At this event, on Peter Schuck’s book on government failure. Peter Berkowitz liked the book more than I did. Berkowitz, a conservative, was not as troubled as I was by the elitist assumptions embedded in the author’s thinking.
Schuck talks about cultural impediments to better government in the United States. On p. 375, he writes
Of the particular cultural features identified in chapter 4, only four–decentralization, protection of individual rights, acceptance of social and economic inequality, and suspicion of technical expertise and official discretion–seem remotely tractable to policy-driven change.
What he describes as bugs, I would describe as features. In my remarks, I will suggest that the problem is not that the rest of America gives too little authority and autonomy to technical experts. The problem is that technical experts have too exalted a view of their own theories and capabilities.
I am in a bad mood about progressives these days, which is making it difficult for me to be charitable. Maybe it’s the long winter–I slipped and almost injured myself on another patch of global warming yesterday. But I am getting tired of the relentless support for grand social engineering notwithstanding its dismal track record, along with the bitter rhetoric against those of us who happen to disagree.
I feel much the same, and I think about the situation in terms of my daughters. I’m old enough to remember the beginnings of politically correct America, but they have been educated by it, and they have been taught to literally hate those who disagree with the Progressive agenda. They are part of it, and they will live with the results and the consequences. Its not my world anymore. I pay almost nothing in taxes. I care little about what happens in New York or California, and not at all about Afghanistan or Crimea. So I think I’ll be the exception to the rule of old people who take up political behavior and voting as a hobby. Its their world, and I’ll just wish them the best of luck.
You came across well during the presentation. I thought your comments on evaluation were good as well as your follow up that said: the problem is not so much that evaluations of programs are distorted but that they are not implemented. Your comments on the White House CEA report about evaluation was interesting. Cass Sunstein has part of a book on cost-benefit analysis. He says most government programs would pass a cost-benefit test.
He also said you are paranoid if the government is spying on you…just sayin’. 😉
“Cass Sunstein has part of a book on cost-benefit analysis. He says most government programs would pass a cost-benefit test.”
I wonder where Sunstein believes the data will come from to evaluate the costs and the benefits? I would think a lot of the data will come from the agencies administrating the programs. I have several friends in government employment, and some of the stories they tell me about how information is collected (or not) and analyzed amount to a Ron Paul campaign commercial — the kind of thing that’s funny and depressing at the same time. I hasten to add most of these stories don’t involve dishonesty (I’ve heard some of those,) but incompetence and inertia.
The older I get, and the more large organizations I deal with the more I become convinced these knowledge problems are pervasive and way underestimated by the wonkosphere — even on the Right. Whenever I hear a number produced by the government (or a large corporation or non-profit, to be fair) I try to keep in mind how many assumptions and how much ass-covering went into it.
The government collects the statistics that are useful to its pre-determined policy agenda. For example, the FBI apparently is no longer going to provide racial breakdowns of national crime statistics. Wonder why.
Missing from the exchanges (and questions) was any reference to what elements make up the composition of “costs,” for “effectiveness.” It is as if we evaluated war that way. God knows, the money and resources are nothing in comparison to the human impacts.
Is this a purely “economic” exercise? There was some little hint of another inference in the reference to the “welfare programs.” But, it sounded like homo economicus as the prime concern.
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There is also the missing distinction — of failures in the constitutionally delineated functions of government; such as, Post Office obsolescence, over extension of “Post” roads into “national transportation,” national security dysfunctions (if not “failures”), and – most glaring- failure of congressional oversight (read Tom Coburn) — from— failures of the Federal Administrative State, a separate embodiment of authority (comprised of bureaucracies and structured politically under guidance of “elites”), which uses the mechanisms of that government for its operational effect.
“I am in a bad mood about progressives these days, which is making it difficult for me to be charitable. Maybe it’s the long winter–I slipped and almost injured myself on another patch of global warming yesterday. But I am getting tired of the relentless support for grand social engineering notwithstanding its dismal track record, along with the bitter rhetoric against those of us who happen to disagree.”
There’s a disconnect in this final paragraph. You started out complaining about a particular conservative’s views. How did this morph into claiming about progressives as a political group? And why are you talking about them as a group when much of your other writing is about individuals? Progressives are hardly a hive mind.
Yet it is the authority and autonomy of Canadian government that prevents widespread financial crises. Maybe they do know better.