policy

The very foundations

This week, as all the TED micro-dispatches migrated out from Long Beach, I had this thought:

Following all the #TED tweets is totally the Allegory of the Cave. I kinda like it. Shadows of ideas.

Now that it’s over, one big theme seems clear to me. Er, I’m not suggesting that this was actually the theme of the conference! Rather, it’s just the shadow that I glommed on to from far away:

In several different domains, what we need most is innovation at the most basic level—at the very foundations.

The big three:

Energy. I was really taken by (the shadow of) Bill Gates’s presentation on carbon and energy. The thesis is simple: we need an energy miracle! The stabilization wedges aren’t enough. Incremental improvements to existing infrastructure isn’t enough. We really need some fundamentally new technologies and processes.

Education. Sir Ken Robinson made a familiar argument about education—basically that the way we do it today is stuck in 1915. But stop a second to really think about the most radical version of this argument, and what it implies. I mean, what could be more foundational, more fabric-of-space-time than school—not just the pedagogy but the social structure? What’s more universal than high school? But no, it’s a relatively recent invention, of course—and it will get replaced by something else. This innovation actually seems the most inevitable to me. It’s not a question of if, but simply of who and how: who will articulate the new models and how will they supplant traditional school. But, take note: as with climate, the “stabilization wedges” (things like Teach for America and KIPP) are great efforts, but not truly transformational. They don’t change the foundations.

Law. This was the biggest surprise to me: Philip Howard argued that law is way too complicated. Okay, that wasn’t the surprise; the surprise was that he thinks we can actually change it. This seems to me like the hardest problem, because the foundations are deepest. I mean like 12th-century England deep. I’ve honestly never contemplated the notion that we could overhaul the way law itself is written and practiced—which says a lot, because as you know I’m generally up for rethinking and rebooting. I’m going to check out Howard’s book.

Now:

I think these three domains are all especially important and interesting because they’re all meta–domains. That is to say, they determine the playing field for many other domains, so changes here cause chain-reactions. There’s huge leverage. Change any of these, and you change the economy. You change technology. You change family structures and land-use patterns.

And that’s true for energy most of all, of course. Hoping for a miracle is not a real strategy, I know; but don’t forget that the early days of steam power, oil and electricity all had a bit of the miraculous to them. Some new energy-harvesting process, or some radically more powerful kind of battery: either could transform society. Changes in energy end up changing everything else—law and education included. How exciting is that?

(Yes, I am mostly just looking for something to occupy my brain TED-wise until they post Jane’s talk.)

 

SOTU

Well, I thought this was just great. It seemed to actually assess in a way I haven’t witnessed in my lifetime. It wasn’t just rhetoric, but actually a pretty cagey annual report.

This Obama guy… let’s keep him.

 

The playing field of public policy

I was just reading a blog post about Afghanistan policy and man, I just could not get interested in it. Then it occurred to me that this is really quite a change from, say, five years ago, when I definitely still self-identified as a wonk-in-training. Or a wannabe wonk, at least.

So I was ruminating on that and without really intending to, I tweeted this little sequence, which I will now assemble here Carmody-style:

  • Once, long ago, I really REALLY wanted to be a policy wonk. No longer. Public policy once seemed very LARGE to me. Now it seems… small?
  • Initially I was convinced that policy (esp economic policy) defined the playing field—the space-time continuum! What a thing to master!
  • But in fact, there are bigger fields on which policy itself is played. Longer games. Supersets. This is @longnow-inflected thinking, obvs.
  • And for me, it’s an open question whether digging into (ephemeral?) policy right now helps you understand (and play!) the longer game.

Nothing to add; I just wanted to reproduce it here. I know a lot of Snarkmarket readers (and at least two Snarkmarket bloggers) are a bit wonkish. I wonder: Do you find your interest and engagement in public policy waxing or waning lately? What’s your own trajectory been?

And I realize “public policy” is ridiculously broad. I’m thinking a bit more of macroeconomic and foreign policy than domestic policy—but my observation above applies across the board. My utter lack of interest in health care reform perfectly balances Matt’s deep knowledge.

 

The looming public/private divorce

I woke up this morning intending to get an early start. As always, I pulled out my phone before I’d even put on my glasses, and thumb-flipped through my RSS reader a bit. Then, just as my attention span was about to hit its limit, someone casually dropped a link to James Fallows’ cover story in the new Atlantic, titled “How America Can Rise Again.” Hook, line, sinker.

This might be the first Fallows story I’ve read that over-promises and under-delivers. Reading it doesn’t really give you anything in the way of insight about how America can rise again. This is about as close as Fallows gets to future-pointed pep talkery:

Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional—but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try. Our American republic may prove to be doomed, but it will make a difference if we improvise and strive to make the best of the path through our time—and our children’s, and their grandchildren’s—rather than succumb.

It doesn’t get much cheerier than that. The piece feels as though Fallows is trying — and failing — to convince himself he’s worrying too much about America’s decline. He brings up several reasons to discount pessimism about the country’s future, and then winds up delivering the most pessimistic argument of all. “Most of the things that worry Americans aren’t really that serious, especially those that involve ‘falling behind’ anyone else,” he says, by way of setup, and then continues: “But there is a deeper problem almost too alarming to worry about, since it is so hard to see a solution. Let’s start with the good news.”

When I finished it, my feelings were somewhat akin to those I felt after I read his September 2009 cover story declaring victory in Iraq. I’d been lured in by a bombastic cover treatment proclaiming, “We won!” At the end, the most resonant message to emerge from the piece was, “Let’s cut our losses.”

There’s a wealth of ideas threaded through Fallows’ latest — the worthy tradition of the American jeremiad, the “innocence” of Mancur Olson, the power of young, unproven scholars in American academia. I thought the most provocative invocation in the piece was his assertion that the situation in California is giving us a first taste of an impending public-private divorce. But there’s not really a big idea or a thesis statement. I didn’t really know what to do with it, so I brought it here.

PS: Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I’m somehow supposed to be moving to DC in three weeks. A post about that is forthcoming.

 

The Useless Iconoclast

A couple of months ago, I started typing up a long post bashing David Goldhill’s Atlantic Monthly cover story on health care that everybody was lauding (especially David Brooks). The article had appeared in the midst of August, when health care reform was on the ropes, and it seemed like just another antagonist helping to push the process to defeat. But by September, when I was drafting the post, the prospects for reform had brightened dramatically. It was revived! With a public option! In the Senate, even! So I put my post away.

Another article, in the New Yorker this time, is getting my dander up again. (OK, it’s a blog post, but for any other publication it would have been an article.)

These articles perpetuate the belief rampant in journalism that systemic change happens in sweeping gestures. And very, very occasionally, it does. But over the past 90 years, almost every sweeping change proposed to overhaul the health care system has gone down to crushing defeat. The real changes have been step by step, bit by bit. Even Medicare when enacted was a mere condolence for the death of the comprehensive insurance system Truman had envisioned 20 years before.

But the worst thing about these articles is that they’re not content to just paint a grander vision than is practical or possible. They also spit at the seeds of change reformers have fought hard to embed within the legislation that’s proceeding.

At the heart of both Cassidy and Goldhill’s arguments is a familiar contention and one I agree with — that one of the biggest problems with the US health care system is the way it distorts costs by shuffling most payments for health care through a gruesome patchwork of employers and private insurers. Goldhill would reboot the current system in favor of a more libertarian solution, establishing affordable options for catastrophic coverage and handing out vouchers for individuals to purchase more routine care. Cassidy suggests he’d like a more progressive solution, perhaps straight-up single-payer insurance.

If their arguments stopped there, I’d appreciate them. Either of these proposals could be part of a good conversation about what health reform might look like in an ideal world. And I think it’s tremendously important that folks continue to paint these alternative visions of what health care can become.

What I find most maddening about these articles, though, is the pose of the lonely iconoclast. The way the authors pretend their ideas are so novel and transgressive that no one’s pointed them out until now. The way they ignore the past 90 years of attempts at health care reform. And worst, worst of all — the way they off-handedly dismiss the real reforms that try to incorporate those ideas into actual legislation as pragmatically as politics allows.

Both men frame their arguments as though they’re the hard-headed realists pointing out the truths no one else will acknowledge. But both are ignoring (or dismissing) reality themselves, not even really engaging with politics as it exists in the real world.

If you don’t mind a bit of wonkiness, read on. Read the rest of this entry »