Bosnia On the Brink?

Last week's issue of the Economist included a glowing discussion of successful nation-building in the former Yugoslavia:

Almost 20 years after political bonds were severed by war, day-to-day links between companies, professions and individuals are quietly being restored. This huge shift in the daily life of the western Balkans is happening without fanfare. Few people have even noticed it. Those within the sphere take it for granted. Those outside are blithely ignorant. Perhaps that is not surprising. Good news is no news: the preparatory meeting to set up a south-east European firefighting centre, part of the Regional Co-operation Council, is hardly worth mentioning even in Sarajevo (where it took place), let alone anywhere else.

Yet it is precisely the fact that soldiers who were fighting one another not long ago now train together, or that firemen co-operate on a routine basis or that everyone from vets to central bankers meets with almost dreary regularity which constitutes the good news. That Regional Co-operation Council in Sarajevo has been patiently ploughing through a mass of dull, necessary work. It is a process, not an event.

Patricia Mahone and Jon Western laid out a more pessimistic view recently in a Foreign Affairs article entitled The Death of Dayton, and reiterated his claims on NPR's Sunday edition yesterday. He argues:

As successful as Dayton was at ending the violence, it also sowed the seeds of instability by creating a decentralized political system that undermined the state's authority... In the past three years, ethnic nationalist rhetoric from leaders of the country's three constituent ethnic groups has intensified, bringing reform to a standstill... Most worrisome is the inability of the leading political parties to agree on a basic political structure for the country. The political order established by Dayton seems to be careening dangerously off course, just as the guardrails that for 14 years prevented a descent into violence are being dismantled. As local fret about the future, international organizations have already begun to withdraw from Bosnia."

How can these two different narratives be reconciled?

I haven't been to Bosnia in a couple of years, but both views ring true to me based on my time in the field. That is because one narrative is about state-building and the other is about nation-building. We often use these terms interchangeably, but they describe different processeses that don't necessarily coincide.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is extremely decentralized, making routine decisions about who is responsible for what difficult and deadlocking political reform. And ethnic divisions are literally written into its national institutions. This has many concrete policy implications. When I was in the region tracking the state's response to vulnerable multi-ethnic children born after the war and their mothers, it was precisely these factors that prevented a coherent response to war victims' pressing needs. So Jon Western is right about the pitfalls of state-building post-Dayton.

At the same time, most Bosnians I connected with are looking forward not backward; civil society is thriving; 20 and 30 somethings in the "Yugosphere" talk nostalgically about pre-war days when Sarajevans embraced a common identity; their younger siblings walk around with Ipods crammed full of music from other ethnic communities . These impressions are consistent with the Economist's discussion of people's emergent sense of common identity and common economic interests in the region. State-building may be failing in Bosnia, but nation-building (or, rebuilding) is making slow but steady gains at the societal level - at least in cosmopolitan, urban areas.

Unfortunately, if you want a prediction about stability in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the near future, my money is on Mahone and Western's analysis, because ultimately it is political institutions that control the military, police and media. Politicians responding to the incentive structure of their institutions are capable of overcomng interpersonal ties - that precisely what happened in the early 1990s; and ties of commerce, as Peter Andreas has showed, are not dependent on a peacetime economy or a stable state. In that sense, Mahone and Western's precautions that the West rethink its disengagement strategy from the region are worth reading.

President Uribe Has Swine Flu.

World leaders who recently met with him are being notified.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

I am usually a fan of Charles Blow's work, but his latest op-ed seems to me a bit sloppy.

Blow claims that one reason Democrats, and President Obama in particular, may be having trouble convincing the country to sign on to large-scale health care reform is due to the public's overall lack of trust in the government. This is a completely plausible hypothesis and one that I agree with, as the numbers regarding trust are incredibly low right now (~20%). What I take issue with is the way Blow points out a "peculiar quirk of recent American politics"; namely, that American's trust in government has generally been lower following the election of a Democrat to the White House and higher after electing a Republican. Blow does not say that the Democratic administrations caused the decline in public trust numbers, but he might as well have given how the short piece is written.

Is it possible? Sure. But given the data and graphic he provides there are all sorts of reasons to doubt it is the case. At the very least, if he is going to imply such a causal relationship he should have provided a bit more discussion. Simply because low trust numbers followed the election of Democratic Presidents doesn't imply causation.

The first problem is one of time: the data he bases his discussion on only goes back to 1976. Truncating the sample in this way gives us no perspective on whether this is an artifact of the data or whether it represents an actual pattern. To be fair, Blow no choice--the data is what it is. But the time frame distorts the possibility that the party affiliation of the President doesn't matter.

Second, Blow gives us nothing to compare the data against in terms of control or alternative variables. Level of trust in government can be caused by numerous factors, including perceptions of Congress, bureaucracy, economic environment and trends, wars and foreign conflict, whether the country is moving in the right direction, etc.

Third, trust is built on repeated observation--people build up an image of whether someone or something is trustworthy based on past performance. That means feelings of trust take time to form and time to change. Additionally, the question asks about the government, not the President. In the United States, the term government has a broad meaning, unlike in parliamentary systems where it focuses on the ruling party. Given that, it is possible that any feeling of trust/distrust is dependent on both previous periods and the wider apparatus of government. We should be paying more attention to the general mood of the country prior to elections than on a single data point after a new President takes office.

Just to play around I collected data on the question of direction from the same poll that Blow pulls the trust data and graphed it side by side. The idea is that trust and feelings about the direction are likely related and do not move in lock step with single elections. Not surprisingly, there is a good fit between whether respondents see the government as trustworthy and whether they think the country is headed in the right direction (Correlation of Right direction and Always/Mostly trust is .8 and Wrong Direction and Some/Never trust is .83).

Moreover, if we map the elections of the last three Presidents on to the graph we notice something interesting.

Each President came to office after a long trend of either increasing or decreasing trust. For Clinton and Bush, this trend continued well into their first year in office. For Clinton, the trust and direction numbers began to turn upwards midway into his second year in office. For Bush, both sets of measures decreased after March of 2002. Obama took office after having watched the trust measure decrease from 55% to 17%. It took over 1 year to see the trust/direction numbers reverse during both the Clinton and Bush presidencies, so it is not surprising that we've only seen a slight up-tick in trust (+3%) during Obama's first year in office. (Although it is interesting that the right direction measure has jumped since the recent election from 11% to 44% in only the first 8 months.)

Bottom line, Blow is right to point out that a massive change in a critical social good like health care is going to require trust on the part of the public. However, the peculiar quirk seems more a function of the timing of elections and less about the causal impact of a newly elected President.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

Apologies Matter

It is very, very significant that Lieutenant William Calley openly apologized for his behavior in the 1968 massacre of hundreds of civilians in a series of villages known as My Lai. Anyone who has read Joanna Bourke's account of the event, which included not just killings and looting but also rape and sexual mutilation of women and young girls, and the subsequent denials, excuses and justifications by the culprits will grasp the importance of Calley's about-face.

Robert Koehler disagrees.

If you steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more defenseless people, something of a higher magnitude is required before you can have your life back.

But what exactly? Koehler is suggesting he "atone," that is devote his life in some way to challenging the militarism that creates My Lais and Abu Ghraibs. But to me that would undermine an apology - which is an acceptance of individual culpability. However laudable such a crusade may be, Calley could not be an effective ambassador for a more humane military through any other means that by accepting his own responsibiltiy without finger-pointing. If all soldiers did this consistently, commanders would have no power to commit war crimes. When we remove the moral responsibility from individual actors and place it on "the system" we participate in moral disengagement. I am not saying the "system" doesn't matter and shouldn't be changed. I am saying that to prevent war crimes you need acceptance of responsibility at both levels, and there can be a zero-sum relationship in the way we cast blame.

Koehler's post goes on to demonstrate as much: he dismisses Calley's apology as meaningless and even unnecessary given the wider web of criminality in which he was admittedly embedded in Vietnam.

As a matter of principle, I refuse to waste time heaping my allotted teaspoonful of disapprobation on a scapegoat. Calley's "responsibility" for My Lai, though personally enormous, is a minute fraction of the symbolic role -- the Bad Apple in an American Uniform -- he was forced to fill. He was, indeed, just following orders. And the first order of war is to suspend your humanity.

But that's too simplistic. Hugh Thompson, the US helicopter pilot who intervened during the massacre, was embedded in the same context and chose to behave nobly. We can and must hold individuals responsible, even as we insist on holding their superiors responsible as well.

The fact is, Americans did neither in the case of My Lai - which meant they too were to blame. Unlike stealing money from your mother, Calley did not "have to" apologize to "get his life back." Instead he chose to, and this choice is such a politically significant diversion from forty years of practice that it would be wrong to belittle its importance - precisely because it signals to Americans that that choice to support rather than condemn him itself was wrong.


Apologies for atrocities matter. They matter psychologically in healing the rift between victimizer and victim, and their national communities by extension. But they matter even more for communicating collective norms to one's own in-group. As long as Calley could openly pretend that My Lai wasn't a grave breach of the warrior's code, and get away with it, one could argue he was living in a culture that condones war crimes. Apologies by men and women like Calley - or England, or Wuterich - are data points suggesting a turn in the normative environment: toward one in which war crimes, if not entirely absent, are at least acknowledged for what they are.

The Complexities of Signaling

Adam Elkus from Rethinking Security tweets about a recent critique of the current US strategy of strategic communication in the Muslim world. The critique was penned by non other than Admiral Mike Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen's contention is that efforts by the US to counter propaganda from Islamic militants is doomed to fail unless more attention is paid to the outcomes of US policies on the ground:

“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in the critique, an essay to be published Friday by Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal.

“I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

Mullen's critique is a great opportunity to discuss the importance and difficulties of signaling.

The quote above reflects general problems with signaling--the practice of conveying information about oneself to another party that in turn either reinforces or alters the image that party has of the sender. Signaling is not simply a topic for security studies, but has wide-ranging applications in economics, business, marketing, and social relations in general.

Mullen is correct that words alone will not matter much--they basically amount to cheap talk since there is little to no cost associated with uttering them. The problem is exacerbated by an actor making declarations of one kind while taking actions that can be seen as inconsistent with those declarations. Since talk is cheap, audiences will look to the actions of actors to see what they reveal about their true intentions, character, and/or interests. However, matching words to deeds in this way is difficult for any number of reasons. Keren Yarhi and I are actually in the process of writing an article on the difficulty and challenges of choosing an optimal signaling strategy. Here are two that come to mind after reading the Admiral's comments:

1. Multiple Audiences: signaling is hard enough, but the degree of difficulty is compounded when you consider that there are always multiple audiences receiving the signals you send. Sometimes these audiences have different expectations of your performance which can complicate how you choose to act. There are strategies for dealing with this situation (e.g. using back-channels or multivocal signals), but these strategies are far from optimal.
   
2. Audience Perception: even if the right conditions exist for actors to select their preferred signaling strategy they still may not be able to effectively communicate their desired message. Why? Because whatever signals they send still need to be interpreted by the audience. Contra what Admiral Mullen asserts in his critique, actions do not always speak for themselves. In fact, they rarely ever do.

Consistency in messaging is crucial in any campaign, particularly when you are working against history as well as competitive interlocutors which may have the ear of your audience. However, it is easier said then done and even when it can be achieved it may not be enough to truly convince your audience that what you say is true.

Updated: Stephen Walt weighs in with his favorable reaction to Admiral Mullen's piece. Walt acknowledges the problems of 'cheap talk', but largely assumes (or implies) that actions will speak for themselves.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

Sting Operations

Maureen Dowd's op-ed Stung by the Perfect Sting rattled some cages in the blogosphere this week. Laura McKenna calling her a whiner, implying the post was really about her own bad blogger press. Tim Burke claiming she is dissing bloggers by failing to reference our own grand debates over anonymity. Danny being Danny Drezner accusing Dowd of comparing bloggers to muggers. The column seems widely interpreted as a slam against the new media.

I was sorry that none of these posts engaged the actual story in the article, which had almost nothing to do with the blogosphere per se. Part of this is Dowd's fault: her argument was poorly executed and buried under asinine introspection (we bloggers would never exhibit careless narcissim.) But look past the fluff and at issue is an important and (yes, Tim) timely legal question raised by not one but two rulings just this month: Should a person's right to anonymous speech shield him/her against defamation suits?*

Anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment. But defamation is not. So what recourse does a plaintiff have when slandered anonymously? At Digital Media Laywer, David Johnson explains the "chicken and egg" problem this way:

If trial proves that the speaker is liable for defamation, then his anonymity was not entitled to First Amendment protection and should be disclosed. If trial proves that the speaker is not liable for defamation, then his anonymity was entitled to First Amendment and should not be disclosed. However, disclosure of a speaker's identity is generally required for a court to determine whether his words were defamatory. In other words, you have to disclose his identity to determine whether his identity should be disclosed.

One way around this is the "summary judgment standard" set out in Doe v. Cahill, a 2005 Delaware ruling on whether or not Patrick Cahill, a City Councilman, could obtain the identity of anonymous blogger John Doe for the purposes of a libel suit. Daniel Solove explained the summary judgment standard in a blog post in that year:

In this case, Cahill was a public figure, and to prevail in a defamation lawsuit, he had to prove that (1) Doe made a defamatory statement (damaging to Cahill’s reputation); (2) the statement was concerning Cahill; (3) the statement was published (disseminated to others); (4) others would understand the statement to be defamatory; (5) the statement was false; and (6) Doe made the statement with actual malice (he either knew it was false or acted in reckless disregard of the truth).

Solove criticizes the New York rulingfor using a looser standard in the case referenced by Dowd. The plaintiff Liskula Cohen, arguably also a public figure, had been vilified on an anonymous blog as "skankiest in NYC" and was only required to show her case had merit to convince the court to order that Google reveal the blogger's identity. But even if they had used the Doe v. Cahill standard it is hard to see how they would not have ruled in Cohen's favor. The only hangup may have been the requirement that the plaintiff demonstrate a defendant's "malice" but this would seem rather an unfair hurdle when a defendant's identity is unknown. Hence the chicken and egg dilemma.

Did the court make the right choice? Should a person's right to anonymous speech (generally, not just in the blogosphere) protect them against defamation suits if filing the suit essentially requires knowledge of the defendant's identity?

Dowd's key argument is: No. She, however, is talking not only about defamation but also about various pernicious forms of cyber-bullying and hate speech as well. (She is also not, of course, opposing anonymous or pseudononymous deliberative argument ala The Federalist Papers; it is a straw man to claim that she has "conflat[ed] and tar[red] all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet" when in fact she carefully distinguishes constructive pseudonomity from mere character assassination.)

On this, I'm with Dowd. I am an advocate of pseudononymous (and to some extent anonymous) blogging, but I am against mindless slanderous invective for its own sake. It cheapens political deliberation, distracts us from the issues, and sets a bad example for our children. As a commenter wrote over at Copyrights and Campaigns:

"Having read the Federalist Papers, I don't recall Publius defaming as 'skanks and hos' those who disagreed with the adoption of the Constitution."

My fellow political bloggers are correct to point out that this behavior is also not representative of most anonymous bloggers or commenters. But that's precisely the reason to agree with Dowd and with the court's decision. Ultimately, "Anonymous Blogger" Rosemary Port's defense rested on the claim that no one takes the blogosphere seriously as a source of facts. According to the ruling:

"The Blogger argues that even if the words ['skank' and 'ho'] are capable of a defamatory meaning, 'the context here negates any impression that a verifiable factual assertion was intended,' since blogs 'have evolved as the modern day soapbox for one's personal opinions,' by 'providing an excessively popular medium not only for conveying ideas, but also for mere venting purposes, affording the less outspoken a protected forum for voicing gripes, leveling invective and ranting about anything at all.'"

To the extent that this perception is true (that is, to the extent that bloggers get tarred in the public eye as mindless opinion-spouters) it's not because of people like Dowd, but because of people like Port who abuse their anonymity to defame others - an act that is in fact not protected by the First Amendment - and then claim this as some kind of moral high ground.


________________________
*The case raises other interesting questions as well. For example: what is defamation? The court found that allegations of sexual promiscuity count, and I would grudgingly agree, though you could have a whole feminist debate about what that signifies. I also think you could argue, though Cohen did not, that this was not simply defamation but a kind of hate speech - in fact, had the blogger turned out to be male, I think we'd be hearing precisely such claims of misogyny - interesting double standard. Also, Rosemary Port has now sued Google for complying with the court's order - hard to imagine that she has a case, since Google's terms of use state it will hand over information if required to do so by the government, but as Solove points out perhaps Google was negligent in failing to go to bat for her? Worth watching to see.

The "Neda" Effect in Sri Lanka

Yesterday Channel 4 in the UK aired the above video, allegedly recorded on a mobile phone and smuggled out of the country by human rights activists, apparently of Sinhalese soldiers massacring Tamil noncombatants earlier this year. The Sri Lankan government (naturally) argues it is a fabrication. Human Rights Watch's James Ross says "there is no way to tell if the footage is genuine," but argues that the release of the film underscores the need for an "objective" inquiry into atrocities - by both sides - during the conflict.

I agree with Human Rights Watch in general - that whatever the validity of the film, truth-letting is politically necessary in order to move the country beyond two and half decades of armed struggle.

But I'm not so satisfied with Ross's claim that we can't know if the film itself is valid, since ultimately footage like this will increasingly matter, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, as post-conflict justice is pursued through courts.

Anyway, are there really no standards of evidence emerging for user-generated video such as this? Channel 4 at the UK has described the measures it took to authenticate the film before airing it, including qualitative comparisons to similar footage from the Bosnian war. It's interesting to think about what kind of authentication could hold up in a hypothetical war crimes court.

Would it not be useful to know more, for example, about how the UK acquired the video? How it made its way from the soldier who shot it to the human rights activist who passed it along to the journalist? One can imagine a number of legitimate scenarios; one can imagine others. Answers to these questions can be found, and have a bearing on the credibility of the film. Retracing that chain to the original cell phone could lead to additional facts of the case, a skill already in use by cyber forensic researchers in domestic contexts. And relevant evidentiary standards must be under development by US law enforcement agencies, cell phone video is increasingly being used to investigate criminals and agents of the state alike.

Not being a cyber forensics expert, I don't claim to know what these standards are or offer suggestions as to how to view this particular video artifact. But such solutions should be devised, as claiming "one can never know for certain" will ultimately be self-defeating for the human rights community, feeding into the denials of abusive governments. The "Neda effect" - the use of cell-phone video to capture and make visible acts of brutality - has the potential to shift the balance of power between governments and citizens, but also the potential for abuse and misdirection. Human rights organizations should be taking the lead in figuring out how institutions of international justice can leverage such technology while mitigating its side-effects, rather than shrugging it off altogether.

Ted Kennedy

I only met Ted Kennedy on a handful of occasions. The last time was at a party to mark the end of my father's twenty-two year history as one of the Senator's chief health-care policy advisers.

My overwhelming impression of Kennedy's vicarious presence in my life was as a disembodied voice. Whenever I answered the phone to hear "this is Senator Kennedy, may I speak to your father?" it seemed as if everything in the house froze until my dad got on the line. Sometimes such calls would amount to very little. Other times my father would soon be on his way to the Senator's house to deliver a briefing.

Those calls didn't happen very often, but they encapsulated the degree that intersection of the Senator's agenda and the rhythms of legislative sessions shaped my family's home life. So I can only describe the experience as strange when I called my father today to see how he was taking his long-time boss's death only to discover that my parent's--temporarily in the news-resistant bubble of their lake house--didn't yet know of Kennedy's passing.

Still, everyone knew it was coming. We might have hoped he would hang on to see his dream of universal health-care coverage come closer to reality; but in the end even access to the best medical care available could not prevent the untimely death of a rich and powerful man who, whether despite his faults or because of them, devoted his working life to improving the lot of the poor and powerless.

Here's what my father said, for comments that were obviously collected prior to Kennedy's death, to the National Journal:

The senator was not someone who invoked emotion or expressed it in public. He thought it was unseemly. But he took these causes personally. There was a young boy in Washington state, the child of a single mother, nine or 10. He had childhood leukemia. He was covered by Medicaid, but it didn't cover organ transplants. Even in those days, if you could do a bone marrow transplant there was a high cure rate. It was expensive. Neighbors were holding bake sales and stuff to raise money. They got up to $80,000 when the child died.

We started putting the story in speeches, because it was a heart-rending example. But after doing it two or three times, the senator asked us to take it out because he was choking up every time he said it. These things were personal to him.

Kennedy was pretty bold. He'd forge ahead when other people are scared. He said to me there were always a thousand reasons not to do something, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. We finally passed FDAMA (the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act) in 1997, and we started it in '95 with the Gingrich takeover of Congress. They wanted to gut the FDA, thought it was an impediment for progress. Kennedy went to the mat on this. By delaying and arguing and blustering and negotiating and mounting a major PR campaign, and writing inflammatory letters to The New York Times, all but two provisions were compromised in a way that was satisfactory to us. And the question was whether to keep fighting or declare victory and go home. Kennedy decided he would fight. He filibustered the thing. He was on the floor for three days. The staff was in the backroom coming up with ways to keep it going.

One issue was federal preemption of state regulation of cosmetics. Kennedy kept coming up with all these examples, and dangers with cosmetics and why it shouldn't be unregulated. It made the front page of Women's Wear Daily. And then the Republicans backed off. The industry went to the guys in the Senate who were carrying water for them and said to back off, that Kennedy was doing more damage with the floor debates and stories than any benefit they could get.

He wouldn't get bogged down in details, but when they were necessary to know, he really knew them. When he was in a meeting or on the floor, he wanted to know more than anyone else.

In one of the many "war on drugs" bills, there was a caucus-wide effort. Most of the people involved wanted more police on the streets. Kennedy had this view that it wouldn't be very effective, that prevention and treatment were the most effective way to reduce illegal drugs. The formula was supposed to be 50 percent of the money on law enforcement and 50 percent on prevention and treatment. People accepted it as a fair formulation.

One meeting he went in to argue about the allocation of funds. We pull up to the Capitol building, where the meeting is, and he says, "Let's hang on for a few minutes and explain this to me. What's the issue I have to be focusing on?" We were saying the caucus wasn't proposing a 50-50 split, and that his job was to make sure it was 50-50.

The argument hinged on appropriations and obligations. Sure, he didn't know [the distinctions] before the briefing. We briefed him for four minutes and he had it down cold. He went into the meeting and spun this back to other senators at the appropriate time, and former Sen. Bob Graham was indignant because he didn't think it worked out to 50-50. Kennedy turned to the budget expert, and said it was obligation versus appropriation versus outlay, and he laid out the details. The budget guy said he was right. If you had asked him 20 minutes later what the difference was, he might not have been able to remember.

UPDATE: And here's some more from NPR (mostly of interest to those who care a lot about health-care reform)..... back to blogging silence ....

Better Political Forecasts through Crowdsourcing

Dan Drezner links to a recent article by Philip Tetlock on the difficult business of political forecasting. His evaluation of this troubled pastime is accomplished through the review of three recent books that all claim to provide a better way to see the future of politics. His own research (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, a fantastic book that you really should read) offers solid reasons to be skeptical of any pronouncements by 'experts' that they have some kind of proprietary knowledge about the future.

While I think his critique of the three books and of political forecasting in general is quite good, I find lacking one of his suggestions for how to improve the practice; namely, crowdsourcing. My issues does not lie with the practice of crowdsourcing, but rather the way that Tetlock describes it.

After his review of the three books (and the requisite approaches to forecasting each represents), Tetlock provides a powerful suggestion for how to improve the prediction business--crowdsourcing political forecasts:

Aggregation helps. As financial journalist James Surowiecki stressed in his insightful book The Wisdom of Crowds, if you average the predictions of many pundits, that average will typically outperform the individual predictions of the pundits from whom the averages were derived. This might sound magical, but averaging works when two fairly easily satisfied conditions are met: (1) the experts are mostly wrong, but they are wrong in different ways that tend to cancel out when you average; (2) the experts are right about some things, but they are right in partly overlapping ways that are amplified by averaging. Averaging improves the signal-to-noise ratio in a very noisy world. If you doubt this, try this demonstration. Ask several dozen of your coworkers to estimate the value of a large jar of coins. When my classes do this exercise, the average guess is closer to the truth than 80 or 90 percent of the individual guesses. From this perspective, if you want to improve your odds, you are better-off betting not on George Friedman but rather on a basket of averaged-out predictions from a broad ideological portfolio of George Friedman–style pundits. Diversification helps.

As Dan points out in his post, this suggestion potentially violates two of the necessary conditions of successful outsourcing, and that is the independence of the experts and diversity of their opinion. Dan says it best:

One of the accusations levied against the foreign policy community is that because they only talk to and read each other, they all generate the same blinkered analysis. I'm not sure that's true, but it would be worth conducting this experiment to see whether a Village of Pundits does a better job than a single pundit.

I would actually go farther than Dan here. The problem with approach isn't simply that political scientists and pundits may conduct their analysis in an echo chamber (although that is definitely an issue), but rather that for the crowdsourcing of these issues to work properly you would want as diverse a crowd as possible--meaning, you would wan to include individuals from outside of political science and the political pundit community.

Outside of an effective aggregation mechanism, James Surowiecki points to three necessary conditions for successful crowdsourcing:

1. Diversity of opinion
   
2. Independence of those opinions
3. Decentralization (i.e. ability to lean on local knowledge)

Political Scientists and pundits do not hold a monopoly on useful insights into the world of politics. Other actors have an interest in understanding and predicting what will happen politically, including financial analysts, corporations, journalists, and politicians and citizens around the globe. Each of these groups likely brings their own perspective and lens for analyzing political outcomes to the table, and from a crowdsourcing perspective that is precisely what one would want (diversity, independence, and decentralization). The answer isn't simply to gather more opinion from political pundits, but rather to gather more opinion from additional actors who represent an even greater diversity of opinion.

I agree with Dan that it would be worthwhile to set up some kind of experiment to determine the optimal composition of a political forecasting crowd. I smell a side project a brewin'....

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

The Zombie Plague Has Gone Viral

I can't stand Keith Olbermann most of the time, but this bit last night - both a spoof of the health care debate and the proliferation of zombie references in political discourse lately - was too priceless to ignore:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A Giant Moves On.

Senator Kennedy is dead at 77.

If You Haven't Seen This Movie, You Probably Should.

Eric Randolph tells us why at Complex Terrain Lab in a post entitled "A New Kind of War Movie" :

"The Hurt Locker has already garnered the epithet of ‘first great Iraq war movie’ since its US release back in June, but that might actually be an underestimation. For a start, it has an intensity that will leave your bowels twisted and your nails bleeding; and it’s made a star of a nobody in James Renner. But, more importantly, by side-stepping the question of the war’s founding morality and justification, director Kathryn Bigelow has achieved something quite new for the war genre. Her resolute focus on the daily activities of a small cog in the military machine – namely, a bomb disposal unit in 2004 Baghdad – results in a film that is neither anti-war polemic nor gung-ho propaganda piece. Rather, she simply seeks to represent the unadorned and bleak reality of daily routine, with the caveat that the daily routine in question happens to be a horrifically dangerous nightmare.

As an exercise in compulsive tension, it is obviously a great subject for a filmmaker, and one that Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have expertly realised. But more than that, it is also a rare look at the process of war-fighting. Cinema has often treated soldiers as metaphors for the grand existential struggles of mankind, or as the tortured pawns of some inherent evil in the world. By contrast, the soldiers of The Hurt Locker are simply employees doing a particular bizarre job. The action is episodic, occurring in a series of fairly independent set pieces that bring home the monotony of work far more than any quest for glory. Although Bigelow tries to inject some concluding “what does it all mean?”-style remarks towards the end, these moments sit uncomfortably in a film that avoids melodrama, sweeping rationalisations or any over-arching narrative."

I withhold judgment until after I have a chance to rent and watch, which on Randolph's tantalizing recommendation I shall do this weekend. But based on his description I think this genre (nuts and bolts of work in and around wars, sans grand narrative) was actually pioneered earlier in the decade - with films about the First Gulf War. Jarhead and Three Kings (possibly, though maybe it was in a genre all its own) come to mind. It's true that you haven't seen a film of this type about the Iraq war, so that's new. I wonder if there is some generalizable lag in films about particular wars that renders this type of movie politically acceptable a certain amount of time after the onset of hostilities.

Election Results from Afghanistan

Preliminary results show it is too close to call; the Guardian interprets this as Karzai having a narrow lead.

UPDATE: Oh, crap.

Web Architecture and Children's and the Media in Cross-National Perspective

UPDATE: The original version of this post was "Children and the Media." It was basically a little tirade about the absence of genuine news media for children.

What was ironic about this post is that my rant was triggered by a visit to BBC's website (upon following a link from BBC's homepage to their "Children's" page, I found primarily a bunch of games rather than substantive news for children):

"What a statement of contemporary assumptions about children's role as citizens! It's as if BBC thinks kids have no interest in current events or need for relevant, age-appropriate journalism. Too bad, actually. As 10-year-old Damon Weaver reminded us with his recent interview of President Obama, young people everywhere can be and are engaged in the events of the day, especially those that affect them (and what doesn't?)."

However, as was pointed out in comments, BBC is actually one of the few "global" news organizations that do in fact produce news tailored to children, and has since 1972. However, you can't find "Newsround" easily unless you grew up with it and know where to look - the BBC homepage doesn't link to it (not even among its "32 languages; I don't know, kid-ese seems like another language to me half the time), or from the "Children's" page (mostly games); you have to go to the "Children's BBC" page from the "Children's Page on BBC" and even that includes only the Newsround icon (see - it's that funny N down there in the corner), but if you aren't already familiar with the icon that won't help much. You won't get far, for example, by surfing around in search of something that looks like the word "News" on the children's page; or "Children's News" on the homepage.

What did I learn from this experience?

1) I was wrong (and delighted to be so). If I want to get my kids interested in reading current events, BBC is actually setting a great example for the US news media. (Although, see here and here.) If there's an equivalent of Newsround here in the States, I've never heard of it and neither have any of the parents I know (most had also never heard of Newsround). By contrast, to hear my commenters talk, Newsround is so ingrained in British culture that kids "presumably all recognize the logo."

2) I was right. BBC is providing children's news, but it's also steering them (and parents like me) away from it in exactly the way I criticized in my earlier post. While we're waiting for global news organizations to follow this example, BBC will fill that niche a lot more easily if it rethinks its new website design to emphasize news instead of entertainment for kids. It would be a simple matter, would it not, to treat the Newsround website as the children's homepage, with games and activities embedded in Newsround itself? Instead, currently, games dominate the Children's page, and Newsround is relegated to a tricky-to-find external section. (I don't know about your kids, but mine would never make it past all the tantalizing drivel even if they knew what to look for; and I doubt many kids outside of the UK will "recognize the logo.")

Architecture is governance. The packaging of information is as important as its presence or absence. It shapes our perception of what is available as well as our access; it shapes assumptions about what it is normal to want; and thus, it communicates and reproduces social values. Though I picked on the wrong news organization, my essential argument remains: too little thought is given in our culture to the idea that kids might be interested in the world around them, whereas enormous amounts of energy are spent turning them into consumers of entertainment and goods. This should be changed.

P.S. My original and now defunct post remains below the fold to remind me never to use this blog as a space for venting everyday frustrations without doing my research. Sorry, BBC.

_________________________________________

On BBC's recently revamped website, I noticed this morning a link to "Children" which I assumed would be a webpage devoted to getting children interested in the news and current events through coverage of topics related to them. Instead I found this:



What a statement of contemporary assumptions about children's role as citizens! It's as if BBC thinks kids have no interest in current events or need for relevant, age-appropriate journalism. Too bad, actually. As 10-year-old Damon Weaver reminded us with his recent interview of President Obama, young people everywhere can be and are engaged in the events of the day, especially those that affect them (and what doesn't?).

Here are other examples of news stories involving children that might have appeared on BBC's "Children" page, were it structured to take children's intelligence seriously rather than to provide cheap and low-quality entertainment:

1) Picking Tobacco is Bad For Children: "THOUSANDS OF child labourers working as pickers on Malawi’s tobacco plantations are exposed to nicotine poisoning equal to smoking 50 cigarettes a day, an international children’s rights group said yesterday. Plan has called upon Malawi’s tobacco industry to vastly improve working conditions, and the government to ensure existing child labour laws are enforced in full."

2) Study Confirms Universal Health Care for Children is Good For Society. "In June, Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy released "The Economic Impact of Uninsured Children on America," a new report whose bottom line is that extending health insurance coverage to all children in the United States would be relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of letting children remain uninsured and would yield economic benefits that are greater than the costs."

3) New York Should Treat Children in Prison Less Harshly, Says Justice Department. "A recently completed federal investigation has documented unsafe and, in some cases, heartbreaking conditions in several New York state detention facilities.The department describes a hellish environment where excessive force is commonplace and children risk serious injury — concussions, knocked-out teeth and fractured bones — for minor offenses like laughing too loudly, getting into fistfights or “sneaking an extra cookie” at snack time."

4) Stressed Out Families? Too Much Work, Not Too Many Children, Is the Problem."Families in which both partners work long hours are more stressed than others, but the addition of children doesn't seem to have much impact on stress levels, according to a new report from Statistics Canada."

5) African Children's Choir on Tour in the Pacific Northwest. "The critically acclaimed choir, whose members are drawn from impoverished African communities, has performed for dignitaries such as President George W. Bush and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, and strives to raise awareness of the plight of children on the African continent."

And children are not just interested in news about children. BBC and other news outlets could take a hint from efforts by children's websites like Pitara, which include a round-up of world news written in language kids can understand. Still, how much more accessible such news would be if it came to kids through the media machines their parents rely upon for daily reports. And how much more engaged children would be in our society if this were the case. And, perhaps, how much more responsive adults would be to children's needs if it were taken for granted that their informed voices were a legitimate part of our national debates.

On the other hand, never mind. All this keeping up would just distract our budding electorate from more important things like Suite Life on Deck and the Honesty Box.

Extraordinary Rendition and Detainee Abuse are Two Separate Policy Problems. Let's Treat Them As Such.

Bob Drogin at the LA Times is the latest to regurgitate the misinformed claim that Raymond Azar, whose human rights appear to have been violated as he was extradited from Afghanistan to Washington on bribery charges, is "the first target of rendition under Obama."

The incident described yesterday by Drogin, in which Azar was arrested in his home and then allegedly hooded, photographed, subjected to a cavity search and told he would "never see his family again unless he confessed," actually occurred on April 7th; Azar is now in detention in or around Washington DC and has also claimed that his treatment at the hands of those who arrested him amounted to torture. Claims began surfacing a few days later on blogs such as Huffintgon Post and Daily Kos that Azar was the "Obama Adminisration's First Rendition Victim"; this claim is now being repeated on various political blogs.

If Azar's claims are accurate, his human rights to humane treatment were violated as he was arrested. The Justice Department's proposed investigation into CIA abuse would seem therefore to be a timely and wise choice, as detainee abuse seems to have become embedded in the culture of many US agencies (in this case, the FBI). This is something that can only be reversed with significant political and legal attention to the matter, and which should not be assumed to have ended with the presidential transition.

However ill-treatment per se doesn't mean Azar was a victim of extraordinary rendition, and this narrative is muddying the public's understanding of the concept itself.

"Rendition," for one thing, is not a human rights abuse: it is simply the practice of transferring prisoners between jurisdictions, and is provided for at the domestic level in Article 4 Section 2 of the US Constitution. Internationally, rendition generally takes the form of extradition, which is a legally arranged transfer of a suspected or convicted criminal, and is governed by a range of bilateral and multilateral treaties. All this is perfectly legal.

But treaty law also constrains the practice of extradition. Among other things, signatories to the Convention on Torture are prohibited under Article 3 from extraditing suspects to states where they are likely to be tortured. "Extraordinary rendition" is a term that came to describe the practice of informally doing just that: transferring a suspect without a formal extradition agreement into the custody of a government at whose hands s/he is likely to face ar harsher interrogation for the purpose of information extraction. In other words, whereas extradition is a legal process aimed at criminal prosecutions subject to due process standards, extraordinary rendition in an extra-legal arrangement for finding loopholes for interrogations.

The practice of transferring suspects to such governments or to CIA-run "black sites" as a means of skirting international rules regarding interrogation was widely condemned during the Bush Administration - but the practice dated back at least to 1995, during the Clinton Administration. Nor has it ended with the election of a Democratic President. After Bush left office, the Obama Administration claimed it would seek diplomatic assurances from countries before transferring suspects (but this was already part of the earlier policy). He has not put an end to the extraordinary rendition policy per se, a choice I've criticized before; the Administration's position was reiterated today. I have not been tracking whether or not individuals have actually suffered from it since Obama took office, but it seems clear to me that Azar did not: this is not a case of the US sending a detainee overseas for abuse.

Azar appears to have been extradited by the government of Afghanistan to the US under the normal legal procedures to face charges of corruption in a US court, as the LA Times article itself admits:

"Their case is different from the widely criticized "extraordinary renditions" carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks. In those cases, CIA teams snatched suspected Al Qaeda members and other alleged terrorists overseas and flew them, shackled and hooded, to prisons outside the United States without any arrest warrants or other judicial proceedings.

The FBI arrested Azar and Cobos with warrants signed by a federal magistrate. And the State Department, Talamona said, asked the government of Afghanistan "for its consent in advance to take these two individuals into custody and return them to the United States to stand trial. They consented to our request."

If there is a violation of extradition law happening here, it was Afghanistan, not the US, that engaged in it (and indeed, give the recent US record of detainee abuse, perhaps governments worldwide would be in violation of Article 3 of the Torture Convention by sending any detainees to the US). But the extradition happened through normal legal channels, not secretly in an effort to circumvent those channels, and not for the purposes of extracting intelligence.

This strikes me as a case of a prisoner who was lawfully extradited receiving ill-treatment as he was relocated. Detainee abuse by US personnel in violation of legal protections is an important issue, but it is distinct from a policy of turning over suspects to governments who lack such protections altogether. Let's treat it as such.

The Political Geography of "Risk"

I spent ten hours today playing Risk with my son. What would normally have been simply a time-killer on a rainy Sunday became, after my earlier perusal of P. Michael Phillipps' treatise on the non-decline of the non-Westphalian-system, a day-long exercise in thinking about political geography.

By lunchtime we had grown tired of the Classic version and took a break to run down to World Apart Games and pick up the 2008 version for an "updated version of the map" (advertised online). But when we had a chance to look at the gameboard we were disappointed at the changes, which didn't make the new map look anything like the world we live in or any empirically grounded version of it. (True the Risk rules would probably mitigate against a world of 190+ sovereign "territories"; but if you must simplify a complex globe, what about lumping countries together according to factors in particular regions that actually do cross national boundaries while distinguishing them from others: like commodities belts or cultural affinities. And instead of using the continents as a frame of reference for scoring, why not use transnational classifications and simply color code the map? The Islamic bloc, for example could be represented in green; OECD countries, dictatorships, or some equivalent of Barnett's non-integrating gap could be other "regions." Parts of these blocs are contiguous but parts would not be, introducing an interesting twist on the rules of claiming and holding territories for bonus points. Also, some of these overlap: many but not all OPEC countries might fall into the Islamic bloc and vice-versa, offering a diverse range of options for accumulating different scores for "blocs."

Any such alternatives would have been more interesting and timely than what Risk 2008 actually offers, which is territorial units in which Russia, for example, looks more like an enclave in Eastern Europe than a continent-spanning empire. As a parent and educator, I was uninspired.) We were told that the most significant changes in this version were actually not the map or the concepts but rather the rules: Risk 2008 offers several different ways to play.

However we were lucky enough to acquire a demonstration copy of an earlier version of Risk, albeit one set later in history: 2210 AD. This version is much more interesting because in some respects the labels on the map make (a kind of) sense when extrapolating ahead into history. What was Brazil on the earlier version is now the Amazon Desert; New York is now the site of one of several underwater cities; central Africa has become the Zaire Military Zone; South Asia is now United Indiastan, China is Hong Kong and Alaska is the Northwest Oil Emirate.

(Also the moon bases are extremely cool.)

Why can't we use the same kind of imagination to create a meaningful post-Westphalian alternative to map our contemporary world - one in which factions compete not simply for territorial space but to access over resources, transit routes and communications grids; in which the political economy of battle is measured not just in land army units but also on the seas, in the air and in people's minds; and in which the political cleavages and alliance structures are often non-territorially-based?

I wonder if the predominance of a Westphalian political geography in the boardgame Risk tells us something about our still entrenched notions of the world we live in.

Westphalian Illusions

Mark Safranski has a useful post up at Zenpundit critiquing LTC P. Michael Phillips' Parameters article Deconstructing our Dark Age Future."(I cannot remember the last time I saw an article written by a military officer, rather than a civilian post-modernist, whose title began with the word "Deconstructing.")

Phillips argues (like many before him, not least Yahya Sadowski) that:

The Westphalian state system is not in fact in decline; this arrange-
ment, as we have imagined it, never really existed beyond a proposed
behavioral model exemplifying the American experience. Instead, territori-
ality, sovereignty, and equality, the guiding principles of that ideal system,
have always been transactional, if not entirely illusory, because effective
global enforcement mechanisms simply do not exist.

Safranski replies (in part):

While definitely fuzzy and spottily adhered to in practice international law is not entirely “illusory”, nor is it a byproduct of 20th century Wilsonian American exceptionalism as Phillips argued. Perhaps Hugo Grotius rings a bell? Or Alberico Gentili? Or the long history of admirality courts? Like common law or an unwritten tribal code, international law has evolved over a very long period of time and does exert some constraint upon the behavior of sovereigns. Statesmen and diplomats think about policy in terms of the impression it will make on other sovereigns, and international law is one of the yardsticks they contemplate. Admittedly, at times the constraint of international law is quite feeble but in other contexts it is strong. An American military officer, who can see firsthand the effect of creeping JAG lawyerism on command decisions on the battlefield ( in my view, greatly excessive and harmful ) and in the drafting of byzantine ROE, should know better than to make such a silly statement.

My skim of Phillips' article makes me wonder at the point of his "deconstruction," since how ever valid it may be the latter part of his article would seem to be arguing for a retrenching of those illusory practices of sovereign statecraft (like monopolizing the use of force rather than bleeding it out to PMCs). But if the monopoly on force was always a Westphalian illusion, what is at stake, exactly, with behaving as if the illusion doesn't matter?

The fact is, illusions are powerful, for good or ill. Anyway, read and draw your own conclusions; the rest of my rainy Sunday will be spent playing Risk with my seven-year-old son. Is the geography of the board we're using an illusion? Yes. Could I publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal proving this? Probably. How much does that fact matter in the conduct of either the game itself or the meta-experience between us that is constituted by the playing of the game? I'm not sure.

Piracy as a Signal of Value?

[Cross posted at bill | petti)

Christopher Penn crafts an interesting piece arguing that piracy (i.e. copyright infringement) is, among other things, a market signal:

Piracy indicates that something is sufficiently valuable enough that it’s worth stealing. It’s worth making an illegal copy and spreading without compensating the creator.

Do you want the most accurate, unbiased, unmanipulated measure of how popular and valuable something is? Go hit up a site like The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or any of the other file sharing services and see if someone is stealing it.

Now, I think this is an interesting observation, as well as a logical one. It seems intuitive that someone must value a product in order to go to the trouble of illegally copying and distributing it. This act takes time as well as incurs particular risks if one is caught. Similarly, for someone to illegally download a product they too incur some level of risk and therefore must believe the product to be worth the risk they are taking on. However, I would have to disagree with Christopher that using file sharing services as an index for how valuable something is constitutes the optimal way to measure value.

In most cases (and I stress most, leaving room for a few exceptions), the market price of a product can indicate three things: level of demand, level of supply, and/or price of inputs for that product. When price rises either demand has increased, supply has decreased, or the cost of inputs has increased. If consumers keep consuming the product at the higher price it indicates that they place a higher marginal utility on that product (fancy way of saying they value or like it more). If consumers are not willing to pay the higher cost the market will correct itself--as demand drops, supply increases, etc.--leading to a lower price for the product.

With piracy, we lose the power of the price signal. 'Producers' in this scenario essentially have no production costs, as it is incredibly easy to produce and distribute pirated products electronically. They also have no concerns for inventory, since 'digital shelf space' is infinite. Additionally, consumers bear no immediate costs for consuming the product. That is the whole point of illegal file sharing--one does not have to pay for what one consumes. Without any kind of feedback besides pure demand, it is hard to gauge how valuable something is since consumers are not being asked to sacrifice anything of value for the product.

However, there is one possible bit of cost that we could incorporate--risk. Copyright infringement is illegal (well, most places) and, if caught, one could face stiff fines and penalties for either 'producing' or 'consuming' illegal content. We woul need to incorporate a measure of risk that takes into account the severity of the possible penalties and multiply that times the likelihood that one would be caught and that the harshest penalty would be applied. Say, for example, R=P x L where R equals the total risk assumed, P equals penalties, and L equals the likelihood of being penalized. This measure could denote the actual 'price' that people are willing to pay to either distribute and consume specific illegal products.

I think if we look at it this way we would find that the value of these goods (in most cases) is far less than Christopher thinks they are, as the probability of being caught is quite low for most participants in this type of economy. If that is the case, the rate of piracy would not necessarily indicate that consumers value the product more, but actually that they value it less since R would likely be less than the market price ($). I think there is a philosophical dimension to piracy that Christopher does not incorporate into his theory (more on this below).

Christopher makes another point with regards to marketing:

Unlike commercial markets where marketers spend time, energy, and money to get you to buy things, no commercial marketer actively goes out and tells people to steal their products and not pay them. That’s completely irrational.

Give away for non-monetary currency, sure, through inbound links or reputation, through legitimate venues like your web site or iTunes, but no one wants to confer any level of legitimacy on pirate markets. Thus, when you see something in a pirate market that is actively being traded (meaning someone right now is seeding or leeching, uploading or downloading), it’s a good indicator to me that there’s value being exchanged, even if the creator isn’t getting compensated.

This is true in most cases, except that whether you pay for a product or not you have still been exposed to the barrage of marketing activities that promote the product.

Finally, piracy as a signal runs into problems due to the philosophical/psychological dimensions to the practice. Peter emailed me to discuss the post and lays out some of the basic logic that I was alluding to above regarding philosophical/psychological factors to piracy:

On piracy--there is also a social/normative component, in that people want to identify as Pirates because Pirates are cool.

Sometimes you'll have folks who want something but don't want to pay, and there's an economic signal there. But, you will also have an identification element at work--I'm a Pirate, i don't pay for anything (even if the cost is negligible), mainly for the self image of romantic hero bucking the system, rebeling against the Man. Pirates are, after all, cool. They even have a major political party in Europe that won seats in the EU parliament.

I agree with Peter, and this fact further complicates using piracy as a signal of value. Furthermore, we know from experimental work that simply making something free can alter how the item is perceived and, consequently, consumed.

[BTW, Peter and Patrick are supervising some really sharp undergrads who are doing some independent Piracy research this summer, and this identification element becomes a strong running theme for them, as the modern notion of piracy contains a romantic and heroic element to it. They have a great blog on the project: http://roguishcommonwealth.blogspot.com]

Overall I think the idea is very interesting and we likely can extract some additional measure of value from file sharing sites. But piracy is just one input among many that we could use to devise a more complete index for value.

(via chrisbrogan)

The Practice of Diplomacy

David Rothkopf has a nice piece in today's Washington Post giving a positive review to Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. He makes the prescient point that she has revitalized US Diplomacy by revitalizing both the department and its approach, taking on important yet not headline grabbing issues that will have a profound impact on the relationships that define the US role in the world in the coming decades. While the White House and DoD focus on Iran and Afghanistan, Rothkopf notes how Clinton is able to address:

Which nations will be our key partners? What do you do when many vital partners -- China, for example, and Russia -- are rivals as well? How must America's alliances change as NATO is stretched to the limit? How do we engage with rogue states and old enemies in ways that do not strengthen them and preserve our prerogative to challenge threats? How do we move beyond the diplomacy of men in striped pants speaking only for governments and embrace potent nonstate players and once-disenfranchised peoples?

Clinton laid out her approach in a major speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last month (I actually listened to it as a podcast, you can get the audio here). She is doing the diplomacy, engaging in the practices that build relationships that constitute US standing in international affairs.

And, as Rothkopf concludes, she's doing this from a position of power. Beyond resources or personalities, she has the single most important form of power in Washington: the confidence of the President. (I want to say that's Neustadt but its still early on Sunday!)

Breakdown of Troop-Contractor Distribution in Iraq and Afghanistan

Today's Wall Street Journal notes that the number of private military contractors (PMCs) current outnumbers the number of military personnel serving in Afghanistan, and the numbers are extremely close in Iraq:

A few points to make:

1. The data illustrate that with the troop surge in Afghanistan has come a slight uptick in the number of PMCs, but overall contractors have far outnumbered troops in that theater. What the article does not discuss is the distribution of duties and roles for PMCs and how that may have shifted over the past few years. I'd be interested to see how fallout from various incidents (i.e. Blackwater [Xe]), while not decreasing the number of PMCs, has altered the kinds of tasks contractors are performing
   
2. Given the reduced size of the military since the Cold War and current US commitments, there is likely to be (and continue to be) a tight correlation between the number of US personnel and number of PMCs, as many PMCs serve service and logistic roles necessary to support combat personnel. This creates a problem for the Obama administration as it's stated goal was to reduce reliance on contractors. Unless they alter current structural conditions (i.e. increase size of military and/or reduce commitments abroad) they won't really have a choice but to continue to rely on PMCs.
   

via iammilitary

Do I Need (Yet Another) Conference Tote Bag? Um... No.

And now I can say that and support a good cause.

This email came to me, through a colleague, from the American Political Science Association today. Members among the Duck readership, please send a brief email to the organization at apsabags@hotmail.com.

Dear APSA member,

Do you need the annual conference bag? The APSA Labor Project is concerned about the labor conditions of those who make the bags. We are also aware there are environmental and sustainability considerations.

APSA does not contract or pay for the bags, one of the annual conference sponsors does; decisions about bag manufacturing are not under our control. We have worked closely with APSA leadership in D.C. to urge the bag sponsor to contract bags made in factories with verifiable labor conditions.

Last year the conference bags were made at a unionized, U.S. factory. This year the bags will be made at several undisclosed locations overseas, which means that labor conditions at production facilities cannot be independently verified. It would be extremely difficult to set up an agreement about where the bags are made, particularly since the bag sponsor may change from year to year.

On another front, while APSA’s sponsors have been moving toward environmentally-friendly products and we know that the bags are reusable for years, we wonder if indeed you need another bag? Doing away with the bags altogether, we argue, would be more sustainable in the end.

We would appreciate hearing from you about this issue to help us represent APSA members.

Please send your comments to apsabags@hotmail.com.

Sincerely,
The APSA Labor Project

Summer Vacation Discriminates Against Poor Kids

I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers. For those who haven't picked it up, yet, the key thesis is that extraordinary individuals are actually not extraordinary as individuals, but simply happen to be the lucky beneficiaries of chance, opportunity and social structures that unwittingly favor some over others by accident of birth - in ways we seldom recognize and even more seldom legislate to balance out.

Bill Gates? Not a genius, just one of the lucky kids who by random chance happened to have access to an early computer terminal in the 1960s, giving him a leg up on the computer revolution. Gifted athletes? Most of them just happen to be born between January and March, helping them benefit from the arbitrary cut-off dates associated with sports league eligibility - kids with those birthdays will always be a little stronger and faster than those slightly younger than them lumped on the same team, and this will translate into a slight advantage at first, compounded over time by the validation and extra sports opportunities that their perceived "giftedness" relative to their "peers" earns them.

Gladwell's book is full of interesting anecdotes about how random circumstance (rather than either individual merit or overt discrimination) accounts for people's success at math, computers, social relations, finance, even at landing airlines safely. But the study that most caught my eye is toward the end of the book, when he explains why long summer vacations (a peculiarly American invention) may be at the root of our education crisis - and in fact do more than anything else to explain the learning gap between wealthy and economically disadvantaged kids.

Gladwell cites research by Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander, who studied test scores among Baltimore elementary-schoolers by income level, and how they changed throughout the school year, and again between spring and fall. Although the oft-cited "achievement gap" appears to suggest that high-income kids do better in school overall, Alexander shows by disaggregating scores between September and May and scores between May and September that low-income kids actually do as well or better than their peers during the school year.

"Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they're not in school."

Like, summer camp, museums, road trips, having reading material and educational computer games lying around the house.


According to Gladwell:

What Alexander's work suggests is the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amoutn of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curriculua, buying every student a shiny new laptop and increasing school funding - all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But the problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.

Well, I don't like Gladwell's comparison to the Asian model of up to 243 school days a year, or other recent calls to get rid of summer vacation altogether.Summer vacation is a good thing, if only because kids need some downtime, and it gives parents who can afford it an opportunity to be more involved in structuring and selecting their children's learning opportunities along lines that suit the kids' and parents interests. (I know summer is really the only time my kids get to explore a variety of extracurricular pursuits there is simply no time for in a heavily regimented school year or to travel.)

The issue is about how to make sure that these opportunities are not solely dependent on the free market. How could we as a society ensure that every parent, regardless of his or her wealth, had access to a menu of non-formal schooling and travel options for their children during summer vacation?

America's Spy-Roads

I was proud to get home from a five-week, 18-state trip without a single speeding ticket. Then I opened my mail to find a stern letter from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, with this photo and a citation for going 6 miles over the speed limit on the interstate:


My first response was to feel a little freaked. Clearly the robot menace has moved from the battlefield to our highways a modest revolution in roadside camera technology has occurred since the last time I was on a cross-country road trip, with potential implications for privacy and civil liberties.

My second was to really admire the AZ system and wonder why it's not more widely used, as it began to sink in to me how extremely effective a deterrent this experience would be next time I traveled through Arizona. We exceeded the posted speed limit numerous times on the trip (only on empty, straight roads in good driving conditions of course) but were never caught by any law enforcement officer. But this spybot caught me and asked me to pay up in a professional, timely manner, and I'll do so and be more cautious when DIA.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of overly regulated roads, largely because the weight of social science says that the more rules and and roadsigns to follow, the less drivers rely on their own judgment and the more fatalities. According to The US, for example, has 36% more traffic fatalities per capita than Britain, where the rules are simpler and more flexible.

[John Staddon, a professor of brain science and psychology at Duke University, published the long article "Distracting Miss Daisy" cited above in the Atlantic last summer. He criticizes the US traffic enforcement system for training drivers to slavishly follow signs rather than pay attention to traffic conditions:

"A particularly vexing aspect of the U.S. policy is that speed limits seem to be enforced more when speeding is safe. As a colleague once pointed out, “An empty highway on a sunny day? You’re dead meat!” A more systematic effort to train drivers to ignore road conditions can hardly be imagined. By training drivers to drive according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions, the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs would be dangerous."]

Nonetheless, having speed limits unenforced is probably worse than not having them at all. And an automated system is far more effective (and cost-effective) than the occasional run-in with an officer. Roads are regulated spaces, so I'm not sure the civil liberties argument applies. I can live with a ticket from Big Brother when I go 6 miles over the limit (and the heads-up of seeing myself with my eyes on my passenger instead of the road) in exchange for knowing that the other speeders - including those who actually post a risk to motorists like me - are also being given an incentive, both economic and normative, to slow down.

Not all agree; Arizona's cameras have been the subject of criticism and even civil disobedience; a bill was even introduced earlier this year to ban the cameras. Only Maryland has initiatied a similar system; while 25 states have cameras at traffic lights, few have followed Arizona's lead and placed spy cameras on freeways. Thoughts?

Rememberification

During any Presidential Administration, there are heated debates, accusations of horrible mismanagement, and political intrigue, but they are actively papered over and downplayed by a powerful White House communications operation dedicated to protecting the image of the President. Once everyone leaves office, however.....

It seems the floodgates of insider accounts that "make news" and tell heretofore unknown details about the good old days of the Bush Administration are opening, and the stream of details might be more interesting than most.

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, has a memoir coming out September 1, and the tease of salacious material is the revelation that the Administration did in fact manipulate the color-coded threat level with political considerations in mind.

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is also working on his memoir, and there are sure to be others (I'm not going to do the exhaustive list, you get the idea...)

The most interesting of course are those from the principles themselves. Former President Bush is working on a memoir where he revisits the 10 most important decisions from his presidency, focusing on terrorism and how it dominated his presidency.

And of course there's the revelation that former VP Cheney is also at work, penning a memoir (the old fashion way, on legal pads that someone else can type up for him...) where he breaks with Bush on some key issues. Cheney, of course, was famous for deriding those who wrote tell-all books, right up until he started writing one.

With all these memoirs, there will be the obligatory book tour and media appearances on all the major cable TV outlets. These guys need to sell books, so they will lay out some hints of juicy gossip and brilliant insight.

As interesting, I think, is methodological question of how to use these documents as sources for the upcoming article on decision-making in the Bush White House (what--you don't have that started yet?). On the one hand, these are valuable, primary source documents, the recollections of decision-makers and participants (or at least recollections as told to their ghost-writers/assistants). For scholars writing about the massive shifts in US foreign policy of the first Bush term, it might be useful to include both Bush's and Cheney's views on a key decision--information that can easily be gleaned from memoirs.

However, its important to be careful how one uses memoirs. I'm reminded of the exchange between Brooks and Wholforth and English about the end of the Cold War. In arguing over competing arguments over the same events using much of the same evidence, they pick a fight over how to interpret the memoirs of Gorbachev and other high party officials. Each claims that the memoirs support the argument.

Today, memoirs are about selling books and continuing the image-making process. That said, they still reveal interesting details about a situation that won't appear in any contemporaneous journalism or even archived memos.

What I'd really like to see--once all the "good" memoirs come out--is a discourse analysis of Bush Administration memoirs. Viewing these books as part of the construction of history rather than attempts at more accurate reconstructions of historic events would be quite the interesting project. Something to file away under the to-do list....