Innumeracy and the affordable housing discussion

 The Salt Lake Tribune has an article, "Utah needs 41,000 units of affordable housing. Robert Gehrke explains how the state aims to help," on how the State of Utah is increasing its commitment to addressing the lack of supply of affordable housing, by increasing the amount of tax credits available, from $1 million to $10 million per year, for the next 10 years, totaling $100 million.  From the article: 

The Legislature significantly expanded a tax credit that has been called the most important source of financing for affordable housing in history

At $200,000 per unit, to build 41,000 units requires $8.2 billion.  At $150,000 per unit, $6.15 billion.

In either case, $10 million per year doesn't go very far, especially as demand for affordable housing will continue to increase.

New Years Day Post #1: Solutions versus cruelty | Immigration

Border wall of containers ordered by Republican Governor of Arizona Dan Ducey.  Photo: Ivan Pierre Aguirre for the New York Times.

These days I'm pretty depressed about the state of the US, given the virulence of the divide between Republicans and Democrats and a failure to focus on improving the quality of life of US residents versus cruelty and performance.

There is no question that things are far different from the time when states were considered opportunities for innovation--laboratories of democracy.

The quality of life outcomes for states under Republican rule are decidedly negative (2022 Scorecard on State Health System Performance: How did states do during the COVID-19 pandemic?, Commonwealth Fund, "SUMMARY OF 23 QUALITY OF LIFE INDICATORS — ARE RED OR BLUE STATES BETTER?," Applied Sentience, "Blue states rank better than red in livability: What does that mean?," San Jose Mercury News).

Perhaps the easiest indicator to track is life expectancy.

And long tax revenue capture.  Generally red states get a lot more back in government spending than they pay out.  While blue states pay more and get less.  Red states are the "takers" ("Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states," Associated Press).

Immigration.  I think one of the most important entries I've written in the past couple years is on "the border crisis" -- immigration -- which Republicans call an absolute crisis. 

 It's a policy issue where Republicans get to show their cruelty ("GOP governors with presidential ambitions court Trump's base with cruelty to migrants," NBC News).

But sadly to reduce the power of the opposition, federal government practices even under Democrats can be pretty cruel.  

It amazes me because the states on the southern border with Mexico--Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California--drive a significant part of their economies through trade with Mexico.  California, being a Democrat run state, acts opposite of the other states.  

For example, Texas' biggest trading partner is Mexico and when they do things like tamper with border crossings it has significant negative effect ("Texas Ends Rule That Left Trucks Waiting For Hours To Cross Mexico Border," Forbes Magazine).  It's like Brexit leading to a significant drop in the UK's economic output, something every reputable economist said would happen.

But the Republican position on immigration makes it hard for Democrats, and makes it almost impossible for policy creativity.  Obama wasn't the greatest--he thought that being tough would get Republicans to work with him, but they didn't.  And Biden has some of the same issues.

The fact is that immigrants are an important source of labor, are motivated, increase the country's diversity, and add population in the face of lower birth rates.  Immigrants can be an important source of revitalization in otherwise shrinking cities etc.

End of Policing by Alex Vitale is pretty bracing.  Eight chapters discuss how we've criminalized certain social matters, and how police response to those problems mostly makes the outcomes worse.  

One chapter is on immigration (US Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and in it he suggests that the US consider dealing with immigration comparable to the European Union, which has free movement within the EU's 27 countries.

I think it's brilliant.  

Creating an American Union of the US and Central and South American countries.  What it would require is creating a kind of "American Union" with Central and South American countries.  Where citizens of participating countries could register and could immigrate/work in other participating countries, and it wouldn't require citizenship in the "receiving" country.  I think it would also allow for temporary rather than permanent emigration.  People could come to the US, make some money, go back home.

At the same time, like the EU, the US should invest in creating "cohesion" programs of investment in Central and South American countries, so that conditions of poverty, political unrest, and negative public safety could be reversed, reducing the demand to emigrate.  

-- "A solution to the immigration crisis on the Southern border, but it's too politically fraught," 2021

And a Caribbean Union.  When I wrote the piece I was focused on the border with Mexico, but the same goes for the Caribbean.  It's unjust that Cuba emigrants have special privileges in coming to the US, and proximity to the US creates the same kinds of tensions for countries like Haiti, Dominican Republic, etc.

Puerto Rico.  And we really should give statehood to Puerto Rico, and create new programs of investment and energy independence for that colony.

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The Salt Lake Tribune, now a nonprofit, has an initiative called the "Innovation Lab," where they focus on longer term issues with an aim of producing articles offering "solutions."

I don't think the issue is the need for solutions so much as a willingness to be focused on solutions and action.

And big time innovation is outside of the mindset of most public officials and community stakeholders.

Why expertise doesn't matter in politics? | ideology, special interests

Robert Samuelson, the economics columnist for the Washington Post, wrote about the death of "policy entrepreneur" Alice Rivlin as an illustration of the failure of knowledge to drive policy ("America has an enduring cycle of disappointment").

(Separately, there is an op-ed in the New York Times, by principal investigators of a study that looked at whether or not state legislators were interested in systematic polling information about the opinions of their constituents on issues under consideration, "Politicians Don't Actually Care What Voters Want." They found little interest on the part of legislators and limited congruence between the electorate and elected officials.)

Samuelson suggests policy entrepreneurs are failing because:

(1) It may be that the problems they attacked were tougher than expected. Eliminating poverty, combating climate change and controlling health costs are hard tasks individually, let alone together.

(2) Elected politicians, who wielded the real power, found many of these ideas too unpopular. Take climate change. Almost everyone outside the Trump administration (it seems) is against it; but there's little enthusiasm for the actual policies -- higher fossil fuel prices or energy controls -- that might have some effect.

(3) The policy entrepreneurs may have discovered that they aren't as smart as they thought they were. Put differently, they may have exaggerated their understanding of the things they were trying to change.

Whatever the cause or causes, the historical reality is unforgiving. Policy entrepreneurship hasn't and won't disappear. But the hoped-for gains have been conspicuous by their absence. There is an enduring cycle of disappointment. Solutions are rarely equal to problems. It is a sobering legacy.

Yes the problems are hard. Yes ideas are unpopular, sometimes, but that is partly because of poorly dealing with them. And yes, people often have a limited sense of "the problem."

But I think he misses the point.

We've moved from a concept of "positivism" and the development of evidence-based policy and a respect for expertise (although to be fair, for centuries policy and practice has been more about reflecting "positions" on issues, not evidence) to a much more rigid focus on ideology and an ecosystem of special interests -- wealthy funders of organizations and media that support these positions -- that pushes ideologically-based positions regardless of evidence.

Policy and practice should be about achieving "optimality" based on expertise and knowledge. It should also be about "evidence" whenever it can be adequately collected. 

Yes sometimes I feel like the focus on evidence can be misguided even though absolutely, replication in other settings is essential. The issue of "what gets measured gets done" is problematic when you're not measuring the right thing or creating measures is time consuming and difficult. But still, so many programs continue to be developed irrespective of a consideration of past outcomes.

But like with "policy entrepreneurs" maybe not being so smart, a lot of it has to do with problem definition. Like with health care you need to approach the matter in tranches. Health insurance was set up to regularize income for hospitals, not to improve health outcomes. OTOH, the National Health Service in the UK was set up to improve health outcomes.

Separating the provision of health and wellness development, the ability to go to a doctor for simple things as well as for dealing with many diseases that are partially behavior related (heart attack, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, etc.), which are called chronic conditions, requires a different approach (these elements of the health system are called primary care) from how you deal with catastrophic and emergency care needs (cancer, heart attack, accidents, etc.) which are part of the secondary care system.

But by continuing to define "health care" through "health insurance," a fundamental rethinking isn't occurring.

So it is timely that the Center for American Progress has a presentation on Monday, about how this works at the state level.  From email:

Laboratories for Corruption
How Special Interests Are Driving Harmful State Policies

July 22, 2019, 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. ET

Center for American Progress
1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

RSVP

Not in D.C.? Bookmark this link to watch the live webcast

Opening remarks:
Winnie Stachelberg, Executive Vice President, External Affairs

Featured panelists:
State Sen. Dinah Sykes, (D-KS)
Lisa Graves, President, Board of the Center for Media and Democracy; Co-Founder, Documented Investigations
Naomi Walker, Director, Economic Analysis and Research Network at the Economic Policy Institute
Danielle Root, Associate Director of Voting Rights for Democracy and Government, Center for American Progress

Moderator:
Sam Berger, Vice President of Democracy and Government Reform, Center for American Progress

Federalism encourages states to act as "laboratories of democracy," wherein states experiment with untested ideas and policies to gauge their effectiveness and potential value elsewhere. This mantle of states being laboratories for democracy can be used to promote policies that advance the public good. But states can also be used as a testing ground for policies that skew political and economic power toward corporations or billionaires and away from everyday Americans.

Many harmful state policies—such as irresponsible tax cuts, deregulation, and attacks on unions and essential workplace protections—are byproducts of corporate lobbying and conservative special interest groups whose main purpose is to help the rich and powerful exploit and manipulate the lawmaking process.

Please join the Center for American Progress for a discussion on how corporations and special interest groups promote state policies that make corporations and wealthy donors richer, at the public's expense. It will also examine how lawmakers backed by these groups further corrupt democratic processes to maintain power and keep harmful policies in place.

Communication breakdown in politics: busing and democratic socialism in Congress as examples

Probably the song by Led Zeppelin, "Communication Breakdown," is the first hard rock song that I remember hearing (I won't go into the details).  The song dates to 1969, and it was either in 1969 or 1970 that I am first conscious of it (although other less hard rock songs I remember from earlier include "The Israelite" and "I can see for miles" by the Who, both songs were on the jukebox of the restaurant that I lived next door to when I was in fourth grade).

Some of the lyrics:

Communication breakdown
It's always the same
I'm having a nervous breakdown
Drive me insane!

Two issues in politics right now that make me think about these kinds of communications breakdowns, which are often about "scoring points" and not about trying to work towards the best possible outcomes.

1. Busing. Sen. Kamala Harris scored points on Joe Biden in the Democratic Presidential candidate debates ("Harris takes fresh aim at Biden's debate remarks on busing, calls them 'revisionist history',").

The funny thing is that I participated in busing, in the Pontiac schools around the same time as Harris, when I was in sixth and seventh grade.

Pontiac was signature in that before the start of the 1971-1972 school year, a bunch of school buses were bombed ("Irene McCabe and her battle against busing," Detroit News; "5 Ex‐Klansmen Convicted in School Bus Bomb Plot," New York Times; CBS News coverage of the story and a demonstration").

I don't recall remembering the event at the time, but it's in my consciousness.  (I didn't go to school in the district until the Spring of 1971.)

Jefferson Junior High School has been closed for some time, and Pontiac, a majority black city in a county that is 97% white, continues to languish in the face of suburban wealth, not helped by its legacy as an automobile manufacturing city, of a make that is no longer produced.  

The city's decline in the 1960s and 1970s was a harbinger of the failure of the Detroit-based automobile industry in later decades.

And in my case, my experience was more about the white students bused into "the black schools" as opposed to African-American students being bused to "white schools."

I don't know exactly when busing started there as  there were African-Americans in my classes, and my neighborhood  and the area around the school was 100% white.  I presume African-Americans were bused to my elementary school.

For junior high, it was reversed, and the (white) kids in our neighborhood were bused to school in the city; the Pontiac School District boundaries extended into the small cities, towns, and townships outside of the city.

I was probably as afraid and as concerned about fitting in as Kamala Harris. Not just the race issue. It was a new school. There were older kids too. Etc. After school started though, it was just school.  It probably helped that I was smart, but I was no athlete, which certainly hurt my ability to bond with other boys.

It wasn't just a black-white issue though, it was a suburb-urban divide, an investment vs. urban divestment divide, and a class issue as well (e.g., I remember issues around the poor white girls living in Pontiac versus the non-poor white girls who didn't live in Pontiac), and those conflicts or differences in outlook, attitude, and experience went beyond race.

Probably it was tough on teachers and school administrators too, but at least it never came across as a problem for them in the way they handled us.

One of the things they were smart at doing was during the last week or two of school in elementary school, they took all of us on a "field trip" to the junior high school.  That should be done regardless, because of the transition from elementary to middle/junior high.  I don't know if schools do that these days.

I doubt that the school system did that before busing started.  But maybe they did.

Much of the coverage on the issue calls busing a failed initiative ("The Lasting Legacy of the Busing Crisis," Atlantic Magazine). As someone who was a participant, I don't think it had to fail, that it could have been used as a way to build an integrated school system.

Women and children stand in front of a bus, refusing to let it pass out of the schoolyard, as reporters look on during an anti-busing protest, Pontiac, Michigan, 1971. Many carry placards and appear to be reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Photo: Tony Spina (? Detroit News).

But the issue wasn't with the kids at least not in my schools -- then again, my foster parents didn't seem to be racist, and I wasn't a racist white kid and I didn't see such outbursts in the actual school setting but likely it was a problem elsewhere -- it was with parents.  And of course, at that age, I wasn't going to public meetings where I might of seen the kind of attitudes that supported the demonstrations against busing.

2.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the new "democratic socialist caucus" and criticizing your supporters/colleagues (""Nancy Pelosi's renewed attacks on AOC aren't just disrespectful, they're dangerous," Guardian).  From the article:

There have been long-running tensions between Pelosi and the so-called “Squad” of new progressive congresswomen, which consists of Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. Things escalated sharply over the weekend, when Pelosi decided it would be a good idea to demean her colleagues in the New York Times. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following,” Pelosi told the Times, referring to a border funding bill the Squad opposed. “They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”

To begin with, Pelosi’s disparaging remarks about the Squad seemed like they were probably strategic. Now, however, the sustained attacks feel increasingly personal. “When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post on Wednesday. “But the persistent singling out … it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful … the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

The election of "democratic socialist"/more radical Congressmembers in 2018, in particular Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib is causing some grief because challenges from "the left" to Democrats on various policies creates a lack of unity which is tough vis a vis the Republicans but also because not every Democratic Congressperson has the same level of seat security as someone from Queens New York or Boston might have.

While Guardian columnist Arwa Mahadi makes the point that because these Congresswomen are all people of color, it's especially dangerous when they are criticized by leaders.  Although to me -- with the proviso I am an old white guy -- it's more about youth and ideology.

This comes up a lot in politics. People who are elected tend to compromise and be pragmatic, because that's what they can achieve in a reasonable amount of time, while people like me are critical because we're getting less than half a loaf and are not only supposed to be satisfied with it, but ecstatic.

I write about what I call "the issue continuum," something I learned through observation while working for a consumer group in the late 1980s.

The group had Nader lineage and we worked with him from time to time. What I came to recognize is that there are all kinds of positions on the continuum of an issue, from conservative and traditional to very "progressive" or "perfect" and that by staking out hard core positions, you'd likely never achieve that nirvana, but by staking it out you got a lot more movement toward it in the end, than if you had been comfortable with a much less "perfect" solution starting out.

This is applicable to any issue, from support of biking, food labeling, regulation of emissions from power plants, gasoline excise taxes, etc.

And you have to measure the acceptability of reaction to certain outcomes in judging what makes sense.

E.g., President Macron didn't have good sense in pairing a gas excise tax increase with tax cuts for the wealthy.

I suppose my line "if you ask for nothing, that's what you get; if you ask for the world, you don't get it, but you get a lot more than nothing" is a more succinct statement of this observation.

Protesters in Colmar, north-eastern France, in March 2019. © AFP

With experience, I've gotten a lot better at positioning my arguments in ways that are more congruent with more traditional approaches, of outlining a pathway, etc.

But at 29 years of age, like what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, and her staffers are similarly aged and equally driven, I didn't think that way. I was more oriented to achieving perfection, rather than achieving the best possible outcome taking advantage of particular opportunities present at that moment.

For example, with biking, elected officials who push it, get really frustrated when people like me criticize the achievements as inadequate, or why aren't we doing the Idaho Stop. They see any sort of criticism by "supporters" as a kind of betrayal.

That's what I think is part of what's going on with Speaker Pelosi.

Although I am more pragmatic as I age, although I continue to push for perfection -- otherwise I wouldn't still be writing blog entries in the face of plenty of lessons that the powers that be, ultimately don't care and aren't interested in improving practice and outcomes in substantive ways (although they give me plenty of opportunities to continue to hone my understanding of what can be better practice).

But I am driven not by ideology other than wanting the best outcomes on a foundation of informed civic participation and citizen involvement.

People who remain ideologues despite aging are not so similarly situated...

(Conservative) Advocacy Agenda Setting in Washington State

The Washington Policy Center is a conservative policy advocacy organization in Washington State.  Their annual "Western Washington Solutions Conference" is one week from tomorrow.

The WPC conference pushes conservative policies on health care, education, and taxation.

And it features Gov. Bobby Jindal as keynote speaker--I'd think that driving your state economy into the ground ought not to get you to be selected as a keynote speaker and to be paid for it, unless it's about 'what not to do.'"

Although, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "Louisiana's budget is a hot mess: How we got here," it's not all Jindal's fault.

But constant tax cuts combined with a serious decline in oil prices--as an oil producing state a significant amount of state tax revenues comes from the oil industry and similarly states like Alaska and Texas have experienced serious revenue declines also--pushed the state to the brink financially.  His putative bid for President allowed him to foist the problems onto his successor.

Still, planning as if the future will always be good puts a state government and economy at serious risk.

Next year, the WPC could get Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas to be the keynote ("With Kansas In Crisis, GOPers Abandon Gov Brownback On Tax Cuts," Associated Press).

In any case, it behooves progressives to organize similar kinds of "solutions conferences" too, although they should truly be focused on solutions rather than bromides.

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Note that the organization LocalProgress is a national group supporting progressive locally elected officials. Their next national conference is in July in Pittsburgh.

The trope about the benefit of "Telling truth to power is mostly" is mostly B.S.: DC edition

The West Wing TV show had an episode I saw about the importance of staffers "telling truth to power."  I've never found it pays off work-wise.

Former DC Insurance Commissioner William P. White would probably say the same thing.  He was fired one day after ("DC insurance commissioner fired a day after questioning Obamacare fix," Post) stating publicly that a work-around on one element of the Affordable Care Act announced by President Obama wouldn't work well for DC, which has a successful state-level health care exchange.

The Washington Post editorializes today, "Mayor Gray delivers a chilling message to D.C. officials," that this isn't a good way to manage your employees.

2.  Last year, Mayor Gray fired the director of the Department of Environment for discussing with the EPA his disagreement with the Executive Branch's change in approach to dealing with EPA regulatory requirements over separating sewerage infrastructure from stormwater run off infrastructure ("Christophe Tulou fired as D.C. environment director," Washington Business Journal).

3.  And there has been a lot of discussion lately in the press (e.g., "On the path to a failed presidency?," Post) about how the Obama Administration isn't very good at listening to underlings who are trying to communicate "bad news." 

4.  I will say that the biggest lesson I got from my brief sojourn working for the executive branch in the Office of Planning for Baltimore County, Maryland is a substantive, real, and deep understanding of how the shots are called within the executive branch. 
The chief executive and there, really, the long time chief budget officer was more powerful than the County Executive, who is limited to two terms, and his office call the shots on policy.  They hire agency directors who understand this, and are willing to work within the parameters and constraints that are handed down to them.

Lowly staffers like me really didn't make policy.  (In fact, I worry a bit that my getting the agency director so worked up about transportation planning responsibilities coming back to the OP that he broached this with the Executive ended up getting him canned when a new administration took office.  Although I am sure that because of his progressive talk--not walk--he wasn't gonna be retained in any case.)

I had a couple of instances of citizens lecturing me about the value of sustainable transportation, and I would stop them, stating that their message would have a lot more impact and carry more weight when presented to their elected officials--I wasn't the person in the way of better sustainable transportation best practice, it was the DPW...

Were I able to have worked there long term (I don't know if it was possible, even if the County budget hadn't gone in the tank, despite what I was told), it would have been difficult to deal with this reality. 

5.  What happens is that people who won't tell bad news, or hide it, knowing the reaction it will evince end up getting fired anyway, when s**t hits the fan, e.g., failures in administrators in not being able to carry out the promises made by the Mayor in the face of inadequate systems e.g., "District officials criticize Fenty's management of summer jobs program." 

Mayor Fenty made unfulfillable promises, his staff likely didn't tell me to cool down the statements, and when they couldn't fulfill the expectations, they lost their jobs.

Also see the book Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman.  The end of this essay by Malcolm Gladwell, "The Gift of Doubt," discusses that book. 

I look at the argument a bit differently. Loyalty is for the people who stay but don't say anything.  That's never worked well for me either.

The routine discarding of expertise in policymaking

So I was reading a review of a book on General Westmoreland, one of the generals in charge of the Vietnam War, in the New York Review of Books, and there was an extended quoting of material by one James C. Thomson, a now deceased State Department staffer, about why knowledge experts on Vietnam-Asia weren't involved very much in policymaking as it related to the conduct of the War/presence of the US in Southeast Asia.

It turns out the quotes are from an Atlantic Magazine article by Mr. Thomson, from April 1968 (it's pretty amazing that the Atlantic Magazine has put most of its archives online), "How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy." 

And the article is quite insightful, ironically I came across it just after I had just written a lamentory email on a schools listserv about how knowledge about organizations and systems and subject specific expertise for the most part doesn't seem to be too important to elected officials at the Council-Mayoral-School Board level in many jurisdictions.

From the article:

Any new Administration inherits both complicated problems and simplistic views of the world. But surely among the policy-makers of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations there were men who would warn of the dangers of an open-ended commitment to the Vietnam quagmire?

This raises a central question, at the heart of the policy process: Where were the experts, the doubters, and the dissenters? Were they there at all, and if so, what happened to them?

The answer is complex but instructive. 


In the first place, the American government was sorely lacking in real Vietnam or Indochina expertise. ...

In addition, the shadow of the "loss of China" distorted Vietnam reporting. Career officers in the Department, and especially those in the field, had not forgotten the fate of their World War II colleagues who wrote in frankness from China and were later pilloried by Senate committees for critical comments on the Chinese Nationalists. Candid reporting on the strengths of the Viet Cong and the weaknesses of the Diem government was inhibited by the memory. ...

But a recurrent and increasingly important factor in the decisionmaking process was the banishment of real expertise. Here the underlying cause was the "closed politics" of policy-making as issues become hot: the more sensitive the issue, and the higher it rises in the bureaucracy, the more completely the experts are excluded while the harassed senior generalists take over (that is, the Secretaries, Undersecretaries, and Presidential Assistants). The frantic skimming of briefing papers in the back seats of limousines is no substitute for the presence of specialists; furthermore, in times of crisis such papers are deemed "too sensitive" even for review by the specialists. Another underlying cause of this banishment, as Vietnam became more critical, was the replacement of the experts, who were generally and increasingly pessimistic, by men described as "can-do guys," loyal and energetic fixers unsoured by expertise. In early 1965, when I confided my growing policy doubts to an older colleague on the NSC staff, he assured me that the smartest thing both of us could do was to "steer clear of the whole Vietnam mess"; the gentleman in question had the misfortune to be a "can-do guy," however, and is now highly placed in Vietnam, under orders to solve the mess.

Despite the banishment of the experts, internal doubters and dissenters did indeed appear and persist. Yet as I watched the process, such men were effectively neutralized by a subtle dynamic: the domestication of dissenters....

A related point—and crucial, I suppose, to government at all times—was the "effectiveness" trap, the trap that keeps men from speaking out, as clearly or often as they might, within the government. And it is the trap that keeps men from resigning in protest and airing their dissent outside the government.  
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Read the full article.  It's very good.  Completely relevant to all levels of government.