Reading notes for Theory & Practice

Shared Responsibilities, Unshared Power, HO Khai Leong

• Given the title and the buzz, I was hoping this book would be an antidote to the sycophancy of Neo's Dynamic Governance. But here's how chapter 7 starts:

  The politicisation of the civil service broadly defined has been a prominent theme in post-independent Singapore's public administration literatuer. Politicisation refers simply to the political control of the bureaucratic apparatus by the governing party in power for the purpose of establishing stability and legitimacy, sustaining social penetration and promoting economic development.

  You had me at politicization but you lost me at "sustaining social penetration". Politicization is a pretty straightforward word: to make something political. We talk all the time here about the mostly false distinction between policy and politics, so maybe a stronger definition of politicization would be to let partisan politics override non-partisan issues in a matter of policy. Singapore's civil service is politicized—that is, partisan—because the ruling party of Singapore, having to its credit denied itself (in the last few generations) violence and overtly corrupt elections, has to hang on to as many other levers of power as possible.

  Even in this book (and although the rest of the paragraph is stronger), criticism is soft-pedaled.

• p 255: "The year 1984 is chronicled as a watershed year when the old guards made way for the new leadership."
• p 257: "a Political Study Centre was established in 1959, and the civil servants found themselves in classrooms where training sessions were given to reorient them to the new government's goals and aspirations." by 1961, civil servants, whose "attitudes now had been transformed by the Political Study Centre towards the PAP, were totally supportive of the government." What did they do, bring in Anthony Burgess to consult on the classroom design? (Coincidentally enough, Burgess served in the British Colonial Office in Malaysia in the 50s.)
• p 265: "The leaking of confidential documents is almost unknown in the Singapore context."
• To summarize this chapter: The PAP thoroughly dominates the civil service, even if civil servants don't literally have to be card-carrying members. Any boundaries are hard to spot since the PAP has been the only party ever in power. The political elite make policy decisions; the Ministers have formal sessions under the Prime Minister and informal sessions under LKY (to help save them from "mistakes"). The Ministers then work with Permanent Secretaries and their bureaucracies to implement policies. The Ministers are supposed to be "smarter" than the Permanent Secretaries. The bureaucracy has a big say in how things actually play out, but Ho doesn't bring up any examples of the bureaucracy doing anything other than carrying out policies as ordered.

Macroeconomics For Business and Society, Adams

• p 98. Talking about the new economy. "Once an advanced computer program has been built, it can be applied widely at little cost." Of course I agree that computers redefine scarcity, and in a good way, and it's nice to see that referenced in a mainstream economics book, though Adams doesn't mention that books, newspapers, music, movies, and most other media can also be applied widely at little cost. In the context of economic growth, which is in the name of the chapter, I think it's important to remember that the transition to developed countries occured without information technology (IT); what's most important is a change in the heads of everybody so that they all organize themselves more effectively and efficiently and build infrastructure and industry. IT is probably speeding this up for a lot of people, but the countries that aren't developing are held back more fundamentally by social and political reasons.
• p 100: I skipped ahead to the graph on p 101 and was about to point out that technology refers to things as mundane as division of labor, but the text does it for me. Always nice to know I'm on the right track.
• p 104: one set of economists provide data suggesting that Singapore, Taiwan, South Koroa, and Hong Kong had zero percent growth of "Total Factor Productivity" between 1960 and 1994. Other economics come up with 27%, 26%, etc. Differences have to do with definitions of "engogenous phenomena", "knowledge capital", etc. Do we dismiss out of hand only the first ones, or do we tell the whole subfield to check back in 10 years when they've found their own collective asses?
• p 105: Adams claims that "growth in East Asia does involve high rates of increase of inputs based on high savings rates." I think that the savings rates here are simply the amount of wealth people created minus what they consumed? In other words, they built themselves industrial economies by working hard all the time on the right things. Whereas the United States, by spending several hundred billion dollars a year on a war, has essentially taken the complete annual output of ((200 billion dollars / ~10 trillion US annual GDP) * ~100 million working Americans equals) two million Americans' out to the desert to blow it up. Two million full-time working Americans could have just done nothing all year, not gone to work, still been paid (from tax revenue), and everything would be the same. Except for the many thousands fewer dead, physically and mentally maimed, and displaced people. Sorry, did I go on a tangent? Macroeconomics does that to me.
• p 106: how does the cogent critique of traditional TFP, "over time, technical progress just proceeds on its merry way without a true economic explanation ...", end up concluding that "the new approaches reflect what we see in the real world as the 'new economy'"? Can't you fix the enormous defects in your simplistic theory without sprinkling Web 2.0 pixie dust?
• p 107:

  Modern growth theory has gone some steps further ... the new growth theorists like to see only one production function which embodies all the forces contributing to the growth of output ... One way to accomplish that is to introduce human capital into the production function. We can write:

  Y = A x f(Kp,Kh,L)

  What a great illustration of the difference between precision and accuracy. You could instead write that the total output of an economy depends on the work the people do, the equipment they use, how well they work together, and what technology they have, and you would be just as accurate as that equation and much easier to read. Whether or not there's even any point in trying to figure out numbers to plug into that equation, much less whether or not the equation is real, is a question I'll hopefully be able to answer at least a little bit by July 2008.
• p 108 through 110. More qualitative discussion of economies gussied up into pretty little quantitative equations.
• Chapter 6. Asian economic development.
• p 117: "The capital investment required by the East Asian countries has been raised in large part from domestic sources." Same point as before. In other words, the Tigers lifted themselves into wealth mostly by their own bootstraps.
• p 118: "Most of today's high income industrial countries started out many years ago as poor countries engaged largely in subsistence agriculture." Didn't pretty much everybody, once upon a time, engage largely in subsistence agriculture?
• p 120. The graph is very cool. I found the journal article that it's from (I assume; the co-author is the same as the textbook author, Francis Gerard Adams) but it's from 1997 and to read it I would have to go over to the campus and physically access the Asian Economic Journal Volume 11 Issue 4. Are you insane? Get up? From my chair? Oh, thank god, Google Books has it.
• p 120: Steps of economic development. These seem reasonable: primary producer, labor-intensive manufacturing, high-tech manufacturing, post-industrial service economy.
• p 124: "The critical step in achieving development is, as we have noted, to shift the nation onto a new and higher production technology." I thought the critical step was to end your civil war, rebuild your civic institutions, and inject limited amounts of capitalism into your economy? I guess that's three steps.
• p 126: "Does the East Asian development ladder have implications for the mature economies? Indeed, did East Asian development come at the cost of jobs and/or welfare in the industrial world?" My knee-jerk answer, based on an anecdotal understanding of how gargantuan an externality polution is, is very much no: by taking our polluting factories, China did us a huge favor.
• p 130: Case study, the Nidas shoe company. We get a lot of slightly disguised case studies, and I'm not sure I get the point. "The Nidas Shoe Company began as a producer of athletic shoes in the northwest of the US in the mid-1950s." Surely this is Nike, founded in Oregon in 1972?

My favorite definition of genius is something that's completely obvious—but only after a genius invents it. This surely qualifies. (Obviously it could be put to poor use as well as good; that's not the genius part.)

Today's good news: Gays can get married in Iowa. Probably it will be stayed and then overturned on appeal, but let's keep our fingers crossed.

SMIG week 3 class notes Tenets of International Relations realism. (Wow, there are a lot of types of realism). Precursor: Peace of Westphalia is first international "treaty" respecting sovereign national boundaries. Now all land on Earth is divided into nations (except Antarctica). This is a very successful system. Top ten (with Joel's rebuttals where appropriate)

• People are selfish (agreed, but people also have a sense of fairness)
• People want power. "It's kind of Darwinism. But it's real—you can't argue with it." This is the second throwaway comment the professor has made that I would happily spend an hour arguing if that weren't completely off-track from the class goals. Darwinism is far less arguable than the validity of IR realism. (Week 1's objectionable throwaway comment was referring to Denmark as punching above its weight in IR. What I object to is the implicit assumption that the "natural" importance of any country comes from its economic and military power and that moral power, social influence, etc are somehow secondary or less real. The terms "hard" and "soft" power contribute to this fallacy.)
• denial of morality or progress in the international sphere
• power is the only currency.
• without power, other national objectives cannot be achieved
• States need military power for self-preservation
• You need economic surplus to get military equipment
• Allies can't be trusted
• international institutions can't be trusted
• stability comes from balance of power

Carr. Blames liberal internationalists for, in their idealism, creating conditions leading to war.

Prof argues (not sure if he's serious or still representing Realism) that we are all realists at heart. Mahmoud asks, what about Mahatma? Discussion results.

the argument: power is most real. if you ignore that, you are unrealistic and war will result because somebody else will use power to take your land. from this description, the prescription is, be strong for peace. Mahmoud's response: then everybody will seek power (e.g., arms race). Realist reply: seek balance of power to limit arms races.

Does the internal structure of a country matter to its IR behavior?

(back to realism thinking) Every country ultimately depends only on itself for defense. Objection: what about Iceland, Singapore, etc? Realism response: you poor sucker. Good luck with that.

Objection to realism: Why is US worried about China if economic power "doesn't count"? Because realists recognize that economic power sustains military power. More discussions about North Korea, etc.

I don't like this U-shaped room; in several classes, I've seen that it produces a tendency for the lecturer to have a back-and-forth with the whole room, like Prime Minister's Questions, rather than a room-wide discussion. Also this class is too big (26 today) for a group discussion. The prof said we would break into groups but it's already halfway through class.

problems and weaknesses with realism...

It seems to me that Realism is the fossilization of 1939-1950 realism. Since our understanding of how the world works has evolved, and the world has changed, Realism is no longer realistic. Perhaps that question gets us to neo-realism?

ad-hoc graph showing number of people dying in wars over time since 1700. Big increase. Responses from students: the weapons are more powerful; there are more people to fight. (which I what I was thinking - let's see # of war deaths as % of population).

The ability for nations to start wars is greatly diminished. my objection: it took about ten determined people to get the biggest army in the world to go to war. some discussion.

Student point: I agree with Morgenthau but you have to contextualize him.

The world has changed, e.g., compare safety of air travel now to sea travel in 18th century. The level of anarchy in the international system is declining. Military action between states is much less legitimate. Most wars are civil wars.

By request, the top ten subject words from the Hobson reading (usual caveats about OCR software only catching a percentage of worlds):

    192 state
    133 international
    128 power
     96 states
     65 domestic
     62 theory
     57 agential
     42 Waltz
     41 anarchy
     38 system

States, Markets, and International Governance

John Hobson

• Two different realism theories in international relations.
  • classical realism. The state is an agent which can affect the international regime
  • neorealism. "the passive/adaptive state"
• At first glance, both Hobson and the many theorists he is discussing seem to both over-complicate and over-simplify: "The ontological superiority of the state over the system means that it constitutes an independent agential variable in IP. Thus as states change, so does the international system"
• Waltz: Domestic political structure is hierarchy; international structure is anarchy. All states are functionally equal, e.g. are sovereign, have governments, etc. Some are just bigger and stronger than others. Survival strategies including emulating and balancing.
• Gilpin adds internal and external fetters to the model. Some stuff about hegemony, which he contrasts positively to imperialism. Hobson describing Gilpin: "[other states] enjoy a 'free-ride' at the expense of the hegemon's altruistic behavior". Pity the poor white man and his burden... Gilpin wrote in the 80s? the 1980s? And this is called realism? jeez.
• p 49- 50. I was starting to zone out until I read this: "It is vital for all statesmen to be able to dress their [foreign policies] in an ideological cloak in order to 'bluff' the enemy. As in Star Trek, the element of surprise that was achieved by the Klingon battleship cruisers' cloaking device gave them considerable initial tactical advantage over the Federation star ships." Sorry, dude, Romulans have cloaking devices, not Klingons (at least until movie number three, when Klingons got the cloaking device through continuity-destroying plot expediency. And the Romulan ships in TOS (The Original Series) are Birds of Prey, not "battleship cruisers". And even in a wet navy, battleship and cruiser are two different things. And your point that statesmen have to hide their real policies in ideology is unconvincing—I tend to believe that people spout ideology because they believe it, and also that anybody playing at that level sees through the bullshit pretty quickly. Oh, and what's with the sexist language?
• "In sum, the bulk of Morgenthau's analysis is based not on systemic anarchy but on fundamental unit-force variables." I hope that's true, because I really didn't read the last six pages very closely.
• p 61: "In line with postmodernists, Carr argues that peace is not possible as long as the sovereign nation-state remains the fundamental political form."

International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism and Beyond. Viotti and Kauppi.

• p 55: "For the realist, states are the principal actors .... Non-state actors ... are decidedly less important."
• p 55: "Realists also assume that states are rational actors." Clearly, we are in another one of those situations where a word is used to label an ideology in contradiction to the plain meaning of the word. Oh, wait, p 56, "the image of a unified, rational state is a realist assumption, not a description of the actual world." Whew!
• pp 57 - 64: history review: Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Grotius, Clausewitz, Carr
• "even among realists, there is no clear consensus on how to define the term power." Military, economic, etc. Relative or absolute. GNP as proxy for power. These rankings are "not trivial ... critical step in attempts to explain the behavior of states ..."
• pp 71 - 76. Balance of power issues. Emergent property of IR systems or planned?
• p 85: realists view the world through a national security prism
• p 88: chapter ends, as did the chapter in the last reading, with a plea to the reader to read more. Maybe if they were more succinct we would love to.

Realism and Neo-Realism, Scott Burchill

• Carr, writing in 1939, criticizes liberal internationalism for working from what Burchill calls "an imaginary desire of how we would like it to be." That sounds familiar. (See also where David Rees and dedalus lay into Ignatieff for claiming that the dirty fucking hippies were right to oppose the Iraq war, but shouldn't get credit for being right because only their blind obedience to dirty fucking hippie ideology motivated them, not the reality of the situation. Ignatieff makes this claim in the same essay where he sort of apologizes for supporting the war because he took wishes for reality. So from 1939 to 2003 we went, what, about half-circle? And now the dirty fucking hippies are the realists.)
• "Carr's work should be understood as primarily a critique of liberal internationalism, or what he called utopian thinking. It was not put forward as a meta-theory of international relations."
• "Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations (1948) comes closer to being a realist textbook."

What explains the seemingly inconsistent actions of NYC Transit authority which, responding to a projected budget deficit, raised some prices while lowering others? Elasticity!

Micro class, like macro, is a bit hard to sit through because we cover the same material as the book. Literally: the powerpoint slides are provided by the publisher. I've already done the reading (as with Macro, I'm a week behind schedule but so is the class) and I feel like the only thing that's going to squeeze any more learning out of this material is wrestling with the numerical exercises, but I can't do that in class.

Economic definition of short run vs long run: The short run is the period of time in which a market buyer can't adjust any part of your consumption or usage (or seller change ...). The long run is when the buyer or seller has had time to change everything.

Digression into geometric series to explain how it's possible to calculate long-term elasticity, which requires an infinite time frame (the longest run, I guess).

Different types of costs

• Fixed cost, and average fixed cost
• variable cost, and average variable cost
• average total cost
• marginal cost. If I have this right, this has to do with why GM would keep making cars even when they lose $2000 or whatever per car sold. The $2000 figure comes from dividing their annual loss by the number of cars sold. In the biggest picture they are destroying value, but it may be the best option for the corporation to try and survive, because their marginal cost may be lower than their average cost. That is, they may be stuck with big depreciation costs and pension bills and such regardless of how many cars they make, so they might as well make a bunch of cars and lose $10 billion instead of $20 billion. In the longer run, they hope to improve the marginal and average profit per car above zero. If the price drops below the marginal cost, then you are literally losing more money the more cars you sell.

Painful review of chart of short-run costs and the relationships between marginal cost, average cost, and average variable cost, hindered by the anti-pedagogical nature of the chart in question which, like most of Png, seems very clear and straightforward and educational but, under detailed scrutiny, are confusing for no good reason. For example, Figure 4.3, "Short-run profit", shows the total cost, variable cost, and total revenue for Luna Farms. But Luna never makes a profit under the conditions in the graph, so when you go looking for the point of maximum profit you can only hope to find the point of least loss. Logically equivalent but needlessly confusing.

Selection from other things I looked at during class

• Earthquake Sets Japan Back To 2147 (more of a macro than a micro topic, probably)
• It's never a good sign when two of your three most productive hitters are a combined 78 years old, pushing 500 pounds, and blessed with the speed and nimble handling of a garbage truck.
• Dual-listed company

I also made this chart:

I'm really unhappy with OpenOffice charting; it sucks at least as much as Excel's and has fewer features. I keep trying to invest some time to learn a serious graphing tool like gnuplot or R.

There is a huge variety in my NUS classes from those where class is the same as the reading (Micro; Macro; hopefully States, Markets) to those where the reading provides indirect, theoretical support (Negotiation) to those where the connection is tenuous (Theory and Practice). Also, some classes are completely case-study driven and some have a few case studies and some have no cases. The Macro class I'm sitting covers the reading pretty exactly, and though I'm a week behind on reading for it, it's a week and a half behind the syllabus, so there's not much new info here.

Discussion about Green GDP.

With much fanfare China was the first country to try to measure Green GDP; that is, to subtract the measurable costs of pollution and environment degradation from the published GDP figures. 2004 figures, which included figures from only a subset of the planned categories (data was not available for all of them), reduced China's apparent growth rate almost in half. The work to do 2005 calculations was then shelved.

Talking points

• This bolsters the argument that GDP is a horribly abused number (and the broader argument, Moneyball writ large, that our understanding of the reality we live in is poor at best)
• Why did China do even try to calculate this? Part of the Olympics greenwash?
• Why did China shut it down? Perhaps because officials are measured by GDP, and they saw their bonuses and possibly careers nosediving
• To what extent does this reflect battling of two factions within China? How could we define these factions? Would American stereotypes of tree-huggers vs anti-environmentalists and greedy businessmen apply? Are there more than two factions?

Investment is the key to growth

Solow neoclassical growth model. "In 1956, Solow and T.W. Swan developed a relatively simple growth model which fit available data on US economic growth with some success[1]" Can we test the model by experiment? Can we plug in data for other countries and since 1956 and see if the model still fits? The model fails in two critical areas.

Even the Singapore Story that we're immersed in stands as a counterpoint to this notion. The only way I can really understand economics is visualize a bunch of pre-historic cavepeople sitting around in front of their cave (I'll elaborate on this later). This is pretty simplistic and maybe misleading, but as a gedanken-experiment it helps me a lot. If your tribe is sitting around the fire and wants to improve its lot, you need motivation, you need trust, you need specialization of labor.

Dur! I just realized I was reading "investment" as "foreign investment". Perhaps there is a definition of investment broad enough to encompass the trust and motivation, but I'm suddenly terribly afraid that I might type "social capital", and I refuse to dignify that term by using it.

Selected sites I surfed during class (other than referenced above)

• Race & money; Lorenz curves by race in US
• hacking iPhones
• Microsoft stuffs the ballot of a Swedish committee to adopt OOXML as a standard. Hrm - something for PP5264 class.
  • Microsoft sustains its monopoly power in the productivity software market (i.e. Word, Excel, etc) in many ways.  One key way is file formats.
  • Currently, ".doc" is the de facto standard.
  • ".doc" is a closed format owned by Microsoft.  Nobody else has access to documentation, so any attempt at compatibility requires reverse engineering and guessing
  • ODF is an open standard which can replace .doc.  Anybody can read the documentation and then create software that reads and writes ODF files
  • ODF is not software; it's just a standard
  • OOXML is Microsoft's response.  It purports to be an open standard, but critics argue that it is so convoluted as to essentially be a closed standard.
  • The battlefield between ODF and OOXML comprises not only the market but also governments and standards-setting bodies
  • The latest piece of news is that Microsoft allegedly paid a number of Swedish partners to join a standards body in order to control a vote on ODF vs OOXML
  Discussion points?  I'm sure there are a lot but how to tease them out?  Who should have the authority to set standards?  How are governments special buyers in the marketplace?  How does something like this affect the legitimacy of standards-setting bodies?
  

Managerial Economics, Ivan Png. Chapter 5:

• p 154: "In the preceeding chapters, we developed the concepts of supply and demand. ... Let us now make explicit the assumptions underlying the concept of supply and demand ... Collectively, these five conditions define perfect competition."

  I've complained about economics (and just about everything else) before, and so I'll try to keep this brief: Teaching traditional economics in detail (supply, demand) in a one-year class is pointless. Let's define economics as the distribution of scarce resources. Traditional economics, covers, it seems to me, maybe 3% of that. A real explanation of how and why economies work is not yet at hand, but it will use a lot of what is currently psychology, political science, evolutionary biology, sociology, criminology, etc.

  An economic class or textbook which sets those aside to focus on the "basics" is like teaching somebody about gravity and calling it the basics of science. If you want to understand how a bus moves down the road, you'll need to know friction, chemisty, engineering, material science, metallurgy, classical mechanics, and so on. Trying to understand why Vietnam is poorer than Thailand (or even trying to quantify the difference, positive or negative) using macroeconomics feels like being asked to explain why the bus gets 5 miles per gallon using only the theory of gravity.

  I'm not arguing for skipping classical economics. If you skip gravity, you won't understand how the bus stays on the road. But I would like to see the overwhelming emphasis of economics classes be on market failures, externalities, and every other inconvenient detail economics has tried to shove under the carpet. My friends who study economics at higher levels assure me that the vanguard of the field is heading exactly this way, but it hasn't trickled down very far yet. Addendum: Check out (through the very expensive subscription your institution pays for in order to access predominantly publicly funded knowledge—don't get me started) the JSTOR results for "Amnon Rapoport": Dominated, Connected, and Tight Coalitions in the Israeli Knesset; Children's Estimates of Proportions; An Experimental Study of Buyer-Seller Negotiation with One-Sided Incomplete Information and Time Discounting. Cool stuff.

  (That 3% number is pretty arbitrary. Maybe it's as high as 50%, which weakens but doesn't demolish my argument.)

  The five conditions of perfect competition are

  • homogeneous products (wouldn't "fungible" products be more precise?)
  • lots of small buyers
  • lots of small sellers
  • free entry and exit for buyers and sellers
  • everybody has equal information
• p 159: So, if all those conditions are met (which is basically impossible), then you have market equilibrium.
• p 165: "A common misconception is that, if sellers' costs fall by some amount, then the market price will fall by the same amount." Of course that's silly. What actually happens is that sellers will pocket the difference, because the buyers don't have equal information or there is a high barrier to entry for new sellers or because the sellers all know each other or because the sellers are all actually owned by the same corporation or individual ....
• p 159 to 181: lots of details on how equilibrium changes in conditions of perfect competition. *sigh* probably ought to brush up on this; after all, gravity is real too.
• p 182: The case study about Micron leaves out the very salient question of how TI and Micron's profitability changed with the changing DRAM prices. Just because the price of DRAM went up after TI sold its DRAM business to Micron doesn't mean it was a bad decision.

Here. Here is where I'll build my secret island fortress.

PP5502

Dynamic Governance. Boon Siong Neo and Geraldine Chen.

A five hundred page case study on the Singaporean government since independence. Is is possible to have a hagiography of an institution?

Chapters 1, 5, 6

• p17. "... if culture and capabilities work independently, the synergistic effects described above may not be realized, and while there may be some ad hoc results, their potential in energizing governance is limited ... for example, great cultural values and the beliefs of founders may be admired and respected but current leaders may not possess the vision or capabilities to build upon the cultural heritage to achieve significant progress"
• p 19. "... in 1979 the [education] system was overhauled ... students were streamed in their [fourth] year of primary school into classes that reflected their academic and language abilities as demonstrated in examination results ... the education system was geared to train students to acquire the technical knowledge and skills that the economy needed. ... Though attrition rates declined and examination passes improved, there was much unhappiness." I would imagine that fixing the course of peoples' lives based on test results before age ten would make some people unhappy. After a long paragraph detailing the shortcomings of this system, we learn that "the basic educational framework remained largely unchanged throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This was due in large measure to the beliefs of the founding political leaders" that other developing countries produced unemployable but educated graduates "who were a potential source of political and social instability." Nice. Maintaining the policy of "streaming" is doubly beneficial, then: it produces a great workforce and it limits the development of political opposition.

  According to the book, the system didn't change until the late 1990s, when the "transition to a knowledge-based economy" highlighted the shortcomings of a robotically educated generation. The new slogans: "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" and "Teach Less, Learn More." The point of the whole story? "Both driving forces for change and counter-acting forces for stability build up in the system over time" until the force for change exceeds the force for stability. This analysis isn't wrong on the face of it, but it feels like it's missing the point. From my very ignorant perspective, it seems like any policy analysis in Singapore has to start with the elephant in the room. Did LKY prevent any educational reform until he was finally faced with convincing evidence in the late 1990s? If not him, who were the faces of the "force for stability" in this issue?

• p 28-29. "Five principles set the tone for dynamic governance choices"
  • anti-corruption. sure, agreed.
  • meritocracy. okay, but apparently only if you can prove yourself before age 10.
  • rationality with pragmatism. To the extent that that means anything, sure.
  • "the principle of using market prices adjusted for social equity". This one I really like, at least in theory. I'm both a critic of capitalism who agrees that it's system which forces many good people to behave badly, and a believer in the power of markets (for better or worse). So, for example, a better solution to the post-Katrina housing problem in the US would have been block grants of housing money to residents, rather than the FEMA trailer debacles.
  • multi-racialism. Which has worked so well that there needed to be a "Council for Education for Muslim Children" to "tackle the social problem of Malay educational underachievement" (Tan). In 1980 Malays made up 14.1% of the population but only 1.5% of university graduates, 5.7% of 'high school/junior college graduates', to use US terms, and 7.9% of professional/technical employees, and 1.8% of administrative/managerial (Tan). Oops. See principle two—I guess those Malays just don't have what it takes to stand out by age 10 and get in the top stream. Maybe they are all late bloomers.

    Joint Government-Malay Community Efforts to Improve Malay Educational Achievement in Singapore, Jason Tan, Comparative Education > Vol. 31, No. 3 (Nov., 1995), pp. 339-353).

• p 38. "it takes extraordinary emotional fortitude and effort for a leader to 'think again' what he has previously initiated or earlier changed, and to change again. ... Over time, groupthink can develop in the leadership so that there is a subtle denial of reality..."
• p 44, PM Lee Hsien Loong about the decision to allow casinos in Singapore after all: "But here the advantages were not so clear, and the dissenters had valid arguments, which we ourselves subscribed to for a very long time." So are the dissenters not part of the group? Or is that the royal we?
• p 189: "Dynamic governance is essentially about how paths are created, executed, renewed and discarded when circumstances change."
• p 190: "The lack of government effectiveness is often due not to a lack of ideas or information, but the lack of follow-through, to delays and failures in execution." very true, but not particular to governments. The same could be said about dieting.
• p 193 features Figure 5.1. Organizational structure of the Singapore Government, footnoted "... for the sake of simplicity, the judiciary and legislature portions of the government have not been included". Funny, they don't show up in the text, either. Which is a pity: if Singapore has had a successful government for 40 years without effective checks and balances with a legislature and judiciary, where have those checks and balances come from? How well have they worked? If they haven't been effective, but Singapore has still done well, does that suggest checks and balances are over-rated?
• p 216. "criteria for assessing the potential of talented individuals ... [which evolved to become] the standard for evaluating policy options ...":
  • "Helicopter quality ... holistic and long-term perspective"
  • "power of Analysis, involving superior intellect, logic, rational analysis and judgment"
  • "Imagination ..."
  • "Realism ..."
  So the civil service strategy is to recruit only philosopher-kings?
• p 218: template for Staff papers. Interesting to note that one of the Compulsory sections is "Use of land implications".
• p 252: "Before the 1990s, economic strategy was based largely on the state trying to identify fast growing industries, using fiscal or other incentives to attract MNCs to locate in Singapore, or growing its own, often state-owned, commercially-run companies. This was how Singapore attracted and grew its electronics industry. This approach depending critically on the ability of the state to perceive "winners" ahead of its competitors." So what are the big, successful bets Singapore placed? Building a container port early in the containerization cycle must be a big one. Would the asset lists of Temasek and GIC be equal to a list of successful bets? What are the big bets that failed? Investing in the airport at Paya Leber before deciding to scrap it in favor of the Changi location is one. What else?

  "With the radical changes in the environment from the 1980s, it has become increasingly difficult to identify in advance fast growing sectors ... the ability to see emergent opportunities and to respond quickly to capitalize on them became critical capabilities."

• p 303: "[The Taskforce on Vulnerable Workers] begare looking for models and systems of welfare, which they felt were instructive. Their search through the literature turned up the system in Hong Kong, a model in Wisconsin, USA written up in an article in The Economist, and a description of welfare reform in New York in ex-mayor Rudy Guiliani's memoirs." That's a literature search? The best documentation on welfare they could find included the Economist and Rudy's ghostwriter?

Henry Chapter 7

A bit of a confusing chapter in that the narrative flow skips between corruption and performance measurement. These are related concepts but not identical, and the boundaries blur in this chapter.

• p 153: "[by 1940] corruption no longer was seen as a deep and pervasive problem in which political parties used taxpayers' monies to reward themselves via a spoils system. Instead, corruption was perceived as an occasional and sporadic phenomenon that mostly manifested itself in the form of dishonest individuals and small coteries ..." Why? Does this reflect a successful reformation of the political culture removing the spoils system? I.e. the "good government" crusades? Or was the spoils system still in full effect and the mood just moved on?
• p 153: "LBJ's Office of Economic Opportunity (later retitled the Community Services Administration in 1975 and ultimately eliminated in 1981)" Don't miss the story of how Nixon appointed Rumsfeld (with Cheney's assistance) director of the OEO in order to dismantle it.
• p 159. The new public management. A "bundle of concepts, approaches, and techniques ... performance measurement, collaboration, coalition formation, benchmarking, citizen satisfaction studies, program evaluation ...":
  • alertness
  • agility
  • adaptability
  • alignment
  • accountability
• p 159: "By 1996, almost two-thirds of the National Performance Review's 1,200 recommendations had been enacted (but almost none after that year), resulting in savings of more than $136 billion ... Nearly 2,000 field offices and 250 programs and agencies, such as wool subsidies and the Bureau of Mines, had been shut down."
• p 162: "In sum, the feds are energetically making up for lost time in adopting the new public management; the states are lagging ... and local governments ... are still leading the movement..."
• p 162: "Corruption in the United States is hardly on the pandemic scale that it reached in the nineteenth century—not even close." How far has the US regressed under the current administration?
• p 163: "An analysis of the propensity of administrators in 476 Texan school districts to manipulate student scores on standardized tests .... Among the striking findings of this research is that the policymakers who set up the system that allowed corruption to flourish were singularly devoid of common sense."
• pp 164-166: "There are five generally recognized kinds of performance measures that are commonly used by governments."
  • Workload or output
  • unit cost, or efficiency
  • outcome, or effectiveness
  • service quality
  • citizen satisfaction
• pp 167-169: "at least eight limitations of performance measurement have been identified"
  • measuring the wrong thing
  • using meaningless measures
  • differing interpretations of the "same" concept
  • displacing goals
  • shifting costs instead of saving costs
  • disguising subgroup differences with aggregate indicators
  • ignoring the limitations of objective measures
  • failing to address the how and why questions

This is supposed to be a Monday morning class, but the prof was travelling so we have a Friday afternoon makeup. On top of that, he plans to travel a lot more this semester so we have another class Saturday morning, then normal class next Monday, then another pre-emptive makeup class next Saturday morning. Bah.

Rethinking Growth, Roberto Zagha, Gobind Nankani, and Indermit Gill

Money quote: "... our knowledge of economic growth is extremely incomplete. This calls for more humility in the manner in which economic policy advice is given, more recognition that an economic system may not always respond as predicted, and more economic rigor in the formulation of economic policy advice."

Brief outline of how the "Washington Consensus", the economic development orthodoxy of the 1990, failed (somebody tell Friedman). The article notes the very wide variety of outcomes, from China's radical transformation to Africa's miseries, and the weak to non-existent understanding of cause and effect in this field. I further note that it takes for granted that "growth" is the desirable thing, rather than improvement in human welfare, Green GDP improvement, etc. Check back when you take off the other side of the blindfold, gals and guys.

     44 growth
     25 financial
     25 countries
     24 1990s
     20 capital
     19 reforms
     16 policies
     16 economic
     15 more
     14 trade
     14 liberalization

When Can Public Policy Makers Rely on Private Markets? Rebecca M. Blank

Privatization of social services. 89% of US schools are public, but only 17% of hospitals. % of revenue from the government also varies wildly by sector. Why?

Options for mixed markets: Private ownership with public regulation. Private ownership with gov't regulation and funding. Gov't ownership with private subcontractors. How to choose which is best? I think Blank's proposals grossly oversimplify reality. For example, "if outcome quality is observable [and some other conditions are true] ... then voucher schemes ... seem appropriate." How do you define outcome quality for a school? Test scores have very little to do with quality of education or learning. Graduation rate? The result of the wave of performance measurement has been (it seems to me, although I have only anecdotal evidence) a wave of cheating on those measurements, everything from controlling which students you take in to offering bogus classes to help students graduate to having teachers literally help students cheat on tests.

Okay, a few pages later we are talking about problems measuring outcomes. "examples where prison privatisation appears to have resulted in lower costs but greater violence". Oh, nope, we're just raising them to dismiss them: "there are at least two ways to argue that even in the presence of these problems the private sector can be an effective provider." You can just figure it out over time, or you can find other "signals." So being a "not-for-profit" signals better quality.

... civil service culture blah blah .... When is government management less attractive? with big inefficiencies. but "it is not clear that the government is markedly less efficient in comparison to the non-profit sector". (Not only that, but what about health care, where the private sector is far less efficient? When you pay for medical insurance, you are paying the salary of the person whose job is to find reasons to deny you the medical service you are paying for. Their nominal job is is to benefit you by they are preventing your neighbor from getting more than their fair share, but in practice they have a very powerful incentive to deny everybody their fair share and pocket the difference. More generally, I think Blank's entire discussion is weak on how incentives distort performance.) Other problem with government management: patronage and corruption.

"... competition — while almost surely a guarantee of greater efficiency — may have other offsetting costs which should also be considered."

The arguments for more and less privatization in public services break down into

• Whether or not you believe government's "ability to be wisely paternalistic"
• How concerned you are about the difficulty of measuring quality
• How much you care about fairness
• If you trust the government

"my own evaluation leads me to believe that there remain a number of areas where the direct government provision of social services is not obviously worse ..." Pretty bold conclusion... I know that my gut feeling from my own readings is that increasing privatization of social services in the US has been somewhat disastrous, but I certainly need more real data before I can stand behind, or repudiate, that opinion.

Rosen Chs. 1, 4, and 5

How supply and demand curves change for public goods.

World Development Report 1998-99, Overview

Summary: Knowledge is very important to developing economies.

Chapter 10: what governments should do to develop their countries

• lots of detailed prescriptions for how developing countries can develop better and faster. Plenty of nuts and bolts, some very good, some not. It's too detailed to make easy reading, but not nearly detailed enough about exactly what is likely to work where to be a useful policy manual. I'll just highlight a few that caught my eye.
• "in 1990 world sales of modern medicines derived from plants discovered by indigenous peoples were estimated at $43 billion. Yet only a tiny fraction of this went to the people and groups who had preserved the traditional knowledge of these medicinal plants or to the countries where the plants were found. Developing countries thus need to increase their capability to negotiate better terms with foreign firms who would profit from this knowledge. To do so, they must participate actively in evolving international agreements on intellectual property rights and biodiversity." Translation: hey, developing countries, you have been screwed. So you better keep showing up at those IP meetings where you've been getting screwed, or else you'll get screwed some more.
• lots on the mix between public and private. Governments should hand over telecommunications to the private sector because the public sector phone regulation is terrible. (True, but can we fix the public sector utilities?) Governments should create standards that the marketplace needs because only gov't, in many countries, has the credibility standards need. But also see ISO 9000, which is not a gov't standard.
• Education, brain drain, etc....
• Economies collapsed in former soviet states because they did not have information systems adequate to finding new suppliers once the centralized production system disappeared.
• Develop a strong legal and judicial system

The Economics of Public Issues, Miller, Benjamin, North

This book is a source of case studies for the intro Public admin class. It is tendentiously written and seems to be a catalog of cases where government has made things worse. Odd selection unless we are being trained to be libertarians?

Lecture Notes

When there is a problem in how people behave, some people want to change the behavior. Economists want to change the incentives.

Single most important factor that helps economic efficiency is competition.

The prof is talking about elements of transaction cost. In particular, negotiating a contract to ensure you get a specific quality of product of service is expensive. This ties into the Blank reading, where she says that the suitability of a sector to being specified in a contract, or not, helps determine whether it can be successfully privatized. I'm not sure how much I agree with that. Perhaps it's just because I work in a field where you really can't create a fully specified contract (software), but I think that the notions of trust and tribalism are at least as important. Even for something like raw steel, there are plenty of ways to nibble at a contract, by tweaking quality, changing delivery dates, etc. Well, now that I write that out, I guess that something like a raw material input to a company like GE could actually be controlled via a contract without any trust; all of the properties of raw steel, from content to timely delivery, are readily and cheaply measured by processes a good factory would need to have in place anyway.

Cost recovery vs user charge.

Sources of government finance.

• tax revenue
• non-tax revenue
• borrowing

The US budget does not break out current vs capital expenditure.

In Asia, richer countries have bigger governments. Asian and OECD countries spend an equivalent percent of GDP on government expenditures. But OECD countries have much larger transfer payments as percent of GDP.

Difference between economic profit (presumably reflecting efficient use of resources at the civilization level) and the profit that companies report.

Difference between cost recovery and user fee. 25 minute digression and I never heard a good explanation, though I can guess from googling that it's simply a policy to provide a service financed in part or in whole by pre-planned means, such as user fees or reimbursement for service provision from a funding source.

"'what should government do' is a stupid question because the boundary of the state changes"

Public Finance in a nutshell:

G = R + B + deltaM + FF + Sd	(1)

Where:

G = Gc + Gi

R = Rt + Rn

B = Bd + e*Br

FF = FI + A + Sf - deltaRs

Where:

G = total expenditure on final goods and services and on transfer payments by the government

Gc = government consumption expenditure

Gi = government investment (or capital) expenditure

R = total operating revenue of the government

Rt = total tax revenue

Rn = total non-tax revenue (fees, levies, fines, user charges, and cost recovery)

B = total borrowing by the government in a given year

Bd = domestic borrowing from non-monetary authorities

Bf = total borrowing abroad, excluding foreign aid and grants

e = exchange rate

M = money supply

FF = non-debt sources of net foreign finance

Ft = foreign investment (net)

A = foreign aid (net loans and grants)

Sf = sale of foreign assets by the government

Rs = foreign exchange reserves

Sd = sale of domestically held government assets (divestment and privatization)

I found that nutshell hard to read so I made my own:

"If you don't have good data you can justify any stupid decision."

Single most important criterion to improve farmer welfare is better roads to market

taxes themselves are not an economic cost to society. The work to collect taxes, and the distortions created by taxes, are costs.

Log of who speaks in class:. Class is 15 m, 13 f. Prof is m.

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During the lecture, the department secretary emailed me to ask which elective I was dropping, with the deadline half an hour after the lecture ended. I replied that I was planning to overload and take three electives. But before the lecture was over, I emailed back that I was dropping this class. The reading load is more than I'm comfortable with, but the reason I'm dropping is that the teaching style on offer doesn't match my learning style. I would like more exposure to the economic nuts and bolts but this doesn't feel like a good environment to do it.

Afternoon lecture: Zainah Anwar, Sisters in Islam. She described various problems with Islamic law in Malaysia, from its muddled constitutional status to its sexist implementation. Her speech is dry but Q&A is more interesting.

On to the reading for tomorrow's class:

The Emergence of Global Governance Theory, Martin Hewson and Timothy Sinclair

I read the first page, skimmed the next 20. I then did a crude word frequency analysis on text I was able to extract from the PDF of the article. Here are the top twelve (omitting articles, prepositions, etc):

227	global
106	governance
69	international
61	world
53	change
30	one
29	theory
24	more
23	organizations
22	rosenau
21	emergence
20	concept

I'm not convinced that Hewson and Sinclair's ordering of words into sentences, paragraphs, etc, adds any value to the list.

We went over it in class and I still didn't really grok the points they were trying to make. But we've been warned that it'll be a source of exam questions, so I guess I'll try again.

Global Governance as a perspective on World Politics, Klaus Dingwerth and Phillip Pattberg

• Despite the title, this is much better. Still lots of abstract words and concepts but they are actually saying something. "We ... argue that a more careful use of the term global governance is necessary to overcome the current confusion spawned by the variation in uses of the concept."
• p 187: First descent into b.s., talking about

  'min-max strategy' of concept formation ... the minimal definition [of a concept] combines a high extension (number of referents) with a low intension (number of attributes)

  Is intension a word? O.E.D. says yes, "4. Degree, esp. notable degree, of some quality, etc.; intensity, depth, strength, force. Often contrasted with extension in sense of width of range. 5. The internal quantity or content of a notion or concept, the sum of the attributes contained in it..." I say bah. Two paragraphs could be replaced by two sentences: "In defining a concept, there is a spectrum between a very broad definition that includes everything but tells you nothing, and a very narrow definition that tells you a lot but doesn't apply to enough things to be useful. But 'global governance' doesn't even fit on one spectrum, because it's used both as a descriptive concept and to label a political program."
• p 188: paraphrase: some people use governance to mean 'it looks like governing, but there's no government doing it'
• bottom line: it's okay to use "global governance" if you clarify whether you mean it descriptively or the prescriptively. And it's not the same thing as "international + transnational," because it frees you from being so hung up on nations.

This article, in contrast to the first, is quite readable and has things to say, even if it takes too long to say them. Can we see any important difference in word frequencey?

    234 global
    226 governance
     74 world
     63 politics
     59 international
     58 concept
     40 political
     40 more
     39 perspective
     30 different
     28 relations
        ...  
     18 rosenau (19th place)

I guess not.

Global Governance: Poorly Done and Poorly Understood. Craig N. Murphy

• "A recurrent theme in the pages of ... Global Governance is the ubiquitous impediment of US foreign policy."

Class discussion: he outlines how some global organizations have failed. c.f. Rwanda. (Rosenau's point is that where governance happens is changing.) Murphy seems nostalgic about the changes. His point (we are told) is that allowing governance to slip into the private sector will reduce accountability and be bad.

I read somewhere in my last week of reading about how more people are seeking to make a contribution through a career in NGOs instead of governments. Classmate response: if I want to save the forests in Indonesia, I can't just go join the Indonesian Forest Service.

I don't know why I got the impression that IVLE, the Learning Management System in use at NUS, was actually Blackboard, but apparently IVLE is actually a homegrown system. I regret my error and reiterate that IVLE's user interface is abyssmal.

A seminar by Ron Noble, Secretary General of Interpol, on "war on terror" vs a law enforcement approach to terrorism. The talk was not for attribution so my notes are brief.

Questions I would like to ask:

• background: Noble has held senior positions in both Republican and Democratic administrations. How does partisanship affect your job?
• There are credible claims that the US has collaborated with other countries to kidnap and illegally hold people? Does Interpol investigate these claims? (Looking at their website, I bet the answer would be that their functions are information-sharing, not policing.)
• What are the priorities for Interpol? External priorities? (is terrorism #1? if so, what's #2?) Internal, organizational priorities?
• Interpol provides passport checking and other useful security services. But very few countries use them. Why not? What can break the paradox of security theater?
• Some number of people like Mahir Arar have disappeared. How would we find out how many?

Further thought: The US anti-terrorism database machinery, like the No-Fly list, is so out of control that I wonder if it could be overloaded and destroyed by writing "Terrorist List" on the front cover of some phone books and leaving them in a backpack on a New York subway.

I had a two-page policy memo due for week two of Theory and Practice of Monday night. Some people said that the assignment was optional; we could do either a week two or a week three assignment. It didn't look optional on the syllabus, so I thought I would do it, but didn't get to it until Monday morning. Then I couldn't find the text of the assignment, so I gave up. Then I stumbled across it (cleverly hidden in the syllabus) while with Kona at quarantine, so I got started, but then gave up again because I didn't have any good ideas, or access to the memo templates we're supposed to use, and I had less than 2 hours before class. Then walking to the MRT from quarantine I had a lot more ideas, so I started writing again on the train. I finished a weak first draft in the computer center and, after wrestling with the p.o.s.H.P. printer and skipping a bathroom stop, was only 10 minutes late to class, which is held in a lecture hall with about 10 too few seats for the class. Fortunately this is the biggest class; now that we're out of shopping week I should find out how big my classes, especially the electives, actually are.

This came in today's email: "NUS has not officially deployed MS Office 2007 to be installed on our systems. NUS Computer Centre is addressing some issues about the software and it will not be available so soon. Hence, it is strongly advised that students save their documents on MS Office 2003 for compatibility reasons within the School." This seems to be common within the MS Office ecosystem. And yet people are still afraid to use OpenOffice because it might not be compatible.

Notes from Tuesday morning class.

• Homework memos will be graded in large part on how proposals are presented so as to be palatable to the intended reader, not just the quality of the proposal.
• Morning-after self-assessment of my memo:
  • Spellcheck and proofreading. A sentence in the first paragraph is missing a word.
  • my solution for the problem that the DDR is a broken institution is glib and superficial
  • goes too lightly on big farmers; doesn't have fallback strategy of nobody sells, e.g., coercive sales
  • Conclusion is feeble
  • Still wasn't sure if Scott wanted single-spaced or double-spaced (and I was in a rush) so I used one-and-a-half-spaced.
  • Skimmed over issues of crop type and international crop markets.
  • No numbers

Essentials of Negotiation, Fourth Edition, Lewicki, Barry, Saunders

• p 15: "[zero-sum] bargaining is most appropriate when time and resources are limited, when the other is likely to be competitive, and when there is no likelihood of future interaction .... Every other situation should be approached with an integrative strategy." In other words, don't bring a knife to a gunfight, and don't bring a gun to a children's birthday party (not least because you might be tempted to shoot the clown).
• p 19: A list of reasons why conflict can be a good thing. Some ("Managers find out how their style affects their subordinates through conflict") are plausible; others ("It invites employees to take another look and to appreciate the intricacies of their relationships") less so.
• p 33. "In getting people to agree it is important that they feel as though they got the best possible deal."
• p 52. "It appears that Iraq felt it could 'stare down' President Bush because it had successfully avoided outright conflight during President Clinton's term." I guess a bombing and cruise missile campaign destroying a number of structures in Iraq and resulting in an unknown number of casualties doesn't count as outright conflict. Jeez, the authors must be really tough negotiatiors.

Ever since I read that a GE90 jet engine could empty out all the air in Madison Square Garden in one minute, I've been keen to see jet engines more broadly integrated into our daily lives. Here's a good start.

Henry Chapter 10 notes:

• A survey of the history of public administration through the 20th century in the United States. The short form is that people started with completely unrealistic models and paradigms, including treating policy implementation as isolated from politics, and ended up with slightly more realistic but still grossly inadequate ideas.
• p 285: "A diagrammatic version of elite theory that relates it to public administration is found in figure 10-2." Figure 10-2 has a triangle cut off the top of a pyramid, labelled "elite". The base of the pyramid is labelled "Mass". The arrow between them is labelled—and I guess it's this label that relates this diagrammatic version of elite theory to public administration—"policy output." There are five words in the diagram, seven in the caption.

  The bigger problem with all of these models and their diagrams is that they are arbitrary metaphors. Could you think of policymakers as fluids, compressed by pressures from opposing interest groups? Sure. Does gloryifying that metaphor with the gaudy name "The Group Model of Public Policymaking and Implementation" and a cheesy picture help you explain and predict policymaking or provide testable hypotheses? Is it useful for modelling? I don't see how.

  It's true that some of these models date back to the 1900s and 1910s, and the chapter does show a progression in model sophistication, and the recent ones make more intuitive sense (especially the "organized anarchy" model), but even the new ones aren't really models in the pure sense.

• p 285: "In these days of questionable campaign contributions and powerful vested interests...." Oh, yeah, these days. 'Cause back in the 19th century the campaign contributions were irreproachable, the vested interests had no say in politics and policy, and the powerful didn't wear vests....
• p 292: "... the automobile [...] accounts for most of the air pollutants and fuel consumption in the United States." Perhaps 30 years ago, but it turns out, at least in California, that that's no longer strictly accurate. For many categories of pollutant, cars are no longer the majority or even, in some cases, the plurality source. Half of airborne sulfur releases in California in 2005 came from ships, and most of the rest from fixed industrial sources. Cars and trucks together accounted for less than 5%. (Three cheers for the dirty hippie freaks!) And less than 30% of energy consumption in 1997 was for transportation.
• p 296: "[critics of rationalist planning say] planning in the comprehensive, rationalist mode, in short, costs more than it saves." Well that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn't it? More broadly, the section of back and forth criticisms of practical incrementalists vs normative rationalists is a fairly unilluminating display of straw men beating on each other.

The immigration authority text messaged me last week that my student visa was ready, so during an unexpected break in classes I headed down to ICA for the fourth time. Despite not having my original claim ticket, I was in and out (successfully) in under 20 minutes. I spent more time than that beforehand, running around the VIVO City mall following bad directions trying to get my NETS card charged with S$100 to pay for the visa. First I went to an HSBC branch to pick up my ATM card, finally, three weeks after I opened my account; their first attempt to mail it to me failed and they didn't see fit to mention that until I called asking where the hell it was. I showed them the NETS card I bought at a 7-11, but they said they couldn't charge it there. Turns out I have a NETS cashcard, not a bank-linked "NETS card". I asked if they could give me a NETS card but they said I would have to go to a local bank. I asked if they were a local bank and they said they were not. I pointed to the slogan on the wall behind the nice lady and asked if that meant they were going to remove that bullshit (), and she said no, it didn't. Long story short, you can only change your cashcard in a 7-11, and they take a minimum of 0.5% per charge. So your payment options in Singapore include NETS, which stores value on the card itself and goes into a reader, and is linked to your bank account in a way I don't know and don't care to know; NETS cashcard which is similar but not linked, and which are allegedly but not actually accepted anywhere NETS is; EZ-Link, which is a contactless stored-value card used mostly on mass transit; the spectrum of credit and ATM cards; or cash. If you have a car and drive downtown you have to have a NETS card to put into your on-board card reader in order to drive into the downtown congestion zone. Last time I was in Hong Kong, five years ago, they seemed to be standardizing on Octopus, which is actually the same technology as EZ-Link, to handle both transit and other transactions. Hopefully NETS will die out soon.

We have two core classes and two electives, plus I'm overloading with one extra elective, plus 5501 is split into Micro and Macro and each appears to have a full course load of reading and assignments. I've been trying to get my readings done this weekend; yesterday at quarantine I read a bunch of very dry definitional material on PPP, HDI, GDP, etc. Nothing new, just underscoring that, with tremendous international effort and investment over many decades, we now have statistical measures that are only mostly misleading guesswork. Then on to Public Administration and Public Affairs by Nicholas Henry. I was going to see if there was an IVLE forum where I could post my notes, but two of my six modules still aren't available online (going into week 2!) so you get to read my notes on Henry here.

• Totally and completely US-centric. Drat.
• p 7: "When Daniel Shays ignited his ill-conceived Rebellion in 1786 ... the nation's political leaders discovered that no arm of 'American government,' such as it was, had been authorized or organized to put down the disturbance, and eventually that chore fell to the Massachusetts state militia." The substance of this paragraph may be true, but I don't care for the wording. It gives me the impression that the "leaders" were sitting around in a pub when word came in of the revolt, and somebody (who were these leaders in the pre-Constitutional period?) said, where's the secretary of the Army?, and somebody else said, oh shit, we don't have a War Department, and somebody said, what about an FBI? Do we have one of those? Because an FBI would be very handy right about now. I imagine it as a scene out of Get Your War On.
• p 14: "[In 1900] government workers at all levels accounted for less than 2 percent of the American population ... Today ... more than 7 percent". How much of that is military? Hmm. Apparently there are 2.7 million federal employees, less than 1% of American population, and 16.1 million state and local government employees. That's around 7 percent. Half of them are teachers. There are no other big categories. All of these figures exclude the military, which with 1.4 million active-duty people would be the second biggest category if counted together.
• p 30. POSDCORB: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, Budgeting. That sounds vaguely familiar
• p 36. "Publicness and privateness in society are comprised of three dimensions ..." Ack!
• Finished the first two chapters. Well, it's readable. I'm not falling asleep or skimming rapidly.
• Watch out when the word "locus" shows up. "Nevertheless, locus is retained in public administration's current paradigm because the locus-centered Paradigm 5 — public administration as public administration—continues unaltered." Uh, sure buddy, whatever you say. "Our definitions of public administration—institutional, normative, and organizationsal—are in no way mutually exclusive; rather, they are mutually reinforcing. Together, they form the 'public' in public administration, the locus of both the field and the profession." So what you're saying is that your definition of public defines public? Great. Inconsistent use of spaces around em dashes is sic.
• I don't know if it's this book, or a reaction to textbooks in general after years of cultivating my cynicism, but I find myself looking for blogs and wanting to fact-check footnotes and alternate narratives...

Update: this blog post has been corrected.

On Friday I attended a presentation by Sherri K. Stuewer, Vice President of Safety, Health and Environment for Exxon, on "Addressing the Risk of Climate Change". The overall tone was one of reason; she took global warming and human contribution to global warming as given. The lies are a bit more subtle now, focussing on how the uncertainty limits what can or should be done. Some key lies:

• While pointing to the 4th IPCC chart showing a range of estimates from 1 to 6 degrees C warming by 2100, paraphrase: 'One degree temperature change by 2100, I wouldn't mortgage my daughter's future for that. Six degrees, of course, would be different.' The lie here is the implicit assumption that dealing with carbon emission necessarily entails mortgaging our economic future. Another lie is that a 1 degree change isn't a big problem. In Q&A, somebody stood up and called bullshit on this, saying that she's presenting the data in a misleading way, as if there's a five-degree uncertainly when in fact the models cluster strongly around a 3 degree increase as the most likely; and that she's emphasizing the 1 degree possibility when a responsible presentation would point out more clearly that a catastrophic 6 degree increase is possible.
• Several slides include data from the "MIT Joint Program", which has received about a million US dollars of funding from Exxon. One slide changes the estimate range into a "wheel of fortune" which she says is the version congressmen best understand. Another slide compares three studies' estimates of what carbon containment will cost, from Battelle, EPRI, MIT. Two seconds of googling shows an Exxon funding connection with EPRI, though not with Battelle. Battelle's estimates are at the low end; MIT's very much the highest. The lie here is presenting as implicitly valid data which Exxon's funding has tainted.
• "A range of 1 to six degrees is a huge range. you will not get support from voters around the world with that much uncertainty." The implicit point is, you will have to wait until there is certainty before any political will can be summoned to address the problem. The truth is that making decisions with incomplete information is a routine problem for governments and polities. (The moderator called her on this one at the beginning of Q&A)
• "As the government creates policies, I think it's very important to governments build in safety valves ... without a safety valve, you could be gambling, with this kind of uncertainty, about the damage to your economy." Several lies packed in to this one: first, that governments are ever willing to do any major action that will hurt existing political power structures (such as campaign contributors); second a repeat that GHG emissions will certainly hurt economies; lastly that "safety valves" means anything other than business as usual.
• In response to a sequence of questions drilling into the core issue of Exxon's particular responsibility in the global warming problem, (paraphrase) "energy is too big a part of any economy for any government to subsidize it indefinitely. Any solution has to take this into account." The lie is that current production is not subsidized, in ways ranging from government funding of roads to US military intervention in the Middle East to the probably incredibly high cost of global warming which is externalized by Exxon.

A few quotes that were more reasonable:

• "consumers will make good decisions if there are transparent cost signals. That kind of transparency on cost is critical to motivating the right decisions."
• paraphrase "Exxon is a bit radioactive on these issues"

I'm generally very excited about the classes I'm going to take, optimistic about the professors, and feeling that I did the right thing coming here. (News that my scholarship was just increased to cover all tuition, which is the offer I had in 2006 before I deferred a year and lost part of the scholarship, certainly helped!) That said, on to the kvetching....

I'm sitting in on a lot of classes I don't intend to attend, just to get a taste of the instructors and topics. All of the classes are packed—I guess other people are shopping too. Today I sat in on law seminar from a guest lecturer on threats to secularism in India. It was incredibly interesting but I had to leave very early to catch the beginning of the Ethics class. After 45 minutes of boilerplate introductory material about ethics in general, somebody interrupted with the obvious question: "how does this relate to civil servants? How does this deal with corruption?" The answer was fairly unsatisfactory: "(paraphrase) I have nothing to say about corruption because, ethically, we all agree it's bad; and because pure philosophy is helpless with the practical problem of corruption." The pure philosophy might be interesting, but in a one-year program populated mostly by civil servants, I think we were all expecting something more immediately applicable to decision-making or to anti-corruption policies.

Then the conversation started to get interesting along these lines but I had to leave to hustle to quarantine to see Kona, and then back for the media class. The content is interesting but other classes are higher on the list. Snippets of audio from the wireless mike in another lecture hall keep blaring out on the loudspeakers. "ow-" and "the nationa-" and, most notably, "... not true!" Also, the instructor started with words guaranteed to keep me out of your class: "I teach by powerpoint." Sorry, buddy. You might lecture by Powerpoint, but people don't generally learn by looking at Powerpoint.

In one class I sat next to an exchange student who turns out to be Neena's and my next-door neighbor at Naga Court. (In the lobby one night I met two Jews on exchange from an Israeli university, one sabra and one from Pennsylvania, who are here for a semester. They said another resident told them the building might come down this December rather than next August. I guess we'll die in that pile of rubble when we get to it.)

Several classes had very enthusiastic professors who knew a lot about their subjects but didn't seem likely to offer a strong learning environment.

I also put two and two together and realized that Bob Herbold is actually on the faculty of LKYSPP as an Adjunctprofessor. He's a former COO of Microsoft, worth perhaps US$100 million. I had previously learned that his wife is the US ambassador to Singapore in a local newspaper article about how she decorated the residence. I guess he wanted something to do. He's not teaching any classes as far as I can tell. Perhaps there will be a Herbold building by the time I leave. But if LKS paid S$100 million to name Block A, I doubt Herbold can afford the larger Block B or the Tower Block.

Speaking of Microsoft: we all have Exchange email accounts with the school system. The mailbox limit is about 30 Mb. We get five to ten emails per day, and most of them have 300Kb to 2Mb attachments. This includes a steady stream of announcments for seminars and parties, "gentle reminders" for those seminars and parties, confusing "clarifications" from the staff with large attachments, the beginnings of standard mailing list pollution ("me too's", items for sale, requests for clarification (of "clarifications") which quote the originals in full, etc, all cc'd to the whole class), etc. I got an email warning that I was about to lose the ability to receive email, the correction of which apparently involved finding a department that I think only exists at the other campus, 45 minutes away, so I now work steadily, and by steadily I mean hour by hour, to weed my mailbox.

More generally, it doesn't seem like the administrative process is able to see the program from the perspective of students. This manifests in two ways. First, many different parts program seem well developed in isolation, but collectively dissonant. One example is that each syllabus seems to follow its own format (and two of my five classes still lack syllabi), but a much bigger example is the profusion of "groups". As best as I can tell, I'm in the following groups:

• All full-time students have to take some evening classes so that the part-time students can mix with the full-timers. For purposes of which evening classes I have to take, I'm in group D (out of A through E). This group was defined as "If you are in Groups C and D, you will not be attending any evening session in Semester 1. You will only be required to attend an evening session in Semester 2. More information regarding the modules will be given later." but that definition turned out to be inaccurate.
• For 5501, which is Wednesday mornings and then repeated Wednesday night, I was in the morning group (which comprises groups B, C, D, and E). But the morning group is very large, so I swapped with somebody in the night class (comprising group A and all part-time students). This means I have two evening classes this semester and may or may not have any next semester.
• For 5501 (Macro) data analysis exercise, I need to find somebody to form a group of 2.
• For 5501 (Micro), I'm in group 3 (of 27) with Helen and David. There was some confusion when I changed from D to A as to whether or not this would affect my membership in 3, put after about 20 emails back and forth it appears I can remain in 3.
• 5502 has a Monday evening combined segment, mandatory for full-timers and part-timers. Full-time students in group B, and all part-time students, stay for 3 hours. On some days, full-time students in group A (which is defined as groups A, C, D, and E from the other list) attend for only 1.5 hours, and then have another hour and a half session Tuesday morning. The rest of the time, those full-timers stay the full three hours Monday night and have no Tuesday morning session.
• For 5502, I'm in group 6 (of 10) with Nazmul, Rudy, Seon Joo, and Caroline.
• For 5136 (Applied Public Sector Economics), 5264 (States, Markets and International Governance), and 5524 (Negotiation and Conflict Management), I'm not aware of belonging to any groups.

Note further that, while IVLE has a provision for creating and tracking groups within a class, nobody's using it. Instead we get emails with 300K Word documents attached (which are of course included in each group reply).

The second kind of problem is stuff that just doesn't make sense for us newbies. The most trivial yet exemplatory example is the locker keys. Each student has a small cubbyhole in one of two student lounges. On the second or third day of orientation we all got keys, with instruction to get them duplicated and to return the original within a week. What kind of sense does it make to ask 68 people, many of whom have been in the country less than 48 hours, to each individually go and find a locksmith? Is this some kind of challenge to see if we can self-organize? Too, the key turns out to be an unusual size which most locksmiths don't have in stock. What a waste of time to have everybody deal with this individually. After three weeks and two attempts to make a copy, nobody's asked for my original back and I've stopped trying to get it copied.

So, lots of energy, lots of exciting things, not quite the polish to have everything go smoothly.

Update: This post has been corrected.

On paper, three weeks of orientation for the MPA program seems very promising. Refresher courses on basic academic skills, which may even serve as crash introductions to new materials for some students, given our diversity; tours of Singaporean institutions; orientation for the library, computer center, and other facilities; time to deal with banks, immigration, housing, etc. Great!

In practice, I find myself thinking, I missed a dear friend's wedding for this? The orientation classes in particular underwhelmed, consisting as they did of recitation of reference material (citation style, note-taking, how to ask questions after guest lectures, etc) with little student participation. The one practice case study we did was very engaging, but it was the exception.

So I was extremely happy to start classes for real today, the Monday of Shopping Week (all classes offered in abbreviated form with no overlapping times). Be careful what you wish for ....

9 am to 10:30. Applied Public Sector Economics, a class I'm interested in. Essentially tax policy, now broadened to cover other funding sources. On my list because everything always comes down to money. The prof is engaging; annoyed with the steady stream of late-comers but holding his tongue, pointedly. Perhaps a hundred students squeeze into a lecture hall with seats for 80. The professor requires all applicants to meet with him; economics background is a must. I flee the crowd at the break and head to the office to ask for a copy of the transcript I handed over, to reassure myself that I did in fact take Macroeconomics in 1991. Good enough? We'll see.

I skip "Clusters and National Competitiveness" (66% buzzword ratio in the title is a bad sign), grab soba noodles for lunch, and attend the 12:15 to 1:30 water lecture by visiting professor Asit Biswas. It starts with general world development statistics but turns into a more interesting series of anecdotes. Sophisticated equipment with a maximum operating temperature of 36 C, in a city with an average summer temperature of 46 C. Two country's public utilities unable to exchange tours of each others' successes because of diplomatic snafus. Etc.

2 pm to 3, International Economic Policy. I'm curious, but it's not on my shortlist. Ditto 3 to 4 pm, Financial Regulation and Development. Finally, Politics and Development: Approaches, Issues and Cases has a painful title but a very engaging young professor. I spend too much of the lecture researching statistics with the Bhutanese student sitting next to me—which US company is closest to Bhutan's GDP (Universal, $3 billion in revenue in 2005); GNH and other alternetives to GDP, population pyramids in South Africa vs Bhutan vs developed countries; hydro-electric potential in Bhutan vs India, etc. I install Dhongkan fonts easily, get Dhonkan input working fairly easily, but fail to get the whole interface to switch to Dhongkan.

5:00 meeting for volunteers for the upcoming Global Public Policy Network conference. If you're lucky you may get to introduce your guest to the President. Or at least help manage the lines through the metal detectors. I go to grab fries (the cafeteria has very very few vegetarian options, and the Muslim food stall is always "out" of vegetable fried rice. The main campus food court is much better but 40 minutes away), have to wait an agonizing 15 or 20 minutes because the stall is short-staffed down to 1 harried person alternating taking money with assembling chicken-fried steak dinners, and barely make it to the 6 pm meeting that was hastily called by our class's staff leader to elect a class president, treasurer, etc. It would be a mistake to characterize this process as Singaporean democracy, because where Singaporean democracy seems to be the scrupulous following of farcically unjust procedures, this process is very roughly fair but quite unscrupulous. At least one person was nominated and seconded but, in the poorly managed confusion, never written on the board. People trying to decline nomination were soundly browbeaten. We voted by raising our hands for counting, ten candidates in a row, while classmates continued to pour in.

Finally, the 6:30 class. Our first core class, the first class of the day that I'm definitely taking. We handed in homework from the weekend (one page on a personal management challenge), broke into groups of five, and discussed each other's challenges. When we came back, the professor explained that, as the email that we had all failed to get explained, we would be staying until 9:30 pm, not 8. Class finally finished at 9:45; I grabbed the syllabus and bolted. Long fracking day. At least one of the days this week, I will skip a class I ought to go to in order to get to quarantine to see Kona again in quarantine.

After a kind fellow student gave me a tip on how to find more class information in IVLE, our "Integrated Virtual Learning Environment." I have documented here the steps necessary to see the reading assignment for Wednesday's PP5501 first-week class.

1. Go to your IVLE student home page. You will see this:

   

2. Click on search in the upper right.

   

3. On this screen, click on "Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy" on the right .

   

4. This screen is a list, I think, of all Modules in the LKYSPP "department". It appears to includes most or all classes ever taught in the LKYSPP department, which is fortunately only in its fourth year. The obsolete ones seem to be in gray text. Go to the third page, by using the "Goto Page" dropdown.

   

5. On the third page, scroll down to find the PP5501 class.

   

6. Click the page icon in the left column next to PP5501. This causes the page to reload, after which you see a recycle bin. Then click on "Workspace" in the left side of the second link bar (the one below the header bar, not the one above it).

   

7. In your workspace, click on the "Bookmarks" tab in the middle of the screen.

   

8. Click on the PP5501 item in the Bookmarks tab.

   

9. Click on the Inaccessible Tools item.

   

10. Stare at a list of tools that you can't access. Go back to step two and repeat all steps until you realize, in step 7, that there are two different modules for class 5501, one for "MICRO" and one for "MACRO". Remove the MICRO and add the MACRO, and continue retracing the steps.

    

11. Click on the "Lesson Plan" item

    

    Find the reading requirement for Wednesday's class. Realize that you had better remember to bring your surplus passport photos tomorrow so you can get the NUS Coop membership card so you can buy books at a 5% discount so you can do the reading.
12. Wonder if bookmarking is the correct permanent solution, or if there will be some mechanism to actually enroll in a class and have the module be in your workspace in the Modules tab instead.

Update: If you register for the class (using a link to a web page that doesn't seem to be part of IVLE), then a day later the class shows up in the main module area, and the bookmark process described above is unnecessary.

Update: This post has been corrected.

If you are trying to connect to a Cisco VPN using the vpnc linux (or Mac OSX) client, and it works fine when you plug your computer directly into a cable modem, but fails with "vpnc: no response from target" when you use an SMC wireless router, some combination of the following may fix the problem:

• In the Advanced Settings > NAT > Special Applications screen, set the following:
  • Trigger Port 50, TCP, Public Port 50, TCP, Enabled
  • 4500 TCP
  • 10000 TCP
  • 500 UDP
• Use the --natt-mode=none flag with vpnc

Team-building exercise at Fort Canning Park. I'm handed my medical papers while on the bus by our cheerful staff, who leave after dropping us off and appointing student leaders for head-counts at the end of the day. It's scheduled for two full days but the superficial activities (cooperative ball-bouncing, hula-hoop passing, etc) and pasted-smile corporate cheerleaders (complete with tedious double-entendre jokes) drain my patience. When the first activity after lunch begins with poking each other in the palm of the hand, I step out of the circle, grab my things, and begin planning a fresh assault on ICA for my student visa.

The first set-back is that I didn't bring any paperwork with me to the team-building exercise. So: a trip back to the hostel to get every conceivable piece of paper I might need. I load the EZ-link card with another S$70. I reach ICA at 3:30.