Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz College of Law (reprise)

In one of my first posts on this blog I observed that easterners are inclined to dismiss midwesterners as rubes and that Glenn Fellows, who tend to be professionally ambitious and have every reason to be, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided a few years ago by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in May, 2009, in The New York Times, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their chances of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because those plums are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others.” Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to this rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

"One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.” My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts that are not really in dispute, and that his enthusiastic endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools ultimately is not entirely rational. True, he would seem disinclined to buck the system from which he has profited, yet I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended as irony. They learn that sort of thing at the elite law schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree.

September 14, 2009, update: Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, Chief Justice John Roberts says no—some went to Yale (AP).

John Glenn Honored at Progressive Field

John Glenn threw out the first ball prior to the Indians' game with the Yankees yesterday. He also talked to reporters about Neil Armstrong, space travel, and what it's like to have Ted Williams as your wingman.

Rationality and Public Policy Making (reprise)

It's early in the semester, which means that we'll soon be taking a close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysisdue. Bardach's book 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, but he tries to suspend disbelief.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books had 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 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.

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?

Autumn 2012 Glenn Fellows at National Building Museum

Back row, from left to right: Adam Kase, Grace Fry, Erin Moeller, Jun-yong Choi, Amber Seira, Jade Holmes, Paige MacMorland, Katie Colburn. Front row, from left to right: Margaret Murdock, Leah Apothaker, Maddie Fireman, Marissa Cooper.

The Federal City

After the Constitution of the United States went into effect in 1789, the government proceeded to make a number of momentous decisions, some of which had to do with the finances of the precarious new republic. Congress had been granted the power to levy taxes, to regular interstate commerce, and to print money—all of which had been denied the Congress under the Articles of Confederation. But the challenges were many, including the issue of who would be responsible for repaying debts incurred during the American Revolution. Some of the states had made an effort to retire their loans, but others had not. Our creditors included both individual Americans and foreigners, and it wasn’t clear whether the states respectively or the national government under the new Constitution should bear the burden of repayment.

The first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who harbored a vision of a “strong, well-mounted government” and a bustling commercial republic, viewed the national debt as a national blessing—up to a point, at least. Hamilton proposed that all of the nation’s public debt be assumed by the new national government and funded at par, a policy that enriched the many speculators who had bought up depreciated war bonds during the hard economic times of the 1780s. In addition to making some people rich (and in effect buying their loyalty to the new republic), Hamilton also proposed the creation of a national bank and investment in infrastructure, that is, “internal improvements” such as roads and canals. To win Congressional approval of this highly controversial plan, Hamilton had to negotiate a deal with those harboring a more modest, agrarian vision of America’s future, particularly the two Virginians, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. A deal was cut over dinner at a New York townhouse: Hamilton’s financial measures would be approved by the Congress, but in return states that had paid off their debts would be reimbursed by the federal government ($1.5 million in the case of Virginia), and the national capital would be moved away from the northeast, where the commercial classes were prominent, to a location more convenient for and receptive to the rural and slave-holding south.

The issue of the national capital was addressed by Congress with the Residence Act of 1790, which authorized President George Washington to select a location somewhere along the Potomac. Unsurprisingly, Washington favored a spot that was below the fall line and not too far from Mount Vernon; to implement the plan, Washington recruited aides, including Hamilton, whom he had learned to trust during the Revolution.

Enter the shadowy figure of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the man whose name is synonymous with the design of the city of Washington, DC. L’Enfant had come to the New World to help General Washington win the Revolutionary War. He made himself useful at Valley Forge, and he did some networking among the officer class through the terrible winter of 1777-78. Afterwards, he employed his talents—many of them artistic—to further the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati, which some people regarded as an American version of the English House of Lords. It was L’Enfant who designed Federal Hall in New York, the building where Washington was sworn in as president of the United States on April 30, 1789, and he earned something of a reputation for what we would call “event planning.” After passage of the Residence Act, L’Enfant offered his services as designer of the city that would arise in the new Federal District straddling the Potomac.

Though L’Enfant was enamored of life in the New World—he wanted to be called “Peter,” for example—it was natural for him to look to his home town, Paris, for inspiration, and that suggested the standard baroque playbook of geometric plans with radiating boulevards, public squares with their neoclassical palazzos, obelisks, and equestrian statues, and long axial vistas—elements suitable for military parades and revues and for exploiting the local topography, the whole composition being an implicit rejection of the humble Jeffersonian gridiron that was to become ubiquitous throughout the rest of urban America.

The result is that among cities in the United States, Washington is unique, and has always been so. L’Enfant thought that the several states would take responsibility for developing “their” grand avenues and piazzas, and that the city as a whole would issue from these nodes like a puppy growing into its paws. That happened in the end, but it took the better part of a century. During that time Washington was ridiculed as an “embryo capital,” featuring “squares in morasses,” and “obelisks in trees,” a city of “magnificent distances,” with tree stumps in the boulevards and a swamp dividing the President’s House from Jenkins’ Hill (i.e., Capitol Hill). For many decades, L’Enfant’s plan seemed a hopelessly grandiose exercise in futility. Benjamin Latrobe called it a “gigantic abortion.”

L’Enfant himself, unfortunately, was a prideful and somewhat prickly character who rubbed DC’s commissioners the wrong way, alienated the most powerful local landowner, and finally wore out his welcome with President Washington. L’Enfant was dismissed in February of 1792, and an imperfect version (see image above) of L’Enfant’s plan executed by the surveyor Andrew Ellicott. Rather quickly, L’Enfant drifted into obscurity along with, after 1800, most of the leaders of the Federalist party that had been led by his patrons.

Washington, DC, began to look like a proper national capital only with the growth of government that accompanied the Civil War, with soldiers, bureaucrats, construction crews, office-seekers, and prostitutes descending upon the capital city. But the growth that ensued was higgledy-piggledy, unguided by the L’Enfant plan, which was neglected along with memory of the man himself. The elderly L’Enfant lived as the “permanent houseguest” of kindly friends at Warburton Manor, where he spent his time petitioning Congress for proper recognition of his service to his adopted country. He died and was buried in an inconspicuous grave in 1825.

Recovery of L’Enfant’s original vision was spurred by the professionalization of landscape architecture and the popularity of Beaux-Arts classicism during the Gilded Age. The watershed event was the Chicago Fair of 1893—formally, the World’s Columbian Exposition celebrating the “discovery” of America. Through the Senate Park Commission, also called the McMillan Commission, Progressive politicians called for recommitment to the basic principles of L’Enfant’s plan; their wooden models are on permanent display at the National Building Museum. As for the long-neglected Major L’Enfant, his mortal remains were exhumed in 1909; his grave now occupies a place of honor near the front of the Lee-Custis Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery.

L’Enfant’s original plan for the city is easily discerned in the modern city. The Victorian train station on the National Mall was eventually removed, part of a deal struck to build Union Station, Washington’s most eloquent tribute to the Chicago Fair. Tiber Creek, which L’Enfant turned into a canal, was covered over, finally giving way to Constitution Avenue. Until fairly recently, Washington still had many of the features of a somewhat sleepy Southern city, racial segregation being only the most lamentable of these. As late as the early 1960s, it was still possible for President Kennedy to joke about the city’s unique combination of “southern efficiency” and “northern charm.” Before long, the Capital Beltway and the Metro had transformed the black-and-white city that had dazzled Senator Jefferson Smith when he came to Washington in the person of Jimmy Stewart. Architectural controls and building height limitations have preserved much of the spirit of the L’Enfant plan.

And now, with publication of Scott W. Berg’s Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (New York: Vintage, 2008), we have a biography worthy of the city that took shape so gradually over a long span of time. Berg shows us that the distinctiveness of Washington, D.C.—it’s beauty, most would be willing to say—is due entirely to its designer’s recognition that this city, unlike all others, “would not happen; it would be made.”

June 20, 2012 update:  See this piece by Amanda Hurley on the recent flurry of adventurous architectural activity in DC.   

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect (reprise)

Because the Washington Academic Internship Program emphasizes the importance of public service, and because our students—Ohio State juniors and seniors all—will soon be venturing out on the job market, we devote a fair amount of attention to career planning. We have found that our alumni are a valuable resource on this front, both as mentors and as guest speakers or presenters. And we are very proud that a fair number of former Glenn Fellows find their way into public service jobs in the nation’s capital. I have heard Senator Glenn estimate that about 20% of our students end up in D.C. I would guess that the percentage these days—perhaps because the Washington-area job market is not as distressed as that of Ohio—is actually closer to 25%. Placement is an important enough part of our mission that it is one of the metrics by which we would want to be judged.

That is why we schedule a presentation early each quarter by Julie Saad, a former Glenn Fellow who works as an analyst at the Office of Personnel Management. It’s also the reason we like to introduce the Glenn Fellows to Presidential Management Fellows and OSU alumni who work in Congressional offices. We invite civil servants with hiring authority to critique the fellows’ résumés, and we pay attention to employment patterns, hiring practices, and training opportunities.

That’s why I recently picked up a book that a former Glenn School colleague, Ryan Meadows, had on his reading list for M.P.A. students a few years ago. The book, written by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune, is called Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (New York: Vintage, 2008). A central tenet is that nurture is more important than nature, which is why Colvin’s book would be more accurately entitled Innate Talent is Overrated. But never mind….

Colvin’s is a positive message, in that being a great performer does not in any serious sense depend on having a special “gift” for one’s chosen profession. People aren’t born with or without the innate ability to hit a three-iron like Tiger Woods, plot chessboard moves like Gary Kasparov, or belt out a tune like Luciano Pavarotti. And being a first-rate scholar is not all about IQ. The skills required to excel in any line of work have to be acquired—through practice. But Colvin—and this is the “bad news”—argues that people in general and business corporations in particular have very little understanding of what one has to do to acquire the skills necessary to work at world-class levels. And that means that while some people might be willing to put in long hours of arduous effort, they may not know how to practice the right way, which means their efforts will be futile.

Colvin develops his thesis with great care, and he relies on a number of case studies that are fairly compelling. Colvin’s portrait of Tiger Woods, which was written prior to Woods’s mortification, focuses on Earl Woods’s fanatical devotion to his son’s training; they were on the course together by the time Tiger was two years old. Judging from Colvin’s account, one wonders whether Earl Woods was more obsessed with nurturing genius than any man since Leopold Mozart.

Or consider the case of the Polgar sisters of Budapest. Their father was a psychologist committed to the proposition that geniuses are made, not born. He purposefully set out to prove it by turning his children into chess prodigies, which he did to prove a point: neither he nor his wife were accomplished chess players, so no innate talent was involved. His efforts at home-schooling proved to be completely successful, largely because he devised the right kinds of drills for his daughters to structure their practice.

Being a genius, in other words, is all about being willing to endure the regimen of what Colvin calls “deliberate practice,” which is not just going through the motions over and over again, but an entirely self-conscious process of constantly pressing the envelope of one’s competence. In order to become an Olympic champion ice skater, for example, Shizuka Arakawa had to endure at least twenty thousand episodes of failure, because that’s what deliberate practice is all about: “Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.”

I’m betting that Geoff Colvin is not a baseball fan, for if he were, he would have known to invoke Cal Ripken, Jr., as the quintessential product of the training regimen of deliberate practice, a regimen devised by his father, Cal Ripken, Sr. (see photo above). Much like Colvin, Ripken père rejected the idea that “practice makes perfect”; in fact, he insisted that “It’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.” For Ripken fils this meant self-consciously repeating drills designed to address whatever his inadequacies were at a given point in his development as a shortstop and hitter—the baseball equivalent of falling on his butt twenty thousand times. It made the legendary “iron man” a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

There is another world class innovator missing from Talent Is Overrated, and his story is dramatically conveyed by Dava Sobel in her Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin, 1996). His name is John Harrison, an eighteenth-century clockmaker whose innovations resulted in the perfection of a timekeeping device that was accurate and reliable enough to determine longitude at sea. Harrison’s is an unforgettable story of sheer, mind-boggling tenacity over four decades during which the British parliament kept raising the bar, sending Harrison back to his workshop over and over again to improve his marine chronometer. It’s a case study that Colvin should have cited because it demonstrates—conclusively, to my mind—that innovation is based on knowledge and the mastery of sharply focused technique (deliberative practice), and that it is foolish to think, as do some admirers of the cult of amateurism, that “too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement.”

There is another lesson in Talent is Overrated to which Glenn Fellows ought to pay heed. It is the idea that career planning isn’t just about landing a desirable entry-level job in one’s chosen profession. It’s about maintaining and adding to the skills associated with high performance on the job. Finally, one should be encouraged by what Colvin has to say about the inexorable effects of aging. It turns out that outstanding performers “suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise” [emphasis added]. In short, on-going professional development and career planning are life-long enterprises, to be sustained up to and even into retirement.

The Strange Career of Pithole City (reprise)

This is week nine for the Summer 2012 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program, which in this unique new semester spells The Beginning of the End. By way of conclusion, I like to consider several public policy classics, including Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." The essence of the tragedy of the commons is fouling one's own nest, and this quarter I'm asking the fellows to read a case study that I recently published. It's about the environmental degradation accompanying the world's first oil boom, which occurred in the 1860s not far from where I grew up--though it antedated me by a few years--in western Pennsylvania. There is a link to my essay, "Pithole City: Epitaph for a Boom Town," over on the right-hand side of this blog. And here is a link to a 7-minute summary of the astonishingly brief but intense history of Pithole City. The photo above is the view down Second Street today. Obviously, Pithole exists today mainly as an archaeological site; it could scarcely even be called a ghost town.