Sunday, September 29, 2013
Amartya Sen on the Female-Male Ratio in India
Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for his work in welfare economics. He also is a past winner of the National Humanities Medal, and he writes often for The New York Review of Books. In the current issue, Sen has a piece on the status of women in India, in which he wonders why the ratio of women to men is markedly higher in the southern and eastern parts of the country than it is in the west (see the map above).
I'm linking Sen's article here because the Glenn Fellows are beginning to refine their policy paper research projects, and it seems to me that Sen does an exemplary job of marshaling quantitative data to explore the relationship between his two variables, culture and sex-selective abortion. Sen says he doesn't know of "any convincing clear-cut answer" to the question that he poses, but one wonders if it has something to do with Muslim attitudes toward women. (There are many fewer Muslims in eastern and southern states, which are predominantly Hindu.) Yes, I know that it is politically incorrect to suggest such a thing.
The point is that quantitative data can be extremely useful in policy analysis, and one doesn't have to do anything fancy with the numbers to explore their meaning. Sen's article strikes me as in many ways a much more transparent, and therefore better, "specimen" of policy analysis than the one that appears in Bardach's Appendix A.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Glenn Fellows Pose with James A. Garfield. . .
. . . at the U.S. Capitol: Joe Sadek, program coordinator; Mike Vrabel; Tom McGraw; Ryan Falin; Corey Damron; Daenayia Hudson; J.P. Suffron.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
The New Deal as Public Policy
Ira Katznelson has written a new book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, that approaches its subject very much as a student of public policy would be advised to do. According to the recent review by Nicholas Lemann in The New York Review of Books, the book is distinctive in that its focus is Congress, not President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sounds to me as if this 706-page tome might reward a close inspection.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Autumn 2013 Glenn Fellows Visit Mount Vernon
Left to right: Daenayia Hudson; Ken Kolson, Director; Ryan Falin; J.P. Suffron, Tom McGraw; Mike Vrabel; Corey Damron; Joe Sadek, Program Coordinator.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Garfield: A Book Review (reprise)
My first full-time teaching job was at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. When I washed up on the shores of that bucolic campus in the summer of 1970—I was 25 years old—I was vaguely aware that the school was the descendant of something called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, and that it had been founded by the Disciples of Christ in 1850. I also was aware that its most famous alumnus was James Abram Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. Somewhere along the way I had learned that Garfield was assassinated by a "disappointed office seeker" and that he was succeeded by a non-entity named Chester A. Arthur.
That was about it. For me Garfield was merely one of several post-Civil War Ohio Republican presidents who had been officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and wore full beards. I probably could not have picked Garfield out of a lineup if it had included Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Over the next decade and a half, I was to learn a lot more, some of it from Allan Peskin’s definitive biography, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), and some of it from my faculty colleagues, alumni of the college, and local townspeople.
Early on, It was pointed out to me that one of the handsomest houses in Hiram Village, still in use as a private residence, had been Garfield’s home while he served as teacher and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. Several alumni of the college were, it was said, on friendly terms with direct descendants. Faculty colleagues supplied some important biographical details. Garfield, I was to learn, was born in a very rude log cabin on the Ohio frontier, endured desperate poverty through much of his childhood, and went to work early on the Erie and Ohio Canal. Garfield’s was a Horatio Alger story—literally, I read the book. He worked his way through the Eclectic as a janitor, proving to be a brilliant and industrious scholar with a gift for friendship and leadership. He wrestled with his students, and he debated itinerant atheists. There were persistent rumors about his having carried on a love affair with Almeda Booth, one of his teachers at the Eclectic. In 1858, he married a local girl, Lucretia Rudolph; their love letters were collected and edited by one of my colleagues on the Hiram faculty. Another produced a play about Garfield’s assassination.
Garfield was an accomplished scholar in several fields, including Latin and Greek. Though he studied ancient languages, he was enlightened in many ways that we would consider modern. He was a voracious reader; he was one of the few Members of Congress who made good use of his lending privileges at the Library of Congress; he was a confirmed abolitionist before the war and remained committed to full racial equality afterwards. He treated everyone with respect, had a playful sense of humor, and saw both the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition. In an age of rampant political corruption, Garfield was a man of honor, though he was no goody two-shoes.
That Garfield was “not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man” is one of the major themes of a new book: Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. The book is a careful study of the assassination based on extensive research in what appear to be the most relevant sources. The madman at the center of the tale is, of course, the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The practice of medicine was very much in flux at the time, with older physicians in the United States being strongly inclined to resist the revolutionary ideas of England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who called for antisepsis in the operating room based on his understanding of the role of germs in the spread of disease. As for murder, Millard endorses the testimony that Guiteau provided at his trial: Guiteau might have done the shooting, but Garfield’s attending physicians murdered him with two months of wrong-headed, agonizing treatment. The chief physician, the ironically named Dr. Bliss, introduced infection when he and many others repeatedly stuck their fingers in Garfield’s wound searching for the bullet. Later, they failed to recognize the infection that had set in, and then to stop its spread. Millard is unable to resist the temptation to assert that this was a case in which ignorance, literally, was Bliss. The other major character in this sad tale is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented a metal detector called the Induction Balance that he hoped would aid Garfield’s physicians in their search for the bullet. Unfortunately, the perfection of the device came too late to save the intended beneficiary.
This is a wonderful book, though in a recent Washington Post review, Del Quentin Wilber makes a legitimate point when he complains that the story of Bell’s Induction Balance is somewhat tangential to the Garfield drama. I am inclined to concede the point, but for me it doesn’t begin to ruin what is an informative and moving story. I do, however, have two reservations of my own.
The first has to do with Guiteau and his motives. Invariably, Guiteau is described as a “disappointed office seeker,” and Millard shows that he lobbied shamelessly to be appointed to a consulship to Paris. There can be no question about his having been a disappointed office seeker. But, as Millard makes clear, he was also a lunatic, a religious fanatic who was convinced that his deed had been divinely inspired. It suited the enemies of the spoils system and the advocates of civil service reform to play down his derangement while stressing the role that the patronage system played in causing a disappointment keen enough to inspire assassination.
The second has to do with the book’s title, which asserts that the destiny of the republic was at stake during the many weeks that Garfield’s physicians attended so incompetently to their patient. This is a little overwrought. For one thing, it doesn't consider the extent to which the powers of the presidency were circumscribed in the late 19th century, despite Lincoln’s aggrandizement of the office during the Civil War. And in any case it isn't clear what public policies were at stake as the honest and enlightened Garfield lay on his deathbed and the hapless Chet Arthur, the creature of a political machine, cowered in a Manhattan townhouse. Garfield may have been the one politician of the Gilded Age who had it in him to put an end to the spoils system, introduce the principle of merit into public service, and put a hammerlock on Jim Crow—had he not been thwarted by an assassin’s bullet. But, as it happened—and Millard tells this story very well indeed—mediocre Chet rose to the occasion to an extent that no one had imagined possible, which is further cause for wondering whether Guiteau's heinous deed altered the course of American political history in any significant way.
If it seemed to some people at the time that the destiny of the republic truly was at stake, it may be because the president of the United States, in addition to being chief legislator, chief diplomat, and leader of his party, serves as head of state—part of what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” aspect of government, in contradistinction to the “efficient” exercise of political power. The American people will mourn a president—even one who is practically unknown to them, like William Henry Harrison, or one who was unloved because he was unlovable, like William McKinley—because the president is, among other things, the embodiment of the state. In Garfield’s case, the mourning was profound, because his many virtues, which included his gregarious and passionate nature, were so conspicuous. He must have been an easy man to love. Careful readers of Millard’s admirable book will mourn his loss still.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
WAIP Alumnus Publishes Story about Rep. Jared Polis
Jay Hunter, a Glenn Fellow during the winter of 2011, has published a piece in today's Roll Call on the entrepreneurial career and personal wealth of Colorado Representative Jared Polis, pictured above. Kudos to Jay! Read his story here.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
The Great Syria Debate: Overtaken by Events?
The BBC is reporting this morning that Bashar al-Assad has accepted a Russian plan to put Syria's chemical weapons under international control. According to the Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Muallem, this would "remove the grounds for American aggression."
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius is saying that his country plans to introduce a resolution in the UN Security Council that, if approved, would authorize the destruction of Assad's weapons, which were banned by a Geneva Convention in 1925. So it is possible that President Obama's proposed military strike against the Assad regime could be, as they say in Foggy Bottom, "overtaken by events," though that would not make the prospect of a Congressional vote any less anxiety-producing for the those who will have to respond for the record when the roll is called.
The Washington Post's George F. Will has weighed in with a column entitled "Syria Presents a Constitutional Moment," which argues in favor of Congressional involvement in principle, though not for Congressional approval in this case. Glenn Fellows will notice that the unusually well-read (albeit unusually abrasive) Will cites George Orwell and James Madison along the way.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Autumn 2013 Glenn Fellows at National Air & Space Museum
Left to right: Mike Vrabel; Ken Kolson, Program Director; J.P. Suffron; Mark Jones, docent; Tom McGraw (back); Daenayia Hudson (front); Corey Damron; Ryan Falin. Photograph by Joe Sadek, program coordinator. Yes, that's Friendship 7 in the background.
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Taking on the Higher Ed Lobby
Ohio State alumnus Kevin Carey, chief education analyst at the New America Foundation, has written a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education that is highly critical of the U.S. higher education lobby, also known as One Dupont Circle. Certain passages might remind the Glenn Fellows of Deborah Stone's treatment of the "art of political decision making," or possibly even Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."
Rationality and Public Policy Making
It's early in the semester, which means that soon we'll be taking a close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis. 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?
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