Archive for April, 2010
My Bill Easterly Moment
In his 2006 book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, economist William Easterly draws a contrast between “planners” and “searchers”; the former offer top-down, big-think approaches to economic development, while the latter think smaller and look for marginal improvements.
Chapter five of his book is entitled “The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats.” Many of Easterly’s critics suggest that this and other dichotomic language are, charitably, unhelpful or, unchartitably, evidence of a Rothbardian anti-state mentality. But in a story about his hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland, Easterly shows that he understands the value of effective bureaucracies — he just believes the evidence shows that smaller bureaucracies, more local to the people they serve, work better than large bureaucracies even if they are staffed with the best and the brightest:
I once had a pothole in front of my house in Takoma Park, Maryland. I got the city bureaucracy to fix the pothole in three easy steps: (1) I called my city councilwoman, Kathy Porter, and asked her to please have the city repait the pothole; (2) the next day, the Takoma Park Public Works bureaucracy was out there filling the pothole; and (3) actually, there was no third step. This worked because the city bureaucracy is accountable to elected politicians such as Kathy Porter, who is accountable to me and other voters. Kathy Porter is a Searcher. Sher built he political career in Takoma Park on responding to constituents.
I take the bus to get to and from work, not out of hair-shirted obeisance to our Gaia Mother, but because it’s cheaper — even with a few taxi rides a month — than buying a second car.
When Arlington Rapid Transit created a new bus route that runs less than a block from my house, I noted that it went for over a half-mile without a stop. It would be convenient for me, and many of my bus-riding neighbors, to break that stretch up with a stop in the middle. So I emailed the director of ART’s bus service, Steven Yaffe, cc’ing my county council member, suggesting they put a stop in.
Well late last month I got my stop. I asked, and the county responded. No hearings, no special elections, no 527s, no PACs, no lawsuits. While hardly life-altering, it’s shortened my commute by a few minutes, and it’s made my neighborhood a bit more transit-friendly.
Most political news headlines and analysis focuses on what happens in Washington, but local government can have a big impact on our lives — whether it’s efficient and effective or corrupt and bloated. Observers and thinkers from Tocqueville to Kirk realized that local policies tend to be more effective than national policies. Those who embrace the concept of subsidiarity and searchers in lieu of centralization and planners should consider that local governments are much different animals than national governments — and in many respects are much more important to our day-to-day lives.
New Winston Group survey of Tea Parties
The Winston Group released a new study of the attitudes of Tea Party members:
In one of the most extensive looks to date at just who Tea Party activists are, how they think, and the ideas that matter to them, the report found that 17% of the people polled considered themselves “part of the Tea Party movement” and more than four in ten Tea Party members said they were either Independents or Democrats. In three national surveys, done for New Models from December 2009 through February 2010, 57% of Tea Party members called themselves Republicans, another 28% said they were Independents, and 13% were Democrats. Two-thirds of Tea Party members identify as conservatives but 26% say they are moderate and 8% described themselves as liberal. The study also found Tea Party members are more likely to be male by a 56-44% margin, slightly older than the electorate as a whole and middle income earners. When it comes to issues, the research found that Tea Party activists espouse a strong economic conservatism. [...] In the February 2010 New Models study, 36% of Tea Party members name the economy and jobs as their top issue with national deficit and spending close behind at 21% — over twice as high as the overall electorate. However, when given the choice in the January survey, Tea Party members favored “reducing unemployment to 5%” over balancing the budget 63-32%, which closely reflects the overall electorate (64-32%). While Tea Party members prioritize job creation over deficit spending and tax issues, they value economically conservative policies because they view them as a means to reducing unemployment and improving the economy. Over 4 out of 5 Tea Party members (85%) say tax cuts for small business will create more jobs than increased government spending on infrastructure while the overall electorate prefers tax cuts by a more modest 61-31% margin.
Press release here; whole analysis here [pdf]. Unfortunately the survey doesn’t seem to include any information on education or demographics. But I’ll leave it to someone more knowledgeable about survey data than me to parse the details. (Via the Twitter feed of Nicki Kurokawa.)
Are think tanks still thinking?
Bob Hahn (until recently of AEI) and Peter Passell offer a lesson from the David Frum firing:
While we find this controversy intriguing in its own right (gossip… inside hardball… what could be better?), we think it misses some broader points in the way the market for think tank services is evolving. Over the last two decades, the top-drawer policy shops (AEI and Brookings) are more dependent on proactive fund-raising – and, by no coincidence, are more amenable to playing partisan games and keener to be in the public eye. These changes have, in turn, altered the role of the policy wonks who inhabit the space. First, there is much greater pressure to be visible; occupation of elite real estate like the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal is seen as critical to raising money. And while the think tanks still do a lot of quasi-academic research, they are more inclined to hire pundits with great rolodexes (make that great Outlook contacts). Note, too, that to stay in the limelight, think tanks are adjusting their time horizons. Tomorrow’s issues matter less than today’s. Accordingly, publication in refereed technical journals – especially the ones that make no effort to be journalist-friendly – counts less for promotion and status.
It is difficult to argue with this assessment.
