Power Players: Mark Kleiman

Photo Credit: Todd Cheney/UCLA

UCLA Professor of Public Policy Mark A.R. Kleiman has been hired by Washington state to assist with implementing its new marijuana legalization law, which is great news. Kleiman, who blogs at The Reality-Based Community, is one of the best thinkers and communicators on crime and crime policy currently out there. Crime is one of the most fascinating public policy areas in part because its study so multi-faceted. Rational-choice models and analytical tools from economics provide the main framework for thinking about crime: law-breakers are just regular people reacting to incentives; enforcement and punishment is a cost, not a benefit, etc. Psychology compliments this by providing explanations for "irrational" behavior: why do impulsive people commit crimes even when the expected payoff is negative; why is swift and certain punishment a better deterrent than high severity, etc. Political science helps us understand the anarchic conflict-resolution environment that exists for certain coalitions and markets for illegal goods that lack a neutral court system and why it leads to violence. Sociology has much to say about the cultural conditions of high-crime populations and their links to poverty and other social ills. Moral philosophy has long been concerned with crime: what should the boundaries of one's freedom be?; how can we encourage virtue?; the concept of just desert, etc. And unlike many social science fields, most regular people have a close personal relationship to the issue of crime and its effects.

With so much intellectual richness, it's a shame the topic of crime has become calcified in a boring equilibrium (likely due to the political incentives of fearful voters and powerful interest groups): Republicans and most Democrats generally support tons of enforcement and severe punishments, with any rhetorical deviation from the status quo treated as a "soft-on-crime" gaffe.

Mark Kleiman expertly manipulates the issue dimensions of crime to cut through its tired framing. By ignoring the culture war and emphasizing crime as simply another boring public policy field for technocratic evidence-based interventions, new political coalitions can form and novel arguments advanced. From Kleiman's excellent Washington Monthly article critiquing the current parole system:

"It would be hard to imagine a system that could combine more punishment with less effective social control. It’s no surprise that so many people wind up what we could call “doing life in prison on the installment plan.” A parent who acted the way the probation system acts—letting most misconduct go unpunished, and occasionally lashing out with ferocious punishments—would be called both neglectful and abusive."

Kleiman's book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, is brilliant in its comprehensiveness, creativity, and style, and is one of the best books I've read all year. Most nonfiction books are too long and larded up with useless anecdotes, vignettes, and framing devices. This book is short and nearly every sentence means something useful and interesting. Kleiman's writing also includes an unusually high degree of epistemic humility. The complexity of social phenomenon is not swept under the rug, with probability and uncertainty playing a large role in claims about the effects of policy interventions, evaluations of research findings, etc.

Power Players: Daniel Kahneman

Most of us are probably familiar with behavioral economics, which studies how and why human behavior deviates from the assumptions held by classical economics (e.g. the rational actor). Probably fewer are familiar with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who, along with Amos Tversky, helped launch this interdisciplinary field. Despite having tremendous influence, most of his ideas have been interpreted and popularized by others. The demands of marketing and originality have thus built up a rather large corpus of Kahneman-boosting material, each highlighting a specific facet or application of his work. All the more enticing, then, when his first book for the lay public, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was released in late 2011.

Instead of simply identifying some small gap in the popular literature, Thinking, Fast and Slow is essentially a grand synthesis of behavioral psychology and economics: Nassim Taleb's focus on randomness and biases in epistemology (The Black Swan), Roy Baumeister's research into self-control (Willpower), Ian Ayres' thoughts on intuition and expertise (Super Crunchers), Cass Sunstein's theories on risk assessment (Risk and Reason), and Richard Thaler's conclusions about the normative implications for public policy (Nudge) all receive attention. Kahneman weaves these aspects together with storytelling, experimental accounts, and interactive games to articulate one simple theory: that human decisionmaking is governed by two systems, one fast, emotional, and unconscious, the other slow, calculating, and deliberate. Even with a high level of familiarity with these topics, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a great book to read, if only because it's written by the master himself. The few biographical bits scattered throughout the book are really interesting, describing Kahneman's work as a young psychologist working for the Israeli military.

Check out a great interview with Kahneman here, his fantastic TED Talk here, and a superb book review by the great Freeman Dyson here.

Power Players: Paolo Bacigalupi

Identifying current trends in technology and culture and projecting them into the future has always been a big part of science fiction, and author Paolo Bacigalupi does this better than anyone with respect to the Earth's environmental conditions. Over numerous short stories (most collected in the spectacular anthology Pump Six) and a full-length novel (The Windup Girl), Bacigalupi describes human civilization trudging along through a bleak environmental dystopia, placing the reader at variable stages of collapse. Most of his short stories focus on one particular environmental facet, but taken as a whole a creepy sense of continuity emerges. Among the horror scenarios detailed are: peak oil, genetically modified food, transhumanism and naturalness, climate change refugees, biological warfare between agribusiness conglomerates, overpopulation, and water politics in a drought-devastated Southwestern U.S.  I recently read The Gambler, a fantastic novelette about near-future internet news coverage and environmental journalism. Check it out here.

Power Players: Amartya Sen

Check out this great interview by Al Jazeera English:



Amartya Sen is a true polymath whose intellectual contributions are quite possibly unmatched by any other living person. A Nobel laureate, he made major headway in incorporating normative concerns (like poverty and gender inequality) back into the economics discipline. He is a giant among political scientists for his contributions to social choice theory (a quantitative subfield concerned with preference aggregation, example: voting). Lately he has focused on philosophy, probably establishing himself as the most important contemporary philosopher since John Rawls with his capabilities approach to measuring justice.

Power Players: Arthur C. Clarke

Amal Siriwardena of the Sri Lanka Guardian has a great profile:

While researching for this article I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, "No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking". He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented. All this indeed makes one wonder whether he really was a closet socialist.

For more, check out this interesting clip from 1964 of Clarke making some predictions about the future.

Power Players: Atul Gawande

Medicine is a curiously antiquated discipline. While the information revolution continues to transform nearly every field of knowledge, the realm of medicine remains largely set in its ways. That we finally have an outspoken physician-intellectual willing to confront this uncomfortable fact in the form of Atul Gawande causes me a great deal of internal dissonance.

Gawande--a surgeon, professor, and author based in Boston--is unequivocally providing a great service to the public and to policymakers by bringing his personal experience and creativity to bear on this important issue. But the other, more thoughtful side of me weeps at the simple fact of his existence and what it implies about the contemporary world of medicine.

Although a regular contributor to the New Yorker Magazine on many health-policy issues, Gawande is probably best known for his most recent book, The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right. In it, Gawande argues that the mundane checklist can be a powerful tool for simplifying the complexity of the world and, in the context of medical procedures, save lives. Checklists ensure that mundane but critical details (like hand-washing) don't get overlooked and that coordination occurs between stakeholders. [watch Atul Gawande describe the idea here].

Using a checklist in all medical procedures certainly seems like a good idea, and the praise heaped on Gawande's book is certainly well-deserved. But... a checklist? Really? That's the exciting, cutting-edge macro-trend sweeping the world of medicine!? Clearly there's more to this story than just a simple checklist.

Most economic sectors are rapidly shifting to computer-aided quantitative and statistical analysis as a method for generating knowledge. This replaces the old intuitive, experiential forms of knowledge (e.g. the venerable "expert", with decades of trial-and-error wisdom) that were unreliable. A while back, the cold statistical logic of randomized trials stripped physicians of their power to discover which solutions work and which ones don't. Increasingly, diagnosing medical problems is a job for computer algorithms. Yet, in many vital areas of medicine, such as surgery, this change hasn't happened. Physicians' individual intuition still holds holds tremendous clout. In this context, Gawande's checklist is simply another mechanism through which rigorous, data-driven knowledge is replacing experiential expertise.

Gawande's willingness to critically examine his own organizations and institutions is refreshing. Although medicine is at the back of the pack in eschewing unreliable experiential expertise, it's headed in the right direction. Now law on the other hand...

Power Player: Donald Saari

University of California Irvine mathematician Donald Saari is somewhat of a rockstar in the world of social choice theory, a field of mathematically rigorous political science concerned with the aggregation of individual preferences. The most common application of social choice theory is in the study of voting systems. I'm posting an utterly fascinating lecture by Donald Saari (a version of which I attended a few years back) that is a pretty accessible introduction to the field. Check it out here.

I'm on record as supporting the Borda Count, an alternative voting system that I believe is superior to our current plurality-rule regime. Although the Borda Count is not without flaws, it more accurately reflects the will of the voters. Lurking biases within the most critical mechanism of our democracy are too important for us to ignore.

Power Players: Benoit Mandelbrot

Last thursday Benoit Mandelbrot died in Cambridge, Mass.  Mandelbrot was a hugely important figure in mathematics: he refined the concept and study of fractals--an object that looks the same the closer you zoom in on it.  The discovery of fractals showed the world that mathematics could be applied to realms previously off-limits to rigorous inquiry.  Just as calculus unlocked the mysteries of change, fractal geometry revealed the inner structure of nature's jagged contours.  A nice obituary is here.

In honor of Mandelbrot, I'm re-posting this spectacular documentary about fractal geometry done by Nova.  It includes many great clips of Mandelbrot and of the crazy computer-generated imagery we've all seen but never really understood.

Power Players: Kehinde Wiley

One of the best painters out there currently.  I usually put too much emphasis on technical skill when assessing art, but Kehinde Wiley's paintings have it all.  More here.