May 13, 2008
Conservation and its discontents
My regional water agency, East Bay Municipal Utility District, is commendably anticipating shortages with a conservation program. Whether the program itself is commendable is not so clear; the story in the paper paper is headlined with the word rationing, and this always makes me reach for my revolver. The proposals under consideration are a hodgepodge of tools, including across-the-board price...
April 28, 2008
Gas prices
Obama resisted enormous political temptation to score a cheap one on gasoline prices today, while Clinton went in the tank. Yay for him, and too bad for her. This round began when McCain floated the insultingly dumb idea of suspending federal gasoline taxes over the summer. This was just another piece of idiocy coming out of his policy closet of...
March 26, 2008
March 24, 2008
Analysis and error
How could a policy analyst have gotten the choice about Iraq so disastrously wrong? Because policy analysis is not an activity that generates certain truth.
March 17, 2008
March 13, 2008
March 08, 2008
March 05, 2008
Math is hard
Two dispatches this week from the “is our girls and women learning?” wars. Elizabeth Weil writes about the nascent movement for single-sex education in public schools, and Christina Hoff Sommers takes on efforts to socially engineer the equal representation of women in science and engineering PhD programs. (Charlotte Allen’s “Women are dumb” doesn’t make the cut.) These arguments over the...
February 10, 2008
January 27, 2008
January 22, 2008
Perversity Training
Mandatory diversity training can feel pointless, but does it actually reduce workplace diversity?
August 08, 2007
The academic estate and the public debate
Just because your first name is "Professor" doesn't make you an expert on everything.
April 09, 2007
Creating Competitive Markets
The name of this blog comes from a now-infamous statement by a senior Republican staffer that Republicans were part of the "faith based community," as distinct from the Democrats' "reality based" foundation. This faith went far beyond foreign policy, extending into vast reaches of domestic policy. From school choice to Medicare Part D to the president's abortive Social Security privatization...
October 05, 2006
Concerning organizational recklessness
Tom Schelling explains the Enron affair, the war in Iraq, and the Foley Follies: an organization may act recklessly not because it's full of reckless people, but because it's so full of cowards that no one dares say, "We can't get away with this."
August 16, 2006
What Can Ethnography Contribute to Public Policy, And How?
In partial response to Mark's question below about anthropology, I'd like to suggest that our policy-oriented readers take a look at Robin Rogers-Dillon's fine book, The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation. Robin is an ethnographically oriented sociologist (that is, she's kind of at the end of the discipline where it starts to morph into anthro) who was a part...
