Of budgets and values

It is shockingly hard to come up with an image
to accompany a post about budgeting.

Budgets are beautiful.

Gordon Gekko's motto--"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good"--was willfully contrarian but hardly persuasive. Greed has the virtue of predictability, but it is not good unless incentives are extremely implausibly aligned.

But budgets are beautiful.

Budgets are beautiful because they are stark and truthful. They tell you everything you need to know about an organization. Does the organization assign resources politically or logically? Does the organization think hard about planning for contingencies? Does the organization recklessly commit all of its funding with no reserve?

Budgets are especially beautiful when they are based on lies.

Consider what Enron's balance sheet said about the organization. The budget was based on lies, and because it was based on lies you could tell that the organization was based on lies. A management that has to lie to make its numbers is an organization that's condemned to fail. (Although not necessarily quickly.)

But it's impossible to make those lies last forever. Eventually, revenues have to meet expenses. And eventually assets (and equity) have to total liabilities.

Organizations do lots of things that aren't beautiful, because they don't have to be true. Organizations sponsor charitable works, even when those organizations' missions are the antithesis of charity. Organizations pass resolutions declaring that they're in favor of women or civil rights, even when those organizations are opposed to both. And organizations say they hire and promote on merit, even when all the top-ranked people in an organization look and sound the same because they're from the same school, same town, same class.

But budgets can't be hypocritical. An organization either spends what it has on a priority or it doesn't. Budgets, therefore, are the ultimate statement of an organization's real values. If an organization values foresight and preparedness, the budget will reflect that. If it's a risky and venturesome organization, the budget will reflect that, too. And if the organization is rotten to its core, then the budget will reveal that, too.

Fun with Local Politics

I yield the floor to my distinguished colleague, the Hon. J.L.:

The question, from a backbencher: "Following local politics --- worthwhile or not?"

The answer: Worthwhile.

Strange as it may sound, I've become a lot less interested in politics as I've become a political scientist. Since moving to Washington for grad school, I stopped following politics back home, and never took an interest in local politics in D.C. I also haven't voted, being unregistered in D.C. and probably not a qualified elector back in Florida.

So it's been fun to pay attention to local politics again. I've spent the past week in Jacksonville, FL visiting friends and family. In the city's municipal elections on Tuesday, Jacksonville residents elected their first black mayor in a stunning upset. At the same time, District 1 voters reelected a controversial young city commissioner with a promising career in Republican politics ahead of him who, depending on your perspective, is either a theocratic zealot or a faithful Christian serving courageously in public office.

In the mayoral race, local businessman Alvin Brown defeated Mike Hogan, Duval County's Clerk of the Courts, for the seat being vacated by term-limited Mayor John Peyton. This race was never supposed to be close. High profile Republican figures were being assured of Hogan's victory. Hogan, a Republican, took a beating in the media and in the polls for dodging a debate. Apparently everyone in Hogan's camp thought it was a sure thing. Instead, this one-third black Southern city with a particularly nasty history of race relations celebrated the election of its first ever black mayor.

In political science, we are fond of aggregate--level voting models suggesting that partisanship and economic conditions are all that matter, and that campaigns and candidates make no difference. But in local elections -- even a runoff like this one with 37% turnout -- little things can make a big difference.

Skipping a debate is a risky decision. While you don't want to legitimize a trivial candidate by debating him, you risk seeming presumptuous if you decline to debate a serious candidate. The story in Jacksonville seems to be that Hogan made some mistakes and Brown, a Democrat, capitalized on all of them, all the while courting and winning support from key Republicans. In the end, Hogan's arrogant, tea party-themed campaign may have lulled his rapidly dwindling base of angry white suburbanites into thinking their votes were not needed, all the while alienating the more moderate factions of his coalition. But let this be a lesson: as lame as debates may be, don't skip them. The campaign turned on local issues, of course, but Republican candidates would be wise to learn from Hogan, who hitched his wagon to the tea party movement, all the while risking enduring some serious retaliation from voters disgusted with the GOP legislature and the wildly unpopular conservative policies of Hogan's co-partisan, Gov. Rick Scott.

In the other race I mentioned above, Councilman Clay Yarborough cruised to reelection, buying enough time to wait for a seat in the Florida Legislature to open up. Presumably, he won't campaign for higher office on his best-known position -- opposition to gays and Muslims holding public office -- but he seems to be enough of a true believer that I wouldn't put it past him.

Yarborough became embroiled in a controversy last year over his questioning of the (Republican) mayor's nominees to the city's Human Rights Commission. Parvez Ahmed, a professor at the University of North Florida, reluctantly responded to Yarborough's questions about gay marriage and the role of religion in public life and ultimately received Yarborough's approval in committee. Another nominee, a law professor, declined to answer Yarbrough's questions and was summarily blocked.

The next week, a journalist posed a similar line of questions to Yarborough. Asked if homosexuals should be allowed to hold public office in Florida, Yarbrough said he "would prefer they did not." As for Muslims, he admitted he "doesn't know." While this response is alarming from a legal/constitutional perspective, the lack of certainty is refreshing to hear from someone who otherwise seems so absolutely convinced of the rightness of his positions. In the end, Yarborough voted against Ahmed when his nomination came before the full city council. In fairness, it was another council member who turned the final vote on Professor Ahmed's nomination into an embarrassing spectacle.

Yarborough ultimately voted against putting Ahmed on the Commission, implying that Ahmed was connected to terrorist groups. (Professor Ahmed's nomination was eventually approved 13-6). It's kind of a shame that Yarborough is best known for his bizarre, discriminatory views on this one issue, an obscure, low-level nomination. In 2007, a local alternative newsweekly ran a fairly favorable profile, portraying Yarborough as an independent-minded and hardworking young politician. Fundamentalist quirks aside, Yarborough is in every way an unusually responsive and engaged public servant. He has shaken up the old-boy network and worked tirelessly for his constituents. After learning more about him, I'm torn between wondering if he should be stopped or encouraged.

In national politics, it's often hard to see how one official, one candidate, one campaign, one volunteer, or one voter can make a difference. But locally, things really are different. Every day, city councils, county commissions, and school boards spend our money and make importnat decisions that impact our lives. I commend those who are serving the public interest in these mostly unglamorous offices. This week in Jacksonville -- 700 miles outside the Beltway -- I've been reminded anew of both the promise and perils of politics.

Will Ph.D.s save humanity?

The question, from a backbencher: "If humanity survives the Mayan apocalypse in 2012, it will nevertheless have to deal with economic instability, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, and myriad other problems. I would like to read into the record two paragraphs from a letter to the editor of Nature (not available ungated) by a U.C.-Santa Barbara professor:

I disagree that we have a glut of scientists with PhDs (www.nature.com/phdfuture). The corporate view of PhD numbers in terms of what the market will bear ignores the major problems that only science can solve in the coming century.
The list is long: natural disasters, such as earthquakes and incoming celestial objects; environmental degradation; sustainable energy; famine and violence; untreatable medical conditions; and threats such as antibiotic resistance. If science abdicates, there is nothing else.

Will holders of the Ph.D. degree save humanity?"

The answer: No.

I would like, first, to quote further from Professor Kosik's letter:

The size of the military is dictated by our defence needs, not the market. In science, by analogy, our global defence needs are soaring.
Spending a few years in the service of science and the greater good, being rewarded with an advanced degree and, for example, going on to teach in high schools is an honourable fix.

I am always glad to read statements such as these, because it gives me an opportunity to quote Richard Feynman: "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." And, in this case, to remind professors that statements like these, uttered by tenured professors to graduate students, will someday be enshrined next to Marie Antoinette's milkmaid costume.

Kosik has succumbed to the technocratic fallacy (henceforward the TF). The TF is a variant of functionalism and holds that all social problems are analogous to engineering problems. The deficit, for instance, is not the consequence of differing views over the proper scope of federal spending and of federal taxation, considered separately (as they indeed are in our system); rather, it is the result of those damn fools in Washington being unable to work harder and come up with a solution. Similarly, wars, terrorism, crime, and the paradoxical consequences of welfare provision (e.g., the sort of thing covered in the Moynihan Report and other first-generation neocon commentary on the Great Society) are technical problems to which technical remedies exist and may be applied frictionlessly.

It should be immediately obvious that this is an attractive viewpoint to a great many people. And that is a group that includes not merely scientists and engineers, whose vanity it naturally flatters because of its naive faith in "reason" to overcome problems. It also includes a great many politicians and senior civil servants, both in competitive political systems such as the United States and less-competitive ones such as the People's Republic of China. Politicians are attracted to these policies because it offers them a nicely nonpolitical justification for their continuance in office, while similarly allowing them to disparage all those who disagree with them as (to use the Stalinist term) "wreckers."

Yet Kosik's letter, which is as pure an expression of the TF as we are apt to find, shows the real problems with the TF, both as an approach to politics and as a guide to real-world practice. As an approach to politics, the TF fails because it misunderstands the nature of political disagreements. Even political fights over purely technical issues (such as, say, CAFE standards) are always driven by interest or identity, neither of which are amenable to technical fixes and which are often compounded by institutional "pathologies" (which are often just institutional design tradeoffs). As a guide to real-world practice, the TF consequently is always running into the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, which requires the TF's adherents to eventually propose dismissing "political" solutions (which are the product of "irrational" conflict) in favor of ever-deeper technocratic fixes.

That Kosik presumes that "only science can solve" environmental degradation, famine and violence, and Deep Impact-style asteroid threats is to claim, simultaneously, that politics cannot solve these problems. Yet political science has much to say about all of these problems, and even leaving beside classic formulations such as the collective-action problem (and later critics), we should be able to recognize that these are basically political problems, not scientific ones. Famine is not caused by a lack of food; violence is not caused by a lack of periodic tables; and environmental degradation will eventually require a political, not a scientific, solution. Indeed, any scientific "solution" to environmental degradation will almost inevitably cause bigger headaches, since it strains belief that there is a sort of carbon-dioxide penicillin that would heal everything without any side effects.

In the end, the TF can lead to bizarre conclusions, like hedge fund managers' beliefs that the system of private property rights currently in vogue would survive the sort of economic catastrophe that would lead to $25-a-loaf bread. We've learned over the past few years that hedge fund folks are apt to really, really believe in their models' assumptions, but this seems to bespeak a sort of obsessive faith in the God of Equations and a willful ignorance of the God of Experience. Of course, that is why we call it the technocratic fallacy.

What does natural selection mean for slavery?

The question, from the Honorable Mr. Coates:

It occurred to me last night that Darwin's Origin of Species was written just two years before the Civil War. In think this might mean something--not in the broad causal sense, but in the correlative sense. I don't have much background in intellectual history. But this is a question I hope to explore. What does natural selection mean for a bonded society?

The answer: It is a justification for slavery.

All good liberals hope that all good things go together. The local apogee of this thinking came in the 1990s, in which we hoped that increasing trade relations with China would give us cheaper tube socks and comfortable jobs in knowledge industries while letting the Chinese transform themselves from wretched peasants living in a tyrannical society into cheerful proletarians living in a happy democracy.

Well, we did get cheaper tube socks.

In the same way, liberals (and I'm using the term here in the broadest sense, to include everyone from John Stuart Mill to out-and-out social democrats) like to believe that more knowledge is better--that truth will somehow set us free. The history of social science should make us doubt that lesson. The recommended reading is Wikipedia's "Scientific Racism" article, which details how social science in a great many instances was used to justify existing power relations.

Before you say that social science has gotten "better" in that regard, think of exactly the kinds of things that critical theorists would mention, such as how psychometric theory is used by large organizations to make large organizations run better (e.g., ASVAB, the SAT) and the political consequences of that and how most research money comes from either the government generally or the military specifically. Yes, social science is "better," but I think that we should reflect on the fact that a good deal of what makes it better is likely to have come not from social science but from societal progress in general.

Returning to the main point: The argument is not that this was bad social science. In a lot of instances, it was the cutting-edge stuff that helped reify racial categorizations. (Think of IQ tests.) And it's hard for nonspecialists to determine the difference, anyway; if it were easy, then many fewer people would get tenure.

Natural selection obviously played a large role in all of this. The eugenics movement, the notion of the Victorian hierarchy of the races, and the general preoccupation with improving the "stock" of the "races" had real roots in (bad) readings of Darwin. This is different from the "Social Dariwnism" aspect of bad readings of Origins of the Species, by the way; this is simply reading in "natural facts" as social science. For the modern version, see the debate over The Bell Curve.

So when I say that natural selection is a justification for slavery, I mean really to say that we should not presume that there is an immediate and objectively understandable implication of the theory for social justice. Just the opposite. Such findings have no immediate implications for how we organize society. Regardless, we will read into them what we want to read, and the more powerful among us will see in these findings justifications for what they want to justify.

[Updated]: TNC has updated his original question, so I will update my answer. In a way, this is just a return to themes I have explored elsewhere, at greater length.

Ideas and innovations don't directly map onto the ways in which we view the social world. Ideas make politics, but not as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

This is why I oppose technological determinism. Politics and power always matter. We used to think that the Internet would help liberate the oppressed--remember the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" and all the other techno-utopias of the 1990s?--but it turns out that the effect of the Internet is at best greatly curtailed by the type of government that you had when the Internet arrived. Chinese democracy is no nearer, and very possibly less near, now than in 1991. The causal weight of the reorganization of social networks is conditioned by the ability of the sovereign to coerce those networks into a form amenable to Leviathan.

In the same way, how are we to understand "the telegraph" shorn of its rootedness in actually existing societies? It clearly helped facilitate commerce and "progress" in a great many ways. On the other hand, it also helped facilitate imperial control of distant lands in greater detail. And, in the same way, we tend to think that radio was as much a boon to dictatorial governments as it was to democracy--which is to say, it was just a tool. (It is easy to imagine democracy without the radio, since it existed. But it is actually hard to imagine what a pre-20th century fascist state would have looked like. There's a reason we think it's significant that futurism fed fascism.)

Looking for moral progress is tough. It does exist! But it's telling that we can find just as much of it in Lincoln, who was after all a corporate lawyer, as in Gandhi, who thought that trains, telegraphs, and lawyers had ruined civilization.