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The Goal of "6 Californias" Remains a Mystery

by Chastity9634 Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Now that billionaire eccentric Tim Draper has gotten enough signatures to qualify his “Six Californias” initiative for the ballot in 2016, I can no longer imperiously demand that the media stop paying attention to him. If this is going to be a ballot measure then it’s obviously a legitimate news story.

So a friend emailed this morning to ask what Draper’s deal is. Beats me. Officially, his motivation is a belief that California is simply too big to govern. As plausible as this is, it’s hardly a sufficient explanation. So what is it that’s really eating him? Well, Draper is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, so a few months ago Time asked him about that particular sixth of California:

How would you like to see things done differently in Silicon Valley, if it had its own government?

The issues of Silicon Valley are things like when Napster came out. No one knew how the law should be handled. It was a new technology. And no one quite knew whether it had some violation of copyright or not … And the people who were making those decisions were very distant, and not familiar with what Napster was. Now we have Bitcoin. We have very uncertain laws around Bitcoin. I believe if there were a government closer to Silicon Valley, it would be more in touch with those technologies and the need for making appropriate laws around them. Silicon Valley is seeing great frustration. They see how creative and efficient and exciting life can be in a place where innovation thrives, and then they see a government that is a little lost.

This makes no sense, since both copyright law and monetary policy are set in Washington DC, not Sacramento. But let’s accept that Draper was just burbling a bit here, and not hold him to specifics. What’s his beef? Basically, he appears to be retailing a strain of techno-libertarian utopianism or something. Information wants to be free! Technology will save us all! Just get government out of the way!

Or something. I don’t know, really. The whole thing is crazy, and it’s yet another example of how easy it is for billionaires to get publicity. Paying a signature-gathering firm to get something on the ballot in California is pretty trivial if you have a lot of money, and it automatically gets you a ton of exposure. So now Draper has that. But what’s the end game? Even if his initiative passes, he knows perfectly well it’s going nowhere since Congress will never approve it. So either (a) he’s just a crackpot or (b) he has some clever reason for doing this that’s going to make him even richer. It’s a mystery.

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The Goal of "6 Californias" Remains a Mystery

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Government Failures On the Rise? Take It With a Grain of Salt.

by TravisMcnutt Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Light has gotten a lot of attention for his recent study showing that “government failures” are on the rise. I’ve seen several criticisms of his study, but it seems to me that basic methodology is really the main problem with it. First off, his dataset is a list of “41 important past government failures (between 2001 – 2014) from a search of news stories listed in the Pew Research Center’s News Interest Index.” Is that really a good way of determining the frequency of government failures? A list of headlines might be a good way of determining public interest, but it hardly seems like even a remotely good proxy for cataloging government failure in general.

For example, 2007 appears to be an epically bad year for government failure. But among the failures are “wounded soldiers,” “food safety recalls,” and “consumer product recalls.” Those all seem a bit amorphous to count as distinct failures.

This methodology also mushes up timeframes. Fast & Furious is counted as a government failure in 2011, but that’s just the year it made headlines. The operation itself ran from 2006-11. Likewise, the “postal service financing crisis” is hardly unique to 2011. It’s been ongoing for years.

Some of the items don’t even appear to be proper government failures. Was the Gulf oil spill in 2010 a government failure? Or the Southwest airline groundings? In both cases, you can argue—as Light does—that they exposed lax government oversight. But this basically puts you in the position of arguing that any failure in a regulated industry is a government failure. I’m not sure I buy that.

Finally, on the flip side, there are the things that don’t show up. The government shutdown in 2013? The fiscal cliff? The debt ceiling standoffs? The collapse of the Copenhagen conference? Allowing Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora? The scandalous demotion of Pluto to non-planet status?

Maybe I’m just picking nits here. But given the weakness of the core methodology; the small number of incidents; the problems of categorization; and the overall vagueness of what “failure” means, I’m just not sure this study tells us much. I’d take it with a big shaker of salt for the moment. It seems more like clickbait than a serious analysis of how well or poorly government has done over the past decade.

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Government Failures On the Rise? Take It With a Grain of Salt.

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Nothing Left to Steal?

by JohnnieR41 Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Megan McArdle points out that cars are a lot harder to steal than they used to be:

Other forms of crime are also getting less lucrative. “Small-time marijuana dealer” is no longer a viable career option in several states. Robbery is also getting tougher. As credit card transactions have come to dominate cash, the potential return from mugging someone, or knocking over a gas station, has fallen dramatically. Even burglars are facing some challenges: Expensive televisions are now too big to carry unless you bring a dolly and a truck, home theater systems are often wired into the wall, and at least in my circles, women don’t wear as much fancy jewelry or mink as they used to. For a while, small electronics made up the cash gap for burglars, muggers, and purse snatchers, but cell phone manufacturers are putting in “kill switches” starting in 2015, which will torpedo that market.

Well, perhaps in years to come thieves will turn to technology to improve their productivity. I don’t know how, but then again, we rarely predict technological revolutions in advance, do we? Maybe new smartphone apps will allow thieves to target more lucrative mugging victims? Or geolocation apps will predict which homes are likely to contain the most easily fencible items? Or maybe sophisticated data mining operations will produce new and innovative opportunities for blackmail. Beats me. But somehow offense and defense always seem to keep up with each other, don’t they?

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Nothing Left to Steal?

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

by Joellen54X Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

by LorrieWolford Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s an additional tidbit from that recent Commonwealth Fund survey about Obamacare:

That’s a lot of Republicans who are satisfied with their Obamacare coverage. They might not realize it’s Obamacare—perhaps they know it as Kynect or Covered California—but they like it. And if you take it away, they’re going to be unhappy. That’s several million potentially unhappy Republicans if the national GOP continues its anti-Obamacare jihad. Just saying.

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

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Quote of the Day: "This Isn’t Theater"

by DanutaBertie Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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From President Obama, asked why he wasn’t making a visit to the border during his trip to Texas today:

This isn’t theater. This is a problem.

“I’m not interested in a photo-op,” he said. “I’m interested in solving a problem.” It would be nice if he weren’t the only one.

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Quote of the Day: "This Isn’t Theater"

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Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama’s Impeachment

by RosalinOrosco Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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I see that Sarah Palin is apparently starved for attention again. Here’s her latest:

President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here. It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along, and, mark my words, will next meddle in the U.S. Court System with appointments that will forever change the basic interpretation of our Constitution’s role in protecting our rights.

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.

Quite right. Minors are swarming our borders because American exceptionalism is at risk thanks to Obama’s failure to help the Ukrainians which means our enemies no longer fear us and the dollar is being debased. Or was it because he failed to arm the Syrian rebels? I forget. Something to do with Putin, though. And the Fed. Plus, um, recess appointments and one-year extensions to TyrannyCare mandates. And Benghazi.

Whatever. Impeach Obama! I sure hope every Republican in the country is asked to weigh in on this.

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Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama’s Impeachment

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Quote of the Day: Bizarro John Boehner Joins Twitter

by Maddiso5893 Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen points me to the latest foray into social networking from Speaker John Boehner:

Democrats like to say they want to fix #ObamaCare, but where’s their plan? They don’t have one.

It’s not worth belaboring the fact that this is epically dumb. What I’m curious about is what Boehner thinks this will accomplish. Who is it supposed to appeal to? To the tea party true believers, it’s too weak to be effective. They want read meat. To liberals it’s just laughable. To folks in the middle it’s incomprehensible. To the media—which knows perfectly well that Dems have plenty of ideas and Republicans are hopelessly fractured over health care—it’s idiotic.

So who’s the audience for this?

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Quote of the Day: Bizarro John Boehner Joins Twitter

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Defining Stalinoid Down

by EzequieMighell Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I was paging through the New Republic and, for some reason, ended up torturing myself by reading Leon Wieselter’s latest exercise in pretension and self-regard. It was fairly ordinary, as these things go, but included this aside about supporters of the Iraq War:

(The other day Rachel Maddow, who has never been significantly wrong about anything, published this Stalinoid sentence in The Washington Post: “Whether they are humbled by their own mistakes or not, it is our civic responsibility to ensure that a history of misstatements and misjudgments has consequences for a person’s credibility in our national discourse.”)

Stalinoid? Seriously? For a very mild suggestion that people with a history of being wrong should be thought less credible in the future? That sounds more like a bare minimum of common sense than a cultural pogrom aimed at neocons and liberal hawks.

I’ve suggested in the past that we should all calm down a bit over analogies to Hitler and Nazis in popular discourse, so I’m hardly one to complain about using Stalin in the same way. But this is still a pretty reprehensible slur. Wieselter needs to find a better outlet for his frustration over being wrong about the Iraq War.

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Defining Stalinoid Down

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In Defense of Optics

by DanutaIPVhtny Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a Twitter conversation this afternoon between Jamison Foser and me:

Foser: Dumbest words in politics: “Optics,” “Gaffe,” “Hypocrisy.” (That latter one is a real thing, but misused to the point of meaninglessness.)

Drum: But “optics” is just short for “how this will look to others.” Nothing really wrong with that.

Foser: “Optics” = “I cannot articulate a substantive problem with this, so I’ll just suggest others won’t like it.” It’s a house of cards.

Drum: But don’t politicians routinely consider the optics of their actions? I mean really, genuinely, think about it. It’s a real thing.

Foser: Not sure why that means anyone should care, or how that validates 99% of use of word by reporters/operatives/pundits….And I’ve really, genuinely thought about it for a couple decades.

Drum: What word would you suggest instead? The concept itself is pretty ordinary.

Foser: I don’t think we need a word for “people might not like the Congressman’s cheesesteak order.” I think we need to shut up about it.

Drum: Hmmm. It’s a slow day. Maybe I’ll blog about this since I think my disagreement is more than 140 characters long.

Foser: Then here’s another angle: To the extent “optics” claims are about “analyzing” rather than sneakily influencing reactions, I find that pointless as well. “Here’s what I think people will think” is generally dull & unimportant.

Here’s the thing: like most anything, there are good uses of the word optics and dumb uses of the word optics. To the extent that it becomes an excuse for fatuous preoccupations with Al Gore’s earth tones or Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees, then yes, it’s dumb. The world would be a better place if campaign beat reporters spent a lot less time on this kind of soul-crushing imbecility.

But that’s not the only use of the word. As I mentioned in my first tweet—though see the note below for more about this—it’s also used as a shortcut for a specifically political meaning of “how something will look to other people.” And if you object to that, then you’re just railing against human nature. Unless you’re clinically autistic, obsessing with how our actions will appear to others is fundamental to the human condition. Ditto for obsessing with other people’s appearances.

That’s especially true for anyone in the sales and marketing business, where appearances are literally what the job is all about. And who’s more in the sales and marketing business than a politician? Sure, they have actual products—universal pre-K, cutting tax rates, whatever—but most people don’t buy their products based on a Brookings white paper outlining the pros and cons. They buy it based on how it fits into their worldview, and that in turn owes more to how it’s sold than to what’s actually being sold.

So when you try to figure out why, say, Marco Rubio’s immigration reform plan crashed and burned, you’re missing half the story if you only look at the details of his plan. If you’re covering a campaign, you’re missing half the story if you don’t report about how the campaign is trying to mold public perceptions. If you’re writing a history of the Iraq War, you’re missing half the story if you don’t spend time explaining the marketing campaign behind the whole thing. For better or worse, politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how various audiences—supporters, opponents, undecideds, pundits, members of Congress, the media—will react to their proposals, and they shape their messages accordingly. If you’re reporting on politics, you have to include that as part of the story, and optics is as good a word as any to describe it.

That said, we’d be better off if there were fewer dumb appeals to optics. If you’re going to talk about optics, it should be based on either (a) ground-level reporting about what someone’s political operation is actually doing, or (b) empirical data like poll numbers about how people react to things. If all you’re doing is inventing stuff that no one on the planet would have noticed if you hadn’t been hard up for column material, then you’re responsible for making us collectively stupider and giving optics a bad name. Knock it off.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’ve defended the word optics against critics before, which suggests that in my mind I really do think it’s OK to use it:

When someone says “optics,” for example, I know that they’re talking not just about general appearances, but about how something plays in the media and how it plays with public opinion. Using the word optics also suggests that you’re referring to a highly-planned operation managed by media pros, not just some random event on the street.

On the other hand, I don’t actually use the word very much myself, which suggests that in my heart I agree with Foser more than I’m letting on.

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In Defense of Optics

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