interest groups bent on frustrating popular majorities ("the mischiefs of faction"). The second, Charles Lindblom's essay on "the science of muddling through," explains why it is simply impossible for policy makers to be strictly rational, and why they must therefore settle for a decision-making method involving "successive limited comparisons" that guarantees incrementalist results.

Today it was David Broder's turn to demonstrate the relationship between these two (that is, Madison's and Lindblom's) ideas and their pertinence to contemporary public affairs. Click here to read Broder's column in today's Post.

Scary Gargoyles at Library of Congress

From left to right: WAIP director Kenneth Kolson, Sam Rose, Terry Traster, Josh Kramer, David Young, Liz Hagan, Jessica Meeker, Chelsea Rider, LOC tourguide Michael Lopez. Photo by Laura Allen.

Autumn 2009 Glenn Fellows visit Pension Building

The autumn 2009 class of Glenn Fellows has arrived. With program coordinator Laura Allen (at far left in this photo), they are Liz Hagan, Chelsea Rider, Terry Traster, Jessica Meeker, Amy Ovecka, David Young, Sam Rose, and Josh Kramer. The picture was taken outside the Pension Building, which houses the National Building Museum.

Inside is a spectacular atrium, where we took another picture, and an exhibit on the history of Washington, D.C., more or less from L'Enfant to the present. Afterwards, we went to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for a panel discussion of "Universal Health Care: Are the People Ready for It?" A busy first day!

Paging Mr. Madison...

Roughly midway through the fall 2009 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program, we'll be reading Mann and Ornstein's indictment of Congress, The Broken Branch, and we'll be listening to a presentation by Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg, who argues that the real problem with Congress is that it has been made subordinate by the growth of presidential power.

Meanwhile, readers of this blog might be interested in an article by Garry Wills in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, which makes something of the same case in the process of documenting the many ways in which the Obama administration has not departed from dubious precedents set by the previous administration. Read Wills's piece here.

Is This a Great Neighborhood or What?

The process of planning for the autumn 2009 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program has made us more keenly aware than ever of how rich are the resources of this city and how wise was the decision taken a year ago to move the Glenn School’s Washington office from downtown to our present location two blocks east of Union Station. Capitol Hill is the most exciting spot in town.

Yesterday, for instance, my colleague, Laura Allen, and I spent the afternoon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building attending an event called “Fighting Insurgencies with Laptops,” which featured a briefing by Nicholas Negroponte, MIT professor and author of the 1995 best seller, Being Digital, about a project that involves the distribution of mini-laptop computers to children in under-developed countries throughout the world. In his keynote remarks, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) explained how a “soft war” based on advanced information technology could put the madrassas out of the business of nurturing Islamist extremism. The full implications of the One Laptop per Child project were then explored by a panel that included, among others, Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United States; Husain Haggani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States; and Anne Gearan, Chief Pentagon Correspondent for the Associated Press.

It was the kind of event that occurs virtually every day while Congress is in session. It was stimulating, free, under-attended (there were about 30 people, most of them Congressional staffers, in the audience), and under-reported. Laura and I had been invited by OSU alumna Rachel Szala, who works for Rasky-Baerlein Strategic Communications, Inc. Rachel is the “O” on the left-hand side of the photo above. The “H” is Sarah Binstock, and the “O” on the right is Rachel Johnston. All three were part of the class of Spring 2009 Glenn Fellows.

Glenns Are Eye Daughters

I am still trying to master the peculiar lexicon of Ohio State football. Several weeks ago, for example, I was told on good authority that Senator and Mrs. Glenn would be invited to participate in a ceremony previously performed only by such luminaries as Bob Hope, Jack Nicklaus, and Woody Hayes. What I heard was that they would be serving as "eye daughters" at the OSU-Navy game. Thanks to the generosity of Glenn School benefactors, my wife and I were able to attend the game (on the 50 yard line) and take a picture (see above) of the Glenns infiltrating TBDBITL to do their thing. And another of life's little mysteries dissolves.

Ordinarily, the novels of Philip Roth are about as foreign to me as Big Ten football culture. Recently, however, I re-read Goodbye, Columbus, and I was gratified to find that Roth's protagonist, Neil Klugman, was as confused and tantalized by OSU traditions as am I:

For many this will be their last glimpse of the campus, of Columbus, for many many years. Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives. We shall choose husbands and wives, we shall choose jobs and homes, we shall sire children and grandchildren, but we will not forget you, Ohio State. In the years ahead we will carry with us always memories of thee, Ohio State...

The John and Annie Glenn Historic Site and Time Machine

Though it was just last week, the docents, or “interpreters,” at the historic Glenn House insist that my wife and I visited the New Concord, Ohio, shrine on September 4, 1937. We were told that sixteen-year-old John Herschel Glenn, Jr., also known as “Bud,” was over at Annie Castor’s at the time, and so we were shown around the house by JHG, Sr. Johnny’s dad was a plumber, and he made a pretty convincing case that the family would have lost its home had it not been for the policies of the New Deal. The curious thing about the Glenn House is its unique cicadian rhythm (Down SpellChecker!). Every January 1 the clock is turned up or back a full seven years. So, if my wife and I were to return next Labor Day weekend, we would find ourselves in 1944, and we'd be told that Johnny was off fighting in the Pacific with the United States Marines. It seems as if this Johnny will never come marching home.

The Glenn House, which is full of period artifacts, is well worth a visit, though time travel can be a little disconcerting.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009)

Here in Washington, D.C., there is today—a month early, at least—a nip of fall in the air. Even more improbably, a wave of bipartisanship has swept over this city, one that is sure to last until next Tuesday morning, when partisan warfare will resume as usual on Capitol Hill.

This brief but intense era of good feelings was inspired by the death on August 25 of Senator Ted Kennedy, who has been eulogized both as “the liberal lion of the Senate” and as an exemplar of political generosity. Kennedy’s many Republican friends in Congress—Senator Orrin Hatch and Representative John Boehner, among them—have offered eloquent testimony to Kennedy’s caring and gracious nature, as evidenced by his willingness to collaborate with Republicans. A special issue of The Hill contains a number of such of tributes. In the Washington Post, even George Will found something nice to say about Senator Kennedy last week.

Let’s enjoy this while it lasts. But before the canonization juggernaut gets up a full head of steam, consider how differently things look from where I sit. I mean that literally. I happen to sit in the Capitol Hill office of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, which is located at 239 Massachusetts Avenue N.E., a few blocks away of the United States Capitol. The Glenn School moved into this old rowhouse a little over one year ago. Before that, the building accommodated a French restaurant called La Brasserie, which Senator Kennedy helped to make notorious.

La Brasserie was one of the local watering holes where Senators went to misbehave, and by that I am not referring to steak tartare. The definitive treatment of Senator Kennedy’s romps at La Brasserie was undertaken by Michael Kelly and published in 1990 by GQ.

As Kathleen Parker wrote in the Post last week, “Kennedy's life was indeed a mixed sack of good works and sometimes-deplorable behavior. A charitable person would hope that he found peace at the end of his life. An observant person might note, without pleasure, that even in death, it’s all politics.”

I see no reason why we can’t be both charitable and observant.