Governing is Prediction

My last post called attention to W. Edwards Deming's observation that management is prediction.

This is true of government as well.

Ideally, both elected officials and civil servants would take into account during policy deliberations some prediction of the effects of the policies. But how can the public follow the issues and know what are the intended or probable outcomes of government measures?

We have prognosticators. Pundits. Professional explainers and predictors. Some write for newspapers and magazines and some talk on television. Surely the most influential of these pundits are the ones whose punditry is most accurate, right?

Not Exactly.

Recently a group of scholars in Public Policy at Hamilton University decided to examine the accuracy of prognostications by professional prognosticators, with interesting results.

This was not a ground breaking study. A more comprehensive twenty-year study of political and economic forecasting was summarized by Philip Tetlock in his book Expert Political Judgment. Tetlock's study was based on predictions by 284 experts on political and economic trends, and a subsequent analysis of the accuracy of the predictions. His findings:

-Extrapolation using mathematical models does better than human prediction
-Education and popularity increase the predictors' confidence but not their accuracy
-Prognosticators overpredict change and underpredict the status quo
-Extremists predict worse than moderates
-Some people predict better than others, even outside their area of expertise

The Hamilton study was more limited in time and scope, but focused on contemporary prognosticators. The most accurate prognosticator in their study was Paul Krugman of the New York Times. The least accurate was Cal Thomas. In general, they found that liberals were better prognosticators, especially if they had no law degree.

Management is Prediction

"The theory of knowledge helps us to understand that management in any form is prediction."

-W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics

Other Deming observations:

Knowledge is built on theory;

Use of Data requires prediction;

There is no true measurement without an operational definition;

Information is not knowledge.

Oh, That's Just a Theory!

It's often the case that people unfamiliar with or resistant to scientific undertakings dismiss peer-reviewed research by saying: "that's just a theory." As if it were an unsupported guess.

I have even said something like that myself: "I have a theory" about something. What I mean to say is, "I have a hypothesis."

A hypothesis is more than a guess. It is a supposition based on familiarity with the subject, experience, or deep thought. A proper hypothesis must be testable.

The point of testing a hypothesis is to disprove it. No hypothesis can be proven. It can only be disproven. If a proper test fails to disprove a hypothesis, the next step is to try another test. Collect more data. Give the problem more thought. Examine whether we have a case of coincidence or one of cause and effect.

Then take all the data collected, observations made, and develop a theory. The theory must be compatible with all the observed data. The theory should also be testable. If the tests fail to disprove the theory, then it may be adopted as the best explanation available, but no theory can ever be proven. It is the job of scientists to reexamine accepted theory in light of new knowledge, new methods of measurement and observation.

Theory is the best you get. There is never final certainty.

On Cooperation

"Competition leads to loss. People pulling in opposite directions on a rope only exhaust themselves: they go nowhere. What we need is cooperation. Every example of cooperation is one of benefit and gains to them that cooperate. Cooperation is especially productive in a system well managed. It is easy to make a list of examples of cooperation, some of which are so natural that we may not have recognized them as cooperation. Everybody wins."

W. Edwards Deming

Redistricting

We attended a meeting last night on redistricting in North Carolina. This is required after every decennial US census, to insure that each legislative district (and some other districts) represent the same number of citizens.

The process is highly political (meaning partisan). It is also subject to complex legal constraints. The Research Division of the N.C. General Assembly has prepared a very helpful pamphlet: "Legislator's Guide to North Carolina Legislative and Congressional Redistricting." The pamphlet makes it very clear how difficult it is just to comply with the legal requirements. Once you overlay the legal requirements with the natural desire of each political party to maximize its vote and minimize that of the other parties, the challenge becomes mind-boggling.

The reasons we have so much difficulty with redistricting are:
1. Representation is by geography rather than by social, cultural or economic affinities;
2. We have single-member districts with representation decided on a winner-take-all vote;
3. By comparison with other countries, we have few legislators;
4. We have only two viable political parties.

The truth is, the reason we have only two parties is because of the first three characteristics of our system.

Is there a better way?

I think there is. For legislative elections, I favor multi-member districts and proportional representation. It is not as complicated as it sounds. Such an approach would almost certainly introduce new political parties into the system and require parties to cooperate. It would be less likely that a single party would control any house of a legislature, thus leading to coalition building. And redistricting would become much less complex.

Based on the past couple of decades of polling by Times Mirror and the Pew Trust, it seems that our population would shake out into perhaps nine or ten opinion groupings and perhaps that many parties.

Would such a change lead to better outcomes? Who knows? But such a system works pretty well elsewhere.

I predict we will adopt such a system as soon as we can persuade pigs to fly.

Management that Works

I'm reading through The New Economics by W. Edwards Deming. That his methods get results is demonstrated by the postwar success of the Japanese automobile industry after he trained them in his system. More recently, his methods have contributed to the current success of the Ford motor company.

Every page of his book has one or more gems. Here's one:

"Reward for good performance may be the same as reward to the weather man for a pleasant day."

The Matinee - Waiting for Hopalong

In the late forties, kids flocked to the matinees. It was always a raucous crowd of children ranging from about five years old to twelve or so. When the cartoon started up, the crowd cheered and then watched in rapt attention as the previews of coming attractions, the next episode of an exciting serial and the newsreels all flashed on the screen.

Then came the main attraction, usually a cowboy movie but sometimes a detective story like Boston Blackie.

Cowboys were the favorite and it was from those movies that we received the most influential instruction about proper conduct. Cowboy movies were far more influential than Sunday School.

The plots were always the same. The villain, a greedy, cowardly bully who sent his hired hands to do the dirty work, had devised a way to take over the town and leave the good, hardworking and honest townspeople, farmers and ranchers without an effective voice.

Then the hero rode into town. It might be Hopalong Cassidy or the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Lash Larue or Wild Bill Hickock. It might even be Roy Rogers or Gene Autry, though they sang entirely too much.

The hero quickly sized up the situation, possibly spying on the villain. Then he organized thetownspeople, pumped up their courage and led them in the effort to undo the villain's plan. There was always a fist fight, and often a gun fight, though the hero never killed anyone. He would just shoot the gun out of the bad guys' hand and "bring him to justice," which meant turn him over to the Sheriff.

It was all good fun, even though we knew it was unlikely that a real world hero could shoot a gun out of someone's hand without otherwise harming him.

Other moral lessons from these movies: greed is bad and greedy people are usually evil; people have to stick together to fight evil; honest workers who do an honest days' work for an honest days' wages are the good guys; if a deal isn't fair, it isn't right.

And altruism is good.

Not bad life lessons.

In the real world, though, it might not work to just wait for Hopalong. Sometimes we have to set things right ourselves.

Ford Ascendant

Ford Motor Company today reported its first quarter net income was $2.6 billion, or 61 cents per share, a $466 million increase from first quarter 2010. Pre-tax operating profit was $2.8 billion, or 62 cents per share, an increase of $827 million from first quarter 2010. Ford also reported it had posted a pre-tax operating profit for seven consecutive quarters.

This is not just good news for Ford. It is good news for a particularly effective style of management, advocated by one of America's great innovators.

After a bad experience with an automobile built by one of Ford's domestic competitors, I read that Ford had hired W. Edwards Deming as a consultant on quality. Not long afterward, I bought a 1987 Taurus and have purchased Ford products ever since.

It wasn't that I thought Deming could magically and immediately bring Ford up to the quality of the Japanese auto makers to whom he gave advice not long after WWII. It was rather that I thought his hiring told me that Ford was now taking quality seriously. That meant a lot.

It turns out, Deming paid no attention to the details of Ford's quality control procedures. He examined Ford's management. It is management, he insisted, that is responsible for 85 percent of a company's problems with quality.

Problems don't lie to any significant degree with the workers, and cannot be corrected by the workers. Slogans and exhortations don't work, he insisted. Instead, he concentrated on changing the culture of management.

Good for Ford.

I'll have more to say later about some of Deming's ideas and how they might help address some of our problems in government and politics.

Church and State II

In the late 1940's, I attended Star School, a rural grade school about eight or ten miles east of Oklahoma City.

In addition to reciting the Lord's Prayer every morning, we had other religious instruction.

The most memorable was the annual visit by an itinerant preacher, who addressed the student body on the importance of religion, the evils of smoking, and related subjects.

At one point in his presentation, the preacher asked if any student could recite the golden rule. He offered a quarter to anyone who could do so. Hands shot up, usually hands of eager boys anxious to win the quarter. The preacher would call on the boys in turn. None ever won the quarter.

The only way to win, it turned out, was to recite the King James translation of Matthew 7:12 - "whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." No variations allowed.

I don't recall that he required the rest of the verse, where Jesus is quoted as saying: "for this is the law and the prophets." That is, this is the essence of Judaism, and by implication, the essence of Christianity.

Sounds like altruism to me. Maybe those who claim to be Christians and also followers of Ayn Rand should reexamine their position.

National Strategy

This morning on CNN, Fareed Zakaria disclosed and discussed a new strategic vision for the United States contained in an article by "Y," the pseudonym used by two military officers on the JCS staff.

The article is intended to be a twenty-first century replacement for George Frost Kennan's "X" article published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs. Kennan's article proposed the strategy of "containment," which dominated US strategic thinking for the next four decades. (Kennan himself objected to what he described as the "militarization" of containment).

The newly proposed Strategic Narrative suggests replacing "containment" with "sustainment." The authors describe it as follows: "The primary approach this Strategic Narrative advocates to achieve sustainable prosperity and security, is through the application of credible influence and strength, the pursuit of fair competition, acknowledgement of interdependencies and converging interests, and adaptation to complex, dynamic systems all bounded by our national values."

I'm skeptical that this new article will prove to provide adequate strategic direction for America's future, but I agree that we need to broaden our vision concerning national security beyond military power and punitive measures. I'll have more to say later.

Earth Day

Today, April 22, is Earth Day 2011.

A week ago, while I was watching Dr. Strangelove at the Old Theater in Oriental, the scene where General Jack D. Ripper described the commie plot to threaten our precious bodily fluids reminded me of an event during the first Earth Day in 1970. I remembered being told by my destroyer squadron commander that the event was a "commie plot." It was obviously a communist plot, he explained, because Vladimir Lenin was born on April 22, the day of the Earth Day celebration. Even more significantly, he emphasized, Lenin was born April 22, 1870, so the first Earth Day was in celebration of Lenin's centenary.

Not exactly.

In fact, the first Earth Day was organized by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, a long-time environmental activist. April 22 was selected because that spring it came on a Wednesday, and wouldn't be a day taken off just to have a long weekend.

As for Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, April 22 1970 wasn't exactly his birthday, either. He was born in Russia, which used the old style Julian Calendar until after the 1917 Russian Revolution. In England and America, which used the Gregorian calendar since 1752, Lenin was born on May 4, 1870. The calendar discrepancy is why the Soviet Union always celebrated the October 1917 revolution in November.

Anyhow, Earth Day never had anything to do with Lenin.

Political Order

Based on a recent review in the New York Times, I have added a new book by Francis Fukuyama to my reading list.

The book, The Origins of Political Order, is said to reflect an evolution of his thinking earlier expressed in an essay, The End of History. Although I had problems with the thesis of his earlier book, I am intrigued by the new one, in which he takes issue not only with his earlier neoconservative colleagues, but also with the individualist views of libertarians.

Fukuyama views politics as a product of history and evolution, and rejects the absolutism of Lockean natural rights theory and market fundamentalism. In contrast to libertarians like Friedrich Hayek, who try to explain society in terms of Homo economicus, Fukuyama emphasizes that a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy.

“Human beings never existed," he observes, "in a pre­social state. The idea that human beings at one time existed as isolated individuals, who interacted either through anarchic violence (Hobbes) or in pacific ignorance of one another (Rousseau), is not correct.”

Vote for the Candidate, Not for the Party

Balderdash!

Remember: if politics were an Olympic event, it would be a team sport, not an individual competition.

The most important fact to know about a candidate for public office is the candidate's political party.

Why is that?

Since the dawn of the American republic, we have had at least two political parties - one that pursued the interests of the wealthy and another that pursued the interests of the common man. (At the beginning, only men could vote, so it was accurate to speak of the "common man," which meant, of course, white men.)

Just try to imagine how the people's business could ever get done if our representatives in Congress consisted of 435 supremely confident egotists in the House of Representatives with no underlying organization. Suppose they had to form coalitions from scratch for every bill. Nothing would get done. Voters need to know what the parties stand for, because they are essential to the process.

Over the past two centuries, party labels have changed, and we occasionally had one or more additional parties, but they always shake down to two. Sometimes a candidate tries to hide the identity of his party. Two years ago, the Republican party candidate for the state house had a float in Oriental's annual Croaker Fest parade. Nowhere on the float did it identify his political party. Only that he was a conservative (whatever that means).

So when a candidate is elected and voters say, "I didn't know he was going to support..." - for example, measures to reduce funding for public schools - it shouldn't be a surprise, but it often is. Pay attention to the party and the program of the party's movers and shakers.

Just ask the voters in Wisconsin.

Darwin and the Anarchist Prince

About five years after Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species, a young Russian army officer, Prince Peter Kropotkin, became involved in geographic and biological research in Siberia and Manchuria.

Kropotkin resigned from the Army in 1867, continuing to work as a scientist and also as a revolutionary. Even after arrest and incarceration in St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress, Kropotkin continued writing important scientific papers.

Later exiled in Western Europe, Kropotkin became prominent as an anarchist, though not of the bomb-throwing kind.

In addition to his activities in anarchist circles, Kropotkin continued writing on scientific subjects.

In 1902, Kropotkin published the book, Mutual Aid: a Factor in Evolution, based on his scientific research of four decades earlier. The conclusion of his book took direct aim at Social Darwinism's claims:

"In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay."
– Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion


In other words, Kropotkin suggests that altruism, so denigrated by Ayn Rand and her followers, plays an important role in the success of the human species.

Interestingly, recent scientific research lends weight to Kropotkin's views. A recent book, Supercooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Why We Need Each Other To Succeed , by Martin A. Nowak, examines the issues. Here is an interesting review of the book.

Even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has reported in a recent column about research substantiating the importance of collective achievement as opposed to individual efforts.

The Great Commoner

A couple of weeks ago, Turner Classic Movies showed "Inherit the Wind," a powerful drama with Spencer Tracy as a fictionalized Clarence Darrow-like character and Frederick March as a fictionalized version of William Jennings Bryan.

The setting was the 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, TN of a high school biology teacher who taught his students Darwin's theory of evolution.

The drama presents Bryan as a narrow-minded religious fanatic. Bryan was, in fact, a fundamentalist Presbyterian who objected to Darwin's theories as contrary to the Bible. The movie's unflattering and inaccurate caricature of Bryan misrepresented a major source of the man's emotional opposition to evolution.

In a 1905 speech, Bryan objected that "the Darwinian theory represents man reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate, the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. If this is the law of our development then, if there is any logic that can bind the human mind, we shall turn backward to the beast in proportion as we substitute the law of love. I choose to believe that love rather than hatred is the law of development."

In other words, what had aroused Bryan's ire was the Social Darwinism that had made such claims.

While on the one hand, Bryan was a fundamentalist, he was also a theological and social liberal. He dedicated himself to the Social Gospel, an important school of religious thought emphasizing the need for Christians to serve their fellow man, including giving their lives to public service.

In a word, he believed in altruism.

Altruism and Politics

"Altruism ( /ˈæltruːɪzəm/) is selfless concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of 'others' toward whom concern should be directed can vary among religions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness." - Wikipedia

Altruism is central to the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and central to early Christian practices as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of Paul. Altruism is also central to Judaism.

The wealthy and powerful have never believed in altruism. Historically, they claimed immunity due to some variation of divine will. But usually the wealthy and powerful have been big on altruism by ordinary people.

Then along came science.

In the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the wealthy welcomed Darwin's theory of natural selection as expounded by certain popularizers ("survival of the fittest"). Social Darwinism was seen as providing scientific justification for why it was meet and proper for wealthy "robber barons" to have accumulated so much wealth. The 1929 crash of Wall Street rather tarnished this claim.

Ayn Rand to the rescue.

Rand (born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905), was an atheist novelist, playwright and philosopher who immigrated to the United States in 1926. A 1924 graduate of Petrograd State University in Petrograd, Russia (later Leningrad and now St. Petersburg), she developed a following in this country for her ideas, expressed in two novels and a series of "philosophical" writings.

In short, Rand's philosophy inveighed against altruism and in favor of "rational egoism," i.e. selfishness. She has many followers, prominently including Congressman Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, former chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan, and more recently most adherents of the Libertarian Party and the Tea Party movement. Her particular talent was in "her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed."

The wealthy and powerful responded by adopting her right-wing romantic fantasies as their own, and pursuing them as a political program. Here. in their admiring view, was an intellectual underpinning to replace Darwinism as a justification for their wealth.

Perfection

"If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be."

Yogi Berra

Spring Has Sprung

Spring has finally arrived. How do I know for sure? Last Friday I watched the opening day game between the Washington Nationals and the Atlanta Braves.

Opening Day of Major League Baseball is a better guide to Spring than the vernal equinox.

On Growing Older

Received from a friend:

"Growing Older is Mandatory; Growing Up is Optional."

Japanese Serenity

It has been 45 years since I lived in Japan.

Much has changed, but much remains the same.

Forty-five years ago, it was not clear that Japanese would accept nuclear power.

What was clear even then was the ability of Japanese society to pull together.

American newspapers write of panic in Japan. As I watch the coverage, I see no signs of panic. Everyone is going about their business with purpose, and the purpose is to help each other.

It reminds me of Reinhold Neibuhr's Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.