Governor Moonbeam Pt. 3

He's not hilarious, he just transcends humor. More here.

The Two-Party System Is Making America Ungovernable

Intelligence Squared US is out with another fantastic debate on the proposition: "the two-party system is making America ungovernable." For those unfamiliar with Intelligence Squared, the forum pits 4-6 relevant public intellectuals against each other over some proposition. One side argues "for" the motion, the other side "against". The audience is polled before and after the debate, and the side moving the most votes wins. I whole-heartedly agree with this particular proposition, although not necessarily with all the points raised in its defense. Check it out:



This medium is great because it allows for a more in-depth argument to be presented--a rare pleasure in today's blog-centric public discourse. The propositions are always good, too. Some of my favorite past debates were, "It's wrong to pay for sex" and "Guns reduce crime". Enjoy!

Short Stories Are Great

I've really been enjoying short stories of the science fiction variety lately. They always seem to have a fast-paced, haunting quality to them. I think that's because the reader abruptly enters the story in the middle; there's no real intro or conclusion, and hardly any information about what's going on. This creates a mysterious vibe which is really fun.

Frequent readers of Unity Politics will know that I regularly post sci fi short stories (for a full list, click the 'Information Nexus' label on the sidebar), most of which come from this fantastic anthology. Another incredible collection is William Gibson's Burning Chrome. It includes the architecture-themed story The Gernsback Continuum, (which coined the term 'raygun gothic') and Hinterlands, a story about a futuristic cargo-cult society. The latter is probably the creepiest and most powerful short story I've ever read.

Most recently I've been immersed in the environmental-themed dystopias eerily imagined by Paolo Bacigalupi. Pump Six, an anthology of short stories, paints a grim future: immortal post-humans reflect on the discovery of an un-modified dog tenaciously surviving amidst a toxic mine-scarred landscape in The People of Sand and Slag; a black-market farmer harvests crops using illegally-obtained water from the drought-devastated Southwest U.S. in The Tamarisk Hunter; tyrannical agriculture corporations rule a post-petroleum world through genetically-engineered crops and industrial plagues in The Calorie Man; refugees fleeing their climate change-ravaged homeland struggle for survival within a socio-economic underclass in Yellow Card Man. Read these last two award-winning stories here.

If anybody has any suggestions for other good short stories (sci fi or otherwise), I'd love to hear them!

Lean, Mean, Aid-Giving Machine

Non-profits seem to have a bad reputation when it comes to their organizational efficiency and bureaucratic vigor. Obviously many non-profit organizations are extremely well-run, but it's no surprise that this institutional model has a set of structural obstacles that hinder efficiency more than the average business.

Firstly, most non-profits are constantly crunched for money. What's worse, non-profit funding is often less reliable and quicker to dry up than income acquired through selling goods to consumers. When economic conditions degrade, donations to non-profits usually fall more than consumer spending because people cut out non-essential activity from their budgets.

Non-profits also have a built-in information problem: it's very difficult to measure success. Businesses have an inherent feedback mechanism in the form of revenue/sales that constantly provides information about the organizational health.

Competition and cooperation among related organizations is also different. All businesses differentiate themselves to minimize competition and to enjoy synergy with similar firms. Additionally, businesses integrate vertically through commercial relationships. Non-profits, which are often defined by an issue (environmental justice, access to education, etc.), find it much harder to differentiate. This means that the set of competitors (for funding, talent, etc.) is much larger. Two organizations both working on the same broad issue, but providing solutions on totally different levels, may still compete directly with each other in a way that businesses do not.

Finally on a systemic level, non-profits lack a critical mechanism that exists in the business world for enhancing organizational efficiency: the market for corporate control. Mergers, acquisitions, buy-outs, sell-offs, spin-offs, split-ups--all of these processes impose constraints on poorly-performing businesses. Good bits of an organization will grow, while bad bits will be eliminated. Granted, some Darwinian selection occurs with non-profits, but not much, and in a much less structured way.

Luckovich

Neologism Watch: 'Anthropocene'

Anybody who witnessed the strange furor over Pluto's demotion from official planet to dwarf planet knows that scientific categories matter. More than factual data, categories shape our perception and influence our values. That's why the recent push to establish a new geologic epoch defined by human impact, called the 'Anthropocene,' is cause for celebration and support.

To be sure, geologic categories should be determined by geologists through rigorous inquiry and public reasoning. Yet the fact that human-driven processes are leaving permanent imprints on the Earth with magnitudes equivalent to other past epoch-defining events should make it a one-sided debate.

An official Anthropocene category could generate a fantastic branding campaign to combat the corrosive belief in a static, historically-fixed Earth. Many environmentalists, by focusing solely on avoiding future environmental damage, neglect a powerful message concerning the changes already wrought by human technology. Bill McKibben's Eaarth is perhaps the best manifesto of this sort, methodically listing current environmental changes caused by global heating and ecological destruction. Fostering environmentalist preferences among a global population still reeling from economic catastrophe has been difficult, not least due to the supposedly vague, far-off nature of environmental costs. But the fact is humanity has made the world its own, whether we like it or not. It's time we formalized this harsh reality.

Quote of the Week

"There is a persistent division in the social sciences between those who prefer to break their material up into variables and those who prefer dealing with whole cases. In our experience, there are few causes of greater confusion among graduate social scientists, many of whom insist on speaking in the language of variables while working with whole cases, or occasionally vice versa . . . Our view is that there is not one 'right' way to do analysis. Both variable-driven and case-driven research are the products of prior conceptualization and theorization, since neither case nor variable exist as objects. If we are interested in parsimonious explanations and generalization as to what causes what, then it is useful to isolate variables and examine their effects across cases. If we are interested in context and in the complexity of outcomes, then whole cases may yield more insight. So one approach may explain part of the outcome in a large number of cases, while another may explain most of the outcome in a small number of cases."

From Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences edited by Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating

Grade-A Political Humor

Hyper-Rationality in American Politics

Ronald Brownstein has a fascinating article about the increasing role Republican governors are playing in opposing Obama:

Whatever the governors’ motivations (one man’s posturing, after all, is another man’s principle), their unreserved enlistment into Washington’s wars marks a milestone. It creates a second line of defense for conservatives to contest Obama even after he wins battles in Congress. It tears another hole in the fraying conviction that state capitals are less partisan than Washington. And it creates a precedent that is likely to encourage more guerrilla warfare between Democratic governors and a future Republican president.

American politics increasingly resembles a kind of total war in which each party mobilizes every conceivable asset at its disposal against the other. Most governors were once conscientious objectors in that struggle. No more. 

Ezra Klein (who's really been on lately) extends the observation by adding the courts to the list of new political weapons being deployed against Obama. These trends fit with my hypothesis about why our politics is so dysfunctional: politicians are increasingly rational (maximizing political utility) and better able to make correct political calculations.

We've already seen this hyper-rationality change the nature of federal legislative politics by eliminating internal geographic diversity in favor of party-rationality (where the only coalition is the party). What's scary now is that this homogenization process is occurring both horizontally across our governmental structure (the judicial branch) and vertically through the layers of federalism (state governors). Dynamic and ever-shifting political coalitions are critical to a healthy democracy, and if party identification continues to eliminate all other concerns (ex. state well-being, proper legal analysis), we ought to explore options for transitioning away from a two-party system. If every last bit of government becomes consumed by political hyper-rationality based on party, zero-sum will be the name of the game. I wonder what the Green Party is up to...

Information Nexus

1. Why Do Protests Bring Down Regimes?
2. Punctuation Mark Love Letters
3. Book Review: Garry Kasparov On Bobby Fischer
4. Is There An Opposite To Absolute Zero?
5. Internet Cat Video

Raahm

It seems that the flux currently wracking the Upper Midwest is not limited only to the political and meteorological domains; metaphysical happenings are afoot in the city of Chicago, which is set to elect a new mayor on Tuesday.

I've been closely following the race through presumptive mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel's doppelganger twitter feed, and it seems that the first Twitter novella may have finally come to an end--in spectacular fashion.

MayorEmanuel realized tonight that his reality--a twitter feed--is not the only reality. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics dictates that the election tomorrow will collapse the Rahm Emanuel wavefunction, thus necessitating the end of a brilliant and motherfucking heartfelt story.

Although I'm sorry to lose such a creative modern fable, the real Rahm will probably have more causal linkages to systems that really matter; jobs, economics, public policy, etc. If there can only be one, best it be the real one. If you'd like to learn more about the science that postulates multiple or parallel realities, check out The Hidden Reality by physicist Brian Greene. Or, for a more literary take, read Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. I'm generally bullish on the stability of the space-time continuum, but after tonight I'm a bit antsy. Is my consciousness just a high-tech twitter feed created by some bored teenager? Oh well, cogito ergo sum motherfuckers.

Make The Switch

I'm probably the last person under thirty to make the switch, but i finally did it a few weeks ago after reading this article. I'm loving it.

The Dimensional Collapse of the Republican Mind

The two major political parties in the U.S. are largely defined by their respective normative beliefs about high-level political philosophic concepts; Democratic ideals and values differ from those of Republicans. These abstract ideals and values can change over time, but generally they tend to be very stable. Specific policy goals change often, but the underlying values don't. Admitting a little more complexity, however, it's clear that causality doesn't simply flow in one direction (ideals --> policy goals). Rather lower-level concepts (like specific policy goals) can affect higher-level concepts by becoming established meaningful commitments in individuals or becoming embedded institutionally. In both cases, the translation (or operationalization) of ideals to policy goals is not a smooth linear process but instead a complex web of multiplier and feedback effects.

So why am I telling you all this? In the realm of ideas, the Republican Party has been really awful lately. It is reactionary and extremely close-minded. Republicans seldom engage in creative thinking or complex reasoning. While they might talk about the virtues of freedom or efficient markets, in reality Republicans act on only one principle: opposing government action. In the operationalization of ideals into policy goals, the Republican Party has hit a critical threshold, and is now being consumed before our very eyes: the policy goal of "oppose government" has mushroomed to epic proportions and its scale is smothering all other normative forces, including high-level ideals and values.

To better understand this situation, let's turn to the concept of instrumentality. Normative assertions come in two varieties, final and instrumental. A final goal is something we want for its own sake; ideals and values fit in this category. Instrumental goals are things we want in order to get something else; specific policy goals are instrumental to achieving the realization of an ideal or value. So when Democrats raise taxes on high-income earners, they're not doing it for its own sake, but rather to get closer to the final ideal of economic equality. [Instrumentality is a very broad concept, and although I'm using it here to only describe the distinction between ideals and policy goals, it can be applied to more mundane topics as well]

In politics, thinking about things as instrumental is associated with pragmatism and strategy. A legislator might support a policy that is directly at odds with her identity and brand if, in the end, the outcome is closer to her ideals and values. As modern science has shown, reality is exceedingly complex, and increasingly we're finding that our intuition and common-sense lead us to incorrect conclusions. This often causes trouble, as good policy can get killed if it seems too counter-intuitive or overly complex.

Contemporary Democrats are very amenable to instrumental thinking. A classic example is school bussing and affirmative action: in order to get closer to the ideal of racial equality, we must employ policies that treat racial minorities differently than whites. Other examples include inflationary dovishness in monetary policy and supporting contraception to reduce the number of abortions performed in the U.S.

Republicans, on the other hand, don't really do instrumental policy anymore. It's like they just don't get it. Contemporary Republicans do just one thing: oppose government action. But what about those two values that have been associated with the Republican Party for as long as I can remember: freedom and free markets? Aren't those the final ideals of Republicans, ones that would lead pragmatic legislators to occasionally craft counter-intuitive instrumental policy? Such policy would take the form of government action that clearly and incontrovertibly enhances freedom and market efficiency. So let's think: on what issues would we expect to see this type of behavior?

Take anti-trust policy. It's a fact that monopolies destroy economic freedom and cause market failures. One would expect Republicans to support government action to reduce market power and safeguard competition. Yet they oppose all regulation of this sort.

Net-neutrality is another interesting issue that paradoxically necessitates curbing the freedom of telecommunications firms in order to safeguard the freedom and creativity of everyone (including the telecommunications firms themselves!). The Republicans? On this issue they are almost rabidly opposed to any government action.

How about environmental issues? To pursue the goal of efficient markets, negative externalities (like pollution) must be eliminated. Taxing certain market activities (those producing negative externalities) therefore increases overall wealth. No luck here: Republicans have utter contempt for the EPA and oppose all environmental policy.

In all three cases, Republicans oppose policies that are instrumental to freedom and free markets. Why? Because they involve government action. Republican opposition to government clearly developed as a policy principle instrumental to enhancing freedom and market efficiency, but it appears now to carry more weight than any other normative belief. Put it this way: in a zero-sum situation pitting the ideals of freedom and market efficiency against the policy of opposing government action, ideals lose every time. This terrifyingly simplistic governing philosophy is really scary, and needs to be stopped. But I'm not optimistic. The Republican Party has a new final goal, one that's simple, requires no instrumental thinking, and is allergic to complex analysis. Escape to Business while you still can!

The Joy of Sect

The New Yorker recently released its long-awaited massive article profiling esteemed Hollywood director Paul Haggis and the bizzaro-world of Scientology. Among the juicy revelations: the FBI is investigating the nascent religion for human trafficking abuses, John Travolta healed Marlon Brando with only his hands, and Scientology's leader, David Miscavige, is an all-around creepy guy.

If you want to learn more about Scientology's metaphysical dogma, check out South Park's excoriating depiction of their origin story. It's excoriating because it's basically a sincere representation of the official doctrine. Also, the Simpsons episode The Joy of Sect is a fantastic glimpse into the dangers of totalitarian religious organizations, i.e. cults.

Luckovich