Bottom-up

There’s very little that’s funny about the BP oil spill, but one of the few sources of genuine humor is the BPGlobalPR Twitter account, a satirical PR representative for the oil giant. The New York Times ponders the significance of a world in which anyone can skewer a famous brand from the comfort of their homes. But I prefer Dan Rothchild’s take:

Bursting the bubble of a pompous company is nothing new; being able to do it and have 11 times as many followers (that is, market share) as the object of your derision is what’s new. Blogs, social media, Twitter, et cetera provide myriad ways for normal folks to, if not comfort the afflicted, at least afflict the comfortable. And there are few better ways to hold power — whether in the form of political leaders, firms, or self-appointed social saviors — to account. No longer can a powerful, politically connected company like BP attempt to spin and manage its way out of wrecking hundreds of miles of coastline. This is changing brand management in a way we don’t, I think, fully understand.

It’s not that the facts are getting out. It’s that the Zeitgeist is being established independent of any entity with which BP can directly plead, cajole, or threaten. We are crowdsourcing the establishment of the snarky, ironic conventional wisdom. And in many ways, this is a much more powerful thing than the rise of mere fact-reporting bloggers.

It’s not just about reporting, which is how Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term) has largely been discussed. This isn’t the democratization of information. It’s the democratization of the takedown, the skewering, the needling. This is not the news media being disintermediated — it’s the professional satirists in the vein of Mencken and Rogers and Jon Stewart being replaced by amateurs, and lots of them. It makes it harder for any big entity or brand to remain hallowed and righteous for very long.

This is another facet of an argument I made last fall. Newpaper partisans like to tout the size and resources of newspapers as a key benefit in producing hard-hitting news. But in many ways size and resources are a handicap if what you want is really no-holds-barred coverage. The New York Times would never produce something as funny or as outrageous as BPGlobalPR, for both legal and structural reasons.

For the last few months I’ve been writing about the challenges facing people at the top of large, hierarchical organizations, with the story of the US military’s failure in Vietnam (as told by David Halberstam) as a running example. You guys are probably getting tired of this particular example, so I’m going to make one more point and then I’ll move on to other subjects.

I’ve argued that the top-down management structures that large organizations adopt severely distort and constrain the information that reaches those at the top, and that this, in turn, causes senior management to make systematically poor decisions. Smart managers of a certain bent grasp this problem and they think they have a solution to it: data! Your subordinates might mislead you, they think, but if you have the raw data you can slice through the layers of obfuscation and get directly to the truth. Managers with an aptitude for math and statistics are especially likely to view number crunching as an alternative (and generally superior) method of understanding the organizations they run.

No one better typified this attitude during the Vietnam era than Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara was trained in statistics at Harvard Business School, and was a young professor there when the War broke out. He made a name for himself helping to organize the fantastically complex B-29 bomber program, and then went into private industry after the war. He wound up at Ford, where he used his formidable statistical expertise to modernize Ford’s production processes, rising quickly to the position of Ford president.

When McNamara was tapped to be Secretary of Defense, he brought this same basic attitude to the Pentagon:

There was that confidence which bordered on arrogance, a belief that he could handle it. Perhaps, after all the military weren’t all that good; still they could produce the raw data, and McNamara, who knew data, would go over it carefully and extricate truth from the morass. Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution…

One particular visit seemed to sum it up: McNamara looking for the war to fit his criteria, his definitions. He went to Danang in 1965 to check on the Marine progress there. A marine colonel in I Corps had a sand table showing the terrain and patiently gave the briefing: friendly situation, enemy situation, main problem. McNamara watched it, not really taking it in, his hands folded, frowning a little, finally interrupting. “Now let me see,” McNamara said, “if I have it right, this is your situation,” and then he spouted his own version, all in numbers and statistics. The colonel, who was very bright, read him immediately like a man breaking a code, and without changing stride, went on with the briefing, simply switching his terms, quantifying everything, giving everything in numbers and percentages, percentages up, percentages down, so blatant a performance that it was like a satire. Jack Raymond of the New York Times began to laugh and had to leave the tent. Later that day Raymond went up to McNamara and commented on how tough the situation was up in Danang, but McNamara wasn’t interested in the Vietcong, he only wanted to talk about that colonel, he liked him, that colonel had caught his eye. “That colonel is one of the finest officers I’ve ever met,” he said.

McNamara was more obsessed with statistics than most of his subordinates, but his generals had the same basic attitude:

The American military command thought this was like any other war: you searched out the enemy, fixed him, killed him and went home. The only measure of the war the Americans were interested in was quantitative, and quantitatively, given the immense American fire power, helicopters, fighter-bombers, and artillery pieces, it went very well. That the body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. That the French statstics had also been very good right up until 1954, when they gave up, made no impression.

I think McNamara’s number-crunching wizardry actually turned out to be a handicap. When his analysis seemed to be faulty, his instinct was always to examine the data even more closely. But no statistical test is going to tell you that your faulty assumptions have caused you to collect the wrong kind of data. To the contrary, the more deeply engaged you become with a data set, the more oblivious you’re likely to be to the big picture. And so McNamara, like the French before him, pushed forward with the inflated sense of confidence that comes from having precise statistics about the wrong variables.

A few months ago, This American Life re-aired an episode from 2002 about the campaign to get the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the official list of psychiatric disorders. Until the 1970s, the DSM, the bible of the psychiatric profession, classified homosexuality as mental disease under the heading of “sexual deviance.” Beginning about 1970, gay rights activists began an ambitious campaign to get the entry removed. They disrupted the 1970 and 1971 conventions, and in 1972 they convinced a gay psychiatrist to address the convention in disguise and talk about the harmful effects of the classification. Then at the 1973 convention, a gay rights activist forced the issue by bringing a key straight APA official to an after-hours meeting of prominent gay psychiatrists at a gay bar. Learning that many well-respected members of the psychiatric profession were in the closet helped to persuade him to support changing the definition.

The thing I found most striking about the story is that almost everyone on both sides of the debate regarded themselves as compassionate people who were trying to help homosexuals. People in what we would now consider the anti-gay camp regarded the classification as a compassionate alternative to the earlier practice of punishing homosexual acts with jail time. They also regarded themselves as enlightened scientists. Psychiatrists like Irving Bieber made their careers with studies that supposedly showed the link between homosexuality and other mental illnesses.

Of course, the supposed scientific evidence for the harms of homosexuality was remarkably flimsy. Virtually all the studies about the harmful effects of homosexuality were conducted in prisons, mental hospitals, and similar environments—it’s little wonder that gay people in these settings tended to have problems. But because gays were stigmatized, straight people rarely had direct contact with normal, well-adjusted, out gay people. And so people both inside the psychiatric profession and outside of it readily accepted the flimsy evidence offered by the researchers like Dr. Bieber. And Dr. Bieber regarded himself as a compassionate man of science even as he spread false and pernicious ideas.

I think something similar is going on in the immigration debate. There are millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Most of them work hard, pay their taxes, support their families, and contribute positively to society. But because they are segregated and despised minority, public attention tends to focus on the small fraction of illegal immigrants that commit violent crimes, become addicted to drugs, go on welfare, and the like. People make sweeping generalizations about illegal immigrants, suggesting that they’re less patriotic, less law-abiding, less interested in integrating into American society, and so forth. Rarely is credible evidence offered for these generalizations, but people readily believe them because they confirm their existing prejudices.

Consider the common argument that tighter immigration restrictions are required to uphold “the rule of law.” Virtually every American citizen breaks the law on a regular basis. We speed, jaywalk, fail to pay use taxes, set off illegal fireworks, smoke pot, infringe copyrights, fail to register our firearms, and so forth. Most of us adopt a laid back attitude when our friends or family break such laws. We might chastise them, but we generally don’t think it merits severe punishment.

Attitudes are completely different when it comes to “illegals.” Here the American public clamors for the law to be strictly enforced—even against those who have been productive members of American society for many years. And the penalty they demand—deportation—is far more severe than the penalties faced by American citizens for all but the most serious crimes.

As I said yesterday, I don’t think most Americans understand that we’ve made it essentially impossible for low-skilled immigrants to work here legally. Nor do they realize that there are thousands of “illegals” who were brought here when they were children and have never known another home.

To be clear, I think this is less a matter of malice than of intellectual laziness. By all accounts, Irving Bieber didn’t hate gay people; he just didn’t try very hard to understand them. Similarly, the American voters who clamor for stricter immigration enforcement aren’t trying to ruin immigrants’ lives, they just haven’t thought very hard about what it would be like to be in an immigrant’s shoes.

But it’s precisely because double standards arise so naturally that we’ve developed strong stigmas against indulging them. We have strong taboos against making lazy generalizations about (or advocating discriminatory policies against) blacks, Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, or other traditionally disadvantaged groups. This taboo provides a counterweight to the ugly, tribal part of the human psyche that has created so much misery over the centuries.

Unfortunately, there’s no analogous stigma with respect to illegal immigrants. To the contrary, liberals and conservatives alike compete to show how tough on illegal immigrants they are. So the same natural but ugly habits of thought that did so much damage to blacks, Jews, gays, and other minority groups in the past are stoking public hostility towards immigrants today. Merely correcting factual and logical errors is unlikely to be effective in the face of this kind of entrenched prejudice. What needs to be done is what the gay rights movement did in the early 1970s: to humanize the debate by focusing attention on specific, sympathetic individuals who have been harmed by the existing policy. The DREAM Act does this beautifully. The Founders Visa does just the opposite.

One of the striking things about the immigration debate is the disconnect between public perception of the immigration situation and objective reality. A recent poll found that 59 percent of respondents consider illegal immigration to be a “very serious” problem. A majority of those polled expressed support for Arizona’s draconian immigration law, and a whopping 66 percent of voters said they wanted to see immigration laws in general enforced more strictly.

We can’t ask these respondants what kind of “very serious problems” they had in mind. But undoubtedly one of the concerns is the widely-discussed fear of a crime wave fueled by illegal immigrants. The violence across the border in Mexico is frequently cited as a focal point for concern, and when illegal immigrants do commit crimes here in the US, people like Bill O’Reilly exploit it to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments.

The problem with the “illegal immigrant crime wave” story is that it’s not reflected in the data. The Wall Street Journal recently reported falling crime rates across Arizona (and nationwide):

In Phoenix, police spokesman Trent Crump said, “Despite all the hype, in every single reportable crime category, we’re significantly down.” Mr. Crump said Phoenix’s most recent data for 2010 indicated still lower crime. For the first quarter of 2010, violent crime was down 17% overall in the city, while homicides were down 38% and robberies 27%, compared with the same period in 2009.

Arizona’s major cities all registered declines. A perceived rise in crime is one reason often cited by proponents of a new law intended to crack down on illegal immigration. The number of kidnappings reported in Phoenix, which hit 368 in 2008, was also down, though police officials didn’t have exact figures.

My colleague Dan Griswold has more on the non-existent immigrant crime wave. So does Adam Serwer, who also corrects the misperception that the federal government has failed to take decisive action to stop illegal immigration. In reality, deportations have been rising rapidly for the last decade, with the Obama administration deporting more than twice as many people in 2009 as the Bush administration did in 2002:

And that was on top of dramatic increases in immigration enforcement in the late 1980s and 1990s. As Griswold noted way back in 2004, we had at that point already quintupled spending and tripled personnel at the Mexican border. Whatever else you might say about our immigration policy, it certain hasn’t lacked for law enforcement resources.

This reminds me of a conversation I had a few months ago with a family friend who told me she was very concerned about the problem of illegal immigration. The strange thing was that she was awfully vague about the exact nature of the problem as she saw it. She said she actually had a good experience a few years ago when she had two different teams work on a construction project. She found the Hispanic team (some of whom may have been undocumented) were both harder-working and more competent than the native-born, unionized crew they replaced. And she said she felt sympathetic to workers who wanted to come here to find opportunities they couldn’t get at home.

She seemed really surprised when I pointed out to her that it’s basically impossible for an unskilled Hispanic immigrant to get permission to work here if he doesn’t have family connections. She said that if this were true, then the law needed to be changed to give people currently here illegally a path to legalization. Which is, of course, precisely what the 2007 immigration bill was about.

Now obviously, I shouldn’t read too much into a single anecdote. This family friend is a well-educated and liberal minded person; no doubt some of the poll respondents were animated by darker motives. But a lot of the support for the “enforce the law” position seems to be driven by voter ignorance. Immigration opponents like Lou Dobbs have painted an inaccurate but compelling picture of lawless immigrants and a passive federal government. Countering that impression, and helping voters understand that we’ve created a legal system that puts many foreign-born people in impossible situations, is crucial to building support for reform.

The New York Times recently ran a story about the supposedly insidious effects of connectivity and “multitasking” on our brains and our relationships with one another. They asked me to participate in a “Room for Debate” feature on the article:

When a new technology enters the social scene, hand-wringing about its social effects is never far behind. So I was not surprised to see Matt Richtel offer the latest contribution to this shopworn genre. The trends he describes are not nearly as novel — or as alarming — as he and the experts he interviews seem to think.

The article quotes Stanford’s Clifford Nass, who warns that excessive use of digital technologies will “diminish empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another.” That may be true for some people, but for most people the reality is just the opposite: the Internet broadens and strengthens our social ties and greatly enhances our ability to engage with one another.

Read the rest here.

I don’t know anything about geology or marine biology, so I don’t have much to say about the oil spill. But I wholeheartedly endorse Gene Healy’s take on the flak President Obama has been getting:

It’s hardly surprising that a president who sits atop a 2-million-employee executive branch, pretending to run it, hasn’t magically solved the problem of bureaucratic incompetence or devised a plan to deal with every conceivable hazard life might present.

Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal may have a legitimate gripe about the feds delaying permission to build protective sand barriers. But most of the complaints dominating the airwaves aren’t nearly that specific. They smack of a quasi-religious conception of the presidency. If only Obama would manifest himself at the afflicted area, shed his aura of cool reserve, and exercise the magical powers of presidential concern, perhaps the slick would recede.

The public’s frustration is understandable. But the unreflective cry “Do something!” usually results in policies that follow the logic immortalized in the BBC comedy “Yes, Minister”: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it!”

As they say, read the whole thing.

Reader Pete makes a great point about Google’s Data Liberation Front:

Moves like the Data Liberation Front function are a costly, and therefore credible, signal to users that Google they should be comfortable giving users their [data]. Google’s basically an advertising-broker, and it’s good at what it does insofar as people feel comfortable offering it access to the more intimate aspects of their lives. Speaking personally, the fact that I can get out reasonably easily and costlessly makes me more comfortable with using Google.

Almost more important is that everyone else can do the same – a big enough privacy scare and a lot of people are going to be making use of the DLF. That implicit threat makes Google’s guarantees of user privacy a lot more credible.

This is in contrast to some of Google’s major competitors, who make lock-in a central part of their business strategy. For example, if you invest thousands of dollars developing an iPad app, Apple may unilaterally decide to destroy your investment without warning, explanation, or recourse. Not only does the DLF give users have the freedom to switch to another platform if Google ever pulls a similar stunt, but the existence of the exit option gives Google a strong incentive never to abuse its users’ trust.

Jerry Brito points to a BBC interview with Mick Jagger:

People only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

As Jerry points out, you can go back much further than 1900. When people look back from the year 2100, I think they’ll see the period 1960-2000 as basically a fluke: a brief window of time where technological forces centralized the music industry to an unprecedented degree and drove massive profits to a tiny number of musicians and firms.

Forty years was long enough to convince everyone that the new structure of the industry was permanent. But it wasn’t. The decentralizing power of the Internet is now returning us to the historical norm, which was for music to be primarily a hobby like tennis or dancing. It is possible to make a living doing these things, but you’re not likely to get rich doing them. And hardly anyone considers that a public policy problem.

I’m back. I’ve completed the requirements for the master’s portion of grad school and when I go back to school in the fall I’ll be a PhD candidate.

I’m interning at Google this summer. As a reminder, nothing I write here reflects the views of Google. And as I said in April, I’m going to mostly avoid writing about Google.

However, I did want to link to this post from last December by Google exec Jonathan Rosenberg, which ties in nicely with some of the themes of Bottom-Up:

To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software … expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t.

Open systems are just the opposite. They are competitive and far more dynamic. In an open system, a competitive advantage doesn’t derive from locking in customers, but rather from understanding the fast-moving system better than anyone else and using that knowledge to generate better, more innovative products. The successful company in an open system is both a fast innovator and a thought leader; the brand value of thought leadership attracts customers and then fast innovation keeps them. This isn’t easy — far from it — but fast companies have nothing to fear, and when they are successful they can generate great shareholder value.

Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics.

Obviously, this is corporate propaganda and should be taken with a grain of salt. But I think it’s sincere, and Google has followed through on the sentiments expressed here. Rosenberg cites the example of the Data Liberation Front project, which helps users who want to leave Google products take their data with them. It’s a pleasure working for a company that not only treats their employees (including interns!) well, but does so while also treating their customers well.

There’s been quite a firestorm over freshly-minted Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act. Fresh from his victory in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary in Kentucky, Paul said he supported most of the CRA but would have opposed the provisions prohibiting discrimination by private businesses.

On the merits of the issue, I agree with Julian: there’s an intellectually defensible and non-racist argument against non-discrimination rules. However, I think that argument is persuasive only if considered in a cultural and historical vacuum. In the world as it actually existed in the 1960s, centuries of state-sponsored discrimination had created a system of institutionalized racism that could have lingered for decades even after the formal legal rules requiring segregation had been abolished. The Civil Rights Act’s non-discrimination provisions were a modest effort to make restitution

Of course, the contemporary debate isn’t really about the Civil Rights Act, which is in no danger of being repealed. The debate is about the character of Paul and the Tea Party movement that thrust him into national prominence. Critics point to Paul’s comments as evidence that he’s a racist—or at least that he’s pandering to the prejudices of bigots within his party. Paul insists that his comments are a matter of principle—that he’s simply an uncompromising defender of individual liberty and private property rights.

The problem with this is that Paul is far from uncompromising. For example, on his immigration page he stakes out the standard Lou Dobbs position: more money for enforcement, no “amnesty” for immigrants who are already here without government permission. On his national defense page, he proposes a moratorium on issuing visas to residents of “rogue nations” and defends holding suspects indefinitely without trial at GITMO.

It’s also telling which issues aren’t mentioned on his website. There’s no mention of equality for gays and lesbians on his websites and he’s reportedly opposed to gay marriage, which is probably the great civil rights issue of our time. There’s no mention of reforming our nation’s draconian drug laws, which disproportionately harm African Americans. There’s no mention of restoring free trade and freedom of travel to Cuba, a cause his father has championed. There’s no statement opposing torture.

In short, Paul’s defense of libertarian principle is curiously one-sided. Paul is an uncompromising defender of the rights of business owners to decide who will sit at their lunch counters. But Paul apparently sees no problem with deploying the power of the state to stop private business owners from hiring undocumented workers. Nor does he seem to care very much about business owners’ freedom to do business with the millions of non-terrorists who live in “rogue nations.” Or, for that matter, the freedom of a gay business owner to marry the person he loves. There’s a principle at work here, all right, but I don’t think it has very much to do with limited government.