I saw and reviewed this a month or two ago, but just today added a much lengthier (and SPOILER-laden) addendum to my original review. I think almost all movies are best seen without preconceptions, and I thought it was a movie very much worth seeing, so if you haven't seen it but might, I encourage you to see it before reading the expanded review.

The neighbor's flying the saltire this morning:

The saltire (the St Andrew's Cross) as a component of the Union Jack:

From the Baseball Prospectus writeup on Rickey Henderson's Hall of Fame Credentials:

My own favorite example of the mainstream media being content to print the legend instead of the fact came when none other than Peter Gammons tried to explain away then-Padre Henderson's role in inciting a 2001 blowup with Brewers manager Davey Lopes when he stole a base in the seventh inning with a 12-5 lead:

What precipitated the Davey Lopes-Rickey Henderson blowup was that Rickey was sick and had been sleeping in the clubhouse when he was told he had to pinch-run for Tony Gwynn. Henderson, who is trying to get the career runs record, went to first base not knowing the score, looked around and saw second base empty and asked first-base coach Alan Trammell how many outs there were.

"Two," replied Trammell.

"Rickey can't score from first base," said Henderson, who proceeded to take off for second base and thus incurred the wrath of his former mentor.

It's a bit funny, at least until you spend two seconds looking at the box score to see that Henderson didn't enter the game as a pinch-runner—he was the starting left fielder. Furthermore, the "stolen base" was ruled defensive indifference. But skip the facts, we need a colorful anecdote! —Baseball Prospectus

How solid are Rickey's HoF numbers? "'If you could split him in two, you'd have two Hall of Famers,' wrote Bill James."

A commenter to the article adds,

My favorite story ... was Rickey talking to himself in the third person ...: one time at the plate, after swinging and missing, the opposing catcher heard Rickey say something to the effect of "Ugh, Rickey doesn't swing at that pitch. Rickey takes that pitch."

Our neighbors on the next block here in Half Moon Bay fly a new flag almost every day. It's always fun to try to identify the flag. Here's today's:

I find the Flag Identifying Tool invaluable. I quickly narrowed this one down to a few choices. Gus was concerned that it might be the flag of the Subcarpathian Voivodeship ("didn't we ally with Romulans to defeat them?") but I'm pretty sure it's just Guatemala.

The Seattle Mariners hired Don Wakamatsu as their new manager, making him the first Asian American baseball manager. The Dodgers, I'm sad to report, missed an opportunity to go one better in the 2005 post-season, when they declined to promote assistant general manager Kim Ng to General Manager. Note that manager and GM are different positions in baseball; the manager is responsible for tactical decisions during games and overseeing the players, and the GM for acquiring players. Wakamatsu is the first Asian American to hold either job.

This Beltrami County voter cast their ballot for Al Franken, but also put "Lizard People" as a write-in candidate, not only in the U.S. Senate race, but for several others. The county auditor/treasurer ruled that the vote should not be counted because it's considered an overvote. Representatives for Franken challenged that decision. (MPR Photo/Tom Robertson) —Minnesota Public Radio

In the mythology, Clinton's decision to raise taxes and cut spending led to an investment boom. This boom led to a surge in productivity growth. Soaring productivity growth led to the low unemployment of the late 1990s and wage gains for workers at all points along the wage distribution.

At the end of the administration, there was a huge surplus .... The moral of the myth is that all good things came from deficit reduction.

The reality was quite different. There was nothing resembling an investment boom until the dot-com bubble ... a surge in productivity growth beginning in 1995, but this preceded any substantial upturn in investment ... [the surge was] the long-predicted dividend from the information technology revolution.

Rather than investment driving growth during the Clinton boom, the main source of demand growth was consumption. ...

The dollar was pushed upward by a combination of Treasury cheerleading, worldwide financial instability ... and the irrational exuberance propelling the stock bubble ... In the short-run, the over-valued dollar led to cheap imports and lower inflation. It incidentally all also led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs ...

Rather than handing George Bush a booming economy, Clinton handed over an economy that was propelled by an unsustainable stock bubble and distorted by a hugely over-valued dollar. ... Because President Bush refused to abandon the high dollar policy, the only tool available to boost the economy was the housing bubble. ...

While the Bush administration must take responsibility for the current crisis ... the stage was set during the Clinton years. ... For this reason, it was very discouraging to see top Clinton administration officials standing centre stage at Obama's meeting on the economy.

—Dean Baker

I'm aware of three candidates for most righteous, furious, funny political cartoonist. David Rees, Ted Rall, and Dwayne Booth.

Interlude. Realizing that list is exclusively male, I spent a few minutes googling for female political cartoonist. I found Signe Wilkinson, who wrote:

Editors also seem touchingly comforted by a breadth of humor that ranges from Jay Leno all the way to David Letterman monologue material. It’s humor that whacks Newt today, then Bill tomorrow, with just a touch of naughtiness. For example, if the news is filled with wild leaks about White House interns, a cartoon showing the first dog Buddy next to the first shrubbery and a lot of excited reporters racing over yelling “Another White House leak!” would be appropriate.

But I just went through about ten of her recent cartoons and they were all terrible, so I'll have to dig a bit deeper than the top google hit. End Interlude.

Anyway, two Mr Fish cartoons have really stood out this year since I started reading him daily. They aren't especially funny. The first one is apropos these very moving times of "Si se puede", and the second one I repost for Veterans Day.

2:09 CST: [Sean] Lynn Sweet and Obama joke about her injury (which apparently took place when she was running to his speech in Grant Park), then she asks about what kind of dog Obama's going to buy, which Presidents he's spoken to, and where his girls will go to school. Obama jokes he's only talked to "living" presidents, and it's not a "Nancy Reagan type seance situation." But has re-read Lincoln. Dog is very important, Obama says, a "major issue." —fivethirtyeight.com

I hope they get a corgi.

Update: A more complete transcript reports that Malia is allergic, so the First Dog will have to be hypoallergenic. Corgis shed prodigiously and continuously, so I guess they are out of competition.

This morning I stopped on the way to work for some Halloween supplies. I went to a "halloween superstore", a seasonal business that sets up in an otherwise empty "Expo" center. It's Halloween morning, and there are dozens are cars in the parking lot. Inside there are four cash registers, but only one employee. The line of customers is about forty long, and did not move the whole time I was there because the employee was on the phone trying to fix a credit card-related problem. I'm guessing that the employee is warming up for the highlight of his year, working at the voting booth. I left without buying anything, and I assume others did as well.

And you want to know why it's an international crisis? I just tried to buy a commercial product from a Taiwanese company. A press release mentions the price, and links to a description of the product. The description has no mention of the price and no clue how to purchase one. I ran around the website for a while and could not find a phone number or email address. There is a contact form with six or eight fields, name, phone, etc, but no matter what I did, it always insisted a required field was missing. In fact, looking more closely, it's not even a working web form. It's just a mockup of a web form. That's an interesting business plan: create a detailed website site promoting your product, but don't actually sell it or make it possible for anyone to contact you.

Can we please just let the global economic system collapse, and take us all with it? I'm sure the cockroaches will do a better job.

In the US, Obama is dogged by rumors that he's a Muslim, which to many Americans is a compelling reason not to vote for him. (Colin Powell regains a tiny shred of self-respect with his comment: "Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim," Powell said. "He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America.")

In the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed is challenging the quasi-dictator Maumon Abdul Gayoom in what seems to be a relatively free and fair election. However, Gayoom has responded to the threat by spreading unfounded rumors about his opponent's religion:

"I do believe he (Nasheed) could spread Christianity," said Aishath Sulthana, a 32-year-old mother of five who planned to vote for Gayoom.

Surely this speaks for itself?

Flexcar was acquired by Zipcar while I was away; last weekend I had my first zipcar experience and also my first Prius experience. Related posts: Review of the Hybrid Flexcar, from 2003, and Hybrid cars, from 2008.

Zipcar

The nearest Zipcar location to Half Moon Bay is 25 miles away, near Stanford. It's in an industrial park, not close to any transit or commercial centers. I forgot to write down the exact address, so we spent ten minutes driving through parking lot after parking lot looking for the car. Finally I called the number on the zipcard. It went something like this:

Zipcar voicemail: please enter your user number and pin
Me: uh, what?  0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: Please enter your user number and birthday
Me: xxxxxx# xxxx19xx#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please wait for customer service ...
Z Human: how can I help you?
Me: Hi, I have a reservation for the zipcar in Stanford but 
I didn't write down the exact address.  Can you tell me where the car is?
[10-minute hold]
Z: Okay, Mr Aufrecht, I can move you to a new car
Me, gritted teeth: Can you give me the street address of the car that I have reserved?
Z: Yes, just a moment ... [ten seconds] it's 3145 Porter.
Me, gritted teeth: That was all I needed.  Thank you.

The car was filthy: some kind of white powder spilled across the back seat, thoroughly stained floormats in back, and a general tinge of dinge in front. Also, it had less than a quarter tank of gas, which is a big no-no. When I stopped at a gas station, the gas pump wouldn't take my member number for the gas card, so I had to use my own credit card. Aside from those problems (all of which Zipcar either addressed or apologized for after I reported them), it was fine. I rented the car for a full 24 hours for $60, inclusive of insurance and gas, and I paid an extra $0.30 per mile after the first 180 miles, so it was comparable in price to a rental car, and much less hassle. The only other Zipcar-specific problem was that Zipcar wants you to leave the key in the "ignition" slot, which means that the car is beeping at you whenever the driver's door is open.

Prius

The Prius has a TV screen in the middle of the dashboard for controlling the radio, CD player, and air conditioning. The Zipcar model didn't have GPS or mapping. The interface is one percent good, 99 percent bad. It's good in that some parts of the UI have been well-thought out, such as how to unobtrusively show a new CD track while the screen is in the energy mode. It's bad in that it's a touch screen in a car.

A touch screen is modal. The defining feature of a modal interface is that it behaves differently in different modes. But this requires attention. When driving a car, you don't want your attention diverted from your surroundings to figure out why touching something doesn't do what it's supposed to do. An ATM can have a touch screen because you are staring at the ATM screen. A car should have lots of knobs and dials, with distinctive tactile properties, that your fingers can memorize so your eyes and brain don't need to bother.

The energy flow picture that is supposed to show you the gasoline vs electricity balance at any given moment is way too complicated.

The Honda design is much better; in the picture below, it's the thing to the left of the speedometer; the bars go up from halfway if you are using up battery and go down from halfway if you are charging the battery.

The scrolling graph of mileage, in five-minute chunks, is reasonably cool, and certainly what I left the screen on most of the time. But it takes an extra step to get to it. First, you push a button (a real button) to see a screen with three choices. Two of the choices are settings, which you will use rarely. Each time you finish changing the temperature a degree up or down, you need a button push, look at the screen, and then push a virtual button just to get back to what you were doing before your toes got cold.

Despite the high technology guts, the Prius is lacking some other small refinements in the cabin. The CD player won't eject CDs with the engine off. The digital clock looks cheap. It doesn't have daytime running lights. My normal catalyst to turn on headlights has always been when I can't see the instrument console clearly, but that was thrown off by the touch screen and I accidentally drove deep into twilight without turning on the headlights. The far side of the dashboard displays the printed text "Passenger", and below that it lights up with "airbag". This is to tell you that the airbag is off. I figured this out when a passenger got it and, next to "airbag", it lit up "On". So that's bad design, since you don't know what it means until after you've seen all the possible states. Why not "passenger airbag off" and "passenger airbag on"?

The gearshift is simplified, in a bad way. Reverse is up and Forwards is down. There's a button for "park" mode, but the car automatically goes into park when you turn it off. I guess you might want that if you are stopped and want to leave the engine on (so you can eject CDs) while taking your foot off the brake, but since Park has been a part of every automatic gear sequence that I've ever seen, why move it from the gear to a button? There was also a gear for "B", which I did not try because I didn't know what it was.

When you put the car in reverse the touchscreen turns into a rear view camera, which probably helps not run over children, but its distorted perspective is useless for parking. And the annoying beep the car makes while backing up is annoying.

The car drives fine; it was adequately powerful for city and freeway driving. I went over 200 miles, mostly freeway, and got just over 50 mpg. Visibility was adequate, even out the funky rear window, and it was as spacious as any other compact car. It's just a shame that the experience is marred by such trivial, easily avoidable mistakes in the cabin user interface.

This weekend was extremely clear in Half Moon Bay, culminating in a gorgeous nearly full moon overhead tonight. I took Kona down to the beach for her night walk, and it was lovely. Moonlight is roughly 500,000 times dimmer than sunlight, but the beach and the surf were very clear. It was like being in the afterlife in an Ingmar Bergman movie: everything is visible, crisp and distinct but grey and dim; it's very cold; and a crashing and roaring.

More human rights:

Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Friday that gay couples have the right to marry

And the Iowa election market may be the only market in the world with a positive trend over the last few weeks. I continue to walk around with crossed fingers, hoping for the election to be over and Obama to be victorious so that we can return to a state of merely being disappointed by our elected leaders instead of being betrayed, bloodied, and exploited for criminal gain.

A federal appeals court temporarily blocked the release of 17 Chinese-born Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , a day after a landmark decision required them to be freed to the U.S.

[...] In court papers, Justice Department lawyers attacked Urbina's ruling ... The lawyers said that Urbina's decision "directly conflicts with the basic principle" that the executive branch, specifically the Department of Homeland Security, has sole discretion as to whether to admit foreigners into the U.S. —Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Newspapers

Excuse me while I go digging in the constitution for that basic principle.

Over four months beginning in early August, Kearsarge planned to visit Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, delivering free medical and engineering assistance to isolated, impoverished populations. It was actually the second phase of Operation Continuing Promise, which began in May when the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer made a humanitarian run down the Pacific side of Central and South America, eventually treating around 14,000 patients and conducting 127 surgeries, while an accompanying force of Seabees rebuilt eight schools and repaired roads.

Continuing Promise is just a single chapter in a much broader U.S. military "medical diplomacy" initiative in Latin America that began in earnest in summer 2007, with the four-month deployment of the hospital ship USNS Comfort. That trip resulted in some impressive figures: 1,170 surgeries, 32,322 immunizations and 24,242 pairs of glasses handed out.

—David Axe, Seapower Magazine

What a good idea.

I don't think there was ever a point when my reaction to the 9/11 attacks was a desire for my country to invade another country. I was in China when it happened, and my reaction for the first day or so was, "that's awful." Then America went insane, and my reaction was, "please stop going insane"¹. All of my reactions since then have been variations on a theme: please stop waging war to stop violence, please stop destroying our liberties in the name of saving them; please stop torturing people; please stop disappearing people; please stop developing the apparatus of a police state; and so forth. But I digress.

What I want to say is that I feel stupid right now because, for just a moment, I bought into the fiscal crisis conventional wisdom. I don't say that there is no crisis, but when I first heard about the $700 billion rescue plan the other day, my initial reaction was, "gee, I guess we need to be talking about something like that." It took a few days to cycle through "wait a minute, this bailout plan looks pretty bad" to "wait a minute, why are we arguing about the details of the bailout plan instead of its premise and justification?" And I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me most of a week to proceed to the reaction I should have had in the first place. When the same administration that used pure, baseless fearmongering to start a war that has among other effects enabled a company the Vice President recently led and remains financially entangled with to flagrantly steal billions (tens of billions?) of dollars now tries to use fearmongering to justify a massive transfer of taxpayer wealth under the exclusive, unaccountable, and secret supervision of a Treasury Secretary who recently led and almost certainly remains financially entangled with a company which stands to receive tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars, the only proper response is, "go fuck yourself."

Is there a crisis? Surely. Does it put the economy of the United States and the world at risk? The fact that a pack of proven compulsive liars who stand to make tremendous gains say that something is true does not make it false. I may not be qualified to figure out this whole thing out on my own, but I did just finish a degree that included serious doses of international development, and included a solid year of reading economics bloggers, including Nouriel Roubini. So I do feel qualified to call bullshit when I see it, and to assess the opinions and credibility of experts. Here's my two ¢s:

• Jim Romanesko writes in a memo to the press: "The coverage of the Paulson plan focuses on the edges, on the details. The focus should be on the premise." If we are arguing about executive pay and whether or not the US taxpayers get an equity stake in the institutions they bail out, the debate is already over and the criminals have won. Gus's lecture notes from his "Venture Capital and Private Equity Investments" class from business school say, "Many people find it difficult to think of concepts or issues that the page does not already list. There is a tendency to edit what you see, rather than to create fresh ideas or radically different approaches." Perhaps Paulson took a similar class many years ago.
• The need for a bailout, especially a massive bailout, is not proven. It's tempting, but ultimately childish, to take the mere fact that proven liars Paulson and Bush are arguing for it. Still, every day that passes with the sky still above our heads gives us more information. Let's take a moment to thank the founders for designing a legislative system that can, without any meritorious individual performers, still perform a vital governance function of slowing over-hasty reaction.
• If a bailout is required, there are much better ways to do it than raising money through borrowing the equivalent of a one-time 50%+ tax increase and then giving the money, no strings attached, to the people who lost it in the first place. For example, government-mandated debt restructuring.
• The crisis is the consequence of deregulation. This seems fairly self-evident. Pure capitalism is not a stable system. Perfect competition and frictionless markets don't exist, people are not rational utility-maximizers, and most real systems are not "close enough" to perfect to be well-understood through purely rational economics. Market failures are the norm, not the rare exception. Markets need parameters and boundaries to be stable and healthy over the long term. It's true that bad regulation can kill markets. It's also true that a lack of good regulation kills markets.
• The repeal of Glass-Steagal contributed to the collapse. That seems likely. The counter-argument, that repeal "made it possible for JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns and for Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch," just doesn't make sense to me. Of course it's better for a financial institution comprising a monstrous fraction of the US financial system to be acquired rather than to collapse, but isn't the size of the institution part of the initial problem? Now we have a small number of giant institutions, all "too big to fail", and thus all big enough to blackmail the taxpayers. This is bad, not good. The Washington Post notes: "Smaller Banks Thrive Out of the Fray of Crisis".
• The bailout, and in particular the Paulson plan, represents the apotheosis of corporate democracy: heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose.
• Dani Rodrik points out that "The rough rule of thumb for emerging markets is that banking crises are associated with an output loss of around 10%".

So, to summarize, the bailout plans feels more like an opportunistic greed reflex than good public policy. It would transfer more money to private interests than the Iraq war did, although it should be noted that it at least wouldn't require tens of thousands of American soldiers and others to spend years killing each other to provide a pretext for wealth transfer. It's not proven that we need such a bailout; and if we do, the current administration certainly cannot be trusted in any respect. If you think this is hyperbole, remember that Paulson told Congress last Tuesday that, "We gave you a simple, three-page legislative outline and I thought it would have been presumptuous for us on that outline to come up with an oversight mechanism. ... So if any of you felt that I didn’t believe that we needed oversight: I believe we need oversight." But the proposal said, "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

---

1. Here's a letter I wrote to my representatives on 18 Sep 2001

Moderator Amy Shuen, author of "Web 2.0". Opening question to panel: How many of you are in Web 2.0 companies? Give us a one sentence tagline about your company, what is web 2.0?, why is your company a web 2.0 star and a model to be learned from?

Christa Quarrles, "As a representative of the large companies"

• Yahoo is the bastion of Web 1.0. CPM
• 2002-2007 era of Google. cost per click
• brought the "promise of the web" to bear, meaning that advertising could be better measured
• stopped addressing the questions in any discernable way and started speaking what Neal Stephenson called "bulshytt"

The MC quoted somebody calling her the "number two" analyst for whatever.

Josh Elman, Facebook platform program manager.

• a social utility that gives people the power to share to make the world more open and connected.
• In web 1.0, information was picked by editors. In web 2.0, the tables have turned, and all the information is being provided by people.

Seth Sternberg, Meebo.com, The web's live communication platform. If users want to chat, anywhere, we want that to happen. Just as everybody outsources search, and monetizing search, to Google, they should outsource chat to Meebo Rooms or Meebo Community IM.

Moderator asks for show of hands, how many have used it. I see about 10 hands. I count about 70 people. Moderator says, "so, a little bit less than half."

Michael Veys, COO of jahjah. "How can we bring the power of those new tools (IP telephony?) to ... and make it as easy to use as a search engine? We've opened up our whole platform and made it available to businesses so businesses can take advantage of, can enjoy all the advantages of web 2.0. The business has evolved and is much more of an infrastructure business than the original consumer business."

Can you explain in detail the business model and revenue stream of your company?

Christa: Ballmer said nothing's changed in search in five years, it's just 10 blue links. That overlooks the improvements in monetization. What's beautiful about the Google model, so scalable (only took $25 million of invested capital, now worth $100 billion+), is the self-service model. How do we get the right ad in front of the right consumer at the right time? ... Myspace is using Google as its monetization engine. Google in their 1st quarter call said they were having problems monetizing Myspace.

Q: How much does Google make per day on some of the most popular keywords? A: mesotheliomia gets $150 a click, top mortgage keywords $15/click (not anymore), debt relief is skyrocketing. If you try to create an equivalent CPM, Google's effectively getting about $120 CPM. Superbowl ads are probably $30 CPM equivalent. Sitewide, Yahoo gets about $1 CPM.

Josh at facebook: As the world becomes a lot more social online, we think new, interesting [advertising] models will appear. A lot of advertising is generating demand; people use facebook to share with each other. More money is spent in demand generation than lead generation. We're doing really well with our current model, advertising. 25,000 different applications, some of those developers have monetized, over $1 million per month reported, users paying for virtual currency. Moderator: Also talked about, iLike and flufffriends, "just such amazing examples of the way in which the facebook platform allowed other companies to be able to monetize on the web." Josh: startups face the challenge of how to get users and monetize users. Facebook provides that. iLike started as their own website and moved to Facebook. Got to 1 million users on facebook in a week, sustained and leveraged that. make money off of ticket sales, music sales, and other things. Users spend a lot of time and money caring for their (virtual) pets, buying people pets and accessories.

Seth of meebo: Google is the panacea for direct response marketers. Brand advertisers, Coke, Pepsi, not served by Google. Where can they advertise on the internet? Nowhere. ... we are aiming to be the best place on the web for brands to park their ad dollars. Three criteria: you have to be able to create very high engagement with the brand. The average meebo user spends over 2 hours per day, and has it active over an hour per day. We give advertisers 10 minutes with the user; when they click on it, we give them something engaging, if it's coke, maybe a game to keep the coke away from the bears, make it social, invite your friend to play with you, the funny thing is you're inviting friends to an ad. Nike did a shoe configurator, you could configure it and send it to your friends. You could set your icon to Chris Brown, using the networks of all the people to let them share that cool branded content with their friends. Second criteria is sharing. The last thing is metrics. How does a brand figure out if they created affinity with a brand? Show them x% click rates. Second thing is to show them the impact of conversation streams in Meebo. Real example: Weezer was being talked at let's say 2000 mentions per day, just to have a number. They released an album and hyped it and went up to 10,000. Then they advertise on meebo, and it spikes to 20,000. You need to give hard metrics to the brands, are people talking about them, is it positive stuff or negative stuff. People spend 300+ years of time in meebo per day.

Joel's note: when the moderator responds to a lengthy piece of answer/bulshytte with fawning praise, I wonder if she's slipping in any indirectly revealing questions, or if she's just fawning? Update: well, the fawning and the fudging of numbers at least are consistent: "If you were one of the fortunate 100 attendees at the beautifully-appointed Silicon Valley Bank auditorium yesterday, you know the answers to the following questions:"

Jahjah: "... disruption .... Apple came to the online music problem and said, how can we do this better without upsetting the whole apple cart? They partnered with the content providers. Jahjah ... enables [some companies] to have some of the new things that are happening, like facebook and meebo, or ip-only phones. We'll give them whatever [?] they need in their value chain so they can go to market with it." Ways to monetize ... subscription model, people will prepay for services, use those minutes, and renew, ofter automatically. Or they pay a monthly fee. We provide a lot of the services, provisioning, fraud, customer care, for yahoo voice premium services. eHarmony, they have a subscription service, you pay every month, you can they have IM conversation on jahjah completely embedded in that environment. Or a revenue share model. The third monetization is advertising. "Still there is no real advertising on the phone. Typically the phone will ring 6-7 seconds before the other person picks up, and that's effectively dead space. So we [use it] ... always with the authorization effectively of the user. Keep the ringtone in the background and play a message over it. Nike can say about a shoe. Or if we see a pattern where users will call between San Francisco and London, the airlines can easily insert a short ad in there, 'try the new promotional services of Virgin between SF and London' We've used that on our own network."

Moderator: notice that there are at least five kinds of network effects that all of them are using

tips: ... "you'll have that passion, and that will translate into something you'll bring to market."

Joel's note: I'm personally aware of two coherent definitions of web 2.0. The first is web applications that use AJAX to behave more like desktop applications, such as Gmail. The second is websites that rely on user-generated content, such as Facebook. To the extent that this panel has any coherent definition of web 2.0, it's the latter. And we are out of time and there are no audience questions. There were a few audience survey showings of hands. Those notwithstanding, this was probably the least interactive event of the forty or fifty public events I've been to since last year.

One of the lists I've been working on is the "default answer per domain" list. The idea is that, in any specific field of knowledge, there's one answer that's far more common than any other. My friend Michael introduced me to the idea by explaining that, in pilot training (he's a military pilot), when the instructor is screaming at you and your mind is completely blank, your best bet is to reply, "sir, to maintain the stability of the aircraft, sir." It's very rarely outright wrong, and even if it doesn't answer the question, it's still a good thing to be doing at all times. There are in fact NTSB crash reports that essentially say, "something minor went wrong, and while the pilots were trying to fix it, they flew a perfectly functional airplane into the ground." When you are flying an airplane and something goes wrong, the need to continue flying the airplane remains both urgent and important.

So I set about trying to extend this concept to other domains. Here's my list so far:

• piloting: "maintain the stability of the aircraft"
• martial arts: "foot position"
• construction: "vapor barrier"
• computers: "permissions problem"
• electronics: "grounding"
• economics: "marginal cost"

My bicycle, as it turns out, was manufactured by RANS, whose primary line of business is airplanes. And the rule for piloting applies to cycling: rule one is always to keep the bicycle upright.

One of the benefits of a recumbent bicycle is supposed to be greater safety in crashes. You ride lower and you are basically supine, not vertical, so your head, container for your vital brain, is not only lower but less likely to lead your body in a Newtonian arc over the handlebars and into pavement. However, Wikipedia does warn that "remaining clipped in during a front tire or wheel failure at high speeds can result in the recumbent rolling over the rider and taking a clipped in leg or legs with it. This scenario, although very rare, can create severe spiral fractures of the femur ..."

So I was riding Sunday morning, southbound on the 1, big shoulders, hardly any traffic, dry road, partly sunny. The only problem was that I couldn't see the ocean. So I craned my neck and tried to peek over the rise between the 1 and the ocean. Then I looked back at the road, saw the pothole, and went down. Fortunately, I was going uphill, hence only about 13 mph, and I went down on dirt, not asphalt. So, did the recumbent layout save me from serious injury, or did I fracture both femurs in matching spirals?

Good news. I basically fell a few feet onto my ass and slid to a halt, balanced on one side of rump. Total damage: a bit of road rash, a small tear in my shorts, and a dirty pannier bag. I'll count that as a cheap refresher lesson in the keeping my eyes on the road.

Kona has several well-defined enemies:

• the cover monster, who lurks under comforters, behind blankets, and within pillows, and who must be repeatedly defeated via combinations of leaping, worrying with the teeth, and biting until dry cotton-mouth overwhelms.
• the vacuum monster, and her cousin the mobile vacuum monster aka the Roomba. Surprisingly, also found lurking in air mattresses. Confront by stalking leading to a determined pounce, and concluded with hasty, triumphant retreat, a bit of plastic grill proudly held in the jaw.
• other dogs, to be bullied or avoided as relative size, apparent fierceness, and number and size of humans in her pack dictate.

  

I wonder if she is happy with her enemies, or if she would willingly trade with me, getting in exchange "the perpetual difficulty of communication between people", "the improbability of accurate software schedule estimation", and Caltrain.

PMI is the Project Management Institute, the biggest and oldest institution in my profession. I'm voting for the Board of Directors. There are nine candidates, three women and six men, and I can vote for up to five. Here are some quotes from candidate statements:

My vision of PMI is to be globally recognized as the de facto advocate for project management, and the key transformation agent through its innovative products, services, programs and partnerships.

PMI's position as the global thought leader in project, program and portfolio management and the authoritative source for all aspects of project management knowledge has been reinforced to me as I have worked with project managers from around the globe.

Second, remain the "Thought Leader" in project management by continuing to be the "go-to" organization for practitioners and corporations looking for project management information.

Finally, PMI must remain a forum for thought leadership in the project management profession

PMI has made significant progress to establish increased membership and presence in various regions, but a stronger focus on a large part of the African region is strategically needed.

As a Board member, I would advocate for PMI's thought leadership in bringing together diverse stakeholders (e.g., academia, corporations, vendors) and professional associations (e.g., engineering, IT, other project management associations) to promote compelling messaging around the value of the profession, and common approaches to its practice.

Slim pickings, you can see, although one of those quotes is markedly different from the rest. Most of the statements are fairly pure bullshit, of both the ב₀ and ב₁ varieties. None of these people seem likely to address what I think is the fundamental weakness of the profession and the institute: the pressures to stop dealing with reality and start dealing with an artificial world instead, a world in which "thought leadership" is a meaningful phrase.

It's barely past noon but I heard something at lunch that I'm confident will be the most important thing I learned today. If a killer robot is chasing you, throw unbalanced things with weird moments of inertia at it, like frying pans and cats. Robot motion controllers can't handle stuff like that, so if it catches a gyroscope you threw at, it may get confused long enough for you to escape. For now.

Two senses of wrong. 2+2=5 wrong. For example, the Sonny Bono act which extended existing and future copyrights 20 years. Extending existing copyrights clearly does not serve the public policy purpose of copyright, which is to incent people to create works. Another example: the US sugar industry lobbied the US Senate to change the World Health Organization to say at most 25% of your caloric intake should come from added sugar, rather than 10% as the WHO drafted it.

Global warming is another example of this kind of wrong. Over a period when 0% of peer-reviewed articles called into question the consensus around global warming (that it's real, important, human-created, important to stop, and possible to stop), 53% of media articles called it into question, and Congress delayed action.

Second sense of wrong. "That's just wrong" wrong. Example: Fannie Mae's "socialized risk, privatized benefits." Crony capitalism. Steven Paine, who was caught on tape soliciting donations to the Bush 43 library in exchange for access. The administration said this is "completely ordinary". Third example: Congressman Rangel soliticed donations to the Charlie B Rangel Center for Public Service from the people he regulates. Launched an inquiry into himself to prove there was no conflict of interest according to the standards of Washington. Wrong because corrupt.

Wrongs of the second kind lead to wrongs of the first kind.

Framers were obsessed circa 1785 with independence. Incredible corruption in Federated US driven by lack of independence among representatives. The US Constitution, however, failed to achieve this. Bribery was not criminalized in Congress until 1853. The 20th century is much better than the 19th century in this sense, but a new form of corruption arrives. Abramof and Cunningham's kind of corruption is the exception; the real problem is the need for constant attention to money to retain tenure in Congress. Incumbent re-election rates have reached almost 100%.

The costs to our society from this dependency. In 1994, Al Gore proposed to deregulate telecommunications; Congress refused because this would undermine the ability of Congresspeople to raise money from the industry. Most importantly, this dependency destroys trust.

Between March and June 2008, 94 Congressional Democrats changed from voting no to voting yes on telecom immunity. Those who had changed their vote had received twice the donations that other members had.

Public approval of Congress is down to 9%, the lowest level ever measured. This is a bankrupt institution. As Congress fails, power shifts to the president and to the courts.

The Change Congress organization, founded by Lessig and Joe Trippi, intends to coordinate and intensify existing efforts to reform. Layer 1 gets people to pledge to one of four complementary platforms of reform. Layer 2 intends to publicize the contrast between actual and pledged support by members of congress. Layer 3 is to steer support in the way that Emily's List does.

Dependency may not be the most important political problem, but it's the first problem that must be addressed because it undermines any other solutions.

Q: How does this dependency affect academics? A: The best academics simply avoid public policy issues.

Q: What about term limits? A:I used to support them, but now, because of California's experience, I oppose them. Lobbyists know more than politicians about how government actually works, so term limits shift power to lobbyists. We need more dedicated, career legislators.

Q: How can the movement you've described take advantage of the presidential candidates' rhetoric of change? A: I'm conflicted. I'm a strong supporter of Barack Obama. I was disappointed when he decided not to take public funding. There are two public funding problems, one around the president and the other around Congress. We won't be able to fund local elections through online contributions in the next ten years even if presidential candidates can.

Q: Can you comment on the decision that corporations are persons and can therefore ... free speech ... campaign contributions? A: This is a hard question for Constitutional law scholars. The Supreme court never actually acknowledged that corporations are people; instead a court reporter added that notion, which then became lore. The Supreme Court is not going to change in any interesting way in the next 25 years. We should therefore focus on what we can do; pass laws that would be upheld by the Supreme Court.

Q: Is there a resource someone can go to to see who companies contribute to? A: That's a softball question, it must come from someone from Maplight.

Q: How do you mass-market this idea to the American people? A: That's too hard. The only way you're allowed to talk about public policy such that the media will cover it is to run for something. But to run for something, you have to become part of the problem. We want to show people how whatever specific concerns they have have been mistreated by Congress because of the dependency problem. We're in a long-term strategy; we expect the Pledge campaign to take three or four cycles. We expect some campaigns to take 10 or 20 years to run.

Q: comprehensive energy policy in context of corruption? A: All evidence is no.

Q: What about eliminating riders and earmarks? A: Our Congress originally had very strong germaneness requirements. But it's better for everybody in Congress if bills are compromise bills instead of single-issue bills. (Joel's note: i.e., an institutional design flaw in Congress allows members of Congress to serve their own political needs at the expense of their intended function.)

Q: You suggested the 19th century had worse corruption, but more damage is being done today. Is this because modern government has more power. A: The 19th century Congress is full of genuinely bad people. The modern Congress is full of good people in an awful system and not taking responsibility for fixing that awful system. If they were personally corrupt, it might be better because their personal bribe needs would be much smaller than re-election costs. Increasingly Congress is just the farm league for K street, where the real money is. This is the same model as my law students: work as an associate and become a partner, somewhat the same pay structure, but I don't want my students running the government.

Q: This seems to be a big jump from your career as a lawyer. What prompted it? A: I started as a constitutional law professor. This is constitutional law; this is our government failing to function. I want to see parties actively content; the constitutional framework within which parties contest must be one we can trust, and this one isn't.

Q: What kind of organization is Change Congress? A: We are a c(3), which is a non-profit; a c(4), which is a interest group organization, and a PAC.

Q: How do you keep lobbyists from infiltrating Change Congress? A: I think lobbyists are an important part of change. But there's the same line as with lawyers in front of the Supreme Court. Note that Members can pay for lots of personal luxuries with campaign funds. That's the line we need to draw.

Q: Twenty years from now, having a conversation with your adult son, what change would you like Change Congress to have achieved. A: Judge Scalia has a line that every generation takes certain things for granted. We look back and can't believe how people were so racist, increasingly sexual orientation is like that. I want my son to say, "how could anyone has thought it would be okay for people to influence congress in the way they did? How could you have wasted your time on that when you could have been playing with me?"

I've added a category for brain stuff, so you can click below where it says "Brain" to read previous posts. Most recently, I mentioned the theory from the Red Queen, that human brains evolved via the battle of the sexes. Here's some fresh information on the issue, this time from the perspective of cooking.

Highlights:

• Human brains got bigger 2 million years ago, but there's no archaeological evidence of smarter humans until 150,000 years ago.
• "In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains."

The battle between brain and gut for energy budget has been pointed to before; interesting to see it pop up again.

Some things come easier than others. I've always had a hard time with simple arithmetic than goes between single and double digits. I'm probably better at estimated square roots of numbers under 100 than I am adding two numbers between six and nine quickly and confidently. Don't ask me why, just a hole in the brain. For calculating any time zones outside of the US, I've learned to absolutely, no matter what, re-check my calculations with a special tool like the World Clock Meeting Planner. And analog clocks with hands always slow me down just a bit. It almost always takes me a few seconds to sort out which is the big hand and which is the little hand, and while I know the hours, I usually end up working out the minutes under my breath just to be sure.

Fortunately, linux offers a plethora of clocks. Here are just a few:

To change subjects for a moment, let's talk about desktop environments. A desktop environment is the code that provides the borders around all of your programs, the maximize and minimize buttons, the system menus and settings, the glue for all of the other things you look at and poke with. It's like The Force for your computer screen. It is part of the "operating system", but technically distinct from the inner guts of the operating system. If your computer were a car, the file system and kernel and such would be under the hood; the desktop environment would be the upholstery and dashboard and indeed the hood; and your programs would be the places you drove to, I guess.

If you use Windows, then all of this is smushed together; Windows XP is your kernel and your desktop and your catechism and everything else. This used to be true of Macs as well. But with OS X, Apple brought in industrial-strength Unix guts, and put a glossy desktop environment on top, and proved that you can put lipstick on a pig. Actually that's unfair to the Unix guts (BSD); it's more like proving that you can make safe and friendly consumer products with nuclear turbine engines carefully hidden inside. Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, by the way, remains required reading if you are interested in the subject of user interfaces and operating systems.

In the Linux universe, things are more wide-open. While the industrial-strength guts are more or less standard, a much broader range of choice remains at the desktop environment level. The two main options are KDE and Gnome. KDE has a reputation as the more flexible, configurable one, while Gnome has gone aggressively in the direction of simplicity. Since I'm not a new user and I'm stubborn about how I do things, I tend to prefer KDE—more on that later. I just want to mention a single feature that comes standard with the KDE bundle, a killer feature whose absences from Gnome is sufficient to guarantee I'll stick with KDE for the duration: the fuzzy clock. It's an option within the Panel Clock (Configure -> Appearance -> Clock Type: Fuzzy). It looks like this:

At minimum fuzz, it says "twenty five to eleven". If you turn up the fuzziness, it will say "twelve o'clock", and then "Night", and then, at High Fuzziness, "Weekend!" I keep it at minimum fuzz because I do want to know what time it is; I just don't want to know to the minute, or watch the seconds and minutes ticking away. I like my doses of mortality just a bit vague. And until Gnome offers the fuzzy clock, I'll never switch.

I've published the airplane recognition poster on Cafe Press, where you can buy it as a 20" x 14" poster. Enjoy!

I just gave up on the last of the three Foundation prequels, written by the Killer Bs (Brin, Benford, and Bear). The ideas were vaguely interesting, but the characters and plot were so wretchedly thin, serving merely as didactic mouthpieces for a not-especially-sophisticated set of arguments about destiny and chaos and humanity and whatnot. The last straw for me was this passage, after the aged Hari Seldon fears he's had a stroke:

Hari yearned for a return to unconscious oblivion, rather than discover that another portion of his brain had died. He did not want to face the aftermath—another harsh setback on the long slide toward personal extinction.

All the talk about the Laws of Robotics made me realize that this may be a suitable framework for contemplating what King Kaufman calls "The Complicated Calculus of Teams I Root for". For me, the calculus goes like this:

1. Thou shalt always cheer for the Dodgers, whoever is playing the Yankees, the Nets, the US national womens' and men's football teams, Arsenal, whoever is playing the Blues, and the Mighty Ducks (but not the non-Mighty 2006 and later Anaheim Ducks).
   1. Thou shalt always cheer for whoever is playing the Giants, except when the Giants are playing the Yankees
   2. Thou shalt always cheer for whoever is playing the Cardinals, unless the Cardinals are playing the Yankees, or the Giants while the Giants are in contention for the NL West or NL wild card
2. Thou shalt always cheer for the A's, the Red Sox, the Mets, whoever is playing the Cowboys, whoever is playing the Patriots, and whoever is playing Manchester United, except when such a team is playing a team defined in the First Rule.
3. Thou shalt never cheer for or against Tiger Woods or Roger Federer or Herman Maier, except inasmuch as one may cheer for a force of nature, such as a sunset or rainbow.

In The Red Queen, Matt Ridley popularized the theory that human intelligence is the byproduct of an evolutionary arms race of sexual selection. It goes something like this:

• fact: human brains are proportionately much larger than almost any other species, including any other primate
• fact: one proven catalyst for extreme evolutionary change is an arms race, where two sets of genes compete with all other things more or less equal. For example, a predator and its prey each get faster and faster, but relative to each other they stay competitive. This continues until all other things are no longer equal; e.g., the cost to be so fast can no longer be paid. For example, it is argued that humans and other primates pay for all of that metabolically expensive brain tissue with smaller digestive tracts, an tradeoff that clearly has limits.
• fact: sexual selection occurs, in which a trait which is not otherwise critical to fitness becomes attractive for purposes of attracting mates, leading to extreme exaggeration of that trait. Example: peacock tails.
• Theory: at some point displays of intelligence became important for proto-human males to attract females, and conversely female intelligence was required to select good male mates. This turned into an arms race, leading to dramatic increases in brain size, a byproduct of which was modern human intelligence.

This is not the only explanation for human brain size; social cooperation and language are also factors. Here's a more recent study which posits something similar: "... the balance of evidence now clearly favors the suggestion that it was the computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains. However, recent analyses suggest that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor."

Today's New York Times has an article about the search for genetic causes of schizophrenia, which is taking longer than expected because none of the big obvious causes pan out. Instead, it seems likely that "the genetic component of the disease is due to a large number of variants, each of which is very rare, rather than to a handful of common variants." What this means is that evolution has done a very good job of eliminating the big causes of (some kinds of) mental illness, leaving only lots of little things that aren't as simply selected for deletion. In other words, there is evolutionary pressure to have good brains. This is surprising to a lead researcher because "I would have thought the brain was a luxury organ when it comes to reproductive success."

I guess he's not current on the Red Queen and human sexual selection for brains. Chalk up a supporting point for Ridley's theory.

Although, an alternate explanation does occur to me. Perhaps we are being bred by brain-eating zombies for taste and flavor.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 last year, I've had problems getting the microphone to work in Skype. It sounds fine in the headphones; you can clearly hear yourself and everything else in the room, but it doesn't go through to Skype. Googling found plenty of people with problems with Ubuntu and Skype and microphones. It seems like there are a lot of reasons this can go wrong. The specific fix for me (Kubuntu 8.04 on a Thinkpad X61 (HDA Intel audio with Analog Devices AD1984 chip), external headset and microphone, the kind with separate headphone and mic plugs, not USB) turns out to be this:

• Open KMix
• Go to the Input tab
• Turn on "capture" by clicking the little radio button at the base of the scale. It should turn from black to red when it turns on
• Also for "capture", move the slider to the top of the scale. Note that there are two "capture" things; I adjusted only the first and left the second at off/zero.

Then the Skype test call worked fine.

After almost exactly a year, I was headed back to the United States. Most airlines will sell you one-year tickets but will only book you nine months into the future. So a few months ago I had to nail down the return leg of my ticket from Seattle, although I didn't have any firm plans for what would happen after arriving at SEATAC. A bit later I made up my mind to go to San Francisco because I've never lived in the Bay Area and it seemed like it might be time. So naturally I checked airlines for dog rules (no dogs on Southwest) and booked a one-way to San Francisco. So Kona and I had a three-leg trip, SIN to NRT to SEA to SFO, starting at 7:15 am in Singapore and ending at 2:30 pm the same day in San Francisco.

When the taxi driver asked if I wanted terminal 1 or 2, at about 3:50 am and after two hours of sleep, I tried to remember where I had come in and had met people coming from the US on the same flight, and said Terminal 1. This turned out to be correct, in that the flight had departed from Terminal 1. But it was moved to the new Terminal 3, and I decided to try and walk to the other terminal so Kona could get some exercise and potty time before the trip. Once I realized that I should completely ignore the advice of the taxi drivers, we made good time crossing the 500 or so meters between terminals. While it's beautifully landscaped, there are no sidewalks for most of the trip, so I was pushing a loaded cart and trailing a corgi while walking on the edge of curving on and off-ramps and splits and joins that were almost, but not completely, devoid of speeding taxis.

After ducking in through car ramp exit, we glided through a nearly empty parking lot, accompanied by surreal muzak.

Terminal 3 is, of course, a giant monument to Singapore's capabilities. While many recent mega-terminals, such as Bangkok's, Heathrow's T5, and going back a few years Denver's new airport had widely publicized disasters, Changi T3 apparently opened very smoothly. It's certainly big and pretty.

We arrived more than three hours before flight time, and everything was going smoothly, as I presented Kona's inch-thick stack of papers, her approved kennel with ball-tip water bottle full of ice, etc. Until the lady asked for an export certificate. Here's her health certificate, I just got it Monday from the vet. No, you need an export license from AVA (the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority). I called United several months ago and they didn't say anything about AVA. Well ...

Kona and I walked around the check-in area for a while; ran back and forth on the sidewalk outside; hung out with the very nice staff (although dogs are supposed to stay in their kennels in the terminal, nobody gave us any trouble).

People started to show up, and we were moved off to the side as various staff spent quality time on the phone. The problem, it turned out, was that the staff believed (from a checklist, I think) that you need the AVA license. They were pretty sure that without the US would put her in quarantine in Seattle at worst, and certainly not send her back, but they weren't sure if the airline might get fined. AVA was closed, naturally, and they had trouble getting anyone from the airline with authority. This went on for over an hour, while we made nice with the other passengers and screwed around in the check-in area.

Finally we were waved to proceed, and I arrived at the gate as it was flashing "last call", which turned out to a bit of hype. And off we went, fleeing the rising sun into the day.

Tokyo Narita features an extra, internal security screen applied after getting off a United flight from Singapore and before getting onto another United flight in the very same concourse. Yay for security theater. Mind dazed from the flight, the lack of sleep, and the stress at Changi, I still managed to reach a realization, aided by the profusion of United 777s at Narita and the announcements for the flight to San Francisco. I could have tried to chang the United return leg to NRT-SFO, skipping the SEA-SFO leg on United(which ended up costing about $300, including $150 for the kennel and $25 for a second piece of luggage. Every time I come back to the United States from a year abroad, air travel has reached a new quantum of suckiness. I asked someone in the security line at SEATAC if we were still doing the shoes thing. "That's never going away.").

Finally, Seattle. Immigration: no problem. Health Department: here's my paperwork. Thank you very much, here's your stamp. Off you go. Baggage. Wait, where's my dog? You'll get her at the main baggage claim. After customs? Yes. Customs: please step this way, sir, for additional inspection. You've been randomly selected.

So we go through my vacuum-packed bags, and they confiscate all of the dog food (which was manufactured in the US, possibly from ingredients made in China, and shipped to Singapore for me to buy it; if I wasn't going to get to eat organic foods, at least Kona, who is not a vegetarian, could. Somehow those variables balance out in my subconscious). But she's going to be hungry! The customs guy is very nice and apologetic, and yes I could have taped some food to the outside of the kennel and it probably would have gone through, but there are no workarounds at this point, and would I like to keep the scoop?

Finally I repack, put my cleared bags on another belt (because it's so much fun to wait for your bags to crash down the carousel slide, you'll want to watch it twice), and head to the main terminal, where I orbit between carousels 1 and 8 watching for the kennel (false alarm, same kennel different dog) and my luggage, having paid three dollars to rent a cart for the occasion. Eventually everything shows up, and Kona is fine. Most of the water bottle has leaked out, predictably, but the absorbent pad lining the kennel has done its duty and the blanket and used t-shirts (for the reassuring odor) are fairly dry, as is Kona. She doesn't get to eat in Seattle, but she does get to do her business, both barrels, in a glorious, sunny Seattle summer noon tainted only slightly by cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. And then it's back into the kennel and back into the airport.

Finally, hours later, with a minimum of anxious waiting, we are re-united, Gus picks us up, and after a stop at In-n-Out we head to Whole Foods in Palo Alto for dog food, and soon we are all relaxing at home.

I'm fairly used to returning to the US after time abroad, so the culture shock list this time around is fairly short:

• We walk on the right side of the sidewalk here
• The sun is liable to rise or set at any moment, not just at 7 am and 7 pm.
• If a car is coming towards you on the wrong side of the road, it's probably a drunk driver.
• It's possible to walk for blocks without breaking a sweat.
• The sidewalks are desolate
• There are ugly utility poles and wires overhead everywhere
• I can afford organic vegetables
• I can't reserve my seat at the movie theater

And a confession: much as Singlish was getting on my nerves the last few months, I was gone less than 24 hours before I first missed it.

Warning: nothing but materialism in this post.

At the beginning of the second semester, after relocating to an apartment about two miles from school, I tried to work out a plan for walking to school instead of taking the bus. The second week that I tried this, tragedy struck. First, my backpack fell off the couch, as it had done many times before. Inside was a Brain Cell, which in turn held my laptop. But I'd dropped this whole combination many times before so I just got back to putting music on my iPod Shuffle (which itself was a second generation Shuffle that I overpaid for at Mustafa Center here in Singapore, replacing the first generation Shuffle that died a natural (so to speak) death thanks to Apple's tradition of shiny but short-lifespan products). I'd been using Ultimate Ears headphones, which fit in the ear canal, sealing off outside sounds, sounding very good, and letting you listen at a lower, healthier volume, even in traffic. Well, healthier as long as you don't get hit by the traffic. Unfortunately, one UE headphone was slowly disintegrating due to a crack in the shell, and the sound tended to come and go. Plus the original plug broke long ago and had to be replaced with an ugly one that eventually stripped the plastic cover.

Part way through my walk, I went for my sweating cold water bottle and managed to launch the iPod to the pavement, where it suffered fatal internal injuries. Then, when I got to school I discovered that my laptop screen backlight was mortally wounded.

Long story short, I replaced the iPod with a Sandisk Sansa Clip (which a kind American friend bought and sent over, it being unavailable in Singapore and Amazon being unwilling to ship it directly). It's about half as expensive as the Shuffle, at US$40, for the same capacity. It's twice as bulky and heavy, but at that still weighs only an ounce and is small enough to hang from the earphone jack (don't try that at home; see above re: falling). It has an adequate display, a microphone, and a radio, all of which the iPod Shuffle lack. Also, it doesn't require any special software like iTunes or linux hacks of iTunes; you can just copy mp3 files over and it catalogs them.

The only minuses are lots of little annoyances in the software. After a few seconds the display goes out, and the first button click wakes it up but does nothing else. Which means that, in normal use, you usually have to hit buttons twice, and then sometimes you hit a button twice when you shouldn't and you lose your place or something. When you unplug the headphones, it doesn't pause; that was a nice trick on the Shuffle. It doesn't queue up clicks very well, so if you want to skip ahead ten songs, you have to click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click. (yes, that's eleven clicks. See above.) It has a ring-shaped four-way button, a middle button, and an offset "home" button. Which allows for a straightforward up/down/left/right, but then to "go" you sometimes go "right" and other times go "middle button", and to stop or pause or go back you might need any of the "left" button, the "middle" button", or the offset "home" button. Mostly what you want to do is either play or pause, but then you get trapped in the menu system way too often so the meaning of the buttons shifts and it gets annoying. It's not a disaster by any means; it's just ... annoying.

Meanwhile the headphones were still decaying, but I solved that problem by losing both them and the Sansa Clip. Which brings me to the moral of my story, I guess: don't buy expensive electronics. You (I) will lose them or break them or they will become obsolete. I try not to buy anything much over US$100.

By this point the Sansa clip had hit local stores, so I bought a new one. I replaced the Ultimate Ears with a rival product, the Shure SCL2. This has been obsoleted by the Shure SE110, and I paid about US$100. They are about as good as the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3. The sound quality seems about the same. The in-ear fit is a bit better but the part of my ear outside the ear canal tends to get sore. The thick wires are less tangle-prone than the UE's super-thin wires and have less of a stethoscope effect.. The case, a stiffened nylon discus kind of thing, is much more convenient and sturdy than the UE leather pouch. Overall, I like them better than the UEs. (And, to be clear, they are in a different league than the earbuds that come with iPods and Sansas and whatnot, which you can replace for like US$10. This is not "audiophile" better, this is a very concrete, walking down the street the difference is night and day kind of better. I don't know how much of that is because of the earplug-style design, versus superior electronic guts, and perhaps there are cheaper earplug headphones that sound as good. But when I was shopping, the slightly cheaper products, especially the Sennheisers of the same style, advertised "bass-driven" sound that was really unpleasant.)

Right around this time, I also dropped my trusty old Palm Vx for the last time; the front bezel came partway off and the buttons stopped working properly. This is technically the third or fourth Palm V; I first bought a Palm V in 2000 for US$330, but left it on the roof of a car in Alaska. I bought a used replacement in Hong Kong for about US$100 in 2002. In 2007 I snapped one up in a junk store for US$20 just to get the real brass stylus (and as a spare), and I think that's the one I have now, the other lying in storage somewhere. I may also have bought one on eBay, also for about US$20, or I may just have price-spotted. At my age the memory starts to go, which is precisely why one needs a Palm Pilot. But beautiful as it is, it's too heavy, about half a pound, and it's getting harder to harder to find serial ports (instead of USB), so rather than try to fix it I'm just giving up.

Just to complete the story, I also lost my Jimi wallet by leaving it under my seat at a movie. It was on its last legs, with some cracked corners and a slowly tearing plastic hinge, but it was an apparent gift from Tom Bihn and so I mourn its loss. Happily, the thing is so damned small that all I could fit in it to lose was a subway card and a few bills.

Meanwhile, I had to do something about my laptop, because the screen tended to not work. Repair was the first option, but a place at Sim Lim had it for most of a week and then gave it back, no charge but unfixed and possibly unfixable. Since it was three years old and accumulating various problems (keys that didn't work too well, a scary clicking noise in the hard drive, deteriorating screen even before the backlight died), I opted for replacement. Naturally, the only suitable option was the latest Thinkpad X; the X60/61. I did try the Asus EEE, much closer to my "don't spend more than $100 on anything you can lose" rule, but the keyboard was too small for real touch typing.

I'd been window-shopping this model for a few months, and even tried out my lessons from Negotiation class at Sim Lim over winter break. The X60 was selling in the US for about US$1000, before tax and shipping and without the 8-cell battery and extra RAM that it really needs. At Sim Lim the bundles started at about S$3000, or roughly US $2200, after tax. So my strategy was to print out the US page and go to vendors and say, "I can get this much more cheaply in the US, but then I have to pay tax and shipping and wait for it. If you can give me an equivalent price, I'll buy it from you right now." What I found was that most (out of 4 or 5 places I tried) would give an immediate S$300 to S$500 discount, but also juggle some more balls, so that they take away hundreds of dollars of value at the same time, and keep you from comparing apples to apples.

One interesting tidbit was that they all wanted to give me 3 gigs of RAM, whether I asked for it or not. When we did practice negotiations in class, we all worked from scoresheets, that told us what our total points would be for various combinations of concessions. But you couldn't see the other party's scoresheet, so the challenge was to figure out what was worth a lot to you but not much to them, and vice versa. Clearly, Lenovo was dumping RAM out that channel cheaply. This wasn't especially important to me in negotiation, but it was cool to see how, by comparing lots of players, you can start sussing out what their scoresheet looks like.

Here, by the way, is a chart for one of the class exercises. Paige Turner's literary agent negotiates a new book deal with Bestbooks. There are eight different points to the deal, from royalty rate to the size of the advance to how many books the deal includes and how long the book tour will be. Each point has five options (e.g., 2% royalty, 3%, 5%, 10%, 15%). So there are 5⁸ possible outcomes, or about four hundred thousand. Some of the points are win-win (translating books into many languages helps both parties); some are purely distributive (royalty and advance payments; if Paige gets more, Bestbooks gets less), and some are very asymmetrical (Paige really, really doesn't want to go on a long book tour but Bestbooks, while preferring a long tour, doesn't actually care very much). So it's possible for two parties to reach a deal where one robs the other blind, or where both do relatively poorly, or even where both do great. Each dot on the graph is a possible deal; the further to the right, the better for Paige; the further up, the better for Bestbooks.

What I learned from laptop shopping in Singapore was to order from the US if at all possible. Singapore has lots of shopping, but very few bargains. Lenovo USA refused to ship to Singapore, so I figured I'd have somebody accept delivery and then re-mail it. But it was a two or three week wait, and then there was some hassle with authenticating my (US) credit card, and my bank (credit union) said there was no problem on their end, and whoever I talked to a Lenovo US said there was no problem on their end, but some other machine in the Lenovo apparatus disagreed because the order got cancelled.

So I headed back to Funan Digitalife Mall, the slightly less seedy and more obnoxiously named alternative to Sim Lim, to the place that had been the squarest dealer in my first round of window shopping. I ended up paying S$2000, or about US$1500, for a "special employee deal" model extracted from the back room that was almost as good as the US model that was US$1200 not including tax and shipping. Break-even, if you count the ten to twenty total hours of time I put into research and haggling over a period of three months as equivalent to spending ten minutes clicking through a web order form.

The X61 is basically the same as the X40. Faster, of course. The battery has some extra rubber feet that make the whole thing about half an inch thicker, and even so it still seems to run a bit hotter. They squeezed in yet another special windows function key, which is annoying until your finger muscles retrain. The left shift key is two keys wide, but the plunger is in the middle of the keycap. I shift with my left pinky (never the right, it turns out) and I don't stretch my finger far enough, so I often depress the keycap without triggering the plunger. That is to say, the left shift key is unreliable due to poor design.

The top bezel, above the keyboard and below the screen, hosts the power button, volume buttons, and a "ThinkVantage" key. I personally find "ThinkVantage" to be a thing that I don't want; if the keyboard must have a silly button with a hideous portmanteau name, I would prefer "FrikSharkLasr". But the real problem with the bezel is that it's flimsy, and flexes when the power button is pushed. This kind of cheap design damages the impression of solidity typical to ThinkPads.

The fan is a bit noisy. The volume buttons were rearranged from the X40 for no good reason. The power supply plug and dock are different from the X40 so you can't re-use any accessories. The ThinkLight is white instead of amber. Of course I put Kubuntu on it. The volume and screen brightness buttons didn't work, though I could still control those things from the command line, until I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.04, at which point almost everything works perfectly without any fussing. One exception is the microphone for Skype, which hasn't worked on any machine I put Kubuntu 7.10 or later on. After a futzing session, it now works; the critical change seems to be turning on the Capture thingie in alsamixer. Wireless seems less reliable than on the X40: at school, the connection often spontaneously died until I reconnected or even unloaded and reloaded the wireless kernel module, a problem which I didn't have with the previous laptop. Battery life is about the same: a reliable four hours plus while the battery is still new. Sleeping and hibernating work fine in Kubuntu, but the machine intermittently refuses to wake up promptly, in particular if it went to sleep on battery and wakes up on AC. That could be the model or Kubuntu or the fact that this particular specimen came out of a box in the back of the shop. All in all, the X61 offers negligible improvement over the X40, to the point where I wish they had upgraded the chips without tweaking the case design; they probably just did that to obsolete the accessories.

And finally, I was able to sell the old ThinkPad (after a thorough hard drive wipe) for scrap at Sim Lim. For all of S$50 for the full kit:

A friend working in the medical data analysis business explained to me that nobody every has diastolic blood pressure of 89, 90, or 91. This is because 90 (mmHg) is the threshold for high blood pressure, so when a doctor or nurse measures your blood pressure, if it's 89 or 90 or 91 but you are otherwise healthy, they squint and write down 88. That way they and you don't have to deal with all of the extra paperwork and hassle of having high blood pressure. It's only when your blood pressure is 92 or 93 or higher that they decide that it's in your best interest to be recognized as having high blood pressure. So if you look at aggregate blood pressure data, there's a gap between 88 and 92.

The Wall Street Journal reports on China's preparations for the Olympics, and includes Beijing's pollution index for the last year. The numeric rating corresponds to concentrations of various pollutants in the air. China considers a rating above 100 to be dangerous; assuming the scale is consistent with that used in other countries, that's two to three times the level that triggers a warning elsewhere. Even so, there's something peculiar about this data:

In exactly which counting system is it normal to round numbers between 51 and 70 down to 50, and 101 and 120 down to 100, but leave all other numbers apparently untouched?

The Straits Times reports (5 July 2008, p S14) on the Large Hadron Collider about to go into to service:

the LHC can pump an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (Tev) into a proton as it flies around the tunnel. This is roughly the energy of seven mosquitoes in flight. Although this may seem small, a proton is about a trillion times smaller than a mosquito.

Sort of. If a mosquito is, generously, a centimeter in size, then it's

(1)

1×10−2 m 1.65×10−15 m

which is about 10⁻¹³, or a ten-trillionth. But that's not especially relevant. The essential difference, for purposes of colliding masses, is in mass. And the difference there is

(2)

1×10−3 g 1.7×10−24 g

or about 10⁻²¹, which is a billion-trillionth.

So squeezing seven Tevs into one proton is more like putting the energy of ten million battleships into one mosquito.

The AP reports that

"There are a lot of people with new wealth looking for relaxation and enjoyment," said John Dane III, president of privately owned Trinity Yachts, the largest U.S. builder.

These days, the biggest problem at Trinity's shipbuilding yards is having enough workers to handle the 24 custom contracts the company currently is working for the luxury vessels.

Meanwhile the local paper reports that "sales for mass market cars may be sluggish but it's boom time for high-end marques" (Straits Times, Life p9, 5 Jul 2008).

The class war is going strong, and it's pretty clear who's winning.

Ambassador Patricia Herbold, former mayor, chair of the King County (Seattle) Republican Party, etc, etc, (her husband is, or was, an adjunct professor at LKYSPP, although there was no sign of him this last year) spoke at the National Library about the US election. We're in the "pod" on the top, 16th floor of the library in downtown Singapore, and the view is quite nice. The following text is my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise marked.

First election without an incumbent President or VP. Lots of young people voting. www.18in08.com. Joel's note: she may be a native speaker, but stilted remarks read off the page with good pronunciation are still stilted remarks. I can't remember the last seminar I attended where the speaker such much of anything interesting or even listenable during the prepared remarks. Turnout is between one and two hundred, very mixed. Perhaps there will be interesting questions.

Examples of how things have changed with modern media: Obama's "bitter" remark, Clinton's sniper incident; McCain's alleged, "unsubstantiated" relationship with a lobbyist. What a negative ad is. "These ... have no place in political discourse."

Primary and convention schedule. Delegates and superdelegates. "Superdelegates comprise about one fifth [of Democratic delegates]." (Bonus points for using "comprise" correctly.) Superdelegates can change their mind, so his nomination is not actually certain. Republican unpledged delegates comprise about one fifth of Republican delegates. Convention speeches as a precursor to future success.

The electoral college.

"So what should we look for as we follow this year's exciting election?" (delivered in a deadpan drone). Key groups: working-class males; young, single, college-educated women; latinos; young people. Influence of technology. www.fightthesmears.com. (A halt because somebody's phone is ringing. "Let me start that sentence again.")

The macaca video "went viral". She shows a video catching McCain in a contradiction. Then a video about Clinton and sniper fire. A video attacking Obama for being out of touch, which starts with a music clip, "Nigger better dance now."

Blogs and Facebook.

Q: something about Democrats, Republicans, and Singapore. And something about polls. A: Voter turnout was up in 2006 and I think will be up even higher this year. To answer your first question, if I understand it, voters can vote for a candidate of any party. They used to say the US was 1/3 Democratic, 1/3 Republican, and 1/3 Independent, though I think that has shifted. John McCain is not a far, far right Republican, and I think he will attract some independent voters.

Q: What impressed me about Obama is "change". You are telling us all these teennagers were impressed by the internet. Do you think if this Afro-American president wins the election, there will be a change in America? A: It's not easy to answer because what you hear on the campaign trail is designed to appeal to certain voter constituencies. And when you are elected, you have to face the realities of life. Strong Congress, lobbying groups ... you have a more reasonable and prudent eye. Example: Clinton was making some of the same noises about free trade, that it was bad for American, but when he was elected, he was responsible for NAFTA.

Q: You talked about young voters, but McCain is old. There is a large senior citizen population in America and most of the developed world. Will they come out and vote for John McCain? Do you believe there's going to be a change in Asia policy if a different party is elected? A: I think the majority of older voters will vote for McCain, not because he's older, but because they tend to be conservative. If elected, I'm sure McCain will not lose focus on this region. Barrack Obama spent some time in Indonesia ... People think we don't pay attention to these region, but it's not true. Our top leaders are spread so thin trying to attend so many meetings and conferences .... We have a very active embassy here, twelve different agencies of the US government, military to military contacts, training sessions, exchange of military personnel. ... Just because a cabinet member does not accept an invitation to a particular event does not mean the US has lost interest in the area. (Sounds like that's not a hypothetical problem)

Q: How much support for free trade in Congress? A: I am concerned. The current Congress seems to be more protectionist. I would like to think this is just posturing during the election cycle.

Q: do you think Obama will be like JFK, to inspire America again? A: I think he's already inspired a lot of people, especially young people.

Q: Which candidate will have a bigger impact on the US trade imbalance? Obama is always emphasizing on withdrawal of troops. Less global influence. If Obama is elected, will US influence as global military police go down? A: I'm not sure I've heard either candidate discuss anything specific with respect to China. Our policy is to encourage China to be a resposible global citizen, which they've been achieving. ... I take issue with your referring to us as military police. We don't go into a country to occupy, we go in to solve a problem. Certainly when you consider the loss of life of our military and the huge financial toll it takes on us, it's not something any of us want to jump into without ... a great deal of thought. McCain would be more inclined to maintain our military posture as it is, but I have no idea what Barrack Obama would do. He's not been in the military; the comments other than with respect to Iraq .... I'll be interested to hear his comments after he visits Iraq.

Q: My question relates to certain schools of thought that American society is fundamentally racist. So far Obama has had a fairly smooth ride; now that he goes out into the open, is it possible that people, red necks, racists, will [vote him out] A: I don't know the answer, but if you look at the number of minorities elected in towns, etc, it's hard to argue this is an overriding situation of racism. Yes there are pockets of racism, there are blacks who are racists, but .... with respect to electing an African-American, I don't think that's a problem. I would like to think that our country is past that.

Q: I'm curious about that issue of gender. Did it play a role in why Hilary Clinton failed? What do you think is going to happen to the constituency of women that were voting for her? Will they defect to McCain? Do you think Obama's choice of running mate might take this into consideration? A: Most Clinton supporters by November will become Obama supporters. Those who are most irritated may stay home and not vote; I'm not sure that they will switch and not vote for McCain. ... There are people, even in the Democratic party, who just don't like her. They think she's shrill, abrasive, any number of things. She started the campaign with an attitude that it was hers, she didn't have a plan if she didn't win after February 5. She had money problems, problems with her campaign manager. Her husband got irritated on the campaign trail and that was caught on video. That caused the media to decide that Obama was going to be the candidate, and the media focus on Hillary was more on the negative side. I don't think it was ever a gender issue with Hilary. I don't think her experience means that women won't be able to be nominees for the next quarter-century.

Q: What will be the major issues in the US political climate in the next several months? A: The economy; surveys show Iraq has moved down, I think because the surge has made progress, but no progress is being made with the economy. Kitchen table types of issue. ... That said, if there is some dramatic event, like another terrorist attack, that will swing things the other way.

Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

The leader is the person with the most power in a group. A leader is non-coercive, goal-directed (Joel's note: I think this one is debatable; if someone can effectively veto any other goals, but puts forth no goals of their own, perhaps they are a leader that breaks this definition or an anti-leader; either way, their role clearly has something to do with leadership), and has followers.

A leader, who determines the group mission, is different from a manager, who implements that mission. But this distinction can be blurry, and one person can have both roles.

Great person theory says that all leaders tend to share special traits, such as drive, honesty, motivation, self-confidence, intelligence, domain knowledge, creativity, and flexibility.

Behavioral analysis of leadership suggests several dimensions. One grid is Autocratic to democratic and permissive to directive. Another is high to low person orientation and high to low production oriented; these are two different axes, and grid training is a technique to move people who are low on one or both to high on both, "9,9".

Analysis in terms of followers: the leader-member exchange (LMX) model, which defines "in-groups" and "out-groups"; leaders treat in-group members better. In self-managed teams, a team leader builds trust and teamwork, expands the team's capacity, attempts to create a team identity, exploits (in a positive way) differences between group members, and tries to foresee and influence change. Grassroots leadership empowers people to make decisions.

The attributional approach is a theory in which leaders try to understand and change the causes of followers' behavior. It also describes how followers think about leaders' motivations, e.g., the "rally 'round the flag effect" when followers extend additional trust to leaders when the group is in crisis.

Charismatic leaders exert special power due to personal charisma. Transformational leaders revitalize and transform their organizations.

Contingency theories focus on the relationship between leaders' characteristics and the context in which they lead. Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) contingency theory says that leaders can be evaluated by how they treat the follower they like least (like judging someone by how they treat waiters and servers). A low LPC leader is likely to succeed in environments of low situational control, when impersonal direction is usually appropriate, and high situational control, when the leader has unchallenged power. In context of moderate situational control, a high LPC leader will be more effective. The notion of putting leaders in situations appropriate for their personal capabilities is leader match.

Situational leadership theory defines two axes: task behavior (higher means more direction required) and relationship behavior (higher means more support required). In low task, low relationship, delegation is the best strategy. In low task, high relationship, participation. In high task, high relationship, selling. In High task, low relationship, telling.

Path-goal theory says that followers like leaders who help them on their path to their goal. Leaders can adopt four styles: instrumental, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented.

Normative decision theory says that seven criteria (leader information rule, goal congruence rule, unstructured problem rule, acceptance rule, conflict rule, fairness rule, acceptance priority rule) together suggest which of five basic strategies (autocratic, autocratic with input, consultative with individuals, consultative in group, group decision) is best for a specific context.

The substitutes for leadership framework describes conditions where leaders are not necessary, such as when individual characteristics of workers make leadership unnecessary, or when the jobs or organization are structured to not require leadership.

Leaders can develop via 360-degree feedback, networking, coaching, mentoring, and on-the-job experience.

---

Okay, that was the study guide. Now I will stop biting my tongue on my personal interpretations:

• p 504. "In view of all the attention that has been paid to the dishonest dealings of many top business leaders in recent years (e.g., most notably the late Ken Lay and his associates at Enron), it's important to note that successful leaders do, in fact, place a considerable emphasis on ethics and morality." This is the purest bullshit, special pleading of the rankest species. "oh, those guys don't count, because they were caught. real leaders are good people. How do we know that? Because leaders are good." This line of logic comes from the same batch of mental vomit as Bush's assertions that the US doesn't torture, or the idea that, "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
• p 517. Rupert Murdoch's vision is cited as "To provide accurate access to news for people throughout the world." He may have said that, but nothing in his record suggests he's ever believed that for as long as one second.
• p 522. "An airline pilot leading a cockpit crew is expected to take charge and not to seek the consensus of others as she guides the plane onto the runway for a landing." In fact, the most horrible air disaster of all time happened because a pilot, impatient to take off on a foggy runway after many delays, ignored his flight engineer's concerns about another plane possibly being on a runway. 583 people died. It's certainly true that, "when the demands of the task make it clear what a leader should be doing, it is perfectly acceptable for them to focus on the task at hand." But the example cited better illustrates the risk of a leader refusing to listen to subordinates.
• p 529. So, can we run nations through the checklist and see if democracy ever comes out as the appropriate leadership style?
• p 540. Question for discussion: "What special qualities make Chan Suh [founder of Agency,com, an online advertising company] so effective as a leader?" Oh, I know. The quality of being lucky. Lots of people are bold visionaries who create companies in sectors that conventional wisdom says there is no market. It takes leadership to do that. But most of those companies fail; it takes luck to land in a sector that really does explode. Bad leadership will help you destroy a success, but good leadership is not a sufficient condition for success. Again, the premise of the question is that, because person X has success, they must be an effective leader, and to me this is a circular premise.

Ethnocentrism is in-group versus out-group identity; pride in the in-group; disrespect for the out-group. Ethnocentrism is necessary for maintaining group identity, and thus for maintaining groups. Every country's foreign policy discourse is ethnocentric, not just China's.

Okay, I'm having trouble following his point. Looking around the room, I'm not the only one. Looking around the room, I see only two other white people; perhaps the speaker would do better to switch to Chinese? He's reading prepared remarks, and his head goes up and down from the table to eye level every second or so, and if I look directly at him, I get dizzy. The talk is grammatical but, given how much trouble he's having getting to any sort of discernible point, the speaker is ill-served by his poor pronunciation.

Okay, none of the details and examples are registering in my brain, but the gist is that both the Chinese and Americans are ethnocentric. China and other countries are somewhat obsessed with the US; this is somewhat natural given the weight of the US, but many countries magnify that perceived weight. For example, there is a slogan that "the Chinese-American relationship is the weightiest of the weightiest" (it sounds better in Chinese). A sign of progress is that this slogan is no longer used. China's foreign policy elite were thrilled after good Clinton/Zhang Zemin relations, but the Belgrade embassy bombing was very bad for relations.

Many Chinese policy elite—challenge from the audience after the speaker names a Chinese academic: what makes him an elite? Does Deng Xiaoping listen to him? The tone in the rooms starts to turn a bit impatient. The speaker thinks the crowd is hostile because of his position; personally, I can't really figure out what his position is in order to judge it.

Chinese policy elites and newspapers give excess weight to the US; Kissinger and Brzezinski get quoted regularly and the US dominates "foreign"-oriented Chinese newspapers.

Some article titles, loosely translated: "Who else can take the ring after the inevitable decline of the United States". One academic's recent article is "Let's compete against political ideologies with the west." He was explicitly denying there is any universal ideology among men. "China should try to slow down the inevitable decline of the United States." "China's moral hegemony will sustain while the US immoral hegemony will not sustain." An outburst from the audience as an academic is named: "He's not an elite. he's my friend actually"

Obsession with the US will be counterproductive to a more dynamic Chinese foreign policy. Some signs of progress in shedding US obsession. The weight of the US in China's interests has declined. China cannot always use the US perspective on things, human rights, development, etc.

Q: You're saying that China's making its own policy based on its own interest. That's simple; why do you have to spend so much time working through this? What is your sample size? What is your hypothesis? How do you test it? A: (he's talking but I don't follow what he's saying or how it relates to the question.) I'm not taking a quantitative approach. How many articles? Fifty, and more than a hundred pieces ....

Q: Among "elites", have you found anyone promoting universal rights, individual human rights? (interjection from another person at the table: What universal rights? US or Chinese?) A: Because of the Chinese political system, talking about universal rights must be "fuzzy".

Q: Psychologists use experiments, not guesswork. Your sampling could be subject to selection bias. How do you define the foreign policy elite? Look at all their writing, speeches, comments, and then decide what are the dominant themes. (that reminds me of this.) A: Yes, in psychology you can do experiment, but not in foreign policy. You can't do a Cuban Missile Crisis experiment. ... Nietzsche, foucault, ... a lot of things can't be quantified. Interjection: you could use one journal back to 1997 or earlier and study all the words and issues.

Q: Many African-Americans and Hispanics still say in surveys that they are inferior to whites. ... A ...

Q: where is Chinese foreign policy formulated? At the X school, or the "muliao"? A: It's far more open than any time before; Zhang Zemin initiated more openness.

Q: There is a theory that national perception and interest are part of the context of foreign policy. But the elite groups actually express foreign policy.

Q: Who and where to watch for changes in foreign policy? A: Read journals, but it's mostly private internal discussions. I can't name who I think are the most influential; I have a list but I can't tell you.

Q: At X university where I was for some time, perhaps half of students and professors' research focus was on US domestic politics or Sino-US relations.

Q: What's the percentage of Chinese elite have a strong version of ethnocentrism? A maybe 30%.

I wrote in March about the Democratic candidates for president that "I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint." I wish the future weren't so easy to predict. Obama disappointed in a big way this week with his FISA cave. Sigh.

Some excerpts of what H.R. 6304 does:

• ... permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States ...
• ... explicitly permit[s] the government to continue surveillance programs even if the application is denied by the court. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever it gathered in the meantime.
• ...ensures the dismissal of all cases pending against the telecommunication companies that facilitated the warrantless wiretapping programs over the last 7 years.

In reaction to the huge response to their last event, SPMI's schedule is blossoming with events. Another full room today (A few more ang moh's here today. Apparently we're all doing the shaved head thing now) for "Collaborating with the Enemy", by Steven Blais of IIL. This event is S$10 for SPMI members, including a very tasty Indian Vegetarian meal (places in the world that have to deal with halal and other religious requirements tend to be very kind to vegetarians as a bonus. Some sort of drawing with a prize over $1000 is announced, which gets a loud murmur going as people dig for their business cards. Given that S$10 each probably doesn't cover catered meals plus rental, IIL must expect to drum up a lot of business here.

Joel's executive summary: Projects must solve problems. Problems come from business. Business analyst, project manager, and system analyst are distinct and mutually exclusive roles. The business analyst role is responsible for ensuring the project solves the problem.

The rest of this post is my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise noted.

The great gap between project managers and those people who want our services. We have to bring in projects that are on time, on budget, and have all the features we promised. And what keeps us from doing this? The customers! When I started they didn't have this gap, they didn't have users. My first system was the automated payroll for the Navy. Punchcards, line printer. Chesty Puller: "I don't really understand this stuff; we have a printer that can print 1400 lines per minute; who can read that?" Not much user interface, the users worked with us, it was fine.

The project manager: what are your requirements?

The business person: I have a problem. You're the IT, you fix it. What are requirements? I have a problem with the annuities system.

PM: Give me some requirements

B: Well etc etc

PM: (to self) this is great, I can use that new java framework and ...

Joel's note: it doesn't seem like hilarity is going to ensue. Summary: the project manager and business person have different goals, contexts, and languages. Process-oriented business versus project-oriented project management. Business teams are together for years; project teams may last two months.

Anecdote about delivering a computer system to which the user responds, "it doesn't feel good." After many weeks, this was articulated into how it looks, how the mouse moves across the screen.

Standard personalities for technical people: INTJ (that sounds familiar. Now can we get the stereotypical FIRO-Bs?). For business people: ESFP.

How does the gap affect the project? changes, delays, scope creep, cost overruns. What tools help deal with this? change management, product acceptance. Joel's note: Hmm, agile techniques are one way to try and deal with this structural problem. I wonder if he'll talk about them, or some other approaches? Here's some thinking on integrating Agile and PMBOK.

I won an award 35 years ago for a US Navy project. On time, under budget, delivered everything promised, never had a defect reported since delivery. Of course, it was never used, and we knew it would never be used before we started working on it. Best project I ever did, because there were no users to mess it up. The point is that a successful project is not the same thing as a successful business. Projects are tactical, not strategic. Strategic business people should not be involved in projects. But now there's a gap between the business needs and the project. Who fills the gap? The PMO? No, it's not their business either.

Let's fill the gap. Organizations have a role for that, whether they label it or not: business analyst. Most of you PMs also do that role. The business analyst's job is to ensure that the project produces a product that solves the problem. The business analyst is a bridge.

As a consultant, I'll be working with a company to improve their project management, and I'll ask, what do you see the role of the business analyst as? And they say, they're a bridge between technical and business. Actually, they are a bridge between problem and solution, which may or may not be technology. The definition of the solution is the requirements. The business analyst establishes the bridge and the project manager gets us across the bridge. In SCRUM we call them the product owner. (Ding! Agile mention. Quick sidenote: I don't want to be mistaken for an Agile cheerleader. My own experiences with Agile are mixed. Whether or not one or more Agile methods is a good solution, they are at least addressing the right problem, which is basically this same gap he's talking about.)

Business Analyst is a role: they define the real business problem, completely and accurately; and "maintains full communication between stakeholders with the problem and solution team". At IBM we weren't allowed to have problems, only challenges.

The business analyst should ask, how will you know that we've solved your problem? If there isn't an answer, there isn't a problem. When we have that, we have acceptance criteria, a contract. The issue is that many times, the business doesn't know their real problem. Incidentally this happens well before we have a project.

If customers get more features, it's scope creep. If IT throws in some extra things, it's gold-plating. Notice who's naming these things.

Incidentally, this guy is a very good speaker, even though he's got powerpoint in the background. I think he could spike 80% of his slides, leaving only a few diagrams, and be better for it. But perhaps the other, wordier slides, which he generally ignores, are helping the readers? Anyway, he's very animated, vivid; you can see the punchlines coming but that just makes it more intimate.

Users don't have requirements; they don't know what's possible. They develop requirements together with the technical team. It's not if the requirements change, it's when. Plan for that evolution and you won't have creep. Halting scope creep won't help if the product doesn't solve the problem, e.g., have the right scope; if the product doesn't solve the problem, why are you making it? And, scope can't creep unless somebody agrees. It's up to the PM to say no to anything that doesn't solve the problem. Um. It feels like there's some sleight of hand here. How can you predefine the scope, given that we've agreed that it's impossible to understand the requirements before you start? I'm not convinced that scope exactly equals problem.

A need is not a problem. Why do you need it?

PM has conflict of interest. PM defines the project she's responsible for, and may push for a better project rather than a better solution. The business has a conflict of interest: it is not objective about the problem or solution. Businesses rarely do due diligence over the project: creating a charter, determining ROI, etc.

The business analyst starts before the project and ends after the project. The business analyst communicates changes back and forth between the business and the project. After project close, the business analyst is still confirming that the delivered product solves the problem. "If you have a solution that does not create at least three new problems, you have the wrong solution." If you are a PM who is also a business analyst, skip the party, go down and have just one Singapore Sling with the project team, then go back and see if the product works in production.

What's the difference between business analysts, project managers, and system analysts? They all do the same functions, (plan, manage risk, work with stakeholders, requirements, test, estimate, impact analysis, evaluate alternatives). But they all do them differently, for different people. BA does acceptance tests; PM tests project plan; SA tests integration. How to test the project plan? The plan breaks everything down into work tasks. Each task has an input and an output. You test the plan by ensuring that all inputs and outputs are used. You test it by laying out the tasks with your team (not with MS Project, but with the actual people). BA focus is business; PM focus is project; SA focus is technical. It is very difficult for one person to do all three roles, especially if they aren't trained.

How many of you grew up and went to school and said, I want to be a project manager. We're almost all accidental project managers. There are people who grow up to be systems analysts, go to school for that. Hopefully some day there will be schools for PMs, fraternities, etc. These three roles call for different personalities, different talents.

BA to customer: Is what you are asking for going to solve your problem? My job isn't to build something, it's to solve your problem.

(Side note because he said something about dodgeball: this is cute but raises the disturbing question: why would you pay three dollars to see the equator?)

How to wear two hats: As the PM, focus on the team. As the BA, don't let project noise (deadlines, etc) influence your relationship with stakeholders. I literally had different hats that I switched back and forth depending on the work I was doing.

First, make sure you understand what the role of the business analyst is. Keep the roles separate. Write the requirements as a BA; come back as a PM and pretend somebody else wrote the requirements.

about ten people just got up and left simultaneously. It's 8:35; are they all going to catch a bus, or like CEOs giving themselves raises, did they just realize that they could leave? The speaker is good but it's true the crowd (myself included) has been drifting for a few minutes.

An abrupt ending, and only one question. I think he could have wrapped up ~8 minutes earlier and had 10 minutes of good questions.

Q: Who has authority? A: The project manager has authority and accountability for the project, the BA for the business.

A lecture from Shaukat Aziz, former Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Joel's note: The Boston Globe seems to think he's one of the good guys. The following notes are my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise noted.

"Think beyond and outside the box, and try to meet the new challenges with vigor. ... The only constant in life today, ladies and gentlemen, is change. You must adapt to change. ... Staying still is not the answer." Apparently this will be an all-platitudes speech?

Today's topic was chosen and approved by Dean Mahbubani. Perhaps he thought that as a survivor of several assassination attempts I would be qualified to speak ... Terrorism is global.

With the recent upsurge in terrorism—clearly it has increased. If you try to travel today, it is a hassle. If your name is Muhammad .... This is done because not everybody knows who you are and there's a risk that if they let the old person in, they will cause trouble.

People link terrorism with a particular region or religion, Islam, but this is not historically the case. In my view, one word can describe most, not all, of the causes: "deprivation".

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Joel's note: Hm. Let's see what a cursory literature search says.

Club de Madrid says ... well, they certainly didn't come down to one word. "Poverty per se is not a direct cause of terrorism."

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert A. Pape, U Chicago :

"this study collects [188] terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001. ... This study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism hasbeen rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays.

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Meanwhile back to the speaker, who has said essentially nothing notable. "If you treat people with respect, they'll be less prone to getting into extreme behavior. More importantly, we must give people a voice. ... At the end of the day, if people have a voice, can within certain norms express their views .... Give people a level playing field and a sense of hope and you will see ... this will bring the temperature down. It has to happen, because there are many fires burning around the world ...."

"Here the role of the media in civil society is critical. The media ... if there is a message that, see how destructive this is, it will help in the hearts and minds of people."

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Q: (from Dean Mahbubani) We both lived in New York, in fact in the same apartment, St James Tower. A: but your apartment was twice as big. Q: But your salary was more than twice as much. A: That's true.

Q: How do we change the American conception of Islam? A: If you see what goes through their minds, 9/11 and 7/7, these are not minor incidents. The whole country was shaken up. ... Make people aware that the acts of a few angry people do not represent ...

Q: So Pakistan decided to side with the US. We hear that Pakistan is signing deals with the people it was fighting against. Is this a good idea? A: We joined the coalition against terrorism because terrorism is bad [my paraphrase]. If a group is willing to talk, I think that is the right way to go. The more people you can get back to a normal life, you have gained.

Q: Assassination of Bhutto discouraged good men and women. to some, terrorists are merely freedom fighters. Can you comment on that? A: Bhutto's death was a national and global tragedy. Every life is precious.

Q: [A regular attendee at these seminars reads from two pages of notes until he is cut off firmly. No idea what his point or question was. He started with "Singapore has found racial harmony with four races and four religious beliefs living together." Aziz responded that the questioner had an incorrect view of Islam?

Q: Is Islam being used as a force multiplier, or is the root cause relative (not absolute) deprivation? Is there a need to control radical madrassas? A: Madrassas are religious schools. I was asked to open a school; they had O-levels and were going to A-levels, they had proper computer classes. In Pakistan, the madrassas we have are clearly performing a role. There may be a few, who are, not as an institution but with individual teachers promoting extremism. Largely they are helping people memorize the Koran and so forth, and also free lodge and board for children who need education. Free books. The curriculum is being broad-based; those who are strictly in religious teaching, no need to be defensive about them, this is an important function in any society. To your first part, there may be affluent people going into terrorism, but they can still be deprived. They may be living in a country where a dispute is festering for ages.

The dean is getting very impatient with long-winded questions. A: The question is on ISI and its links to uh. Let me say that ISI is professional and respected. They pursue the national interest. The Taliban, the people in Afghanistan ... the rest of the world together recruited young people to fight the Soviet Union. ... Pakistan is very clear that we do not allow on our soil activities that are prejudicial to our interests or any other nation's. The Taliban is an Afghan government. We have 3 million refugees in Pakistan, Afghan will not take them back. We would like resettlement, more aid (which is happening in the Paris conference), a concerted effort against drugs.

Q: Karzai threatened to send troops to Pakistan after a jail break? do you think he's serious? A: Pakistan has always said that a strong, stable Afghanistan is good for the region.

Q: in the west, there's a myth that the religious reasons for terrorism are more important. Is that true? A: Faith does play a part, but it's only part. Islam as a faith doesn't promote violence. There are many attacks outside the Islamic world.

Q: When you were prime minister, what did you do to improve the quality of life of the people and deprive people of the financing for the terrorism? A: Great economic growth in Pakistan. Pakistan's per capita GDP is much greater than India. For the last several years, 7.5 percent growth, 5.5 percent this year. In terms of quality of life, reduction of poverty .... In terms of financing, it's a global effort.

Q: What is the greatest cause of deprivation that is leading to terrorism and what can we do? A: It's hard but I'll give you a few. Lack of people having rights, lack of income, feeling of hopelessness, ...

Like many of these seminars featuring politicians, the informational content of the seminar is very close to nil. The value in attending is in getting a sense of the personality of the speaker.

Impact Analysis

What would have happened to those receiving intervention if they had not received the intervention? In scientific terms, you need a control group. Remember that a control group is not a population that remains unchanged. A control group is a population that is subject to everything the target group is subject to except the intended intervention. The important thing to know here is that there are many, many ways to end up with useless data, as this Economist article about randomized evaluations discusses. A randomized study showed that giving away mosquito nets for free was far more effective that charging anything.

You might conclude that the trial showed that they should always be given away. Yet it turns out that millions of nets were already in use in the part of Kenya where the field trial took place, so their value was known. The experiment guaranteed supplies, so it did not test the assertion that you need to charge something to encourage reliable suppliers. And the recipients were pregnant women, whereas the point of giving bednets away is to provide anti-malaria treatment universally. The evidence from western Kenya was clear. But it hardly settled the question of whether the government should give bednets away across the country.

As an aside, it seems like we could very profitably spend a few weeks on the scientific method directly, rather than orbiting it with alternate language.

Experiments

The best experiment possible: fully blind, randomized, large sample size, repeated.

Since this is rarely possible in economics and social science, especially at larger scales such as national development, we can use alternative methods:

• natural experiment. For example, when different states in the US which are otherwise similar adopt different policies.

  An example of a natural experiment occurred in Helena, Montana during the period from June 2002 to December 2002 when a smoking ban was in effect in all public spaces in Helena including bars and restaurants. Helena is geographically isolated and served by only one hospital. It was observed that the rate of heart attacks dropped by 60% while the smoking ban was in effect.—Wikipedia

• matching
• statistical equated controls
• non-experiments

The instructor apologizes for putting Mao in a list with Stalin and Hitler in a previous lecture. I certainly think, based on my understanding of history, that by many plausible definitions of the set of "most prolifically evil dictators of the 20th century", Mao is a solid member (scholars actually put him at the top of the democide league table). Where's my apology for taking him out of the list? The instructor further notes that anyone who thinks that Hitler, Mao, et al were "born evil" is missing the point of the class. Judging from remarks in this and previous classes, those of us who are not in the habit of writing and forwarding angry emails are missing out on a substantial portion of discourse for this class.

Perspective: when I get somewhat frustrated with the challenges of this course and fantasize about nasty feedback (example: instructor: "students who are not faring well in terms of points right now should ..." me: "is there a way for us to know how we are faring in terms of points right now?" instructor: "no, but there will be soon" Oh good, it's the final session of class for the semester and the only information about our performance is a single paper that has been returned.) I find it helpful to read things like this, which illustrate how you can easily out yourself as an asshole to be ignored. Then I take a deep breath and pet my dog.

I supported the notion of impeaching Cheney enough to make T-shirts, which very aggressively failed to sell. Now that Kucinich has introduced a bill to impeach Bush, it's worth thinking about again.

Briefly, the basic argument for impeachment is that Bush committed many impeachable offenses. But just as Supreme Court decisions are rooting more in counting to five than in pure application of legal theory, impeachment is a political, not legal act. Probably most presidents have committed impeachable acts; after all, the US has gone to war at least eight times since the Congress, the sole organ with Constitutional power to wage war, last passed a bill declaring war. But only two presidents have been impeached, and neither was convicted.

Politically, both Bush and Cheney would have to be impeached simultaneously, which would lead to the speaker of the house succeeding to the presidency, which puts Pelosi in a very awkward position and probably ends up as a strong incentive for her not to allow impeachment. The other standard political arguments against are that it will distract from more important issues, and than Bush will be out of office very shortly anyway.

The strongest argument for, I think, it to begin re-establishing the basic civil norm that politicians, even and especially the president, must obey the law, and that there will be consequences if they do not. From that perspective, Ford's pardon of Nixon morally enabled the disasters since. A commenter at Making Light argues that it literally enabled some of the disaster-makers:

... if [they] are impeached (House) and tried and convicted (Senate), they will not get Federal pensions and they will be ineligible for any Federal office.

This is what should have been done to Nixon and Reagan's cohorts -- if it had we wouldn't be dealing with the current criminals.

A third argument would be that impeachment might help restore international respect for the United States (and restore some of our "soft power"). Between that, re-establishing rule of law, and removing many dedicated imperialists from government permanently, I think impeachment is at least worth serious public discussion. Otherwise, it's business as usual.

Since we are still talking about cost-benefit analysis and how to apply it to situations with hard-to-value outcomes, here's an interesting article in the New York Times:

The Bush administration is about to propose far-reaching new rules that would give people with disabilities greater access to tens of thousands of courtrooms, swimming pools, golf courses, stadiums, theaters, hotels and retail stores.

... The Justice Department acknowledged that some of the changes would have significant costs. But over all, it said, the value of the public benefits, estimated at $54 billion, exceeds the expected costs of $23 billion.

If you've seen my sidewalks photo-essay, you'll know that Singapore isn't great with accessibility. This is not scientifically collected data, but I do see very very few disabled people, such as people in wheelchairs. in public here.

About half an hour before class was over, a camera crew from "Corporate Communications" came in to film the lecture in progress for some unspecified purpose. A few minutes later, we came to this slide in the lecture:

Design contamination refers to the situation where participants know that they are being observed (tested) and act differently because of it.

In the slightly stunned silence after they left, someone muttered, "this is contamination."

Evaluation

Programs convert inputs to outputs, which lead to outcomes. Process evaluation is a descriptive analysis, performed after implementation, which measures the efficiency of inputs to outputs. Impact analysis measures the relationship between outputs and outcomes and seeks causes.

Reading

Rossi, P., M. Lipsey and H. Freeman (2004) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 7th Edition. Sage Publications, Chapter 1—An Overview of Program Evaluation, pp 1-28

Rossi, P., M. Lipsey and H. Freeman (2004) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 7th Edition. Sage Publications, Chapter 12—The Social Context of Evaluation, pp 373-419

Each time I try to do the readings for this class, I bounce off. There's more than a few Harvard Business Review articles, and they all tend to blend into one ur-article, which goes something like this:

Does A Successful Dynamic Leadership Framework Need Great Followers?¹

I've dedicated my entire life to following the greatest men in the world. I know that they are great because they are the CEOs of big corporations that make lots of money. And they have security guards, so I can't follow them too closely. But I am compelled to understand why they are so, so great. When I first started in the 70s, everyone said I was daft to research greatness, but I did all the same, just to show them. I conducted research so intense that they had to invent a new kind of supercomputer to crunch my data. It melted. So I recruited a team of highly trained interns and conducted more research, on a more powerful supercomputer. That one melted. So I built a third. That one caught fire, set off the halon system, killed three of my interns, then melted. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, reader, the strongest leadership research on the strongest leaders in the world.

And what I discovered is that one single factor explains why some men are great and others are not. That factor is awesomeness. The greatest men are awesome. In the chart, you can see a list of awesome men and details of how awesome they are. If you train yourself to be awesome, you too can be a great man. But you have to be awesome.

By the way, I have a consulting business where I teach people how to be awesome. Call me.

Yes, these articles really annoy me. If you want straight-up notes for the exam, go read my notes for Policy Analysis, the other core module this semester. I promise those are straight up. Anyway, here is the reading for the class.

Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself. Best of Harvard Business Review 1999.

Know yourself, including what kind of learner you are (visual, auditory, etc) and if you are more of a leader, follower, or adviser. Do this by feedback analysis. "Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations." Once you know yourself, do what you are good at.

W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Tipping Point Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Bill Bratton is great. Do what Bill Bratton did. Which is Tipping Point Leadership. So you should do Tipping Point leadership. There are four hurdles, Cognitive, Resource, Motivational, and Political. You should, respectively, Break Through, Sidestep, Jump, and Knock Over these four hurdles. (Yes, the palimpsest on this one is pretty easy to see through. They had an article about hurdles, a book called "Tipping Point" was a big best-seller, so they put the words "Tipping Point" on their hurdle article. What it really is is a missed opportunity to talk about the tipping point of the hurdles. But you only actually tip the Political Hurdle, so I guess that wouldn't work.)

Here's a reality check, courtesy the Washington Post. It shows crime over Rudy Giuliani's whole tenure as mayor; remember that Bratton was only commissioner from '94 to '96. And don't forget to look for the tipping point:

As a further aside, as long as Rudy continues bragging about his 9/11 leadership, perhaps those deaths should be included in the graph in 2001, which would obliterate the notion that violent crime decreased in New York over his tenure. But happily we haven't heard much of him lately; presumably running one of the worst presidential campaigns in American history has shown that platform consisting of three digits and a punctuation character isn't a winner.

In fairness to Malcolm Gladwell, the graph shows an inflection point, not a tipping point, which is "the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable", something more relevant to network theory and propagation models. Whether or not there's anything to "tipping point" beyond glib pseudo-science is a discussion for another day; suffice it to say there's little of Gladwell in Tipping Point Leadership.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance. Harvard Business Review: Breakthrough Leadership, December 2001.

Summary: emotions matter. Great leaders cited: Jack Welch, in a sidebar.

Maria T. Farkas, Linda A. Hill, A Note on Team Process.

This is actually quite useful. It is from Harvard, but not from the Harvard Business Review. It's a note prepared "for class dicussion". It's too good and thoughtful to glibly condense to one sentence. And it mentions women and other groups that may be excluded from team discussion.

Jim Collins, Level 5 Leadership, The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve

Out of 1435 Fortune 500 companies, only 11 sustained greatness for 15 years after a major transition. All 11 had a "level 5 leader." Therefore, you should become a level 5 leader. A level 5 leader is deeply humble and intensely willful.

From page 6: "If Moclker had given up the fight, it's likely that none of us would be shaving with Sensor, Lady Sensor, or the Mach III—and hundreds of millions of people would have a more painful battle with daily stubble." All I can do in response is point to this article by Moclker's successor, James Kilts: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades. (Here's some more serious criticism, noting among other things that "Kilts was personally never part of our community anyway. He never moved here, commuting from Rye, N.Y., and even holding his ''worldwide annual meetings" within a few miles of his home."

If you google for Level 5 Leadership, Jim Collins' home page cites David Maxwell of Fannie May. When "Maxwell’s retirement package, which had grown to be worth $20 million based on Fannie Mae’s spectacular performance... became a point of controversy in Congress", Maxwell voluntarily gave up the last $5.5 million of it. Wow! Amazing. What humility! Meanwhile, Fannie Mae engaged in "extensive financial fraud" over six years by doctoring earnings so executives could collect hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses. Of course, Maxwell retired in 1991 and fraud was only uncovered going back to the late 1990s. I'm sure Maxwell was completely clean..

Louis B. Barnes, Managing Interpersonal Feedback

Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

Nothing to do with Harvard.

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, A Survival Guide for Leaders. Harvard Business Review.

When people are forced to change, they often attack the person responsible. Be prepared for this.

This is actually a perfectly reasonable point, and there's some good advice: recruit the uncommitted; "resist resolving conflicts yourself—people will blame you for whatever turmoil results"; "restrain your desire for control and need for importance", "read attacks as reactions to your professional role, not to you personally". I have only two objections to the article. First, it very strongly encourages you to assume that the change you are promoting is the right change, and dismisses the idea that people are resisting the change because it's a bad idea. It's quite true that people resist good changes, but people also resist bad changes and the people directly affected by a change do have special insight into its impact. That shouldn't amount to an automatic veto, but it shouldn't be treated primarily as resistance to overcome or subvert, either.

Second, Heifetz and Linsky are the perpetrators of "Adaptive Leadership", the basis for books and articles and who knows what else. It just reeks of bullshit, in this case the bullshit of perfectly good but un-novel ideas repackaged under a new name to start the next fad. "Who Moved my Tipping Cheese Fish: Adaptive Leadership Lessons from the Great Lieutenant Bligh".

I think what really gets my goat on these things is that I don't buy the premise. The premise of almost all of these articles is, X is objectively great, as proven by outcome Y. X's secret is Z, and therefore you should do Z. But outcome Y is often quite flimsy. Bratton wasn't responsible for decreasing crime in New York. Jack Welch's financial success with GE may have been partially built on sand. Maxwell shows humility for giving back a fraction of a monstrous cashout. I think the real lesson is that, at a minimum, we know much less than we think we know, and we should be really cautious about people drawing bold conclusions, especially when they are trying to sell us something. I hope that's not news to anybody.

What about Enron?

I found two HBR articles about Enron prior to 2001 (plenty more afterwards). Both were positive:

Enron, with its "loose-tight" management policy, is an example of an organization that has figured out how to effect change without the usual pitfalls, says Mintzberg. [It] manages only two corporate processes very tightly: performance evaluation and risk management. Everything else is managed loosely, and local leaders get an enormous amount of discretion in figuring out how to get things done.

—Burning Questions 2001: How to overcome Change Fatigue". Harvard Management Update

[Enron] has invested millions of dollars ... to ... ensure that fluctuations in gas prices do not jeopardize the company's existence. ... [Enron]'s success - measured by both market share and profits - illustrates how financial engineers, working with marketers and strategists, can differentiate a commodity product without taking undue risk.

—"How Financial Engineering Can Advance Corporate Strategy", Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb 1996

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1 This title is derived from the most commonly used words in the 90 Harvard Business Review articles with Leader in the title.

Google Foundation has a program, RechargeIT, to promote plug-in hybrids. This is very exciting because a plug-in hybrid can have radically less impact than a regular hybrid. In a nutshell, a regular hybrid is just a standard gasoline car with some doodads to make it more efficient. But a plug-in hybrid is a real electric car, that can also use gasoline so you don't get stranded on the road.

And now for the details. First, although hybrid sometimes means an engine that can burn natural gas or ethanol in addition to gasoline, here we're talking only about gasoline/electric hybrids.

Cars burn gasoline to move you around. That is, they spray gasoline into cylindrical chambers of an internal combustion (e.g., "inside-burning") engine, mix it with air, and then explode the mixture with a spark. The hydrocarbons—molecules of hydrogen plus carbon—in the gas combine with the oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen dioxide—water— plus some energy. The resulting hot exhaust gas wants to be much bigger than the space at the top of the cylinder where we detonated the fuel/air mixture, so it pushes a piston in the cylinder. The motion of the pistons spin a shaft, and that drive shaft in turn connects to the wheels via the transmission, moving the car forward. But only about 35% of the energy from the gasoline makes it even as far as pushing a piston. The rest just heats up the engine block, which heats up the coolant fluid, which heats up the air passing through the radiator. Unless you live in Alaska and hence diverted a bit of that heat to warming up the inside of the car, it's purely wasted energy. And of the fraction of initial chemical energy that did go into pushing the pistons, almost half will be wasted in friction along the path between the driveshaft and road/rubber interface, so that only about 20% of the energy in the gasoline actually moves the car forward. At best.

The exhaust gas, meanwhile, has some impurities, such as incompletely burned carbon (carbon monoxide instead of dioxide, the former being far more toxic) and even raw gasoline. It travels through a device which catalyzes the incomplete chemical reactions into finishing (hence, a "catalytic converter"), various other devices to capture other impurities such as sulfur from the gasoline, a muffler, and out the tailpipe. If all of that equipment is modern and in good working order, the exhaust gas is actually fairly free of toxins and smog-producing chemicals. It does, however, have plenty of carbon dioxide, which of course is a greenhouse gas the emission of which will possibly turn Miami into another New Orleans by 2050.

A diesel is much the same except that it burns at a temperature so high it doesn't need a spark; because of the higher combustion temperature, a modern diesel engine can be more efficient than a gasoline engine.

So what's a gas/electric hybrid? Well, it's a gasoline engine car with a set of electric motors and really big batteries. Big as in hundreds of pounds of batteries. What's the point? Well, gasoline engines aren't especially flexible. They like to run at a certain speed. Even with a transmission—a set of gears that let the engine shaft turn at a different rate than the wheels—cars are finicky. My old Toyota MR2 had an unusually wide "power band", from about 2000 rpm to 7000, but even it didn't develop much power at 1000 rpm. And to get a range that wide, the engine computer has to play tricks like spraying in extra gasoline that won't get burnt (called a "rich" mix), or extra air (a "lean" mix). I hope you will not be surprised to learn that a rich mix is not good for your mileage, or, for that matter, your catalytic converter. I'll skip over the details of Carnot efficiency and stoichiometric ratios; what you need to know is that any particular gasoline-burning engine can be made very clean and very efficient, but only in a very narrow range of speed and power. The engine block design that got 30 miles per gallon in my 2500-pound MR2 at 60 miles per hour (or would have, if I hadn't driven it with a 21-year-old right foot) will not be as efficient in a two-ton truck. In fact, it won't even be as efficient in the MR2 at 30 miles per hour. And that's where hybrids come in.

The thing with energy is that it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed. Power plants don't create energy; they just transform the chemical energy in coal or oil or natural gas into the kinetic energy of a spinning turbine, and then into electrical energy. Dams and windmills, well, you can probably figure them out yourself.

The other thing with energy is that it's hard to store. So almost all of the energy that we generate—by generate I mean liberate from coal, or steal from rivers and breezes, etc—gets used right way. And I don't mean right away as in "your call is important to us" right away. I mean that if you flip a switch to turn on the light on the ceiling, at the same instant a turbine in a big industrial building somewhere shudders microscopically.

The total power output of the entire Western United States power grid at any moment equals the total power consumption. (Almost. About seven percent of the output is wasted in transmission, turning into heat and that eerie hum you hear around power lines.)

The power grid notwithstanding, it is actually possible store power on a smaller scale. And that's what a hybrid car does. Each wheel has its own electric motor, and they all connect to a big battery. The big battery in turn connects to the engine. It tries to keep the engine running at its optimal speed, and when that speed produces more power than the car needs to move, the extra power at the drive shaft is converted, via an alternator, into electricity stored in the battery. When the driver asks for more power than the engine can efficiently produce, the battery sends electricity to the wheel motors to supplement the power coming from the transmission. Electric motors are more efficient over a much wider range of speeds and powers, especially in starting from zero, than gas engines attached to mechanical transmissions, so this can work out quite well. In particular, hybrids will often use only battery power at low speeds, with the gas engine helping push the car only at faster or freeway speeds.

With all of this extra gear, you can play some extra tricks. The coolest one is regenerative braking. Electrical motors can easily reverse; that is, they can turn motion into electricity instead of vice versa. So when you tap the brakes in a hybrid, the car does not need to push brake pads into rotors, thus converting your precious energy of motion into hot brakes. Instead, the motors turn into little generators, with your car wheels playing the role of the rushing river. The wheels get slowed and the battery gets topped off. If everything were perfectly efficient, you could start at the top of the Grapevine with a dead battery and empty tank of gas, roll several miles down the hill, brake to a halt, enjoy an In-n-Out burger, then turn around and roll all the way back up on battery power. (This would work better if the Earth didn't have any air to cause wind resistance, but then the milkshakes probably wouldn't taste right.)
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Regenerative braking is unique to hybrids, because you need both the electric motors and big battery. But the other trick hybrids can play is simply to turn the gas engine off whenever it's not needed. In particular, an idling engine always gets zero miles per gallon regardless of how efficient it might be. (Similarly, a really expensive Lamborghini which is lost and going in circles isn't any faster than a Hyundai, though it's much funnier to watch go past you the second time around.) This is something that most new gasoline cars are supposed to start doing Real Soon Now, since improvements in gas engine technology mean that starting the engine no longer wastes a minute worth of gas, the way it used to when Eisenhower was president.

The upshot of all of this technology and cleverness is that the current batch of hybrid gas/electric cars, most famously the Toyota Prius but also plenty of Hondas, Fords, and so forth, get maybe a quarter more energy out of a gallon of gas. So the Prius gets about 45 mpg. By the way, there's all sorts of controversy about how the US government calculates mileage. One of the things RechargeIT is doing is driving some Priuses around with lots of instrumentation; among other things, they are averaging 44.6 mpg over the last year. That's pretty good, but it's barely better than a diesel Jetta, which doesn't have the hundreds of pounds and thousands of dollars of extra equipment. And VW claims to have 60 mpg Jettas on sale in the US in months.

To make sense of this apparently poor performance, you have to remember is where a gas/electric hybrid gets its energy from. Yes, it has an electric battery, but what charges that battery? The Toyota Prius doesn't plug into anything. The only way that you add energy to the car is by pumping gasoline into the tank. The battery charges only when the engine is running. So all that fancy technology merely makes the car a really, really efficient gas-powered car. But gasoline engines have efficiency limits; the hybrid system lets the car spend more time at those limits, but cannot exceed them. The bottom line is that current hybrids are still 100% gasoline-powered.

I wrote about this when I first drove a hybrid Honda in Seattle's Flexcar fleet, five years ago. I wrote then that "by putting electric technology into a non-masochistic package (unlike the EV1 or earlier Honda Insight) that will actually sell tens of thousands of units, familiarizing consumers and generating real-world trial experience, it's a medium-sized technological step towards true renewable-resource cars." Well, Toyota's sold a million Priuses, gas has passed US$4/gallon, and the next step is at hand. The next step is plug-in hybrids. The difference between a regular hybrid and a plug-in is $10,000 worth of extra equipment and lots more batteries. Enough batteries for the car to hold forty miles worth of electrical energy. And instead of filling the batteries by burning gasoline, you can plug the car into regular 120-volt outlets. Suddenly, that entire second drivetrain, previously slave to the gas tank, is liberated. To be sure, it's still going to be slave to oil, natural gas, and coal-fired power plants, but the frying pan is a better place to be than the fire: even coal plants can be well over 40% efficient, and an electrical drivetrain is much more efficient than a mechanical transmission. Of course, from a climate change perspective we probably want to look at pounds of CO₂ emitted mile traveled, which is a research topic for another day, but remember that you can use zero-emission wind, solar, and nuclear power as well. So a plug-in hybrid is the best of both worlds: you can use clean electrical power for shorter trips, plug in anywhere to recharge, and if you don't have time to recharge or want to go more than 40 miles, you've got a gasoline motor and gas tank that give you all the freedom of a very efficient regular car.

How well does it work in the real world? Again, RechargeIT has equipped a fleet of cars with sensors, in this case four cars, and they end up getting 66.2 mpg. Since every single trip is recorded down to the second, you can start getting at the why of the numbers. Here's a trip from yesterday:

Speed (mph):

Engine RPM

Battery (%)

Even though the trip was only 3.6 miles and never broke 40 mph, it looks like the gas engine still kicked in 11 times, almost once per minute. And of course on a long freeway trip, you're going to completely deplete the pre-charged battery and then all of your energy will come from the gas tank. So I guess there's still a ways to go. Even so, over the last year the plug-ins' mileage averages about 50% better than the stock hybrids, and the greenhouse gas emissions are 29% lower per mile. I think the GHG numbers are based on the Googleplex using all solar power, in which case the plug-in charge is emission-free. I would want to know if they take into account drivers' plugging in at home or elsewhere, in which case you'd want to charge the plug-ins with the GHG emission per Wh of power sources for the Bay Area power company. And of course a true lifecycle analysis would take into account the GHG emitted building the cars, shipping them to Mountain View, etc etc. Even so, plug-ins are almost certainly another step in the right direction.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember before when we were talking about the power grid in the US, and how it doesn't have any ability to store power? Well, what if we attached a bunch of batteries to the grid, and charged them up at night, when there is surplus (and more efficient) capacity, and then dumped it back into the grid at noon, when demand peaks and the old, less economical, heavily polluting power-plants have to be maxed out to prevent brownouts? A fleet of plug-in hybrids, of course, could do that. Apparently, if you play your cards right and all the regulation falls into place, your plug-in hybrid could be a profit center.

One thing on the RechargeIT blog really surprised me:

Not the Lexus hybrid; I've even seen them on the street here in Singapore. But I had assumed that when a hybrid motor is put into a luxury car, producing only a 1-2 MPG efficiency improvement, it was pretty much a farce, a bit of greenwashing. But what this graph points out:

is that an improvement from 10 MPG to 12 MPG is worth as much as an improvement from 30 to 60. So maybe those hybrid limos and SUVs aren't completely ridiculous. But don't get carried away; 30 is still much than 12.

Meanwhile, California's regulators, CARB, seem to have done a decent job over the last few decades in standing up to car manufacturers to force them to improve the environmental impact of their cars. But the terminology can get confusing: LEV, for Low-Emission Vehicle, ULEV for ultra-low, and on and on to the latest: AT-PZEV, "Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emission Vehicle". This refers to different levels of pollution coming out of the car, like sulfer dioxide and carbon monoxide. The confusing thing is that, when they use "emission", they aren't talking about carbon emissions. So a car can be ATPZEV and still be pumping out the CO₂ that will ultimately put Miami and Bangladesh underwater. Perhaps one day CARB will start regulating greenhouse gases as well, though for all I know that's tied up in a lawsuit or something. Apparently RechargeIT is lobbying CARB on the issue.

By the way, the head of the EPA, which is federal as opposed to the California state CARB, has been going to absurd, and possibly illegal, lengths to stall on doing anything about GHGs. Watch for yourself:

Presenter: Larry Hahn, retired DEA agent now living in Singapore.

Training was in Jordan, not Iraq, for safety reasons.

8 week training period, would have preferred 16. Time pressure came from political timetable for government turnover. Training to a standard of "minimum competency".

Trainees were motivated primarily by job-seeking. Instructors were from about twenty coalition countries, and all spoke English (except for the Scots), using Arabic-speaking translators. Almost a third of instructors were Jordanian and spoke Arabic.

Training based on UN/Kosovo model, emphasis on human rights; 4 weeks general policing and 4 weeks tactical exercise. Modified to a more paramilitary curriculum: democratic policing; patrol; terrorism; crime; firearms; defensive tactics; patrol 2; patrol 3.

Training site built in the desert in Jordan (by DynCorp, on a no-bid contract).

What went wrong? See "The Coalition Provisional Authority's Experience with Public Security in Iraq", US Institute of Peace. Large-scale public order breakdowns; army not trained to deal with civil disorder or provide police functions. Existing Army and police force disbanded, and probably would not have been effective anyway.

Some recruits said that when they went back, their bosses would just send them out to get money. "When you do this training, you've got to train all segments." It takes about five years to train an effective police force.

I knew that IKEA was ultimately owned by a non-profit foundation, and I wondered that we didn't hear more about it. Apparently, it may be mostly a tax dodge, not an actual philanthropic adventure like the Gates Foundation. That's a shame.

Context analysis of Queen Elizabeth I at her ascension to power.

Scope	Boundary	Opportunity
Global	Catholic Church, Spain, France	Colonies
National	decentralized power system sectarian civil war threats from abroad	public desire for peace Crisis=opportunity
Organizational	No money no standing army parliamentary limits on monarch	offer of marriage Institutional power of monarchy
Personal	gender limitations questions of legitimacy	daughter of a king

Seven sources of power: positional, coercive, reward, expert, referent, network, and associative.

Reading

The readings come from a book in pre-publication.

• p 40: "power without legitimacy is always transient." Oh really? An awful lot of dictators-for-life (or their subjects) would disagree, surely. You could argue that the ability to maintain power through violence is a form of legitimacy, but then you get fairly tautological: power without the ability to maintain power is transient.
• p 49: Wikipedia says Bill Gates topped out at just over $100 billion, not $160B.

Valuation Techniques for Cost-Benefit Analysis

If a market price is not available for a cost or benefit being analyzed, other methods can assign a value. These are called shadow values. One example is Travel Cost Method, which determines the value of an attraction by measuring what fraction of people at different distances are willing to travel to it.

Methods to value human life are controversial to some, but public policy analysis cannot be performed without valuing human life. And, analogous to the argument that everybody is operating through models all the time, whether consciously or otherwise, it's clear that everybody does in fact apply an implicit value to human life all the time. Various methods can extract numeric values from observing human behavior. There is huge variation in the value people implicitly place on their own life in different contexts, suggesting (proving?) that psychology is a better framework than economics for understanding much human behavior.

Reading

Zerbe, Richard O., Jr., and Allen S. Bellas. 2007. A Primer for Benefit-Cost Analysis. Chapter 7, pp. 164-214. Edward Elgar Pub

One of Tufte's key ideas is data ink: most of the ink should embody data, not other things. For a spectacular example, compare the two illustrations of the British Empire on Wikipedia:

Of course the first map contains a lot more information, so it's not a fair comparison, but as a visual answer to the question, "what was the British Empire?", the second map is far more effective.

Guest lecturer.

Context matters. Um, was somebody saying it didn't? The context paradox: it both enables and constrains. Four levels of context: personal/team, institution/organization, the nation, global.

Does a good leader adapt to the environment or pursue a consistent vision and, perhaps, choose the moment where the variable environment suits that vision?

The most critical part of leadership is knowing when to step aside, and a system which enforces that is a good idea.

Reading

The readings come from a book in draft form.

• p 8: To quote Samuel Huntington, "a framework is a simplified way of viewing reality." I don't care for that definition at all. I think "modeling" is a much better term for simplifying reality. OED's first definition is "A structure composed of parts framed together." A conceptual framework may set some things as more or less important, but that's not essential to its function.
• p 13: "According to ... the US State Department ... between 1985 and 2004, 13,096 people around the world were either injured or killed as a result of terrorist attacks." This is then compared to deaths from a few genocides and wars. Setting aside the incorrect conflation of casualties with fatalities, if this chapter is about context, then how about seeing death tolls from diseases, malnutrition, natural disasters, and so forth. (An interesting side-note would be to look into somehow better identifying "inevitable" versus "evitable" consequences of natural disasters, where evitable consequences come from population patterns, building codes, etc. Then we would get into which population shifts are themselves evitable and inevitable and ... maybe that thread is better left unpulled.)
• p 14. You can compare GDP with sales revenue? We've been discussing that here (1, 2). As a rule of thumb, profits plus one half of revenue (approximating labor costs) may be a better equivalent to GDP. Although this quibble does just bolster the point of the book, that the biggest companies are still smaller than "minor regional powers". Although I wouldn't call Taiwan minor. What's halfway between minor and major?
• p 14.

  ... what then defines the national context? We offer a simple list of three defining elements:

  1. Geography
  2. History and Culture
  3. Economy

  That's four elements.
• p 16: "Huntington identified a number of conflicts which were occurring at what he termed the fault lines between Civilizations. His choice of a geographic expression to describe this phenomenon was not accidental because most of the conflicts he identified occurred in places where two civilizations came into proximate contact and hence conflict." But the majority of conflicts since World War II have been civil wars. So I'm not clear on what point Huntington (or his paraphrase) might score by showing that most conflicts between civilizations happen where two civilizations come into contact. It seems like the (wrong) point lurking in the shadows is that most conflicts are are between civilizations, which they aren't.
• p 17. Now we're citing Bernard Lewis, having heard from Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. It would be nice if every public intellectual who was utterly wrong about the Iraq War was then treated more critically for the rest of their career.

The point of the chapter seems to be that context matters. I agree, but don't see anything novel or outstanding about how the chapter develops that fairly obvious point that justifies the existence of the chapter. It felt like a series of, "yeah, and?" moments.

Two interesting books covered in the Freakonomics blog today. Traffic is about the behavioral aspect of ... traffic. And Nudge, co-authored by Cass Sunstein, is about how the presentation of choices affects the choices people make. The latter in particular seems to offer a way past the paternalism vs freedom debate: wherever possible, governments should not coerce people to do things that are good for themselves or for society, but should structure institutions (primarily paperwork, I guess, but not exclusively) to direct people to do the "right" thing. An example, including unintended consequences, is presented concerning organ donations:

1. When organ donation is an option that people have to select (in the US, this usually happens while getting a driver's license), donation rates are low.
2. Changing the policy to opt-out, so that unless you take action you are a donor, dramatically increases donation rates.(Singapore is enacting this for Muslims, who thanks to a past exemption from opt-out policy, have low donation rates in Singapore, which de-prioritizes them for getting organs.)
3. But opt-out also leads to more cases where family members challenge organ donation, since the donor's will is only recorded implicitly, not explicitly. This is still a better state of affairs than before opt-in, but not optimal.
4. The new policy solution proposed is to force everyone to make a choice, to donate or not donate. If you don't pick one of the two, presumably you can't complete some other task (like getting a license) that's important to you.
5. What unintended consequences will that have? I guess we'll see. In software design we are constantly faced with similar issues of user volition and assumptions, and usually the best thing is to understand what the user intended and make the software tend to do that, rather than force them to make a lot of decisions. Which works fine until there is more than one obvious thing for a user to intend at a specific decision point. The trade-offs are different for something as heavy as organ donation, but only in degree, not in kind.

Chee Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party, is in the news lately because of court hearings to ... well, there are a bunch of things, all stemming from civil disobedience and arguments with the Singapore establishment, e.g., Lee Kuan Yew. There was a three-day hearing to "assess damages in a defamation suit brought against them by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew." During that hearing, Chee and his sister "behaved in a manner that 'scandalised the court, adversely affected the administration of justice, and impugned the dignity and the authority of the court'," which led to contempt of court charges. One of Chee's lawyers was Mr Jeyaretnam, who "became an opposition MP in 1981, but has been in the political wilderness since 2001. That was when he was declared bankrupt for failing to pay damages totalling about $600,000 from defamation." During the course of the hearing, both Lees were witnesses, and Chee, acting as his own lawyer, had some intense confrontations with the Lees, which (judging from the newspaper accounts) amounted to Lee Kuan Yew being so kind as to tell Chee what his problem was.

For good measure, "in a separate hearing ... Chee Soon Kuan and a party supporter were fined for speaking in public without a permit."

I'm not informed enough about the details of the cases or the laws to offer my own opinion; it wouldn't surprise me if Chee was technically guilty of everything he's charged with. What's more striking to me is how utterly thin-skinned both LKY and Singapore's legal system appear to be. For Lee, who is profoundly powerful many years after his nominal retirement, to castigate Chee, who was never more than the most token of opposition and seems just about as close to powerless as one can be—broke and nearly devoid of allies or public sympathy—is graceless and petty.

Followup articles about the incident quote the judge as saying that, if left unpunished, misbehaviour in court will diminish the dignity and authority of the court. Chee and his sister started serving 10 and 12-day jail sentences for contempt this week; I didn't see what happened with the damages for defamation.

On the same page of the Straits Times we read that

Singapore's Attorney-General has warned against "fanatics" who seize on the cause [of human rights] to further their own political agendas. Human rights has become a "religion" that breeds devotees who border on the fanatic ...

The A-G's fellow speaker was Professor Thio Li-ann, whom I've quoted before for her anti-gay bigotry.

The last thread of this saga is Gopalan Nair, a former Singaporean who is now a US citizen. Singapore disapproves of his calls for civil disobedience on his blog, and threatened to arrest him when he arrived in Singapore to observe the Chees' hearing. He dared them to, and they did. He's now out on bail, though he surrendered his passport. He's asking for the right to travel in order to, among other things, deal with accumulating parking fees for his car at the San Francisco airport. I just have to say, if you are going to fly to a country whose authorities behave as demonstrated above, and you dare them to arrest you, do not leave your car in short-term airport parking. That's just a failure of common sense.

On a personal note, I've tremendously enjoyed my stay here in Singapore, a stay which is due to end in six weeks. I'm quite grateful to the Singapore government and taxpayers for partially subsidizing my stay here. It's a very interesting country with some lessons to teach, both good and bad. I cannot imagine being comfortable enough with the political climate to settle here, and I think even a two-year stay would have been a bit too long. The only other place I've lived that had the same oppressive sense of fearful self-censorship was mainland China. I guess you could say I have to leave for religious purposes.

Discount Rates

A thousand dollars today is not the same as a thousand dollars in ten years. Cost-benefit analysis must account for changes in the value of money, i.e., inflation. This affects both costs and benefits.

Dealing with uncertainty

Several tools to account for uncertainty in cost-benefit analysis.

Sensitivity Analysis

Adjust some of the variables and see how much the projected outcomes change. Ignores relationships, especially non-linear relationships, between variables. This can be addressed by bundling various "consistent combinations" of changes into scenarios and comparing scenarios.

Monte Carlo Analysis

Estimate the probabilities of the different values of the key variables, including probabilities relative to other variables' changes. Use a computer to simulate thousands of different outcomes and see which are most likely. (Example)

Reading

Zerbe, Richard O., Jr., and Allen S. Bellas. 2007. A Primer for Benefit-Cost Analysis. Chapter 9-10, pp. 215-289. Edward Elgar Pub

This book says benefit-cost instead of cost-benefit. The difference has me counting syllables and emphases to figure out why it sounds worse. I think cost-benefit is iambic, or nearly so, as "cost" is de-emphasized. And analysis is purely iambic, so putting them all together is magical: "cost ben-e-fit a-nal-y-sys". But be-ne-fit-cost a-nal-y-sis sounds terrible.

• p 250. Using inflation numbers like 5% or 10% for discounting, when extended over a human lifespan or longer, produces a discount multiplier close to zero. That is, it says that the present value of something 70 or 100 years in the future is nothing. Taken at face value, this makes long-term cost-benefit analysis useless, and raises ethical questions. Instead, other rates such as "Social Rate of Time Preference" and "Shadow Price of Private Capital" can be used; charts on page 251 suggest values for time periods measured in decades and centuries.
• p 256: Risk is typically ignored in cost-benefit analysis. That's been very clear to me as a project manager doing estimates, and the key reason is that the users of the analysis don't want the risk. They just want a number. So I try to present a range instead of a number, but I think it just gets collapsed to the side of the range that the user wants to hear.

We tend to read the blogs (or watch the TV) that reinforces our existing beliefs, because they are more comfortable. So I was amused to read emotionally conflicting reports of the same event, from two different blogs that I read and tend to agree with:

The newswires report that the judge in the case has ruled that the use of copyrighted materials in the movie Expelled is protected by the “Fair Use” doctrine and that the request for preliminary injunction has been lifted.—Panda's Thumb

The quote is neutral, but Panda's Thumb (a "voice for the defenders of the integrity of science"; I would characterize it as in opposition to the intellectual dishonesty of the anti-evolution movement) has been deeply critical of Expelled; reading between the lines they are disappointed that the injection was lifted. Meanwhile:

We (Stanford's Fair Use Project) got word of another great success today. We're representing the filmmakers of Ben Stein's Expelled. The film is an attack on the culture that forbids "intelligent design" from being considered seriously. (I'm a member of that culture.) The film uses a 15 second snippet of John Lennon's "Imagine." Yoko Ono was not happy with the use, and sued. In a decision issued this morning, Judge Stein denied Ono's motion for an injunction against the film, finding we were likely to prevail on our fair use defense.—Lessig Blog

The class to date in context. First, we did a two-day module on leadership and communication, unfortunately scheduled in the middle of the busiest stretch of the previous semester, and discussed "inner compass" issues (classes -1 and 0). Then we did reviewed our Myers-Briggs results (class 6), which are a bridge from the self to the group and FIRO-B (class 5, I think). The 360 reviews (class 6) are very much, how does the group see me. Presentation skills (class 7). Today is the penultimate lecture by the professor; then a guest lecturer gives two lectures on context, then the final lecture is on theory. The self-oriented material is more psychological than other things, and that can chafe. At the outer areas, context and organizations, studying these issues hasn't been proven to change behavior.

Class exercise to identify and deconstruct the behavior that we want to change.

Cost-benefit analysis

Financial Analysis

Starts with the cash flow, the direct, measurable flow of money as a consequence of a policy alternative. Then broaden to include indirect costs, such as opportunity costs. IBM, for example, calls these green dollars and blue dollars. I once worked with a CIO who said that a particular policy option would be "free" because they could use their existing staff without extra training or having to hire or rent experts. This fallacy reflects a failure to understand "blue dollars".

Financial analysis vs cost-benefit analysis

To get to a true cost-benefit analysis, the scope of analysis must be widened even further. In addition to direct cash flow and indirect costs, complete cost-benefit analysis includes broader social costs and externalities.

Ex ante CBA is performed during planning, to inform decision-making. Ex post CBA is performed after a project is complete, to evaluate the outcome and add to general knowledge. It is also possible to do CBA in the middle of a project, and to compare ex post and ex ante CBAs to see how accurate the ex ante analysis was.

Kaldor-Hicks Criterion (an improvement on Pareto optimality): a policy should be adopted if the gainers could, in theory, compensate the losers and still be better off.

What's better, a cheap project with a very high benefit/cost ratio, or an expensive project with a lower benefit/cost ratio? They have different scales, and cannot be directly compared without more context.

Standing is very important: who and what should be counted in CBA?

Include only the changes in costs and benefits which are attributable to the alternative, i.e., the difference between baseline and the alternative. Exclude sunk outcomes. Exclude costs which are shared across all alternatives. Exclude transfer payments (not to be confused with transfer pricing), because they don't change the net cost or benefit, just the distribution. Treat taxes and subsidies case by case. Include true opportunity cost of government costs, not arbitrary prices. Avoid double-counting. Consider changes in asset value. Include externalities. Consider secondary outcomes. Include unpriced outcomes.

Reading

Boardman, A. E., D. H. Greenberg, A. R. Vining &D. L. Weimer. "Cost Benefit Analysis Concepts and Practice. Chapter 1

• p 5: Discussion of US federal requirements for performing CBA, starting in 1981. I think it's important to note (though the authors don't) that CBA is often a partisan political tool. A few ways it can be manipulated: require CBA for disfavored projects while not performing CBA on favored projects; control the scope of CBA to include or exclude important factors; selectively use or ignore the results of CBA.
• p 18: three perspectives, based on role. Analysts do real CBA. Guardians (e.g., OMB) tend to do only financial analysis. Spenders (in "service or line departments") tend to see all expenditures as benefits. They also weight their CBA heavily by political support.
• p 22: "CBA is often taught in a way that is completely divorced from political reality. We wish to avoid this mistake."

Sinder, J. A. & D. J. Thampapillai, "Introduction to Benefit-Cost Analysis", Chapter 4 & 5

• p 52: exclude international outcomes. Um. It's hard for me to get on board with that while still feeling like an ethical person.
• p 61: handy checklist of private vs social perspectives on various costs.
• p 62: Review questions. This looks like good practice.

Framework for feedback observations:

Situation

Behavior

Impact

Student presentations

The groups that volunteered to present today on Adaptive Leadership had a very vague brief. Our group decided after some discussion to present by play-acting our discussion about how to present, simultaneously a bold move and a kind of cop-out. (Amusingly, the way we played with the fourth wall was by raising it, since we interacted as if the audience didn't exist, instead of by speaking to them.)

We were lucky to have an expert presentation coach present for class, albeit a grumpy one since she had come directly from the airport without a stop home. It was tough for me to listen positively to the feedback, because I was proud of our work and wanted more strokes before the criticism, which the coach was simply not in the mood to provide. So it might have been an artifact of my imagination that her final words, congratulating us for making a presentation tailored to the group that communicated our message, came across in a tone of damning with faint praise.

Our most essential feedback, I felt, was when the class was asked for a show of hands: who thought we achieved our objective. The majority raised their hands. Other feedback: our method of writing out dummy text for our points as we went, and then revealing well-formed writing on another whiteboard as we left, was a bad idea. We should have just planned our stagecraft better to write out legible points as we went.

The presentation following us used the overhead for powerpoint, a minus in my book, but they more than made up for it by showing clear signs of practice: they all spoke freely and naturally without notes (except for the over-long Churchill quote). So the fluency was a big plus (update: well, two and a half well-performed segments out of five was still a huge step up from most presentations last semester). Content-wise, it didn't seem especially penetrative; something about politics as an integral part of leadership; a profile of Jesus as a leader, another of Churchill, and a shout-out to Jack Welch. At the very best, they didn't get any closer to defining "adaptive" leadership than our group did. (The message of our group was that adaptive leadership was an ill-defined buzzword, even to the point that we weren't sure whether it was intended to mean leaders who adapt, or leaders who lead people to adapt. While there might be useful ideas related to adaptive leadership, we weren't convinced they were new ideas.) Overall, the second group seemed like five independent presentations on peoples' personal interests, coordinated neither with each other nor with those before or after.

Side note: Jack Welch's leadership skills should be continually re-assessed for the next twenty to fifty years as the long-term damage he did to GE in search of consistent, indefinite short-term results emerges.

Second side note: I don't think Jesus is a good example to use for illuminating adaptive leadership. Religious figures aren't very suitable as case studies or anecdotes, because they're mythological. I don't mean that they're false (though as an atheist I happen to think that as well), I mean that they are loaded with content and meaning that is distracting from the point. Believers may overly credit, or perhaps not bother no notice, the actual context; disbelievers may wonder how the speaker's belief colors or undermines the suitability of the case study to the point at hand.

Watching the coach criticize the second group is illuminating, though again I'm not a neutral observer. She came to the front smiling, whereas she did not with ours. She asked for a show of hands between liking slides with pictures versus slides with only text, but her body language seemed to dictate the result (half the class raised their hands for the first, but only about 1/6th for the second choice). I have the impression that she has a number of pre-scripted points to make and is looking at the presentations largely for cues to spool out her points. I agree with many of the points, but don't care for the style of presentation (I'm complaining about the style of presentation used to critique the presentation - I'm so meta(l)).

Third group: finally, somebody seems to have found what the prof told us is the one paragraph buried in the entire book about Adaptive Leadership that actually defines it. (My paraphrase) Adaptive leadership is when a leader changes group behavior to better solve problems. Both the leaders and the followers are adaptive. More specifically, the problems and solution may be ill-defined, and the methods of changing behavior include cooperation and personal communication.

Sadly, it doesn't look like groups 2 or 3 haven't adapted anything in their presentations to address how the first two presentations went. We deliberately dodged this by going first. Although, we did consider making a change in our last rehearsal just before class and were unable to work it out, and so stuck with our original plan, so we wouldn't necessarily have adapted any more effectively.

Review of our 360 Reviews

A mention of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, etc). I had read that this wasn't actually grounded in clinical evidence. Here's a 2007 study:

Results: Counter to stage theory, disbelief was not the initial, dominant grief indicator. Acceptance was the most frequently endorsed item and yearning was the dominant negative grief indicator from 1 to 24 months postloss. In models that take into account the rise and fall of psychological responses, once rescaled, disbelief decreased from an initial high at 1 month postloss, yearning peaked at 4 months postloss, anger peaked at 5 months postloss, and depression peaked at 6 months postloss. Acceptance increased throughout the study observation period. The 5 grief indicators achieved their respective maximum values in the sequence (disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance) predicted by the stage theory of grief.

I've read that three times and I'm still not sure what they are saying. I guess they sort-of validated Kübler-Ross?

Krugman offers the first explanation I've seen for why energy and food are excluded from some measures of inflation.

Decision Matrices

We're looking at this chart on page 249 of "Expert Advice for Policy Choices". For some reason, the authors assert that both of the choices, pushing welfare recipients to get jobs, and "child support enforcement", are strongly supported by Conservatives, but "jobs" is only weakly supported by Liberals, and enforcement is actively opposed. Our overall topic is how to set up decision matrices to evaluate outcomes, but this example shows pretty clearly that this can be a very thin exercise. Let's catalog how it can go wrong:

• Are all of the important criteria included?
• Are all of the criteria weighted accurately?
• Can each criterion be accurately converted into a proportionate numerican value?
• Can you accurately determine the value of each alternative according to each criterion?
• Are all of the criteria mutually independent?

At the very least, it seems like malpractice to me to make and present measurements like this as single numbers instead of ranges.

Anyway. Three kinds of matrices:

• Alternatives by criteria.
• affected parties: what is the benefit or cost on each affected party for each alternative?
• political matrix: which constituencies support or oppose which alternatives?

Once you have a decision matrix, how do you reduce heterogeneous criteria scores to comparables?

• Qualitative:
  • Remove dominated alternatives. If an alternative is worse or tied with another alternative on every criterion, remove it. This can be combined with any method, qualitative or quantitative.
  • Rank the criteria. Whichever alternative is best by the #1 criterion wins. Ties go to the #2 criteria, etc. Assumes that the #1 criterion is more important than all others combined.
  • Pairwise. Compare two alternatives across all criteria and judge the winner. Compare the winner to the next alternative. Repeat. There can be only one.
• Quantitative
  • Satisficing. For each criterion, determine a minimum level to be acceptable. Score each alternative pass or fail for each criterion. This effectively quantifies everything, but does not address the relative value of different criteria.
  • Weighted criteria. Assign each criterion a value proportionate to its relative merit, and convert ratings within criteria to fractions of that value.

Another possibility is to combine elements of several alternatives.

Analytical reports should do as much as possible to simplify the decision for the decision-maker. If some alternatives are clearly excluded, they should be identified as such. If more information is needed to rank tied alternatives, that information should be precisely specified.

Readings

Bardach Part I, pp 47-59. Appendix A, pp 107-121

Weimer, D. & A. Vining (1999). Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice, Chapter 1, "Review: The Canadian Pacific Salmon Fishery," pp 1-26

Weimer, D. & A. Vining (1999). Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice, Chapter 11, "Goals/Alternatives Matrices: Some Examples from CBO Studies"

Today we are reviewing our Myers Briggs test results. This is also the deadline to complete our 360 Reviews. This is a third-party program to whom the school is paying lots of money to operate an independent website where we can type in our co-workers' emails and names to harass them to fill out a questionnaire about us. I think we're supposed to get seven people to respond. I sent invitations to thirteen people, of which three completed the survey and two started and abandoned it. I don't blame them for abandoning it; it's seventy questions and a lot of them read like this:

AHMED reduces complexity to a few core priorities in pursuit of 
the major strategic objectives
 	1. Substantial improvement needed
	2. Slight improvement needed
	3. Effective
	4. Very effective
	5. Role model
 
	0. Not observed

Here's a few more actual questions:

• ...develops strategies in accordance with the business vision
• ...monitors the effects of change initiatives and reviews their value

Please excuse me while I go monitor the effects of my change initiatives.

Class Session

We got our Myers-Briggs results back, and spent 90 minutes arranging ourselves around the classroom in order of score. Then we got and discussed our FIRO-B scores. Some of this seems helpful but it takes me a conscious effort of will to ignore the similarities with horoscopes and cold reading techniques.

Scott McClellan becomes the latest in a long, long sequence of former Bush officials to publish a book about it. He appears to take more responsibility than Feith. And this quote takes him a lot further than many others in and outside of the administration have been willing to go:

In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

As with virtually all such attacks of honesty and conscience, it's much too little, far too late.

Steven Liew, director and legal counsel for eBay Asia Pacific.

Skype is wonderful; which is why AT&T, SingTel, Verizon, etc, hate us.

"Anybody from Singapore government here? [many raise their hands] Oh. What goes on in this room stays in this room." I guess I'll stop blogging then.

I read Harry Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit" but I don't think I quite grokked his definition, which if I remember correctly hinged on the indifference of the bullshitter to the truth or falsehood of the notion they were promoting. Mathematics uses the Hebrew character א (aleph) to denote infinity, or more precisely the cardinality of infinite sets. Since there is more than one kind of infinity, mathematicians define א₀ (aleph-null), א₁ (aleph-one), etc. since bullshit exists in potentially infinite supply, I propose the use of the Hebrew character ב (bet) to denote it. Then Frankfurt's definition is ב₀.

I propose to define ב₁ (bet-one). A text is bullshit of this variety if nobody in reasonable discourse would argue the opposite, and if removing it would not reduce the communicative value of the surrounding text. This can be tested by rewriting the text to convey the opposite meaning; if the re-written text is completely absurd in the context of the original discourse, the text is ב₁. This is not novel, of course; I've sketched it out before and I'm sure it's been defined by others many times. Let's look at it application, with this speech from the managing director of the World Bank. The original opening:

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Members of the Press:

We have come to a critical period in Asia’s history.

It is clear that the future will not merely be an extension of the past.

As this new world continues to take shape, those of us in business, in government, in international organizations have to adapt to unprecedented circumstances, with unprecedented speed.

And, I would argue, with more collaboration than in the past.

To complicate things even more, it is evident the changes taking place are not isolated; they influence and in some cases accelerate each other.

Let me start with an example that illustrates this new connection between events, the need for early recognition and speedy responses and, above all, the importance of concerted action.

Let's apply the test:

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Members of the Press:

We have come to an unimportant period in Asia’s history.

It is clear that the future will merely be an extension of the past.

As this new world continues to take shape, those of us in business, in government, in international organizations have no need to adapt to unprecedented circumstances, or with unprecedented speed.

And, I would argue, without any more collaboration than in the past.

To simplify things even more, it is evident the changes taking place are isolated; they do not influence each other.

The test method doesn't work perfectly; the last paragraph of the quote can't be reversed very easily. But I think it's a start in a promising new line of theory.

Pedestrians of Mumbai are being asked to join a new campaign to demand their right to walk freely on pavements meant only for them.

The pedestrian "satyagraha" or civil disobedience is finding support from people fed up with cluttered pavements or dangerous roads that do not have sidewalks.

... The pavements are encroached on by illegal structures, hawkers and slum-dwellers. The organisation demands that pedestrians be provided a six-foot-wide walkway along the middle of the roads.

It's not that bad here in Singapore, but there are more problems then you might expect. Here is a selection of the obstacles from a 2.5-mile walk:

Also very interesting is this story about what Paris is doing to reduce traffic. Tactics include raising parking rates, eliminating free parking, eliminating many parking spaces, changing some car lanes to bus and bike lanes and sidewalk, providing cheap rental bicycles, giving residents with parking passes, and providing short-term parking for deliveries and such. Costs were covered by selling exclusive outdoor advertising rights. Coming up next: city-sponsored car-sharing.

Class time is lagging quite a bit behind the syllabus, so I'm going to restructure each blog entry to contain a complete topic rather than match exactly what we did in class on a particular day.

Selecting criteria

Before you can choose between options, you have to assess which options are better or worse. Before you can do that, you need to define "better", but this is often very complicated. Also, the focal goal of a policy may bear little relation to its outcome and consequences. Criteria may come from many sources, from policy-makers to analysts to the public. Criteria may include:

• consequential criteria
  • good or bad outcome
  • who is affected?
  • efficiency
    • maximum output with minimum output
    • achieve objective with lowest possible cost
    • maximize net benefit for society
• moral criteria
  • right or wrong
  • Definitions of equality and equity
• Political viability
  • enough support
  • not too much opposition

Projecting outcomes

One the problem space is identified, the problem is defined, criteria are determined, and alternatives invented, the analyst must project outcomes. An outcome projection describes the outcome in terms of the criteria, including both the general direction and estimated magnitude of each value.

Extrapolation comprises three parts: secular trends, cyclical fluctuations (with seasonal variations as a special case), and irregular movement. In other words, what would happen if everything proceeded normally, what kinds of predictable periodic changes can be identified and filtered out, and what sorts of surprises may happen?

Extrapolations depend on models. Joel's note: Models 101: Models are simplified representations of the aspects of reality that are relevant to a specific problem. The path of a baseball in flight can be modeled fairly accurately with a simple Newtonian equations plus a fudge factor for air resistance. A whiffle ball is strongly affected by air and so the model for the baseball won't work as well for the whiffle ball; you'll need a different model. Everything you think you think in the context of a model, whether you realize that or not. Nobody uses formal Newtonian models to catch baseballs; but we still do have some model working in our brain based on our past observations of how baseballs behave. This can be proved by painting a whiffle ball to look like a baseball and then throwing it to someone expecting a baseball. They'll use the wrong model and fail to catch the ball. But if they know it's a whiffle ball, they'll adapt their working model, change their position, and make the catch. You should always be aware of what model you are using, its limitations, and alternative models you might need to use. End of Models 101.

Side note: the 51-49 principle (perhaps it could better be labeled "the 51-49 fallacy"?): Pushed by antagonistic group behavior, we treat our own 51% confidence as 100% confidence.

Judgmental forecasting: AKA expert knowledge forecast. Based on past experience and training, make a qualitative guess about the outcome.

The internet has a few catalogs of forecasting methods.

Feasibility

Is a proposed alternative politically possible?

Readings

Bardach Part 1, pp 25-47. Part II, pp 61-88

Patton, C & D. Sawicki (1986). Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Chapter 5, "Establishing Evaluative Criteria", Pages 139-175

Guess, G. M., and P. G. Farnham (2000), Cases in Public Policy Analysis. Chapter 4, Forecasting Policy Options, pp. 135-207, Georgetown University Press.

Paul Kagame spoke at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore to a crowd of students, diplomats, and reporters. All text is my paraphrase of his remarks unless otherwise noted.

Africa has a reputation for perpetual crisis and unfavorable investment climate, but this is no longer completely correct. What changed? Africans deposed many dictators; the end of the Cold War; the end of apartheid; the spread of information technology, finance, and investment in Africa. Resulting in improved investment climate. Joel's note: He said "investment" nine times during his remarks.

Q: What is the key to better governance? A: You need good leaders at many levels, not just at the top. [some empty verbiage] It's a matter of choice that Africans have to make.

Q: Singapore has its own kind of "democracy". What kind of democracy will Rwanda have? (Joel's note: this is a very loaded question in Singapore, since Singapore's form of democracy is not very democratic. Kagame didn't seem to pick up this nuance.) A: ... common principles of democracy, different details. People must free themselves, not just apply foreign formulas. When I'm watching TV [of the West?], I get the impression that it's about having the most money to splash about.

Q: Did Rwanda choose Singapore as a model/advisor? A: [...] yes.

Q: Being Tutsi, how did you feel about reconciliation? A: ... from my background of injustice and prejudice, I know how good it is to be different [from that behavior]. ....

Q: Your focus on human rights is rare for Africa. What steps are you taking to promote this in the African Union? Do you see leadership on this in Africa? A: [...]

Q: I commend your zero-tolerance on corruption. What institutional framework are you implementing to prevent more massacres? A: genocide is ideological, from the colonial legacy ...

Q: You come close to fitting the bill of the "Big Man" trap. What are you doing to not follow that role? A: "I don't feel close to a Big Man ... I am very conscious of the fact that there is a tomorrow without me." You have to build institutions ... constitutional processes ... limits .... "I will follow it to the letter. If you want, there is another time of judging coming up [when Kagame reaches his term limit]"

Q: What about the office of Vice President, which was created just for you in 1994 and dissolved after you became President in 2000? A: "yes..." It was during a transition period. I didn't want to be in government, but they said I couldn't leave after our struggle to get to that point, so they made me VP. The guy I recommended for president didn't work out and problems remained, so I accepted the presidency.

Q: Will China rape our resources too? A: "This is the most important thing you have come to ask. They say the right things ... the US is more worried about China in Africa than Africans are. They [the US] are worried they [China] are going to beat them at their own game." Africa must step back and plan. "I don't think anybody owes us anything. If they find you sleeping, they will take things and leave you sleeping. They will not wake you up." There is no value-added industry in Africa; cotton is exported raw instead of being processed in Africa. It's up to Africa to demand cotton processing in Africa. It's not discrimination; we have to set the terms. China and India compete for what we have, so [having both interested] will give us a better price, "if we are not sleeping."

Policy Formulation and Policy Design

What is the scope of possible alternatives? Can the analyst propose new options or only evaluate already identified options? Status quo is usually an option.

Recipes for getting new solutions from existing solutions:

• Magnify
• minify
• substitute
• combine
• re-arrange

Generic policy options for correcting market failures (from Weimer):

• If there could be a working market but there isn't ...
  • Is the market too restrained?
    • Is it overly regulated, granting some actors monopoly rents and hence causing inefficiency? deregulate, but look out for windfall losses and gains during the transition. Examples: US deregulation of airlines, telephones (etc etc etc).
    • Is something illegal when it need not be? legalize. Example: drugs
    • Does the government own companies in an industry that isn't actually subject to market failures that can be solved by nationalized companies? Privatize.
  • Is there potential for a market but none exists yet?
    • Would assigning property rights create a healthy market? Then assign property rights. Example: water markets. Watch out, once again, for windfall losers and winners. Also, the new market may be very thin.
    • Could a new good be created with legal backing? Example: pollution permits.
  • Could a market be simulated?
    • An auction can expose non-market situations (natural monopolies, public goods) to market forces. Instead of competition within the market, which is hard or impossible, promote competition for access to the market.
• Is market failure endemic, or is something else more important than efficiency?
  • supply-side taxes
    • output taxes
    • tariffs
  • supply-side subsidies
    • matching grants
    • tax expenditures (business deductions and credits)
  • demand-side taxes
    • commodity taxes
    • user fees
  • demand-side subsidies
    • in-kind subsidies
    • vouchers
    • tax expenditures (personal deductions and credits)
• Rules
  • Framework rules
    • civil laws
    • criminal laws
  • Regulations
    • price regulation
    • quantity regulation
    • direct information
    • indirect information
• direct supply
  • government provision
  • independent agencies
    • government corporations
    • special districts
  • Contracting
    • direct contracting
    • indirect contracting

Risk-averse behavior

Scenario: a flu outbreak expected to kill 600 people, and two different programs to fight the outbreak. The class was split in two and each half presented with a choice. Half the students see two choices: option A saves 200 people, option B gives a 1/3 chance of saving 600 and a 2/3 chance of saving none. That group split between the choices. The second half had option C, dooming 400, and option D, a 1/3 chance of nobody dying and a 2/3 chance of 600 dying, and went unanimously for option D. Of course A and C are the same program, and B and D are the same program, and both programs have the same statistical outcome.

This was presented as an example of the power of framing, in that the choice between two options changed dramatically based on the wording. But I reasoned differently: this is a PR problem. (Since there's no statistical difference, neither option is obviously better from the information at hand.) The public isn't going to do policy analysis of a hypothetical 600 losses from flu. The only number that will matter to the press is the actual number of dead. From that perspective, 400 and 600 are the same number, and the real choice is:

• Option 1: certainty of failure
• Option 2: 1/3 chance of not failure, 2/3 chance of failure

and that choice is easy.

Readings

Correcting Market and Government Failures: Generic Policies, Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice Chapter 9, Weimer and Vining. 1999.

Mike Piazza announced his retirement. Mike is my favorite baseball player; I was there at Chavez Ravine the first time he batted third. It was the third home game of 1993; Darryl and Eric Davis had been benched after stinking up the first two games. He set a lot of records for the Dodgers until they traded him shortly before his free agency, to the Marlins, who flipped him to the Mets a week later, and he played the bulk of his career for them, before playing out two final years in San Diego and Oakland. His two best years were his rookie year, in 1993, and his penultimate year with the Dodgers, in 1998 at age 28. That year, he was worth 12.3 wins, a peak season for the ages. Bench had a 13.3, but defense put him over; his offense never came close to Mike. 31 is my third-favorite number (behind 47 and 42).

When he was traded from the Dodgers, I made up this chart and used a push-pin to mark my progress, and regress, through the five stages of grieving. Then I became a sort-of Mets fan, as long as they weren't playing the Dodgers, a secondary loyalty made easier when they ended up with Pedro, among other former Dodgers.)

Here's a sportswriter:

He made the act of squatting behind a plate for three hours cool for the first time since a man named Johnny Bench did it in the '70s.

... He was the best hitting catcher of all time.

He was a Florida Marlin for five glorious games.

He pulled off a mullet [and a silly moustache] for most of the '90s.

Yes, Mike Piazza had a hell of a career.

—Kevin Kaduk

I don't know how meaningful this market is, but it seems like a plausible measurement. I find the daily noise hard to read so I made a ten-day moving average graph:

Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute, Inc, on "Winning the Oil Endgame". Unless noted, all text is my paraphrase of the speaker's message.

Winning the Old Endgame, a free book describing a for-profit path to eliminate oil usage in the US by 2040. How? Improve efficiency, at (US$ ca 2000) $12 per saved barrel, and new sources (cellulosic ethanol) at less than $26/bbl.

Global response to the 1970s oil crisis was drastic worldwide conservation, in which the world reduced demand so much that OPEC lost pricing power for a decade.

Whaling was the fifth-biggest US industry in the early 19th century. New technologies rendered whaling obsolete (for lighting oil) before the whales were (all) gone.

Cars could be made more fuel-efficient (via streamlining, lower mass, etc) at an effective price of US$0.15/liter. Trucks can be similarly improved.

Cars can be made more efficient without being made undesirable. Of the chemical energy in auto fuel, 6% ultimately moves the car (as opposed to pushing air out of the way, warming the tires, etc etc. Only 0.3% goes to moving the driver. Carbon fiber crash cones can solve the issue of lighter cars being more dangerous (all other things equal).

Showing a demonstration design: "Think about it like a computer with wheels, not a car with chips." Uh, that may not be the best line to use. Also, the information design of his presentation is awful, not even counting the horrible black backgrounds.

Joel's note: this is very sexy, so far, but he's focused solely on replacing oil and on lighter cars. He's not talking directly about carbon emissions, although those are reduced when cars are made more efficient. Also, carbon-fiber construction is much more energy-intensive than steel, at least for now: "the effective combination of [reduce/reuse/recycle] could decrease the energy intensity of CFRP to the level of steel parts." Aside from that, I'm accumulating cognitive dissonance as he keeps describing and demonstrating all of these technology solutions that don't seem to be showing up in force in the real world. Industry conspiracy again?

Plug-in hybrids could alter the pattern of electricity usage. Power up your hybrid at night with cheap power; during the day, park your car at work at a smart plug and sell your power back to the grid at premium prices. "The first two million Americans to do this can earn back the cost of their car."

Blended body airplanes can be three times as efficient as tube and wing construction.

Joel's note: I start to suspect that the real benefit of four dollar gas is that it will batter down the social resistance to doing "weird" things. Anybody running a long-distance truck fleet could have saved a lot of money any time in the last few decades (or more, for all I know) by introducing more efficient, but weird-looking trucks. Why didn't they? I bet social resistance is a huge factor. Oh, and just to mention: we are once again sitting in an heavily air-conditioned room at noon with the shades drawn and the lights on listening to someone talk about energy efficiency.

Sweden planned to get off oil by 2020, but a new government postponed that to 2030.

Most of this will happen without government participation. Five ways governments can help.

Stimulate demand for more efficient vehicles. Feebates: rebates on more efficient cars paid for by fees for less efficient cars; revenue-neutral and serves to internalize the pollution externality. Require government procurement to include only most efficient cars. E.g., don't let officials pick their own prestige SUVs etc. Working with Wal★Mart to get more efficient supply trucks.

Share R&D risk. 50% of casualties in US military come from convoys; 70% of their cargo is fuel. This is because of military planning that assumed fuel delivery was free. By changing this assumption in procurement rules to account for fuel delivery cost (in money and human lives), fuel will count one or two orders of magnitude more, and 0.1mpg tanks will be more accurately perceived as very limited military options.

It is possible to shrink the adoption curves, so they don't take 15 years to turn over from old products to new products. How to rebuild the US military with efficiency in mind.

The Department of Defense is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States. In 2006, it spent $13.6 billion to buy 110 million barrels of petroleum fuel (about 300,000 barrels of oil each day), and 3.8 billion kWh of electricity. This represents about 0.8% of total U.S. energy consumption and 78% of energy consumption by the Federal government.

Breakthrough competitive strategy via platform efficiency. Boeing 1997 is like Detroit now.

An hour in, he mentions carbon intensity for the first time.

Peak oil is a distraction, because 1) we can't know when it happens because so much oil reserve is in non-transparent countries, 2) efficiency justifies the same actions that peak oil justifies, 3) (I missed #3).

The biggest threat to US energy security is US energy policy. The effects of US policy have transferred tremendous wealth to Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. US policy favors overly centralized systems of oil, natural gas, and grid distribution, and creates terrorist targets.

What about Singapore? Sitting on a gold-mine of "negabarrels" and "negawatts". You could save 3/4 of your usage in the next few decades. Singapore does have a good policy of charging close to the true social cost of driving. A modern power system (distributed, diverse, renewable) will cost less and emit less. Singapore is uniquely positioned to demonstrate the path to an oil-free future and set an example for China.

Q: Why are the policies so backwards? Is this just special interest capture? A: The oil industry is split, more good than bad. We're used to thinking that the oil problem can only be solved by draconian measures, but design, technology, and business strategy can solve the problem better. The Prius did outsell the Ford Explorer last year, and compacts and subcompacts are outselling SUVs. If I actually want to get things done, I'll work with the private sector together with civil society, not with government. I open-sourced "Hypercar" concepts in 1993 so that nobody could patent it and the industry would have to compete to implement it.

Q: How energy-efficient are the lightweights to make? A: Lifecycle analysis is very favorable. If you have a limited carbon budget, it's better to spend the carbon turning it into structural materials are light and strong and don't rust or fatigue than to burn it to propel steel.

Q: Is this a case of negative externalities? A: The car-making industry is in many ways the biggest human enterprise ever. It's fairly unique. They base strategic decisions on accounting, not economic analysis. Breaking these habits requires strong leadership, like Mulally at Ford. Car company employees tell me they have all of the necessary capabilities but they've never been asked to put them together.

Q: I'm an engineer. Why aren't we doing these things if they are so easy? A: See my lectures on the topic. It costs less to do things right, but it doesn't happen. It's about rethinking economic assumptions. "Singapore has some of the best engineering in the world for clean rooms, HVAC design, ..., but it doesn't get much respect here because it didn't just step off a plane with slides." See also 10xE

Now that people are abundant and nature is scarce, the Next Industrial Revolution will raise natural resource productivity 10- to 100-fold.

We want to get CEOs to call school deans and warn them that they will only hire properly trained engineers.

When you are studying public policy, you see public policy everywhere.

Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, told me about a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It concerned Vietnam, and the $64,000 question: What would John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he lived? R.F.K.’s answer was: J.F.K. would have gotten us out of Vietnam. He would have waited until after the ‘64 elections, and then “fuzzed it up.” [25]

Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny — particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology. —Errol Morris

Leadership Direction

If a person has a sense of purpose, they seem to go much further, including perhaps going further biologically.

Happy life: research points to three factors: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

Randy Pausch Lecture

Yay! George Takei is getting married! E! Online incorrectly refers to him as "the once and forever Lt. Sulu", but of course we all know that he is now Captain Sulu.

The Food Crisis, by Juan Jose Daboub, managing director of the World Bank.

Food prices have risen dramatically. Dollar-denominated prices have increased 2.5 times since 2002, most of that in the last year or so.

Boilerplate description of the problem and solutions. It's hard to pay attention to him reading from his prepared remarks, especially when they give the sense of being polished to a fine state of inanity and inoffensiveness. "Power is shifting not just between countries, but within countries." Seriously? I refuse to believe you until I see it on a powerpoint slide (to his credit, no Powerpoint). "A few years ago, few people knew of Youtube. Today ... million videos are downloaded each day." Really? Wow. "Singapore has much to teach the world. Of course not all lessons from a small island nation are applicable, we understand that .... but I do believe Singapore can and should do more. As a small but highly successful state highly integrated with the global economy ...." "These are unprecedented times and they call for us to work together ...." "There are no excuses for failures; Singapore's example shows hard work pays off ... you have a responsibility to help keep the flame of economic freedom burning."

And the moderator: "In a short twenty minutes you have cast canvas on a range of issues we in Singapore and we in ASEAN have to deal with, and are dealing with."

Q: My question has to do with the implications of recent food price increases for the Doha framework. Is more rapid progress in the Doha round needed? Is that one of the measures you have in mind?" That was a much less pointed question than I expected from that questioner.

Q: Can you provide more explanation of why the food crisis is happening. What kind of response is necessary?

A:

We estimate 7% of world food production is traded internationally. ... Short-term actions: we are working with 54 countries that need to provide some temporal relief to 5, 10, 12% of their population. They are providing some direct, transparent, focalized to the demand subsidies ... In the medium term, the solution is to have the supply side respond. We are reviewing policies that certain countries have and try to advise ...

Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, and the Daily Show website has the full ~17 minute interview online. It almost goes without saying that Feith lies more or less continuously throughout the interview, and I won't attempt to catalog that. Instead I want to point out something damning that Jon Stewart says:

Feith (at about 3:40 in Part 1): "there was a serious consideration of the very great risks of war and I think that many of them were actually discussed with the public, but to tell you the truth one thing is absolutely clear: this administration made gross errors in the way it talked about the war, some of the them are very obvious, like the WMD—"

Stewart: "—That was all we had to go on."

Which citizen in their right mind would rely solely on their own government to inform their decision about whether or not to support war? And I don't mean that in a post-Watergate, cynical Generation X or Y kind of a way, or even in a democratic way. Governments start wars. There is, in the lingo I learned last semester, a principle-agent problem, in that we the people delegate the power of war-making on our behalf to a government, but the decision-makers in that government have incentives that do not reflect the desires and needs of the people. If I could make one structural reform to the United States, it would be to require a three-quarter majority of the Senate and House to declare war. Of course, as a necessary corollary we would also have to restore the norm that the president and the military don't actually wage war without a declaration from Congress, a norm which disintegrated during the Cold War.

Anyway, on occasion of Feith's book promotion appearance on the Daily Show, a book which he claims that "if the public doesn't have accurate information, it's impossible in a democracy like ours to have a serious proper discussion of these enormously important issues. My purpose in writing the book was to provide accurate information ...." Here are a few of what I take to be well-established historical facts about the Iraq War:

• Key decision-makers in the administration, most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, wanted from before the election to wage war with Iraq.
  • The reasons varied with each person
  • Chief among the reasons was oil, directly and indirectly
  • Another key reason for many decision-makers was to benefit Israel
• Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to the United States
  • Al-Queda was not working with or operating in Iraq
  • Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction
• The administration deliberately lied to and misled the US Congress, the people of the United States, American allies, and the United Nations in order to create support for an invasion.
• Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2001 or early 2002.

Reading notes

Economies don't have purpose. They just happen. Just as wearing a striped shirt in front of a television will cause a pattern to appear; collecting a number of independent actors who can exchange things of value with one another will cause an economy to happen. There's no purpose for the moire pattern on TV; there's no purpose for an economy. It just is. Since material wealth (broadly defined to include drinking water, health care, etc) is the primary source of happiness, a good economy is better than a bad economy. A good economy is one with allocative efficiency: the most possible output for a given input. Of course that's not the only way to define "good" for an economy; other contenders include Pareto efficiency, equality, and fairness, but in purely economic terms the best economy is the most efficient one. The challenge for public managers is to balance the various definitions of "good" in a way that more or less reflects the preferences of the public, and having defined aggregate good, to do what they can to help achieve it. Last weeks' readings pointed out the danger of skipping that first part, the definition of the problem. This week's first reading assumes the problem is simply one of efficiency:

Boadway, R. & D. Wildasin (1984). Public Sector Economics, Chapter 3, "Market Failures"

A economic fundamentalist justification of the public sector's existence as a cure for (some) market failures.

• p 58: "... the jointness in use of public intermediate goods prevents the market from extracting a price from firms unless they can be excluded." Ack. No. Jointness of use does not prevent the market from extracting a price; only lack of excludability does. Jointness of use, more commonly (but no more usefully) called rivalry, is separate. Consider a golf course. It is, up to a point, non-rival. If I'm playing the tenth hole, I could care less whether or not somebody is playing the first hole. Within a certain range, let's say between one and a hundred golfers at a time, adding an extra golfer has no cost. That's great for the club because it provides them with a large "inventory" of time slots to sell. But it neither enables nor prevents them from "extracting a price". What enables the golf club to extract a price from golfers is the fence they put up around the course to keep the public out. That's excludability.
• p 73 to 77: charts of US government expenditure. Not adjusted for inflation, so mostly worthless; they do include percent of GDP, though. The total expenditure table does include state and local, which is nice. Still, I think this is pretty skippable.
• p 77: "Veterans Services", as it usually is, is mistakenly broken out into a separate category instead of included within "National Defense". If you send a million people to war and promise to take care of them, surely the lifelong cost of that care is part of the cost of war. (And if you manage that obligation as a cost to be cut, obscenities like this will be inevitable.

Kleiman, M., and S. Teles (2006). "Market and Non-Market Failures," in Moran, M., M. Rein and R. Goodin (eds) Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, Oxford University Press, pp. 624-650

Same topic, two decades later. Let's see if anything has improved.

• p 625: "Under certain highly restrictive assumptions, the market can be shown to be a a Pareto optimum." Those are better qualifiers for "assumption" than the last article's "It has been shown by Friedman and Savange (1948) that under certain reasonable assumptions individuals will behave [so as to maximize their expected utility]". Does that reflect 20 years of progress or are these authors just more rational (hah hah) to begin with?
• p 625: "The economic analysis underlying the doctrine of market failure assumes an individual capable of maximizing expected subjective utility ... That assumption is obviously false for children and the insane. But it is also false for many decisions made by ordinarily competent people about, for example, time management, saving, financial risk taking, diet, exercise, and the use of psychoactive chemicals. ... Thus the scope of suboptimal performance in voluntary individual choice and spontaneous organization is substantially larger than orthodox welfare-economics approaches suggest." Yay! Much better.
• p 637: causes of government failure: Inadequate Penetrative Capacity, i.e., not enough detailed information; Inadequate voluntary cooperation; institutional overhead; voter attention and inattention; path dependence of political decision-making; competition for technical expertise; weak administrative culture.
• p 647: "Public policy, institutional analysis, and political philosophy do not deal with three distinct subject matters; rather, they are three different attempts to deal with the problem of how human beings ought to govern themselves."

Much better.

Class notes

Class lecture starts with the material from class 2 reading.

Cheese is almost all flown in from Australia or further, and it's not cheap, ranging from S$20 to S$60 per kilo (S$10/kg is about as US$3/lb). This pale orange stuff was fairly cheap, but the way it was packaged, I couldn't tell what it was. It smelled good, so I bought it, but then I couldn't get it to taste very good. I tried various combinations of dark rye, crackers, dijon mustard, and soylent pink, but it was never more than so-so. Until I made some pasta and threw tiny cubes of it into the pasta sauce; then it was incredible. Umami festival in my mouth. Still no idea what the cheese was, though. It seemed like a visitor from the hard cheese family, Parmesan and Romano and whatnot, but it was closer to chedder in consistency, a bit crumbly and not very plastic.

Kona has a new chew toy:

And here are a few pictures from the balcony.

The One Laptop Per Child project has been interesting to watch; it's not hard to find negative opinions about OLPC leader Nicholas Negroponte and his MIT Media Lab (here's my own, albeit second-hand). Despite a lot of problems and opposition, it's gotten surprisingly far. Recently, a whole lot of shit appears to have hit a whole lot of fans, as key people quit, often in anger or despair. Since I'm trying to figure out what to do after graduation (I've got it narrowed down, ideally, working in a tech/management job for a non-profit on the West Coast of the US), I've been following semi-closely. Well, here's the latest inside scoop and it does indeed appear that it's hard for a born dysleader to lead. Is the project doomed? Impossible to say. Even if it is, the surge of ultra-cheap laptops is a substantial accomplishment, although not necessarily a world-saving one.

Three causes of mass death: disease, famine, and deliberate killing. The last is the domain of the leader. (I guess the traditional inclusion of Death in this list violates fourth rule of good categorization systems.)

Speaking of Jim Jones, here's a transcript of part of his final speech:

Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. . . . Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land[ing] out here. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. . . . Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? . . . We’ve lived — we’ve lived as no other people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with it. (Applause.). . . . Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane. . . . Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. There’s nothing to death. . . . It’s just stepping over to another plane. Don’t bethis way. Stop this hysterics. . . . Look, children, it’s just something to put you to rest. Oh, God. (Children crying.). . . . Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t — don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child.

The key to getting people to do awful things is to diffuse responsibility.

Extended discussion of the Milgram experiment. The Wikipedia entry raises the point that the phenomenon in those experiments is more probably learned helplessness than obedience to authority.

Positive psychology: instead of how to get from negative to normal, how to get from normal to positive.

Shreekant Gupta, an NUS econ professor.

The drain of CO2 from the atmosphere is negligible. This is a detail I'm still not clear about: if the drain is close to zero, then how can any level of emissions over zero be sustainable? I know that, at this scale, there's a big difference between zero and negligible, and it's important to count your zeros. So it might be possible to emit X gigatons of CO2 without moving the PPM count more than Y points per year, but since Y really needs to be zero or negative (since the total accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere today already commits the Earth's climate to change pretty radically), surely X can't be all that big, and so Z, the amount of economic activity that produces X, is kind of a mystery.

The current situation: if emissions have to peak by 2020 and drop dramatically, we can stabilize CO2e (CO₂ plus methane and other gases, all converted into the CO₂ equivalent) around 550 PPM, with a total temperature change around 4 or 5 degrees C (which is huge).

The best current climate change legislation on the table in the US is the McCain-Lieberman Act. Seriously. It was voted down 43-55 in 2003.

Most countries in the world really are bit players in GHG. The 173 smallest countries add up to 20% of emissions (if you count the EU-25 into one country, and speaking as someone who would (grossly simplifying) love to see some kind of global government and welcomes the black helicopters, it's encouraging to see the EU being treated as one entity instead of 25)

Q & A

Points of analysis for different proposals:

• how much price certainty is provided. Adoption of alternatives to status quo, i.e., fossil fuels, depends on some price stability. Lots of things become competitive when oil is $40/barrel, but the multi-year, multi-billion dollar investments in these things depend on oil staying over $40/barrel for years and years.
• economic efficiency
• how will it be enforced?
• wealth transfer from North to South

The South would have no objection to joining into a global climate treaty on some kind of per capita basis. The tacit assumption is that the South is going to get paid a lot to join, via emission credit transfers. But this may not be true, because it depends on the actual price of emission credits. The Montreal Protocol is an example: the North basically paid the South to stop using CFCs.

There should be a sense of liability from past performance (historical GHG emissions) but in reality the Northern countries refuse to take any responsibility for historical emissions.

Getting agreement is easy compared to implementation and enforcement. Canada stopped complying with Kyoto without any penalty.

Update: While looking up the question of how many people Hitler personally killed (for Leadership class), I came across this comment linking Hitler's rhetorical ability to induce genocide with global warming advocates' rhetorical ability to ... induce genocidal economic damage, I guess. What's most interesting to me is that those concerned with global climate change bemoan the total lack of substantive action to address the problem, while, simultaneously, others are warning that efforts to address climate change will cause effects parallel to genocide. Maybe both viewpoints are right.

Update: Jon reminds me that there's a lot of mystery in how land use relates to carbon emission and sequestration, and suggests that sustainable CO₂e emission levels might not be much higher than pre-industrial levels. Which obviously is never going to happen the easy way. In the face of news like this I always like to retreat to my environmentalism bottom line mantra to cheer myself up: Pollution doesn't hurt the Earth; the Earth is a six- billion-trillion-ton ball of rock that is beyond our power to hurt. Pollution only destroys the capacity of the surface of the Earth to sustain our lives.

What is public policy analysis?

Problem conditions, policy problems. Traffic congestion is a problem condition. The policy problem may be one or more of:

• gas price is too low
• import tariff is too low
• public transportation is inadequately used
• car culture dominates
• Insufficient support for bicycles

How do we know there's a problem? People complain.

Traffic congestion problem turns out to be a market failure because of externalities. Joel's Q: Is this a commons question? The common good is empty freeways, which get over-consumed? I think that's the same problem and same solution from a different analytical angle.

Some tools:

Boundary Analysis

Saturation sampling: sample everything. E.g., talk to everybody.

Sample and interview.

Boundary estimation

Joel's note: I bet card-sorting exercises (from usability testing) would be applicable. You would interview a sample of stakeholders to get things to put on the cards (in the prison example, phrases like "prison" and "sentencing guidelines" and "crack cocaine" and "building prisons"), and then give people stacks of cards and ask them to sort them into two piles, a pile of issues that are relevant to the problem and a pile of issues that aren't relevant. One challenge would be to get enough issues that are probably out of the boundary to be sure the boundary is big enough and well-defined. Hmm, looks like somebody's done something similar, though not exactly boundary analysis.

Classification Analysis

Hierarchy Analysis

Possible causes, plausible causes, actionable causes.

Multiple Perspective Analysis

Readings

Quade, E. S. (1982) Analysis for Public Decisions, Chapter 1, "The Need for Analysis"

Quade, E. S. (1982) Analysis for Public Decisions, Chapter 20, "Politics, Ethics, and Guidance from Analysis"

Executive summary: public policy analysis is thick with politics.

Weimer, D ... Policy Analysis

Howlett, M & M. Ramesh (2003) Studying Public Policy ...

Bardach Part I, pp 1-10

Dunn, William N, 2007. Public Policy Analysis: An Introductory .... Chapter 3, pp 71-120, 4th ed. Prentice Hall

• Policy problems are "unrealized needs, values, or opportunities for improvement."
• The biggest part of public policy solutions is discovering and defining problems, aka "structuring" problems.
• policy problems arise out of problem situations that are sensed by analysts and other stakeholders.
• policy problems are interrelated
• policy solutions go obsolete even though the problem may remain
• Errors of the third type, solving the wrong problem. Errors of the first type are false positives, or, in bad English, "rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true". Errors of the second type are false negatives, or, "accepting the null hypothesis when it is false".
• p 87. Descriptive and normative models. Finally, the right language choice. I don't quite follow the example of using the formula for compound interest is a normative model. I guess you could (and I guess the author does) consider the formula itself descriptive, but the act of using the formula normative since it pushes the analyst towards assuming that having the most money is the most important thing.
• p 92. Another sloppy example, in which drawing a graph (er, "simple symbolic model expressed in the form of a linear equation") relating rainfall and reservoir depth is alleged to lead an analyst to confusing correlation with causation, or of getting the causal arrow backwards. I understand that it's useful to remember that drawing a graph is an act that implies a certain model, and I understand that correlation should not be confused with causation, but I don't follow the path (to hell) between the two.
• p 99: rules for good classification systems
  1. Substantive relevance
  2. All things to be classified must fit
  3. Categories must be mutually exclusive
  4. Consistency (which follows from rules 2 and 3)

Class notes

"eightfold path to policy analysis": define the problem, assemble some evidence, construct the alternatives, select the criteria, project the outcomes, decide!, tell your story. Looks more or less like the scientific method. Researching a paper last year for States Markets, I came across this paper by Philip Gorski (that URL is specific to NUS's JSTOR access, but I bet you can hack it for your own institution), which argues that the Hypothetical-Deductive Model (the fancy label for the scientific method as more or less practiced in the 20th century) doesn't work well for social science, and a different model should be used. He argues for ... well, I am skimming his conclusion and it's so jargon-heavy that it's hard to summarize what he's arguing for. I think he's arguing that we can't use the pure HDM in social science, but we can and should still use the principle of falsifiablity.

Anyway, back in class discussion, we are still working through basic models of decision-making. A Chinese classmate offers this example of a limited decision-making model (my paraphrase): "When the Chinese government planned the Three Gorges Dam, they were concerned with energy and the economy. Then some experts said there would be environmental problems. But when the officials were planning the dam, they did not have that information." My own mental model of how that decision was made was that environmentalist voices were probably actively excluded; that officials were aware there was some environmental impact but simply didn't care until public (and foreign) pressure about the environment made it into a political issue.

We are still talking about the "incremental model". This overlaps closely with the PMI seminar I went to the other night, which was talking about how to handle risk. Nobody in class (to the extent that I've been listening, which is a smaller extent than it should be as I fiddle with JSTOR and Gorski and the lot) is talking about risk or how this model addresses risk.

Other models of decision making:

• Two-stage mixed scanning: first stage is groping around to set up the problem; second stage is rational decision model.
• garbage can model: all the inputs, context, etc, get thrown into the bin together and the decision/solution is the result of everything banging into each other. Or, as the original authors put it, "one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated. The mix of garbage in a single can depends on the mix of cans available, on the labels attached to the alternative cans, on what garbage is currently being produced, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene." The different things that go into the can are problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities. This was then somehow implemented in a computer simulation.

  A later article points out that "although the model's verbal description assumes the presence of decision makers, the FORTRAN code retains just problems, choices, and solutions as elements of the decision-making process." Class consensus: what's the point? I think that it's confusing to talk about this model without noting its roots in computer analysis of decision making. I guess I would summarize it thusly; the garbage can model is that people, problems, solutions, and opportunities all go zooming by more or less randomly. That's simply how it works in the real world, like it or not. So as a policy analyst you should focus on what you can control: coming up with solutions to problems that are current and that are "in play". And keeping history in context: there may be good solutions on the shelf, or good historical lessons about bad solutions; and your solution may in turn sit on the shelf.

• elitist model: the elitists get what they want.

Meanwhile, please enjoy this amusing picture.

Class discussion has worked back to "common sense" and "gut feeling" as decision-making processes. There are three interesting lines of thought here, in my opinion:

1. Research into how brains make decisions, for example the tendency to decide first and rationalize/explain second.
2. Antonio Damasio's books about the role of emotion in making decisions. Unfortunately the one I tried to read kept putting me to sleep, or perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read it at bedtime, so I never got past the second chapter. But it was very interesting.
3. Stephen Colbert's research into Truthiness. Somebody should get some research grants. Actually, if the show and audience ended up funding serious research in cognitive science, that would be totally awesome.

We seem to still be recapitulating the reading. It would be nice if we could start from the reading instead of ending there. For example, somebody just said it's important to be objective, but one of the readings, perhaps the Dunn, pointed out that analysts can only avoid intentional bias, not unintentional bias (and we know from much research that unintentional bias is incredibly powerful, from constraining the imagination of the possible to confirmation bias etc). While the tour through the methodology is interesting, we haven't caught up to the essential, unsolved problems in the field and in its foundations:

1. principle-agent problem. For practical reasons, the public has to delegate power to decision-makers. How can those elected or self-appointed decision-makers be trusted?
2. preference discovery and aggregation. how can we figure out what we collectively want?

Apropos to that, see this thread, about the new US Republican Party slogan, "The change you deserve." Highlights from the comments include, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard," and "Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice," "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." (that one's more poignant because the actor being addressed died of a stroke aged 44) The slogan is already being used to sell an antidepressant, Effexor, which bears a warning that it may promote suicidal tendencies.

It's now noon; there is an interesting seminar in the same room at 12:15, and of course class at 2 pm (I was going to go home to walk the dog, and come back for the evening version of the 2 pm class, but it's raining and I think I'll just stick it out (Kona seems to be fine skipping the noon walk, not that I make a regular habit out of it, but it stresses me out to no end). I guess I'll try to get lunch after the talk and take it with me to 2 pm class. Grump grump grump.

Meanwhile we continue to recapitulate the reading; we're talking about the importance of defining the problem correctly before taking action to solve it. This is a huge point in the reading, and even that may understate the issue. As they say, "ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν", "never do harm to anyone", or less accurately but even more pointedly, "first, do no harm". I think that can be extended to, "zeroethly, stop doing harm."

The Singapore branch of the Project Management Institute isn't especially active, which is surprising considering Singapore's reputation for management. If you hold the PMI's "Project Management Professional" credential, you need to earn 20 PDUs per year to maintain your credential; a PDU is a "Professional Development Unit" and you get them from attending seminars and meetings and such, at about one PDU per hour. The Puget Sound and San Diego branches (home to Microsoft and Boeing, and to half the US Navy, respectively) offer monthly breakfasts, dinners, and whatnot so you can pick up PDUs steadily. Singapore's branch does very little, aside from an annual all-day seminar that's only worth 8 PDUs.

So when they announced a seminar for Monday night, on a topic that's not completely boring, for two PDUs, and for free for local members, they should not have been but were surprised to get 270 registrations instead of the seventy they planned for. I'd bet that the total number of credentialed PMPs in Singapore is probably right around, oh, 270? Anyway, on to my observations: Attendence was announced at 270, which seemed about right. Counting the five rows around me, there were 44 people, of which 10 were women. Mostly Chinese, but a strong Indian representation. If there were Malays, I couldn't clearly spot them, but I'm not so good at telling Malay from Chinese without staring or telltales like headscarves or names. Two people carried on extended conversations on their cell phones; the local norm is apparently that it's okay to do this as long as you talk very quietly and cup your hand over your mouth.

---

The talk was by Assistant Professor Lieven Demeester from INSEAD (an international business school), previously a management consultant. Following is my paraphrase of the speaker, unless otherwise noted

• What's new in the last few decades in project management and uncertainty? Game theory, psychology, etc. And globalization.
• If you plot the chance of a task completing against time spent, with time on the X and chance on the Y, you get something like this (Joel's note: found this on Google, not from the seminar): There's a 50% chance the task will end within, say, 10 days, and a 95% chance it will end in 20 days. If you ask how long the task will take, an answer with a single number is misleadingly simplified. It's probably going to take about ten days, not much less, very possibly twice as long, and maybe even longer.
• The consequence of this is that if you ask for an estimate and they are conservative, it will come back much closer to 20 days. Then the schedule gets built around these estimates, and they reify. That is, the (longish) estimate becomes the reality; workers will pace themselves to complete the task at the "deadline", called the "college student" effect. If the task is completed early workers will probably go and do non-critical work until the deadline instead of reporting completion promptly. If they are juggling several tasks, especially with several bosses, they will load-balance tasks, which may be optimal for them but sub-optimal for the big picture. And even if early completion is achieved and reported, other people may not be ready to start early.
• Goldratt's solution with "Critical Chain Project Managament" from 1997 is to set the expected duration for each task on the lower side of the estimate range, and then put the difference between low and high estimate for all of the tasks into a single, project-wide buffer. This has two benefits:
  1. The earlier dates motivate everybody
  2. Because the buffer is based on lots of individual risks, it's more accurate. (Under the same principle as insurance: Even with good historical data telling me you have a 0.001% chance to crash your car every day, I can't predict if you will crash today. But if there are a million drivers, it's a safe bet there will be about ten crashes per day.)
• "It's very hard to eliminate multi-tasking" but you should try
• Joel's paraphrase: Failure is an option, in fact small-scale failure is nearly certain, and you should plan for it.
• Some of the cognitive biases that hide risk: framing the issue too narrowly, overconfidence, confirmation bias (counting the hits and forgetting the misses), escalation of commitment.
• Well-managed projects are boring and appear to have a lot of time wasted on risks that never happen. Joel's note: we end up with an Institutional Design problem: how you do structure an organization so that finding and mitigating risks is rewarded instead of punished?
• Four strategies to manage risks (this was arranged in yet another two by two matrix, probability of risk vs impact; I'll let you figure out which strategy goes in which box): let it run but monitor it, delegate, control (with help from above), and actively manage.
• Two strategies to deal with unknown unknowns
  1. Iterate and learn. Joel's note: Examples: China's economic policy, called "crossing the river by feeling for the stones one step at a time"; agile programming, spiral development, etc. Timing depends on the speed of learning. Note that this strategy requires the capacity to learn
  2. many parallel attempts. Example: electronics and car manufacturers rolling out many products and then discontinuing the losers. Internally competing teams to build the same thing.

Overall, I think this was a great event, because it did exactly what it's supposed to do: teach some new lingo and buzzwords in use in the field. I learned things I didn't know, I could imagine applying some of it, and the speaker was competent at presenting. It was only during questions that the quality of the event dropped: the question I remember was in two parts: why are you talking so much about CCM and not at all about CPM, the last big buzzword? And how do I do CCM if my client wants firm deliverables?

Unfortunately, the speaker chose not to give direct answers. For the first, he danced around so much I'm not sure what the answer was, other than that you can buy CCM add-ons to some CPM tools (which could mean anything; vendors love to be buzzword-compliant and adding a frobitz tool to your Enterprise Schmebling System could do anything from nothing to breaking everything to actually turning your Schembler into a Frobitzer; the only thing you can count on is that whatever the effect, it's simultaneously the opposite of what the salesperson told you it would be and what you want (and in a stunning demonstration of non-transitive math, even if you want exactly what the salesperson told you, the way in which it's different from the promise is different from the way in which it's different from what you want)).

For the second question, I felt he committed the original sin of project management: he wouldn't deliver bad news. The point of CCM, if I understand it, is to make the project somewhat more efficient by being more honest and focused in accounting for risk. You can be more confident that the whole thing will be finished by the end of your buffer, but your visibility along the way is not radically better than before. It's better, because you have genuine fuzzy information instead of precise but false dates, but the only firm date you can expose is the last one. So if your client wants lots of firm dates, you have to have lots of little chains, which erodes the benefit of having a chain (which is, to reiterate, that pooling the risk for lots of little tasks into one shared buffer is better than baking risk, i.e. padding, into each individual task). But instead the speaker ran like a broken record on the script that, if you talk to your client (or vendor) about how doing it the old way you can promise them September, but with the new way you can maybe hit March but probably May or June. Which first of all doesn't make sense as an example, because why wouldn't you just promise June? But more importantly, in my experience it's not credible to promise great results from a new method. People who've been in software for a long time learn that it doesn't work that way. The best you can promise is transparency.

The second core class for the special short semester, two three-hour classes per week for six weeks. Six classes on Policy Analysis, four on cost-benefit analysis, three on program evaluation.

One of the other students asked me how to blog at the end of last semester (that is to say, last Friday) and said he experimented with all of the big blogging sites over the weekend, so I hope to share a link to his new blog this week.

This Monday morning class marks the beginning of our third semester: two core classes, each at twice per week, to wrap up two complete classes in six weeks plus finals.

This class has a lot of personality test sorts of things, including (of course) the MBTI. There's also some sort of online assessment thing where you ask one boss, four peers, and four "reports" ("report" being the very unpleasant word for people who report to you, e.g., subordinates (not a better word)). Which confused me because we don't have an "reports" here at school, but now I'm realizing that we were supposed to pick people from the real world, not from school. D'oh. That makes more sense then my addled thinking. I guess I'll go and invite some more reviewers. Some discussion; a student comments that back home, nobody who reported to him has internet access. Apparently, if you are Japanese it's unlikely you will get high ratings from your peers, no matter what. Questions about the wording of the invitation that "reports" get; what if many of my "reports" were more politically powerful than me, even if I technically wrote up their reports? What if my boss was my father? What if I've never had a boss?

FYI: American Dental Association's notes on brushing and flossing. (Yes, it's relevant to class.)

Group discussion on whether phones, SMS, and laptops. Consensus: phones bad, SMS fine. Some mild mockery of the student in the back who has been emailing and SMSing for the whole first hour of class and is oblivious every time class attention is directed towards her. No problem with laptops (or phones, for that matter) perceived by students. Faculty have discussed banning laptops. Suggestion (from students) that there should be no laptops in class except for taking notes. Joel's note: My own behavior fits the "infovore" or "internet addict" profile. I want to pay attention to class, but I struggle. Blogging helps by keeping me focused, but it leads to a bigger problem, which is that I follow up interesting things and tune out of class. I have actually tried playing solitaire simply as a way to occupy a bit of the more spastic part of my brain so the bulk of it can pay attention, and that does actually seem to work, but of course it looks terrible to anybody sitting behind me. I think knitting would accomplish the same thing and be more socially acceptable, but I don't especially want to have a bunch of knit things. And I'm not the sort of person who dresses my dog. From the prof: "When somebody's taking notes, you get a sense of participation and eye contact. When they are day trading, it's simply a void and you ignore them and the students near them."

People who get silver (where silver means something pretty special) and want gold instead. The psychology of peak performance. Joel's note: but peak performance and peak achievement are only loosely related. Most peak achievements can only be reached by via extreme performance, but peak performance doesn't guarantee peak achievement.

The value of IQ and EQ as performance predictors. Applied EQ is called, of course, Primal Leadership.

As an aside, (almost) everything that's wrong with the Business self-help industry can be found in this quote adorning the Amazon page for that book: "Harvard Business Press is discovering innovative ways to conquer the changing business universe while keeping its focus on the basics." As Orson Welles would say, "This is a lot of shit, you know that?"

Pictoral highlights from today's surfing:

Fractal Wrongness:

Fractal Rightness::

Photos from this morning's walk down to and along the Singapore river

Institutional Change

"What's the point of knowing the world if you cannot change it?"

Theories of institutional change:

• functional/efficiency theories

  North 1993: When groups see opportunities that cannot be realized under existing institutions, they make new ones. (Examples: new companies. bankers inventing new financial instruments. Property rights). North's ideas are tricky because they are so obvious that it's hard to tell if they are genius (things which are obvious to all but only after a genius figured them out) obvious or tautologically obvious: people create institutions because they need new institutions in order to get stuff they want.

• public interest
• power
• path dependence
• evolutionary
• Bayesian Learning/demonstration effect
• Crisis as trigger

Exam notes

35% of final grade. Computer lab 2. From 12 problems, choose six. For each problem, describe in one paragraph and look at appropriate institutional mechanisms. E.g., poverty, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, externalities. Think about enforcement, about principles behind mechanism. Discuss hypothetical consequences of adopting the prescribed institution: solve problem, don't solve problem, perverse incentives.

Final Paper

Due May 5.

Student Presentations

I've generally given up the struggle to comment productively and politely about student presentations, in favor of the uncontroversial point that the LKY school should put more resources into training students on public speaking and presentations at the beginning of the school year, and should do something to get professors to be a bit more rigorous and consistent on evaluating student presentations. And I do have one more point:

A simple test to determine if a recommendation is meaningful or just bullshit is to see if offers a real choice. Would you actually consider doing the opposite? Consider:

• get on the "learning curve"
• build capacities

Is that helpful? Did you depend on that advice to help you NOT do the following things:

• get off the "learning curve"
• destroy capacities

That aside, I want to make a point about cancer. There's a serious problem in how cancer statistics are interpreted by scientists, doctors, the media, and the public. I think Gird Gigerenzer's book was my first exposure to this paradox. It's this: cancer screening is not a purely positive thing, and actually may be a bad thing in some cases. Let's look at how this could be true:

Take a simple country with 1000 people, who live to age 70, and only one kind of cancer. If there is no cancer screening or cancer treatment, 10 will die of cancer, and all at age 60. Since there's no cancer screening, these ten cases are not discovered until they have severe symptoms, let's say at age 58. So the average survival duration after cancer detection is 2 years.

Now restart our clocks and add cancer screening, every two years starting at age 40. This time, 10 cases of cancer are discovered, all at age 54. Everybody gets treatment. They all die at age 60. The average survival duration after detection has risen to 6 years. But all that really happened was that ten people each spent an extra four years dealing with cancer. They didn't actually have longer, better lives.

Now, let's go one more time around, adding super-sensitive cancer screening. This time, 20 cases of cancer are discovered, all at age 50. Everybody gets treatment. Many go into remission, but ten still die of cancer at age 60. The rest die of other causes at age 70. The average survival duration after detection has risen from 2 to fifteen years! But in fact, nobody lived any longer than they would have without screening, and twenty people lived as cancer survivors for years or decades, having paid in money and blood and tears for treatment that didn't actually help.

Think this model is absurd?

AN Australian researcher says there's little evidence that prostate cancer screening saves men's lives.

And Professor Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney said a study of Australian newspaper and television stories about such screening for prostate cancer found most of them promoted it aggressively, ignoring the almost complete absence of evidence that it would save lives. — The Australian

The point is that not all cancers will kill you, at least not before something else will. We can detect cancers that we can't effectively treat, and we can't always differentiate between cancers that will kill you and cancers that won't. And it's a fallacy to say it's always better to be safe than sorry, because it doesn't work that way. False positive results, being told you have cancer when in fact you aren't slated to die from cancer, can lead to more than a little sorrow, especially if you undergo expensive and painful unnecessary treatment. The National Cancer Institute in the US says the same thing, but in a much more convoluted way:

At least two requirements must be met for screening to be efficacious:

1. A test or procedure must be available to detect cancers earlier than if the cancer were detected as a result of the development of symptoms.
2. Evidence must be available that treatment initiated earlier as a consequence of screening results in an improved outcome.

These requirements are necessary but not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening, which requires a decrease in cause-specific mortality. For example, these two criteria are met in the case of screening for childhood neuroblastoma by assessment of urinary catecholamine metabolites. On the basis of these criteria, a mass screening program was conducted in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, between 1981 and 1992 for 6-month-old infants.[3] Over that 12-year period, the annual incidence of neuroblastoma in children younger than 1 year increased from about 28 per million to 260 per million but without a significant reduction in incidence in children older than 1 year. Because there also was no reduction in mortality for the disease, this experience provided strong evidence of overdiagnosis—diagnosis of some neuroblastomas detectable by screening, which would not have been clinically diagnosed later. Similar experiences have been reported elsewhere in Japan [4] and in the Quebec Neuroblastoma Screening Project (QNSP) in Canada.[5] The history of screening for neuroblastoma also provides a useful illustration of the benefit of undertaking well-designed evaluations of emerging screening technologies before implementing screening programs. Although such studies are very costly, it has been shown that the QNSP itself averted unnecessary morbidity for thousands of children and did so while returning a yield plausibly estimated at a cost savings 64.5 times the investment in the study.[6] —NCI

In case you didn't follow, let me translate:

Cancer screening is a bad idea unless there's a test that finds cancers early, and treating these cancers early actually helps. Even then, screening may not be a good idea. They did a twelve-year test in Japan where they found way more brain cancer in infants under age 1, but cancer detection rates in older children didn't change and on average nobody lived any longer. So screening infants for brain cancer (at least, with that kind of screening and that kind of brain cancer) was a big waste. That 64.5 times savings they mention is, if you read carefully (and I had to check the abstract of footnote six to be sure I had it right), is the savings from scrapping unnecessary cancer screening programs, not the savings from performing screening. Bury the lede much?

Remember, these are general points. This is not a diatribe against all screening, or in favor of cancer. But it is clear that screening is not an unmitigated positive, and it's a big mistake to think it is. This is a tough point to make in the face of powerful individual appeals from survivors, but the underlying issue is the same as other kinds of medicine: individual testimonials are not data. If you have a mental picture of someone dying unnecessarily from a late diagnosis, you need to balance it with a mental picture of someone dying unnecessarily from treatment for a cancer that they don't actually have. Then you can put all of this emotion to the side and get back to evidence-based medicine. Put another way, humans are not wired to think accurately about statistics, and we need to remind ourselves of this weakness constantly.

Today's good news:

Spain's re-elected Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced a government Saturday which for the first time included more women than men and a female defence minister. —AP

Meanwhile in Singapore:

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong reshuffled his Cabinet on Saturday, as part of a process to groom the next generation of leaders for Singapore.

The most eye-catching in the slew of changes announced by PM Lee was the appointment of Mr K. Shanmugam as Law Minister and Second Minister for Home Affairs from May 1. —Straits Times

The newspaper featured pictures of twenty faces: from the PM and Minister Mentor and Senior Minister to the various Ministers. As many as five looked Indian or had Indian names; at least one had a Muslim name. None appeared Malay, and none were women.

This is both a symptom and a problem. It's a problem because it restricts the viewpoints present in discussion by Singapore's ruling group (though, arguably, not any more than one-party rule). Some Singaporeans brag about the meritocratic government recruitment system, but it's a poor excuse for meritocracy that doesn't raise up any women or many minorities.

The equivalent for the US: five women out of twenty one. Four ethnic minorities out of twenty one. For most cabinet members I've never heard anything about their religion, so I would assume all are professed Christians.

Side note: Did one second of Google on that assumption, and found the most adorable Hegelian dialog within the Radio Islam web site (that's Farrakhan):

• Jews in Bush’s Cabinet? Don’t Hold Your Breath
• USA´s Rulers -They are all Jews !

It's not quite as tasty as it looks, since the first link is a reprint from the New York Observer and the second refers to Clinton's administration. But it did lead me here, which (taken with, obviously, a very large grain of salt) suggests that there are no Jews in Bush's cabinet. I'm sure there are no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. I can just barely imagine one of them being a (very discreet) atheist, but I haven't heard anything. Of course I wouldn't be the first to suggest that many of them appear to actually practice Manichaeism. This is getting a bit off-topic and I'm using too many fancy words, so let's just re-iterate the positive: a majority female Spanish cabinet, and female heads of government in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and Liberia. This post should not be construed as a declaration of partisanship in the US Democratic Presidential Primary race of 2005-2008.

Service Delivery for the poor

Per-capita spending on health doesn't correlate with better health conditions for poor. One key reason is that, in almost all countries, most of that spending is concentrated with the wealthy, so per-capita spending on the poor remains very low.

Guest Speaker

Sasa Vucinic from Media Development Loan Fund. See him speak here.

We start with this video.

Only 18% of the world's population lives in countries with a free press. "Only 18% knows exactly what's going on, gets unfiltered views ..." Um, there went a big non sequiter? Are we going to talk about media failings in countries with freedom of the press?

Got financing from Soros in 1996. Financed 167 different projects worldwide with 70 teams in 23 countries. Current loan portfolio $23m with interest rate 2% to 10%, lowest rate to riskiest projects. Overall, 2.5% loss rate. One case of fraud, in Macedonia, involving imported chicken wings.

Funding is from large agencies, however they have inconsistent direction due to management turnover. Now offering bonds for individual investors.

How not to censor a radio station: send troops to confiscate the equipment. Very photogenic. How to censor: call the potential advertisers and threaten them.

Student presentations.

CPF changes in 2007

CPF is Singaporean Social Security. The first presenter spends 6:30 giving a recitation of minor details of the 2007 changes to the CPF, presented devoid of context or interpretation. Example: "By legislating re-employment by 2012, to require employers to offer re-employment to workers reaching 2 up to age 65, and eventually to 67".

Second presenter: Analysis. Will the reforms encourage people to work longer? will they benefit low/middle income/older? Will the resource be enough [sic]? More reading verbatim from slide.

Do the changes actually benefit low/middle? Not really.

Questions: What does it mean that the plan allows reduction of older workers' wages?

Joel's evaluation:

• Reading/reciting text from slides: check.
• Poor time management: check
• Slides filled with hundreds and hundreds of words in small text: check
• Overall thoughts: might be a good presentation to a group of Singaporean accountants. As a presentation of policy analysis, dry and difficult. Dives directly into excessively detailed exploration of minutiae without without any introduction, explanation of context.

Prof's evaluation: presentation doesn't refer to any economic concepts from class.

Public Housing Subsidy: UK vs Singapore

• Reading/reciting text from slides or notes: check. Softer-spoken reader, too, so the soporific effect is amplified. I want (as I do with most student presentations) to go up and rip the notes out of her hands and shout "snap out of it!" Next presenter in the group much better on this account. Update: no, I take that back. As she's gotten deeper into her time period, she's talking way too fast as she simply shovels out words in a stream. If you have 20 minutes, you need to reduce the number of ideas to fit, not just talk faster. And you need to present a hierarchical structure: here are my main ideas. Now I'm talking about the first main idea. Now I'm telling you three details in support of my first main idea. Now I'm telling you my second main idea. Etc. Instead, this is just a flood of words that goes on and on, almost in a chant, without any use of pauses or any other structure, so once you tune out, you're gone.
• Poor time management: No. finished 2 minutes early
• Slides filled with hundreds and hundreds of words in small text: check
• Overall thoughts: Once again, the presenters' focus is on the minute facts and details that they have researched, not on introducing an idea to the audience. These presentations are way, way, way too detailed in the wrong, wrong wrong places. All facts and data, little to no information or knowledge.

Singapore Healthcare Policies and Financing

In 2005 Singapore spent 3.8% of GDP (with government contributing a total of 0.9% of GDP, or about a quarter.) Would love to see that directly contrasted with other countries (the US as the most expensive, Japan, the other Tigers, etc). Oh, now we get some pointless small details.

• Reading/reciting text from slides or notes: Check. Just as painful as the last one. If you are reading your entire presentation verbatim from a piece of paper, you are failing. If you can't hold the ideas of your presentation in your head, how do you expect your audience to do so? Second presenter is much better on these terms, though he's picked up the hyperfast talking problem. (I also talk way too fast when presenting.)
• Poor time management: finished 4 minutes early. borderline between good and too short, but certainly far better than too long.
• Slides filled with hundreds and hundreds of words in small text: check. Bonus demerits for using clip art figures with incongruously pink skin. Further demerits for pointless animation. Credit for actually stating a conclusion more or less clearly, but still the same absurdly busy, pointlessly overformatted, essentially randomly organized slides as everybody else.
• Overall thoughts:

This (PDF) is the carbon cap and trade game that I created when it was my group's turn to present in Global Issues and Institutions class. It has two intended pedagogical purposes: to demonstrate how a carbon market will move production to more efficient producers (which is the the point of such a market), and to illustrate how cheating might undermine the benefits of such a market. I playtested it once, and then we played it once in class, and I discovered a third pedagogical purpose: to illustrate that smart, educated people may still have trouble creating a rational market in the context of a confusing, complicated new game :).

I created the game because a quick search didn't show anything quite like it. What I specifically wanted to create was a carbon emission permit market that could be created in a classroom without special equipment. This isn't a general-purpose "learn about global warming" game, it's an attempt to model a real, if very simple, permit market. It clearly needs more work, so I'm now offering the materials of the game on the internet, under a CC Attribution license (do whatever you want with it, but include my name and link back to this post).

Here's what didn't work when we tried it. (In some of these, "work" is subjective because we wanted to see a particular outcome for educational reasons; so there's a catch-22 between rigging the game to get the result you want, and setting up the game as an experimental simulation and seeing what happens. In general I think the model is so simple and contrived that it doesn't have any experimental information to offer; it should be treated purely as a teaching tool):

1. We didn't come anywhere near playing eight or twelve rounds in 30 minutes. We did two or three rounds in 1-2 hours.
2. The results over the few rounds we played weren't as expected. Overall efficiency should have improved, but it got worse. This probably reflects individual players not clearly understanding what actions to take. (Note that this also depends a huge assumption in the game, that companies that make more profit per unit of emission also make more economic output per unit of emission.)
3. Almost nobody cheated. Admirable but not realistic.
4. The paper bits for money and permits are a big pain in the ass. I think it would go better computerized, so that everybody's actions are forced to follow the rules of the game and so that we wouldn't need to do any data collection during the game. Of course, then you would need a computer lab or laptops to play.
5. I thought I rigged all of the companies so there would be some obvious buyers and obvious sellers, but that happened only shakily.
6. The instructions don't help make a working market. This is really the big problem underlying the others, because this is the crux of the home game. The game needs some clear notes on how to run a real auction market with buyers and sellers, so that everybody who wants to buy or sell can do so easily in a few minutes.

So, here it is. If you want help using it in your class, I'd be happy to help you.

The instructions PDF for the game can be downloaded here. The spreadsheet supporting the game is available here, in OpenOffice Calc format.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The Ionian Mission, Patrick O'Brian

Inspired by Naomi Novik's novels, I'm now working through O'Brian's twenty Aubrey and Maturin books. They are amazing. I don't plan to review any of them any further than that. I do want to offer this passage from The Ionian Mission, the eighth book:

Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen's departure he had rarely been in a mood for music and in any case the partita that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever be able to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne which followed that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their closely-argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and there were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the discourse. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the whole sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed.

From the body of a Reuters article:

... the survey, conducted among 69 U.S. rock-formatted stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles and Knoxville to Buffalo, found 84 percent of the respondents planned to vote in the November election.

...

About 30 percent of the respondents called themselves Democrats, while nearly 22 percent described their politics as Republican and 21 percent declared they were independents.

...

Asked about their overall presidential preference, Democrat Barack Obama led the pack with 26 percent support among those planning on voting in the November election. McCain ranked second with 22 percent and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton drew 18 percent.

The survey found women and fans of alternative radio, featuring '80s and '90s rock, tend to be Democratic, while men and classic rockers lean Republican.

So Democrats are a plurality of respondents and Obama is the leading candidate. What's the headline? "Male rock fans likely to vote Republican: survey"

I realized over the weekend, the same weekend that included 16 hours of Leadership and Communication training between from 2:30 Friday afternoon and 5 pm Saturday, that I've mentally checked out for the semester. This is not the fault of the training program, which was taught as well as possible for such a large class at such an inconvenient time. (In fact, that kind of public speaking training, as well as basic presentation skills, ought to be moved up to the pre-semester 1 special classes.) Nonetheless, my brain has departed for greener pastures.

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Unfortunately, it's only week 11 out of about 13, not to mention reading week and two weeks of exams. While my attendance is unblemished (so far) and I've written or transcribed or quoted about eighty thousand words of class and lecture notes over the last three months, the semester is far from finished, and my groupmates in my three or four or five group assignments would probably not appreciate my permanent mental departure. So, I guess I'll just mentally check back in and get back to work.

The World Bank

Note that there's a very substantial difference between the World Bank and the IMF. The World Bank has a lot to do with development, whereas the IMF is a bunch of economics PhDs.

Is the World Bank part of the problem or part of the solution? (Or both?)

Joel's note: When I started thinking about getting a post-graduation job, I talked to some professors and started reflecting on my options. One of my epiphanies was that, even though these multinational agencies and NGOs and such have global scope and deal with issues all over the world, they all have offices. If you work for one, you'll probably work in one of its offices. And those officies are in specific cities. If you want to work for one, you'll probably need to live in its city. Like these, in Washington D.C:

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In 2006 the World Bank approved US$23.6 billion in loans. Global FDI was US$1.3 trillion, and total capitol flow was $6 trillion. (The US economy was $13 trillion that year.)

The World Bank IDA offers 40-year plus interest-free loans, in theory funded by repayments from older loans but in fact always short of funds. Accounted for $9.5 billion of the World Bank's total 2006 lending. "In contrast to previous studies we find that the US exerted a significant influence on IDA lending during the period 1993 - 2000. We demonstrate that the influence was both statistically as well as economically significant." (University of Copenhagen study)

You can't talk about the World Bank without mentioning the Washington Consensus. And here's a useful-looking Stiglitz interview:

Multinational Monitor: What was the "Washington Consensus?"
Joseph Stiglitz: It was a consensus formulated between 15th Street and 19th Street in Washington among members of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. Treasury Department, and the World Bank. It argued that the keys to success in developing countries were three things: macro-stability, liberalization (lowering tariff barriers and market deregulation) and privatization. It was largely formulated out of experience with Latin America.

MM: Does it still exist as a consensus?
Stiglitz: No. There is a consensus that those precepts, while important, are neither necessary nor sufficient for successful development.

Institutional Economics is a large part of the post-Washington Consensus thinking.

These three things are certain: death, taxes, and that trade group spokespeople will defend their product in the face of all logic, complain that they are unfairly maligned, and point out the desirability of their product.

"Some people want to blame our industry because they have a vested interest in doing so, either by making a name for themselves or by hampering the adaptability and usefulness of our products for competitive purposes," said Robert G. Pickel, chief executive of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, a trade group. "We believe that there are good investment decisions and bad investment decisions. We don't decry motor vehicles because some have been involved in accidents." —New York Times

I guess it's not surprising, since it's precisely that behavior, sincere or otherwise, that is their primary professional skill and the point of their jobs. But the precise word choice, at least, can offer some novelty.

Two eight-hour classes, Friday afternoon/evening and all day Saturday. Right in the thick part of the semester when everybody's assignments are piling up, so we are cheerful but stressed. Our special guest is Marie Danziger from KSG.

We have a handout with pages such as How Listeners Think and Advocating a Controversial Position. So I'm trying to figure out which bullet point from which page is correctly modeling the lecture.

Anecdote: in surveys of KSG graduates, writing skills are the #1 most used skill obtained at KSG; public speaking is second. Regression analysis is something like number twenty-seven. Joel's Note: assuming this is typical for most schools, policy or otherwise, does this mean most people are busy trying to persuade other people about positions which they in fact don't know are true?

Describing a public speaking class, in which everybody takes turns speaking in front of class. Sounds practical, like the Negotiation class.

If you want to be successful speaking publicly, visualize yourself stunning your audience (in a good way).

We know from study after study that people don't change their opinions from rational argument alone. There must be some element of emotion. Joel's note: another example of the thesis that our emotional centers play vital roles in our thinking processes?

You must take into account not only your own filters, but your audience's filters.

Student Debates

Three minute speech on each side.

First student reads her 1-minute speech from her notes. Instructor lets her finish, and then asks her to repeat her speech, without notes, while making eye contact with everybody in the room. Hint: divide the room into quadrants. The second student is one of our most verbal. This is getting very interesting, not for the subject matter per se but for getting to watch how the instructor manages the class.

The second pair of students has the topic of legalizing homosexuality. Too much going on to blog, but it's very interesting. Both students do very active, engaging speeches. Also the whole room (about a hundred of us) are brought to howling laughter repeatedly. Some techniques on display: answering a question with a question, citing personal expertise (15 years as a doctor), reframing a legal issue as a health issue, a soundbite: "not legislation but rehabilitation".

A mention of Mario Cuomo. I still remember seeing a Mario Cuomo speech on TV when I was about six or seven ten, it must have been his speech at the 1980 1984 Democratic Convention. It's still the best speech I've ever seen. I don't remember anything he said; I just remember that I was in complete agreement with the absolute rightness of everything he said and everything the party represented and I couldn't understand how anyone could listen to his speech and disagree. I miss that feeling and that certainty.

Debate on the effect of putting your hand in your pocket. Some people are neutral, others are opposed. Nobody is positive.

Side note: here are some tips on preparing for TV appearances, such as "MEN: I SAY AGAIN Wear Makeup. TV lights can penetrate several layers of skin. You can't possibly shave close enough to prevent whiskers from showing without makeup." and "Tip the bows of your eyeglasses up slightly off your ears. This angles the lenses down to reduce glare from lights."

Don't write on your hand.

Analyzing

Hrm. Instructor suggests that, to improve your diction, you should find someone on TV whose diction you like and record it and try to reproduce their pronunciation, emphasis, intonation. But that's not what diction means. Diction is "4. The manner in which anything is expressed in words; choice or selection of words and phrases; wording; verbal style:" Diction is word choice. It seems fairly common to stretch the word to refer to these other factors of verbal performance, and I'm not so ignorant as to remain a prescriptivist in the face of clear, dominant usage change. But it's clear that our language is poorer for the change (just as it is when comprise is used interchangeably with compose; we end up with two words but only one meaning). Pronunciation, emphasis, and intonation are not diction; they are pronunciation, emphasis, and intonation.

Saturday: Press Conferences

In a press conference, you can communicate two to four ideas at most. The rest of the press conference is spent finding new ways to repeat those ideas while answering questions.

What can go wrong? The media may have their own agenda, and their own stories to pursue: they may ask you questions leading you in a direction you don't want to go.

Avoid answering hypothetical statements. Don't argue with your audience.

Tactic: make a list of topics and phrases you don't want to say.

Storytelling

Storytelling: the latest corporate fad

This recent quote seems relevant:

love the fact that Trey and I have gotten awards for being topical and satirical, but at the end of the day, we are just making jokes. If you ask me how to really solve the health-care crisis, I have fuckin' no idea, and I don't want to be a part of it. But I can make a little fat kid yell some emotional truth about it. That's what we've figured out over the years. If you're gonna make it a TV show, you would never do the actual politics of something, but you would do the emotions behind the politics. Who cares if it's a right-or-wrong policy—here's how it makes me feel. —AV Club Interview

Property rights, contracts, transaction costs.

From an economic standpoint, legal systems' functions are to define, transfer, and protect property rights.

The role of the judiciary: they only clarify and define within the bounds of existing law, rather than creating law. Objection: in practice, this distinction is impossible; the act of clarifying often entails creating new law.

Informal enforcement mechanisms:

• Unilateral
• Bilateral
  • self-enforcing contracts
  • vertical relationship
  • hostages/collateral/third party
  • private enforcement ... violence
• Multilateral
  • reputation
  • enforcement by powerful third party (could be collective government)

I had no idea how much reading I wasn't doing for this class this week:

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 2 “Political Culture and Public Administration”

Florence Heffron, Organization Theory and Public Organizations, Ch. 7 “Organizational Culture”

M. S. Haque, “The Diminishing Publicness of the Public Sector under the Current Mode of Governance”, Public Administration Review, 2001, 61 (1), 65-82

J. S. Jong and H. Muto, “The Hidden Dimension of Japanese Administration: Culture and its Impacts, Public Administration Review, 1995, 55 (2), 125-34.

J. Jabes, N. Jans, J. Frazer‑Jans and D. Zussman Managing in the Canadian and Australian Public Sectors: A Comparative Study of the Vertical Solitude, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Volume 58, Number 1, 1992, pp 5‑21.

J. Jabes and D. Zussman, Organizational Culture in Public Bureaucracies. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 55 (1), 1989, pp 95‑116

Anne M. Khademian, “Is Silly Putty Manageable? Looking for the Links between Culture, Management, and Context”, in J. L. Brudney, L. J. O’toole, Jr., and Hal G. Rainey (Eds.), Advancing Public management: New Developments in Theory, Methods, and Practice, 2000, Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, pp 33-48

Hal G. Rainey, “Building an Effective Organizational Culture”, in James L. Perry (Ed.), Handbook of Public Administration, 2nd ed., 1996, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp 151-166

D. Zussman and J. Jabes, The Vertical Solitude: Managing in the Public Sector, Halifax, NS: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1989

Lecture

Civil society. Since four of my electives have covered this subject to varying degrees, there's nothing new here I have a great opportunity to review and consolidate my learning.

Microcredit is the subject this week.

What is credit? Something you owe someone. That's credit. Are debt and credit the same thing? Lines of credit. "Credit is borrowed money". Grameen is not the first microcredit lender: ACCION and others came first. But Grameen had the best marketing.

Three C's of credit: Character, Capacity, Capital. Other kinds of microcredit: associations, bank guarantees, community banking, cooperatives, credit unions.

Microcredit as the goal: focus on providing credit to poor; the borrowers have to declare what they will do with it. If the borrower cannot look the lender in the face (c.f. cultural rule that women look down while speaking) and explain what the loan is for, the interview is over.

Microcredit plus: provide credit and training. Example: BRAC.

Microcredit as the means: example: Proshika.

As of February 2008, Grameen has 7.45 million borrowers, service in 97% of Bangladeshi villages.

Grameen's key feature: ultra-high level of contact between bank and borrower. Weekly loan repayment; followup in person one day after payment is missed. Borrowers must learn to sign their own names instead of making a thumbprint. Borrowers are required to use a small part of the loan as a group fund, as mandatory weekly saving, and as emergency fund deposits.

The Sixteen decisions, such as "We shall not live in dilapidated houses. We shall repair our houses and work towards constructing new houses at the earliest" and "We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education."

Ten poverty indicators, such as "each member of the family is able to sleep on bed instead of on the floor" and "Family members have adequate clothing for every day use".

Despite a hands-off approach, the bank must intervene in some cases, for example, if everyone in a region is using their loan to weave baskets and the local demand for baskets is saturated. But Grameen still avoids telling borrowers what to do, in contrast to some other micro-finance institutions (MFIs).

Measuring success of MFI:

• Outreach (number of loans, growth rate of assets, etc)
• self-sustainability. profit, etc
• Subsidy dependency index: how much does the MFI depend on charity?

Joel's note: isn't poverty reduction the ultimate purpose of MFI? Why isn't it on the list?

Four decade history of MFI initiatives in India. Government project: SHG, vs Grameen-model MFIs. State government raided and shut down all MFIs in one district in March 2006

Related services offered via same channel: insurance, pension, etc.

Note to self: Need to grok the difference between Return on Assets and Return on Equity.

Our presentation

My teammate and I are presenting on the last case this week, Microfinance 2.0. We will go without powerpoint slides. But I haven't practiced my own presentation as much as I should have; I've practiced pieces out loud, but not the whole thing with a clock. My feeble excuse is that I will be flexible after hearing what our classmates do in the two preceding presentations. My rough topic outline:

• theory
  • What is poverty/what is money?
  • A working economy is dynamic: everybody has to dance at the same time
  • systems: capitalist/market; socialist
• How does microfinance help?
  • provide liquidity
  • provide motivation
• How should microfinance work?
  • Reach more people
  • make more changes in people being reached
• Should microfinance be capitalist or socialist?
  • Is there a third way?
  • What are examples of organizations that serve millions of people over a period of decades, but are neither governments nor for-profit businesses?
  • Indefinite charity? Mixed model?

Singapore's Minister for Transport & Second Minister for Foreign Affairs

The talk is about five minutes long before we stop for questions: impressive. Also, I think I heard the Minister mention carbon, which would be a rarity in Singapore where the environment rarely gets even lip service.

Q: long-winded question about bicycles. to give you a hint: "... it's a multiple-sector task, but I feel it should be the transport ministry who would lead in facilitating this bicycle commuting into our transport plan ..." Dude. Your question is, "what are you doing about bicycles?" Ask it and shut up. If you have a more targeted question, ask that. A: We've looked at, what are the immediate things we could do, not just recreation but commuting too. Working with NParks to try and close up the gaps in the system. Try to facilitate inter-modal transfer: look at the route you can take and at the MRT station or bus interchange upgrade the bicycle parking facilities. Also an inter-agency process. Some have asked, why can't we integrate cycling into the [whole city]? You have to balance against other transport: it might take space from buses. (Notice that alternative transport is implicitly a zero-sum ghetto: there's no notion of taking space from car lanes.) ... Also pedestrians: adding more shade; soon 86% of all overpasses will be sheltered. (Recall from earlier posts that overpasses are fundamentally pedestrian-hostile in the first place)

The dean just interrupted to say that this discussion will be off the record, and mentioned bloggers specifically. In my opinion this doesn't apply to what I've typed so far (ask Samantha Power), but I'll respect the request and stop blogging at this point. (I did arrive after the Dean's remarks, though, so maybe I missed an earlier announcement.)

I think I have the liberty to put my own questions on the record. My question was "A few comments and then a question: I've bicycled in San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Copenhagen, and I would be terrified to bicycle in Singapore. Second, [regarding whether bicycles and transport should compete for space while car space remains inviolable]. Both legally and culturally, cars are dominant in Singapore. What will you do about Singapore's increasing adoption of car-dominant culture?" My followup question was, "What about changing the law so that pedestrians have right-of-way in unmarked as well as marked crosswalks?"

Now I just have to work on my tone of voice: I think I get stressed asking questions and have a needlessly confrontational tone. And in my haste to make a point and ask a question while not talking too long, maybe I was too terse. The point I think I didn't make very well was that there is a cultural problem with aggressive driving in Singapore, as exemplified by drivers honking at other drivers who are slowing to turn off an arterial, honking at pedestrians who are in the middle of crossing the street, etc. While it's true that Singapore probably has the best-behaved drivers and most orderly streets in Asia, or maybe tied with Japan, it could do better.

Sunil Sharma from the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute (speaking only for himself, not the IMF). Provides training for 1000 to 1500 officials per year from 38 regional countries. Patterned after a similar office in Vienna. About 60 PhDs on staff providing training in macroeconomic and financial management, statistics, and legal issues.

The IFA, the International Financial Architecture.

Accumulating questions:

• Has there ever been a period of time in which we had both a degree of global capital mobility and some economic stability?
• According to the chart (Obstfeld and Taylor 2002), the only events to reduce global capital mobility have been the world wars. Even the Asian financial crisis didn't dent mobility growth. Are we therefore, assuming a new world war doesn't start, safe from drops in mobility?
• Is there a correlation between global capital mobility and greater human welfare? Is there a causal relationship? (A: studies do show that greater mobility does correlate with indirect benefits. Without some minimal institutional competence, you won't benefit from foreign capital.)
• From other classes, we here that institutional capability is the current hot topic in international development. What's going to be the fad after that?

Financial systems have been liberalized only recently. Italy had interest rate limits into the 1980s. Greece has a primitive system into the 1990s. Regulation Q limited interest rates US banks could pay.

Bretton Woods: currencies locked to US dollar, US dollar related (but not locked) to gold. (Joel's note: An interesting bit of trivia is that the US still values its gold deposits at $42.222/ounce. That's a multi-billion (but not multi-tens-of-billions) dollar bit of trivia. Ran across it reading somebody's review of the US FY2009 budget.)

IMF current statistics: 185 member countries, 2600 staff (with 400 to be fired in the next six months (Joel's note: talk about burying the lede; this is a talk about challenges for the IMF and it's now 40 minutes into the talk)), US$338 billion in quotas, which is smaller than Citibank's subprime losses.

Eight countries have direct membership (the UN Security Council permament members plus Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia) in the Executive Board; the other 177 members are represented by 16 other directors. 30% women, although there is a shortage of female economics PhDs to hire. The biggest concentration of economics PhDs in the world. (I wonder who's in second place?)

The word corruption is no longer taboo. Q: What's still taboo? A: I would not be able to write what I really think about the exchange rate regime of a particular country.

Notional purpose of the IMF is to serve as a revolving pool of money that member countries could borrow from during balance of payment crises and thus avoid destructive trade policies. The IMF is funded by the difference between receipt and payment interest rates.

Top IMF borrowers in last 60 years: Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, Korea.

Ten years ago, reserves of a central bank were guarded secret. Now most banks put them on their website.

What's going on now: deeper financial markets in developing countries; relaxation of capital controls; more international financial market integration and private capital flows.

Bankruptcy laws are important because they allow you to clear the decks quickly. The US recovers quickly because of its bankruptcy laws.

If you peg your currency to a foreign currency (e.g. the dollar), you can no longer change your domestic interest rate to meet domestic conditions. For example, Middle Eastern countries peg to the dollar, and now they have interest rates far too low for their domestic economics. Which exchange regime is better is not generally agreed; it depends on local institutions. Fixed but adjustable is bad because the infrequent adjustments are shocks, preceded by tension.

Canada: has floating exchange rate, and retains control of domestic money supply.

Banks: do a "maturity transformation": borrow short-term, lend long-term. By design, they thus have liquidity risk. By design, the banking system is leveraged. The investment banks in the security markets do not do maturity transformation; they manage liquidity. They are not key to the running of the payment system. They are more lightly regulated. But with the changes in the capital market, the investment banks have a more critical role in the monetary system, and should be held more accountable.

Student Presentations

Bangladesh

Unitary system, Westminster government.

Village life model after independence, then administrative state during military rule, then adversarial, village life, and back to administrative state (under current caretaker government).

Singapore

Detailed powerpoint. Not especially relevant to the assignment, which was "Whether the model describes the politico-administrative relations in your country?" I feel inspired to dig out the stopwatch for the next presentation.

China

First, you must understand why China chooses socialism. It was chosen by the people, with the belief that only socialism can liberate China from a semi-feudal role. Only socialism can prosper the new China. (Sound of Joel smacking his forehead into the table. China didn't chose socialism any more than Taiwan chose capitalism. A communist army conquered China.) China has the party first, then the state. (Which is a feature of authoritarian states, not socialist states.)

Five administrative levels. ... As have many others, I've recommended against reading from slides. Well, I've found something worse than reading from slides. Reading the formal constitutional procedure by which China's senior leadership is selected, from slides.

I'm seriously considering walking down to interrupt the current presenter, in front of 20 classmates, and turning off the projectors, taking the notes out of the hand of my classmate (who is a very nice person), physically turning him around to face the crowd instead of the screen, and encouraging him to complete his presentation in five more minutes or less. The presenter is, let me repeat, a nice person whom I like, and I generally try to avoid criticizing classmates on this public blog, but this is just about the worst presentation I've seen here. Not just for the technical issues of posture, but the content: a detailed analysis of the Chinese government as it is claimed to function. What's the point of that? I certainly hope that not a single person in this class, including the presenter, is that naive. On the plus side, a weakness is listed. Perhaps that's on an official list of approved criticisms, part of some anti-corruption campaign? Ah, yes, the presenter just said "corruption".

If it weren't for the extreme rudeness to my classmate, I would replace the first two minutes of my own presentation (were I called upon next) with a discussion of the technical aspects of the last presentation: the poor time management, looking at the screen, back turned from the audience, reading from paper with head tucked down, the obvious lack of practice, reading from slides.

Papua New Guinea

274 local governments. Westminster government. Queen is ceremonial leader, represented by the governor-general. Three levels of government. Strong parliamentary democracy.

Taiwan

Five branches of government, the usual three plus the Examination and Control branches. The control branch is like the GAO in the US. Best fit for politico-administrative relations: functional village life.

Philippines

In addition to the three branches, a Civil Service Commission with non-partisan employees.

UAE

Pakistan

Administrative model under political regimes; functional village model under military regimes.

Myanmar

After all the fuss of last week's guest and then the overloaded Global Issues class yesterday, today's Non-State Actors looms as an anti-climax. Plus it's raining, but more of a sullen wet than an exuberant storm.

Student Presentation

What is social enterprise? Joel's note: One of the key characteristics of private enterprise is the imperative for growth, which is so pervasive and intense that it appears to be reified as an end goal. I wonder whether, as social endeavors and civil society adopt more of the cladding of capitalism, they will also adopt the growth imperative.

Note that the PP5503 Baumgartner reading for this week dovetails nicely with today's class.

Should social enterprises have the same accountability as private actors? As government entities?

Joel's note: the professor is drawing a graph with X = social return and Y = economic return, making the point that there is an inverse relationship, and that it's curved, not linear. The professor, in referring to the graph, just referred to the economic return axis as "growth". hmmm.

Private enterprises which return lower than market rates on their capital are considered to be destroying wealth. Should social enterprises be expected to have higher SROI than government? That may be missing the point for neo-Gramscian-type civil societies, but could it be a good standard for neo-Tocquevillean entities?

Professor Presentation

Social enterprise and social entrepreneurship.

Joel's note: Wikipedia comes to the rescue to clarify the relationship between social enterprise and civil society: the former is a subset of the latter:

Social enterprises are generally held to comprise the more businesslike end of the spectrum of organisations that make up the third sector or social economy). A commonly-cited rule of thumb is that at least half their income is derived from trading rather than from subsidy or donations.

Joel's note: Um, cost of capital is not "the cost it takes to start the business" or "recouping the money that's put in to it". Cost of capital includes risk-adjusted interest rates. Is there an equivalent on the social side? Is there a social capital interest rate? Is that interest rate positive if the world is getting worse and negative if the world is getting better (or vice versa?)?

Sources of capital for social enterprises....

Something like 4 out of 5 businesses fail within 5 years (numbers I just pulled out of my ass. Here's some data: "The NFIB estimates that over the lifetime of a business, 39% are profitable, 30% break even, and 30% lose money, with 1% falling in the "unable to determine" category."). What's the rate for non-profits?

Guest: Albert Teo

Social Entrepreneurs in Singapore.

Next week

I'm presenting one of three cases, Microfinance 2.0 with BJay.

This is one of those classes where everything happens at once. Along with two other classmates I was assigned to do the student presentation for the week; we decided to have all of the other students each do two-minute presentations, followed by two of our own members doing presentations, and then a carbon cap and trade game. Plus the usual break, discussion, and professor announcements. And then we have three guest speakers, two of which are surprise guests. Urp.

Guest speakers

(I didn't catch all the names). Speaker #1, from World Resource Institute:

I apologize for the acronym SD-PAM. It's a mathematical fact that some emerging economies must limit their emissions if the Earth is to mitigate global climate change. Kyoto has a single solution for Annex 1 countries, and insubstantial, qualitative activities for the rest. For an overall solution, some of that distinction must change, and the changes must be acceptable. Maybe not all of these initiatives will be measured in terms of GHG, but they all have to have something concrete, e.g., going to x% of renewable energy.

Many developing countries are taking substantial activities that stack up well to developed country activities. New plans due by 2009, under the Bali framework: new program, which looks very different from Kyoto Protocol. Countries have to figure out how to make credible commitments of their domestic climate change programs.

Q: Will post-Kyoto agreement have sanctions? A: nothing like the sanctions in WTO, which is backed by "mutually assured destruction" concept. There will be some connections between financing and policy (Joel's note: so the enforcement plan consists of getting serious about not bribing countries that don't do what they're supposed to)

Q: Canada has reneged on its commitments. Will Annex I countries use the new framework to renegotiate. A: In Washington, we tell lawmakers about China's progress, and they say, is it legally binding? and we say, well, with Canada as an example, so not so much. The number one priority for the US team at Bali was to eliminate the difference between Annex I and other groups.

It's important to remember with ETS: it's not fundamentally using the market to reduce emissions. Countries agreeing to ETS agree to meet caps, and then use the market to allocate emissions. Emissions trading is not the way to go; it will be a big part of the policy mix. Caps have a political advantage over taxes: Carbon traders are asking for more caps, because that increases the size of the market they can play in. That wouldn't happen with taxes.

Dubach: Actually, there's not much debate with economists. Carbon taxes are better economically.

Are emission trading markets sending the correct signal? Are they sending the signal that it's morally okay to (? to buy the right to pollute?). There are people who believe that carbon trading is unjust. Many Southern civil society groups are very antagonistic to carbon trading. Other issues: getting credit for things that would have happened anyway. Projects financed by emission trading may not be good projects.

Should SD-PAMS get ETS credit? That is, if the Indian government runs a program to distribute efficient lightbulbs, should they get carbon trading credit for the calculated benefit? The challenge is to promote new behavior. If China does fuel efficiency standards, they probably would have done that anyway because of concerns about oil dependency. People are generating a lot of potential credits, but who will buy them? There's no carbon market, only a market for compliance. That market must be generated by a country accepting a tight cap and forcing its companies to buy credits. The Lieberman-Warner bill, the most advanced bill in the US, does not allow purchase of overseas credits. Countries prefer to do expensive things at home instead of cheap things overseas.

Navroz Dubach: CDM is interesting. It's a market, but a market without property rights. It has huge transaction costs and is not easily verified. The Indian government just loves it, it's just a cash cow for Indian industry. There's supposed to be a technology transfer, but most projects are from one Indian company to another. Land-based projects are even more political.

30 years ago, power companies were all owned by governments, except in the US where they were heavily regulated. A large percentage of GHG comes from electricity generation.

Renewable energy does have environmental benefits, but it costs more. Access rates to electricity are as low as 3% in some countries. 50% in India. We've been looking at electricity and regulatory institutions.

These frameworks have to filter down into actual actions. How does that happen? Nominally, governments implement the frameworks they agree to. But that implementation is political, with winners and losers. So the policies are often vague, and the regulator has to balance pressures. Many regulators in developing countries were set up as part of donor-funded adjustment lending programs. So regulators are poorly integrated with governments.

Carbon Trading Game

It needs more work. We got through three years out of the planned 8 (trimmed from 12). Brief notes: We need more training and examples before the game starts. The auction mechanism doesn't work. The market isn't clearing even though the companies are set up to have a market. The printed tokens and housekeeping are a big pain and the whole thing should be electronic.

Student Presentations

My group asked all students, in groups of 2, to prepare four-minute presentations with topics we handed out, all based on the assigned reading. we discouraged Powerpoint and forbade bullet points. We also asked all seven groups to perform their presentations once before class, in full dress rehearsal in a classroom in front of one of us. (Three and half groups actually did.)

Logistics

Ten page double-spaced policy memo. First draft due April 1. Final due date: April 22.

Prime minister's office (that's me—I'm the PMO for China for this class) initial memo: overview of policy. Planning memo and overall negotiating position. Final memo is country's negotiating position. China and India teams are discouraged from presenting solutions including a hard cap, since that's almost completely unrealistic.

Next week: guest speaker from IMF.

Schedule group presentation Monday, April 14.

J. Gregory Dees, Jed Emerson, Peter Economy, Enterprising Nonprofits: A toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001) ; Chapters 1, 2, 3

Case: Social Enterprise Spectrum: Philanthropy to Commerce

Case: Social Enterprise: Private Initiatives for the Common Good

Fundamental missions of social enterprises:

• reduce conditions with socially undesirable side effects
• provide goods and services with socially desirable side effects
• create a safety net for the less fortunate
• promote a more just distribution of benefits and burdens
• advance human rights

Nicholls, A; (2006). Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change, Oxford University Press, Chapter 4

J. Emerson, “The Blended Value Map: Tracking the Intersects and Opportunities of Economic, Social and Environmental Value Creation” – Executive Summary

Concludes with nine areas for further research in the field of social entrepreneurship.

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 5 “Politics and public administration”

F. R. Baumgartner, “Public Interest Groups in France and the United States”, Governance, 9 (1), 1996, pp 1-22

A notion that's been lurking around the edges in several classes is this: Is it a problem for civil society to do functions that arguably the government should do? It got sharper in Corporate Social Responsibility discussion: if CSR is primarily a means to prevent more direct regulation, then wouldn't social purposes be better met with that same government regulation than with self-regulation and regulation by the civil society sector? According to this article, France's answers are pretty clear. The state is the sole source of authority and power for action on behalf of the public, because only the state is fully accountable. Any more narrowly defined group claiming to be acting in the public interest is assumed to be a special interest seeking rent.

This simple purity breaks down in practice, however, because it turns out that the French bureaucracy differentiates between "serious" and other kinds of civil society groups. If it has enough allies in government, a civil society group is considered "serious" and becomes basically an arm of the government. Otherwise, it's a pest. The differentiation between serious and other, which is effectively a determination of what is in the general public interest and what is not, is made within the French good-old-boys club. You won't be surprised to learn that the French military industry is part of the French public interest.

Sheila Coronel, “Recovering the Rage: Media and Public Opinion”, In OECD, No Longer Business as Usual, Paris: OECD, 2000, pp 215-226

Summary: Investigative journalism is a very important element in reducing corruption. In many parts of the world there are few effective legal protections for journalists, leading to a vicious circle because journalistic investigation is a key means of improving institutions like the courts, which could provide better legal protection for journalists. Also a lot of journalists get killed.

OECD, Open Government, Paris: OECD, 2003, pp 9-21

OECD, Citizens as Partners, Paris: OECD, 2001

Nicholson Baker uses a review of a book about Wikipedia to rhapsodize about it and discuss his own role as a defender of articles facing deletion. The discussion of the dynamics of Wikipedia is very interesting. What's even more interesting is that the entire article goes by without a hint that the "2.2 million articles" Baker talks about are only the English-language articles. These make up less than half of the total. Some obvious questions: When there is discussion to delete an article in one language, what does this mean for the versions of the article in other languages? Which leads to, what are the relationships and communications between the Wikipedia communities in different languages? Are most languages just shadows of the English? How many articles have no English version? Most interestingly, I think: do the bodies of contributors in various languages each comprise distinct communities, and if so, how do they differ amongst themselves and what, if anything, do those differences tell us?

This last week felt like the pivot week between the easier part of the semester and the part where you feel behind all of the time. By Thursday I was starting to stress out so I made up a calendar with all of the due dates for the rest of the semester, and it actually isn't that bad, as long as I don't procrastinate myself into hell, like I did the last three weeks of last semester. But on top of that, it was just a very busy week:

Monday morning was the roundtable with Douglass North (plus his lecture Tuesday, and a seat at a fancy dinner with him Tuesday night at the sort of place where when you tell the wait staff that you're vegetarian, they ask for details; and then, as everybody else gets their eight courses, you seamlessly get gourmet vegetarian dishes); I fell behind on the reading and didn't read for two out of five classes this week, and a third was by the skin of my teeth. I'm doing a carbon emission cap and trade game for Global Issues next week and that took hours disproportional to the fraction of the grade it represents, but it's a lot of fun and I weight fun pretty high when it comes to schoolwork.

Wednesday I juggled my schedule because the other Americans volunteered me to present our findings on the political vs administrative dichotomy in the US. After all my bitching about presentations, I knew I would be eviscerated if I didn't practice, so I ended up giving the presentation once in the shower and a second time to Kona during her morning walk. She pooped during the presentation, which I took as a signal that I was going over my time limit. It went well enough in class, but would have been better if I'd practiced it with my team. For next week's Global Issues class (for which most of the content comes from students, one of the few classes where the professor has actually followed through on early-semester promises to not simply lecture straight through all the time (controversial sidebar for another post: many debates about the value of pure lecture vs student discussion)), we've asked all of the students, in pairs, to do four-minute presentations based on elements of the assigned reading. We're discouraging powerpoint and requiring them all to practice once in front of us (the week's discussion leaders) before class.

We did a trial run of the game Friday, using whoever I could beg or bully to join, including an attempted press-ganging in the student lounge. I thought it would be nice to have some law students in the simulation to better represent the more predatory businesses, but none were willing to come. The trial was excellent, which is to say it took five or ten times longer than I hoped and I found lots of things wrong with the game, which is just about exactly the outcome you hope from from a trial run. (If a trial run actually goes well, that just means something is going to blow up badly when you do it for real.) So I'll spend part of the weekend revamping the game and the rest trying to pull ahead on reading.

The US illegal domestic spying story has been going on for a while, and most of the plot twists are ugly. But finally there's a hint of light at the end of the tunnel: The House just now approved a new FISA bill that denies retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms and which refuses to grant most of the new powers for the President to spy on Americans without warrants.

Before the Senate gets around to gutting the bill in conference, let's savor for a minute that a few hundred of our elected officials still think that restraint of government and accountability are worth voting for.

By the way, every single web page request you make in Singapore appears to go through a proxy server. That is to say, the Singaporean government has the means to view and filter everything you do on the web. Every now and then it glitches a bit and some pages don't load properly until you reload a few times. Like this morning. Just an inadvertent, gently reminder that I'm living in a society which has never even had some of the freedoms that Bush, Senate Committee Chairman Rockefeller (D-WV), and the rest are so eager to dismantle.

Update: It took eight reloads to publish this blog entry.

Das-Gupta, Arindam (2005), “Non-Tax Revenues in Indian States: Principles and Case Studies”

Asher, Mukul G. (2005) “Mobilizing non-conventional budgetary resources in Asia in the 21st century”, Journal of Asian Economics, 16, 947-955. Via ScienceDirect

Here's the abstract:

The 21st century will be characterized by the curtailment of tax policy autonomy and high locational elasticities for economic activities. Resource mobilization tasks for Asian governments will therefore be far more complex. With respect to traditional taxes, base broadening and modernization of tax administration will have to be primary instruments of raising additional revenue rather than rate increases.

The paper suggests that Asian countries will need to substantially enhance their capacity to benefit from innovative instruments of resource mobilization. These include public asset restructuring, treasury management, and revenue from creation of property rights, regulatory levies and more effective use of cost recovery and user charges. Resource mobilization and delivery of public services will have to be increasingly linked. An Asia wide tax forum to address common concerns, such as tax avoidance will need to be considered.

Here's my translation:

Attention Asian governments: it's going to get much harder for you to collect taxes. You should try to collect taxes from more people, and do a better job collecting taxes. But you're also going to have to find new ways to get money, like renting out government land, getting more money for your oil, and charging more for government services. And you should start cooperating with each other to catch people trying to hide taxable revenue in each others' countries.

Bailey, Stephen J. (1994) “User-charges for Urban Services” Urban Studies Vol 31, No 4/5, pp 745-765. Via EBSCOHost/Business Sources Premier. (Optional)

• "User-charges increased from about one-quarter to one-third of all own-source revenue in the US during the 1970s and 1980s" What's "own-source" revenue?
• Some services traditionally have user charges: sewers, street maintenance, waste collection. Not fire or police. Libraries avoid heavy user charges. "User charges for [outdoor] sports facilities [in the UK] ... cover less than a quarter of the debt charges and running costs ... Copy-cat charging leads to a broad uniformity of user-charges ..."
• The history of user charges is more complicated than simply substituting user charges for taxes.
• Look, look, actual humility from an economist: "More generally economists' pricing prescriptions lack situational relevance for practitioners, policy-makers and users .... Government and academic economists [tend to] fail to consider implementation theory. Economists are partisan advocates of efficiency with no natural priority over other participants in the public expenditure process."

Lecture

Various points about wages and taxes. The backward-bending supply curve.

Here's an interesting review of a book about the real shape of the supply curve: inverted S.

[Work Behavior of the World's Poor: Theory, Evidence and Policy by Mohammed Sharif] provides a sound theoretical alternative to the conclusion that poor workers are irrational or perverse when they increase labor supply in response to falling wages. Instead, by focusing on how, when wages fall below subsistence, workers are forced into a distress sale of labor in order to survive, the authors may awaken in economists and policy makers greater sensitivity to the plight of poor households.

We're running in circles on the point that "Income tax with FULL LOSS OFFSET encourages risk taking." I'm not really following the specific math, but the underlying point, if it's the same as the reading (page 589 in Stiglitz), is this: If you can get a full tax offset for your losses, then the net effect is a bit asymmetrical, like a bit of a subsidy (not sure why, lost track of the numbers). Also, and I think this is the main point in the reading, if the government provides tax offsets, the government is effectively acting like a partner. The government thus becomes the partner of last resort, and this is probably economically good.

The Economic Theory of Public Enforcement of Law, A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavelli

• p 3. "we assume for simplicity that public enforcement is the exclusive means of enforcement"
• p 4. "For simplicity, we focus on the assumption that individuals are risk neutral in fines and in imprisonment."
• p 19. "assuming for simplicity that injurers are always found liable"
• p 31. "assume for simplicity that individuals are risk neutral"
• p 35. "assume for simplicity that sanctions do not deter"
• In the discussion forums for my mail program (mutt), I've seen proposals for a feature whereby, if the body of the email includes the word "attachment" or "attached", but you try to send the email without any attachments, the programs asks you if you are sure. I would love that feature. On a related note, I think that all economists should be required to use a word processor which detects the phrase "for simplicity" and forces the author to include a section that addresses the probability that the simplifying assumption is true in the real world and how irrelevant the previous analysis will be if the assumption is not true.

Class discussion

A chart showing a correlation between income levels and less burdensome regulation. But the ability to go into business without any regulation presumably doesn't correlate as well, since then legitimate businesses would be competing with charlatans who are bad for the economy. How would we measure that, and try to correlate it to wealth? That is to say, a lot of legitimate businesses are quite happy to have enforced regulations, so they don't have to compete in a race to the bottom. Who would want to try to make a profit selling widgets if the competition was a steady stream of fly-by-night companies making widgets that break two days after you buy them? You would have to turn into another fly-by-night company yourself. So what is the measurement that would suss this "level and not-ground-level playing field" issue out?

Today's good news:

A Cal State East Bay math teacher and practicing Quaker who was fired for refusing to sign a state-required loyalty oath got her job back this week, with an apology from the university and a clarification that the oath does not require employees to take up arms in violation of their religious beliefs.

Presentation on the case study

World Bank involvement in financing judicial reform in Peru circa 1996-1997. The question is whether Fujimori's government is serious about reform, or just wants World Bank cover for further abuse of the judiciary. Events make it utterly clear that the latter is the case, but is any way left for the Bank to still have a positive impact?

Why Peru? There was an opportunity to help fix a judicial system that had never worked in the history and pre-history of the country. The Bank justified participation under the theory that a corrupt judiciary hurts the economy.

Extended history of the judicial system reforms in Peru 1994 to 1997. There are a bunch of different entities in the system with various constitutional powers, dealing with: how are judges trained, how are they selected, who has authority to remove them, how much are they paid, etc. All of these are intensely political questions, especially who can remove judges, since without judicial independence the judiciary has no foundation and may do more harm than good. The story of judicial reform in Peru appears to be the story of Fujimori attempting to maintain subtle but real control through institutional tools; i.e., having the power to select the people who select the people who can fire judges, things like that. Each time Fujimori or his pawns make a step or delays real reform, the Bank writes a complaint or delays the next step. Eventually a more or less acceptable structure is in place, and the loan gets approved in late 1997, with money to be lent in early 1998.

Then Peru's Congress passed a law gutting judicial independence, and the World Bank's project director put a six-month hold on the loan. The case ends with the director about to respond to a meeting summons from Fujimori.

Q: what's the best outcome the World Bank could have been responsible for? If you assume that Fujimori would not give up control of the judiciary, could the World Bank still have catalyzed a meaningful (and dare I say, sustainable) improvement in Peru's judiciary? After all, the pretense for their participation, was the impact of a corrupt judiciary on the economy. Perhaps Singapore is a model of the best possible outcome as long as the political elites (Fujimori) keep their power monopoly: Singaporean business courts are world-class but the Singapore government has a 100% success record in suing political opponents in Singaporean courts.

Q: In this case, who exactly should have been more transparent, how would it have been in their interests to be transparent, and what would have been different if they had been transparent?

Class Discussion

Goodness and shrewdness. Do you need transparency to have accountability? (I don't think so) Is transparency a precondition for reform? (I don't think so)

What is transparency? There are two problems with defining it in terms of exposure to external scrutiny. The first is that that suggests that some extra effort is taken to be transparent. The second problem is that if such effort is necessary, that effort implies judgment and thus an unavoidable lack of transparency. E.g., GRI requires that an organization take time to write a report. Inevitably, the report authors will be exercising judgment about what is relevant. Or suppose you are releasing documents; even an innocuous decision about whether documents have anything meaningful, or what file names to use, etc, can spin the outcome. Only universal, automatic transparency (all meetings open to the public, all documents and emails and phone calls shared on the internet as they happen, etc) avoids these problems completely, although it introduces other problems. Although this seems fantastical, some open source projects come quite close to this; all members of the project communicate online in archived, public discussion rooms and all work is done in a public repositories, including all historical changes. Wikipedia is another example, at least up to a certain level; above that level, transparency disappears, and lo and behold it's in the un-transparent point that we hear about all the Wales scandals.

Transparency and the media: Perception of corruption is very high in the Philippines and very low in Singapore, but how much of that reflects a free press in the Philippines and a captive press in Singapore?

How is it in government or corporate interest to be transparent? So far we've got some indirect benefits of perception and reputation. I think it's in the interest of the governed for the government to be transparent, but maybe not in the interest of the government. What about SWFs as an example of both transparency and North's natural state argument?

Q: Does transparency have to have a moral dimension? Does transparency have to have a positive effect? (If there isn't an ultimate purpose then it's just a mechanism, and mechanisms shouldn't be fetishized.)

Prof-led Discussion

Why are we discussing transparency? We can see why non-state actors would want it; why do companies and governments do it?

Rational explanation: companies benefit because transparency may level the playing field and so reduce transaction costs. (I'm not sure I followed that argument to the conclusion. I can see how transparency could be a competitive advantage in a market: I'd rather go to a transparent money-changer.) Ultimately, for self-interest. Reason two: reputation and trust (in turn leading to the same aggrandizement as self-interest.

Other reasons for companies to be transparent: to solicit feedback; to get first-mover advantage (but what advantage?) As a means for credible commitment, which is useful in various strategies (e.g. chicken). As a means for forestalling government regulation. To solve a tragedy of the commons problem within a business context.

Dutch disease and resource curse. UK and other North Sea countries were not damaged by the discovery of oil because they had transparency and good governance, but oil in African countries has been a net negative for societies. (Joel's note: Since evidence is now surfacing of the extent and breadth of corruption in Alaska, does that suggest that Alaska in the 1970s did not have transparency and good governance?)

Origins of transparency

Open Skies Initiative as an early example of transparency. US and Soviets would be allowed to overfly each others' territories for military verification. Proposed in the 1950s but not ratified until 2002. Nonetheless, reframed concepts of openness and transparency. 1986: Gorbachev takes up the US offer of transparency across the board and furthers the norm of transparency.

US corporate disclosure starting in early 20th century in response to trusts and other bits of capitalism.

Sweden's freedom of information act in 18th century.

What are the supposed benefits of transparency? Anti-corruption, economic growth, political stability, civil freedom. Back to, what kind of accountability is necessary for success? And back to the issue of Singapore as an example of success without accountability.

How would you know if Singapore was not doing okay? You wouldn't, if you only read the Straits Times. (Joel's Note: Not only does the Straits Times filter, but I think it's also important that the bad news that it does print seems calibrated to control the boundaries of thought. That is, it provides a steady stream of things to worry about that are small, that direct public thought in desired directions, and that distract from more fundamental problems)

Transparency as a means to efficiency or transparency as a means to rights.

Joel's note: N.B.: A key issue in US politics the last few months is the degree to which the government and telecom companies will be held accountable and/or subject to transparency for illegal domestic surveillance. The courts have made a beautiful catch-22 ruling about who can claim to be damaged and thus have standing to sue in order to get disclosure. If I remember correctly, you can't sue unless you were harmed, but you can't get access to information that shows you were harmed until after you win a lawsuit. The whole dispute comes into even sharper focus in the context of today's class.

This is the one class where we get in trouble if we don't do the readings, and it's in two hours and I haven't done the readings. Erp.

Florini, The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World, chapters 2 and 9

Mallen Baker, “The Global Reporting Initiative - Leap forward or last gasp?” Ethical Corporation, p 40, March 9, 2006

"Sustainability reports are even more heavily dependent on the context [compared to financial reports]. And yet all the current models of reporting expect the companies to provide their own narrative – to tell the story complete. But that does not work, because the end user actually does not read the reports, and does not even trust the company to provide its own context."

We talked about that in class, but I think maybe in 5263, not 5262, about the problem that we don't have any real feel for the numbers yet. If a corporation outputs 5,000 tons of CO2 in a year, is that more or less than their fair share?

Virginia Haufler, “Corporate Transparency: International Diffusion of a Policy Idea?” Paper prepared for the IR Field Workshop, University of Maryland, April 17, 2006.

One World Trust Global Accountability Project, 2007 Global Accountability Report

How are 30 top TLAs (including NGOs, IGOs, and MNCs) doing with their accountability reporting? They range from pretty good to pretty bad; the average IGO is must better than the average NGO, which is slightly better than the average MNC. Of four dimensions, transparency is worst. "All assessed TNCs have weak external stakeholder engagement capabilities." TNCs are narrowly in the lead on complaint handling,