October 27, 2010
Why can’t Chuck get his business off the ground?
The new broom in Toronto
After a particularly hard-fought election campaign, Chris Selley looks at the opening moves Toronto mayor Rob Ford will be making:
It’s kind of funny to see people who’ve spent the past 10 months trashing Rob Ford now insist he needs to extend olive branches to the progressive community. If I were Rob Ford, and I had an olive branch, I might be tempted to extend it rather violently towards my harshest critics. (Then, in accordance with my new and improved image, I’d take two deep breaths and calm down.)
Clearly Mr. Ford is sticking with his gravy train priorities off the top: departmental efficiencies, contracting out services, cutting councillor budgets and staff. At a media scrum on Tuesday afternoon, his message hadn’t changed, that I could discern, from what it was during the campaign. Basically: Trust me. The money’s there to be saved, and it won’t hurt a bit.
Still, Mayor Ford will have a city to keep happy. And while they received very little notice during the campaign, his platform included several populist, pro-democratic and dirt-cheap measures I’d defy anyone to oppose and that could earn him some grudging praise from disaffected Pantaloons and Smithermanians.
The large turnout and the not-quite-majority of votes cast for Ford should at least quiet the claims that he “doesn’t have a mandate” for a little while. If he can actually deliver on some of his campaign promises to reduce spending and eliminate some of the least useful municipal programs/initiatives, he’ll be a vast improvement over the last mayor. Even if he doesn’t — he only has a single vote on council, so it’s not automatic that he’ll be able to implement his agenda — it should be an interesting term in office.
Kathy Shaidle shows why Rob Ford had “hidden” strength in the campaign that the media couldn’t account for:
What is Rob Ford most famous for?
No, not that he looks exactly like everybody’s drunk, abusive stepfather. No, not the “gravy train” line.
Rob Ford is “the guy who returns every call.”
That was always Ford’s claim to fame: that even if you didn’t [live] in his ward, he returned your call. If you were wrapped up in red tape and called Rob Ford, an hour or maybe a day later, the tape got snipped. The Wheeltrans showed up at your elderly mother’s door. That stupid problem you’d been screaming at bureaucrats about got taken care of.
Everyone in Toronto knows a Rob Ford story like that.
October 25, 2010
Studying bureaucratic bias
I’ve always thought that behaviour patterns of bureaucrats are fairly easy to predict: it all hinges on risk/reward. A bureaucrat with expectation of retiring at the peak of pension eligibility will have a very high aversion to risk — but not quite what most people refer to as risk. A bureaucrat has a built-in bias to “stay the course”, to avoid “rocking the boat”, and to prevent the kind of change that will introduce exceptions to normal process.
Expecting a bureaucrat to react like an entrepreneur is unrealistic, because the bureaucrat’s risks (loss of promotion opportunities, loss of status, but not usually loss of job) do not scale well against the possible rewards — except in particularly corrupt jurisdictions, bureaucrats do not directly benefit from making risky decisions.
Given that, is it any surprise that bureaucrats, as a whole, are quite unwilling to step outside “normal practice” or to allow variances, exceptions, or (sometimes) even common sense solutions?
I should be careful (except that I’m a blogger, where “careful” really just means “avoiding lawsuits”), because there’s a risk I’m suffering from one of the traits identified in behavioural economics, the illusion of competence in my preceding horseback judgement:
There is a fashionable new science — behavioral economics, they call it — which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the “bandwagon effect.” And it labels as “hindsight bias” the all-too-common tendency during the recent bust to imagine that past events were more predictable than they were. Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like “loss aversion”: how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got.
But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that “in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence.” Public servants are human, too.
Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence.
In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand.
October 23, 2010
“How Many Australian Politicians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?”
None:
The (tangential) Free-Range issue here is this: Why are we increasingly subject to rules and regs that have nothing to do with REAL safety and everything to do with litigation, worst-case-scenario-fantasizing and good ol’ CYA? It’s a time, money and morale-waster, with the added benefit of turning competent people into incompetent cowards. Just like so many rules and regs are implementing with kids: No, children, you CANNOT ride your bikes to school. No, children, you CANNOT do your own chemistry experiments. No, children, you CANNOT babysit/whittle/get a paper route/smile at a stranger. It is all TOO DANGEROUS.
And someday we will wonder why no one in the world (except, perhaps, electricians) can do anything.
H/T to Walter Olson.
October 21, 2010
An excellent example of how not to teach
Cory Doctorow finds the worst example of teacher overreach (for this week, anyway):
Fundamentally, these teachers have prohibited doing any kind of outside work, having any productive discussion with your friends and family that might connect the history you’re learning with the world you’re living in. They have reduced education to absorbing and regurgitating a specific set of facts, divorcing it from any kind of critical thinking, synthesis, or intellectual rigor.
Parents have complained to the principal, who “will decide soon whether these rules are okay.”
I had a high school history teacher who marked me down for including additional information that wasn’t in the textbook (I read history for interest well before high school). I wonder if this is one of her relatives . . .
If I was a parent of one of these students, I’d be giving strong consideration to moving my kid to another school if the principal upholds this policy.
October 20, 2010
Shocker: terrorists now free to take photos of public buildings!
<sarc>Speaking of giving terrorists a free ride, some liberal lame-brain has granted terrorists the right to take photographs of public buildings:
The New York Civil Liberties Union and Libertarian activist Antonio Musumeci just won a court case that affirms the right of photographers to take pictures and record video out front of federal courthouses. The US federal government settled the case by apologizing to Musumeci for his arrest, acknowledging that it is legal to record at courthouses, and promising to issue guidelines to federal officers explaining this fact to them.
Amazing. Next you’ll be telling me that just anyone can now brazenly take photos of any federal building at all!</sarc>
“We got an opt-out!”
I’ve said before that I’ve been avoiding going anywhere by plane for the last few years, but I didn’t realize the security theatre also applied to aircrew:
My name is Michael Roberts, and I am a pilot for ExpressJet Airlines, Inc., based in Houston (that is, I still am for the time being). This morning as I attempted to pass through the security line for my commute to work I was denied access to the secured area of the terminal building at Memphis International Airport. I have passed through the same line roughly once per week for the past four and a half years without incident. Today, however, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at this checkpoint were using one of the new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) systems that are currently being deployed at airports across the nation. These are the controversial devices featured by the media in recent months, albeit sparingly, which enable screeners to see beneath people’s clothing to an extremely graphic and intrusive level of detail (virtual strip searching). Travelers refusing this indignity may instead be physically frisked by a government security agent until the agent is satisfied to release them on their way in what is being touted as an “alternative option” to AIT. The following is a somewhat hastily drafted account of my experience this morning.
As I loaded my bags onto the X-ray scanner belt, an agent told me to remove my shoes and send them through as well, which I’ve not normally been required to do when passing through the standard metal detectors in uniform. When I questioned her, she said it was necessary to remove my shoes for the AIT scanner. I explained that I did not wish to participate in the AIT program, so she told me I could keep my shoes and directed me through the metal detector that had been roped off. She then called somewhat urgently to the agents on the other side: “We got an opt-out!” and also reported the “opt-out” into her handheld radio. On the other side I was stopped by another agent and informed that because I had “opted out” of AIT screening, I would have to go through secondary screening. I asked for clarification to be sure he was talking about frisking me, which he confirmed, and I declined. At this point he and another agent explained the TSA’s latest decree, saying I would not be permitted to pass without showing them my naked body, and how my refusal to do so had now given them cause to put their hands on me as I evidently posed a threat to air transportation security (this, of course, is my nutshell synopsis of the exchange). I asked whether they did in fact suspect I was concealing something after I had passed through the metal detector, or whether they believed that I had made any threats or given other indications of malicious designs to warrant treating me, a law-abiding fellow citizen, so rudely. None of that was relevant, I was told. They were just doing their job.
I’m not surprised that they refused him entry after he declined to participate in the latest act of security theatre . . . but I wonder if aircrew have not — until now — been required to go through the full indignity that awaited mere travellers if they refused AIT screening.
H/T to Jon Henke for the link.
October 18, 2010
QotD: The primary achievement of modern schools
They were right — although I had to see it for myself before I fully grasped the magnitude of the phenomenon — children are learning machines, more or less in the same sense that sharks are eating machines.
The only phenomenon more astonishing than that is the way the public school system manages to kick, stomp, and crush a child’s inherent curiosity and love of learning, often destroying it altogether by the third or fourth grade. Yes, children are learning machines. The fact that government schools have managed to condition them against learning is an astonishing — if wholly negative — feat, achieved at the unspeakable cost of countless hundreds of billions of dollars.
Nobody has any choices in the matter. The government’s schools are underwritten by the kind of theft we call taxation, and nothing good can ever come of that. Their little desks are filled by a kind of conscription. The entire institution is administered and operated by unionized net tax consumers, who savagely resist any attempt to objectively assess their work and reward (or punish) them on that basis.
I’d like to have a nickel for every time I’ve had to listen to school administrators inviting parents to participate in the education of their own children — and then complaining when parents actually do it.
They want you to participate, all right, but only on their terms. They don’t want you questioning their policies and practices. They want you to validate whatever they do to your kids, to provide them with what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim”. And if you won’t do that, or if you won’t sit down and shut up — or better yet, just go away — then they identify you as “problem parents” and “trouble-makers”.
L. Neil Smith, “Salt on the Ruins: A Chapter from the Forthcoming Where We Stand“, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-16
October 14, 2010
British government takes chainsaw to Quango jungle
To my surprise, the British government appears to be quite serious about reducing the number of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (Quangos):
The government has announced that 192 quangos are to be scrapped.
Some will be abolished altogether others will see their functions carried out by government or other bodies, the Cabinet Office says.
A further 118 will be merged. Some are still under consideration but 380 will be retained, according to the list.
Minister Francis Maude said they did not know how many jobs would go. Labour’s Liam Byrne said the cull could end up costing more than it saved.
Quangos — “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations” — are arm’s-length bodies funded by Whitehall departments but not run by them.
Sounds like a worthwhile effort. I rather expected the study would “discover” that almost all of the Quangos were performing “essential services” and therefore would be continued. I’m delighted to find that I was being too cynical.
October 9, 2010
“Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life”
James Delingpole posts the most interesting resignation letter you’re likely to see this year:
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.
Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment.
October 8, 2010
October 3, 2010
Personal responsibility is key
A post at The Economist looks at the ongoing debate on liberal/libertarian joint concerns:
My colleague noted the other day the discussion Matthew Yglesias has been having with his readers over whether liberals and libertarians can agree on some regulations they both hate. So, here’s a regulation I hate: you’re not allowed to swim across the lake anymore in Massachusetts state parks. You have to stay inside the dinky little waist-deep swimming areas, with their bobbing lines of white buoys. There you are, under a deep blue New England summer sky, the lake laid out like a mirror in front of you and the rocks on the far shore gleaming under a bristling comb of red pine; you plunge in, strike out across the water, and tweet! A parks official blows his whistle and shouts after you. “Sir! Sir! Get back inside the swimming area!” What is this, summer camp? Henry David Thoreau never had to put up with this. It offends the dignity of man and nature. You want to shout, with Andy Samberg: “I’m an adult!“
I would gladly join any movement that promised to do away with this sort of nonsense. For example, Philip K. Howard’s organisation “Common Good” works on precisely this agenda. Common Good’s very bugaboo is useless, wasteful legal interference in schools, health care, recreation, and so on. But what you quickly note with many of these issues is that they’re driven by legal liability concerns. You have a snowblader in Colorado suing a resort because she crashed into someone. You have states declining to put up road-hazard signs because the signs prove they knew the hazard was there, which could render them liable for damages. You have the war on children’s playgrounds. The Massachusetts swimming ban, too, is driven by liability concerns. The park officials in Massachusetts aren’t really trying to minimise the risk that you might drown. They’re trying to minimise the risk that you might sue. The problem here, as Mr Howard says, isn’t simply over-regulation as such. It’s a culture of litigiousness and a refusal to accept personal responsibility. When some of the public behave like children, we all get a nanny state.
As Robert Heinlein put it, “The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skimmed milk because the baby can’t eat steak.”
September 30, 2010
Inter-service rivalry now compromising SAS training
Of all the various famous units the British have to boast of, surely the Special Air Service (SAS) is the top of the list. That status still doesn’t exempt the SAS from being a pawn in the ongoing battle between the Army and the RAF:
For five years now, the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the British Army have been feuding over the lack of aircraft for parachute training. The latest row involves Britain’s SAS (Special Air Service) commandos, who have been unable to train all their operators in complex parachuting techniques, because the RAF has been unable to provide transports to carry the SAS personnel into the air. This is considered a more serious matter than previous problems with not having enough transports to train members of the Parachute Regiment. The SAS threatens to send their operators to the United States for training, relying on long standing ties with their American counterparts (the U.S. Army Special Forces and SOCOM). This would be embarrassing for the RAF, and that would be the point.
This sort of feud has been going on for a long time. For example, four years ago it was revealed that the British Army had to decide between supplying its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and providing aircraft for its paratroopers to complete their training. As a result of this shortage, in 2005, only about 25 percent of paratroop trainees were able to make the required jumps, to become qualified parachutists. Back in 2003, 93 percent were able to successfully make their jumps. In addition to the morale boost, being a qualified paratrooper also gets you an extra $3,000 a year in bonus pay.
The RAF, rather like the US Air Force, has different priorities than the other services, and clearly doesn’t value their inter-operational harmony as highly as controlling the equipment and doctrine to support their own mission (as defined by air force commanders). This isn’t a new thing: it’s been going on since the first world war. It also shows a failure of leadership on the civilian side — the civilian bosses should be much more insistent on getting the overall mission done properly than in allowing these turf wars (cloud wars?) to interfere.
September 27, 2010
Air travel: does the punishment fit the crime?
Terry Teachout isn’t enjoying his air travel experiences on his current trip. A selection of his Twitter updates from this morning:
First: I’m at LaGuardia and seized with an all-consuming hatred for air travel, every aspect of which is disgusting, degrading, and dehumanizing.
Second: I’d also like to throttle most of my fellow travelers, including all who are conducting cell-phone conversations within earshot of me.
Third: Finally, I’d like to offer a special welcome in hell to the people at Gate D6 who are reading self-evidently stupid books and magazines.
Fourth: Gee, you wouldn’t think that I’m H.L. Mencken’s biographer, would you?
Fifth: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Sixth: I guess I’m in what I like to call one of my exterminate-all-the-brutes moods. This, too, shall pass…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve pretty much given up on air travel since my last flight experience. I’ll use it for extreme long distance or trans-oceanic travel, but otherwise, I’ll continue to avoid it as much as possible. (Probably my worst trip overlapped with one of the attempted terrorist attacks.)
