Gowanus Green

 

Gowanus Green

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Public Service

California Capitol Fellows Program

Schools of Public Policy:

• Harvard Kennedy School
• Berkeley Goldman School
• Princeton (The school formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson School)
• Pepperdine

Employment and Internships

Doing Policy

Next week, use PowerPoint only for tables, graphs, and images.  You do not need to use it at all.

If you have a PowerPoint for your presentation next week, either post on the class blog or email it to me for posting.

From Bardach:

• Complexity is your main enemy, so start by simplifying. The two main routes to simplifying are by means of outcomes and by means of constraints.
• [D]on’t be misled by the word best in so-called best practices research. Rarely will you have any confidence that some helpful-looking practice is actually the best among all those that address the same problem or opportunity. The extensive and careful research needed to document a claim of best will almost never have been done. Usually, you will be looking for what, more modestly, might be called “good practices.”
• Two particular types of vulnerability are especially worth attending to. 
• One pertains to likely failures of general management capacity—such as a low general level of leadership talent or the lack of a “good government” ethos—that would make it easier to implement this or any other practice successfully.
• The other pertains to weaknesses intrinsic to the particular practice itself—such as a service delivery program’s susceptibility to conflict over whether to give priority to this or that catchment area or needy subpopulation, or a safety-oriented regulatory program’s inability to determine whether to err on the side of injury-tolerant leniency or costly stringency.

Policy Lessons from the Movies

Apollo 13 and Brainstorming:

All the Way:  LBJ on policy windows:

LBJ's words to David Halberstam: 

When you win big you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them [in Congress] who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back.

The Martian and a lesson about life:

The Eightfold Path, Continued

By Tuesday, pick the issue for your last paper.  Students will volunteer for brief presentations a week after that.  See Bardach, p. 82 on memo format.

• Read Bardach, Part III and IV.  Also bring questions about careers in public policy.

========================================

Eightfold path.  Do not be an Underpants Gnome:

• Confront the Trade-offs
• Tradeoff triangles and polygons
• Pitfalls:  not focusing on the margins; Rosy Scenario
• Decide
• What is the $20 Bill Test?
• Lawyer up! "Intepretive Awarenss"
• Tell Your Story: SUCCES
• BLUF
• The "Grandma Bessie" or Mom Test
• Related on political feasibility:  The MAGA-leaning Uncle Test

Polls.  In 2000, Bill Clinton said:

The President. Okay. I'll give you an example where, according to the polls I have the unpopular position, okay? The Congress passes a repeal of the estate tax, an outright repeal. Now, I can—and I'm going to veto it if it comes to my desk, okay? Now, I can say the following. I can say, "I'm going to veto this because it only helps less than 2 percent of the people and half of the relief goes to one-tenth of one percent of the people, and it's an average $10 million." That is a populist explanation.

I can say, "I'm going to veto it because we only have so much money for tax cuts, and I think it's wrong to do this and say this is our highest priority, when we have done nothing to lower the income taxes of low-income working people with three kids or more or to help people pay for child care or long-term care for their elderly or disabled relatives or to get a tax deduction for college tuition."

Or I could say, "I think there should be estate tax relief." I do, by the way. "I don't care if it does help primarily upper income people. The way so many people have made so much money in the stock markets in the last 8 years, there are a lot of family-owned businesses that people would like to pass down to their family members, that would be burdened by the way the estate tax works, plus which the maximum rate is too high. When it was set, income tax rates were higher, but there was a lot of ways to get out of it. Now the rates are lower, but you have less ways to get out of it. You have to pretty much pay what you owe more." So I could say that.

So it's not fair to totally repeal it. Like even Bill Gates has said, "Why are you going to give me a $40 billion tax break?" And he's going to give away his money, and I applaud him and honor him for it.

So I could make either of those three arguments. It's helpful to me to know what you're thinking. I know what I think is right. I'm not going to change what I think is right. But in order to continue to be effective, you have to believe I'm right. So that's kind of what I use polls for.

Friend and Foe:  "Who's for this?"

• Supporters
• Allies:  supporters who will recruit more supporters and neutralize opponents
• Opponents

What Can Friend and Foe Do?

In Government

• Votes
• Cosponsorships: Franken's story about Isakson
• Hearings and reports

Interest Group Community:   REVERSE LOBBYING

• Statements, testimony, amicus briefs
• Reports and op-eds
• Advertising and grassroots mobilization
• Direct lobbying
• Political campaign activity

Resources Available to Friends and Foes

• Debts:  The Favor Bank
• Power status:  majority/minority
• Expertise and information

Size and motivation of membership

• Money
• Polls

Identifying Friend and Foe

• Policy History
• Current statements and comments
• Cosponsorships
• Polls

The Eightfold Path

For Thursday, Bardach, Part II  - and by Friday, turn in your last reflections for the course.

You may notice that we are revisiting concepts from earlier in the semester -- a feature, not a bug.

 The Eightfold Path

• Define the Problem
• Deficit and Excess: supply shortages and inflation
• Evaluative:  is gentrification bad?
• "What's the story?" can be a better question to ask people than "What's the problem?"
• Construct a timeline.  Inflation example.
• Pitfall: Beware defining the solution into the problem.  "We have too few roads!"  But is that the problem?  Would more roads be a solution?  VIDEO
• Assemble Some Evidence
• Other governments in the US
• Other countries.
• History:  consider analogies, be careful about similarities and differences.  Bush and pandemic preparedness
• Pitfalls:  relevance to the decision, confirmation bias.
• Construct the Alternatives
• Start comprehensive, end focused
• Consider the level of government making the decision
• Pitfalls:  vague specification of alternatives
• Select the Criteria
• Efficiency:  costs and benefits
• Effectiveness.  Peter Drucker: "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
• Equity -- think back to Stone.
• Initial political support
• Sustainability -- i.e., feedback!
• Pitfall: confusing outputs and outcomes.
• Project the Outcomes
• Sensitivity analysis 
• Pitfall:  ignoring uncertainty, the possibility of black swans
• 
  
  
• Confront the Trade-offs
• Tradeoff triangles and polygons
• Pitfalls:  not focusing on the margins; Rosy Scenario
• Decide
• Tell Your Story: SUCCES

Finishing Policy Feedback

For next Tuesday, Bardach and Patashnik, Part I.

Superfund progress over time

No Child Left Behind...

RERUN!  JUKING THE STATS

NCLB loses support

In any analysis of policy evolution, remember the broader political and social environment:

• 9/11
• Iraq and collapse of Bush support
• Democrats take Congress in 2006
• Economy crashes in 2008, taking state budgets with it.
• Obama takes office in 2009
• The Tea Party movement rises in 2009-2010

NCLB and ESSA

Obamacare and Medicaid Expansion

• NFIB v. Sebelius and effective repeal of individual mandate
• Status of Medicaid Expansion
• Stuff that people liked:
• Coverage of pre-existing conditions
• Ability to stay on parents' plans 
• Trump says repeal and replace will be "so easy"
• Loss Aversion and support for ACA

Last Paper, Research, and Writing

Last course assignment is a Truman-style policy proposal on any issue of your choice, due by 11:59 pm on Friday, December 10.

• Sample (but on yours, use endnotes, not parenthetical references).
• Tips

Usual specs:

• Document your claims. Do not write from the top of your head.
• Essays should be double-spaced and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page.
• Cite your sources with endnotes in Chicago/Turabian style. Endnote pages do not count against the page limit.
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you.

During the last two weeks of the course, you will each make an oral presentation on your proposal.  They will be seven minutes, maximum, including time for questions and answers.  You may use PowerPoint for graphs and data, but not simply for repetition of what you are saying.

• The writing lecture
• The research lecture

Here is the web pages from which I worked:

• https://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/JPitney/writing.htm 
• https://gov116.blogspot.com/2021/10/research-2021.html

And of course, the great scene from The Wire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShWe-4mtV8w

To repeat some pointers:

• ALWAYS SEEK THE ORIGINAL SOURCE.
• AVOID DROPPED QUOTATIONS.
• "Avoid announcing the thesis statement as if it were a thesis statement. In other words, avoid using phrases such as `The purpose of this paper is . . . . ' or `In this paper, I will attempt to . . . ."
• In US English, use single quotation marks only for quotations within quotations, double quotation marks at all other times.
• In US English, periods and commas go inside quotation marks.  Superscripts follow closing punctuation

More Policy Feedback

For Thursday, Karch and Rose ch. 8, conclusion 

Racial and ethnic identity redux

From the email:

Not mandatory, but if you have time, this John Oliver video is worth talking about in small groups tomorrow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liptMbjF3EE&t=1220s 

 (As my previous email indicated, the Claremont in the video is the one in San Diego County.)

After the passage of the infrastructure bill, POTUS said:

Vice President Harris and I look forward to having a formal signing ceremony for this bipartisan infrastructure soon.  Because — but everybody is not — I’m not doing it this weekend because I want people who worked so hard to get this done — Democrats and Republicans — to be here when we sign it.

But we’re looking more forward to having shovels in the ground to begin rebuilding America.

​He might recall what President Obama said in 2010, the year after Congress enacted another large stimulus bill:

Infrastructure has the benefit of for every dollar you spend on infrastructure, you get a dollar and a half in stimulus because there are ripple effects from building roads or bridges or sewer lines. But the problem is, is that spending it out takes a long time, because there's really nothing -- there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects.

 

 From the mid-1970s on, federal deficits (solid line) were deeper in the hole (% of GDP) than aggregate state and local deficits (dotted line).  

Shriver Center on Poverty Law: more than 70 percent of hazardous waste sites officially listed on the National Priorities List are located within one mile of federally assisted housing. 

Superfund progress over time

No Child Left Behind...

RERUN!  JUKING THE STATS

Policy Feedback and the Parable of the Seeds

Vaccination rates and mandates

International comparisons

Matthew 13:3-9 (NIV)

A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.

Progressive Era and the Social Gospel:  The American Economics Association started as a semi-religious group! 

Infant Mortality in the United States, 1915-2017: Large Social Inequalities have Persisted for Over a Century 
"The IMR in the US showed a consistently downward trend between 1915 and 2000, with the rate declining from 99.9 per 1,000 live births in 1916 to 6.9 in 2000, at an impressive pace of 3.1% per year (Figure 2). However, between 2001 and 2017, the IMR declined more slowly from 6.8 in 2001 to 5.8 in 2017, at an annual rate of 1.3%."

Again, Policy feedback:

• Generosity
• Duration
• Administrative control
• Coalition potential
• and Timing

The Road to Medicaid

• 1935: FDR signs the Social Security Act. In addition to benefits for the elderly, the Act establishes key social-welfare programs including:
• Unemployment insurance;
• Aid to the blind and "crippled children;"
• Aid to Dependent Children (later AFDC, aka "welfare");
• Public health.
• 1945: In a special message to Congress, President Harry Truman proposes a comprehensive, prepaid medical insurance plan for all people through the Social Security system.
• 1963: Mollie Orshansky publishes the first version of poverty thresholds, which would become the "poverty line."
• 1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 in the presence of Truman. The law establishes both Medicare and Medicaid.
• 1966:  Rocky! moves the Overton Window.
  
• 1972: Medicaid Eligibility for Elderly, Blind, and Disabled Individuals Linked to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Eligibility. Provides a uniform baseline income for eligibility to Medicaid, in conjunction with eligibility for SSI.
• 1981 Congress establishes home and community-based care waivers in Medicaid.
• 1982: Arizona: The Last State to Opt into Medicaid and the First with Statewide Managed Care
• 2010:  Obama signs the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), for the first time prohibiting health insurance companies from denying or charging more for coverage based on an individual’s health status, providing for expansion of the Medicaid program, and subsidies for insurance purchased through State-based Marketplaces to ensure that private insurance is affordable. 

A

States and Feedback

For Thursday, Karch and Rose, ch. 4

Last course assignment is a policy proposal, Truman style

• Sample
• Tips

Key features of state government

• Balanced budget requirements
• Capital budgets and  credit ratings
• Revenue sources and limits
• Interstate competition
• Donor and recipient states

Intergovernmental lobbying

Regional Governors

• CONEG
• MGA
• GSGP

Partisan Governors

• RGA
• DGA

Other Examples of Government lobbying Government

• Los Angeles County
• San Francisco
• University of California (and a familiar face at Berkeley)

Policy feedback and the states

• Generosity
• Duration
• Administrative control
• Coalition potential

Unemployment Insurance

• Benefits by state
• Update

Evaluation II

Will break into small groups at 12:05.

For Tuesday, Karch & Rose, introduction, ch. 1-3.

Issue-Attention Cycle at work:  live ammo on movie sets.

• California
• New York

From last time:

Census data rest on self-reporting.  There is no method for verification.

The spike in Native Americans 

Survey: 34% of white Americans who applied to colleges or universities admit to lying about being a racial minority on their application

Constitutional reform (Schuck, ch. 12)

ALL POLICY INVOLVES TRADEOFFS

For discussion:

JAMA Study

Financial Incentives and Other Nudges Do Not Increase COVID-19 Vaccinations among the Vaccine Hesitant

Can financial incentives, public health messages and other behavioral nudges –approaches deployed by state and local governments, employers, and health systems – increase SARS-CoV-2 vaccination rates among the vaccine hesitant in the US? In mid-2021, we randomly assigned unvaccinated members of a Medicaid managed care health plan to $10 or $50 financial incentives, different public health messages, a simple appointment scheduler, or control to assess impacts on SARS-CoV-2 vaccination intentions and vaccine uptake within 30 days of intervention. While messages increased vaccination intentions, none of the treatments increased overall vaccination rates. Consistent with backlash concerns, financial incentives and negative messages decreased vaccination rates for some subgroups. Financial incentives and other behavioral nudges do not meaningfully increase SARS-CoV-2 vaccination rates amongst the vaccine hesitant.

Full text available for download here:https://www.nber.org/papers/w29403 

.................................

Thirumurthy, Harsha and Milkman, Katherine L. and Volpp, Kevin and Buttenheim, Alison and Pope, Devin G., Association Between Statewide Financial Incentive Programs and COVID-19 Vaccination Rates (August 27, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3912786 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912786

 

To encourage COVID-19 vaccination, many states in the US have introduced financial incentives ranging from small, guaranteed rewards to lotteries that give vaccinated individuals a chance to win $1 million or more. We compiled information on statewide incentive programs along with data on daily vaccine doses administered per 100,000 individuals in each state. Leveraging variation across states in the daily presence of incentives, we used difference-in-differences regressions to examine the association between these incentive program indicators and vaccination rates. Difference-in-differences analysis showed that 24 statewide incentive programs were associated with a non-significant relative decline in daily vaccination rates of 8.9 per 100,000 individuals (95% CI [-64.3,46.5]; p=0.75). Furthermore, there was no significant difference in vaccination trends between states with and without incentives in any of the 14 days before or after incentives were introduced. Lotteries and other incentives offered by 24 states were not associated with a significant change in COVID-19 vaccination rates. More substantial incentives or mandates may be necessary to raise vaccination rates.

Evaluation I

For Thursday, Schuck, ch. 13.

James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989), ch. 9, cited in Schuck, 323-324

Outputs: what employees do on a day-to-day basis.

Outcomes: how the world changes because of the outputs

	Outputs are visible to managers	are hard for managers to see
Outcomes are easy to measure	production organization (tax system) simple repetitive stable tasks; specialized skills.  Easy to stress measurable outputs & outcomes over hard-to-measure (satisfaction)	craft organization (Forest Service, wartime military) application of general sets of skills to unique tasks, but with stable, similar outcomes. Relies heavily on ethos and sense of duty of workers.
are hard to measure	procedural organizations (OSHA, peacetime military -- see Powell passage below) specialized skills; stable tasks, but unique outcomes. SOPs are especially important	coping organization (colleges, police departments) application of generic skills to unique tasks, but outcomes cannot be evaluated in absence of alternatives.  "

Colin Powell on working the numbers:

If, for example, you are going to judge me on AWOL rates, I’m going to send a sergeant out by 6:30 a.m. to bloodhound the kid who failed to show up for 6:00 a.m. reveille.  The guy’s not considered AWOL until midnight.  So drag him back before then and keep that AWOL rate down.  I vigorously set out to better every indicator by which my brigade was statistically judged.  And then went on to do the things that I thought counted.

Issue One: Capacity

• Congressional agencies
• Inspectors General

Issue Two:  What do we measure?

•  "Passing" and outcome measures

Issue Three: Causality

• An alternative explanation for the drop in crime. (And an updated analysis)

Issue Four:  Reactivity

• Teaching to the test
• Compstat
•  Juking the crime stats in real life?

The spike in Native Americans 

In episode 42, members of the Soprano crime family meet Chief Doug Smith, a sleazy casino operator.

SIL: No offense, chief, but, uh... you don't look much like an Indian.
SMITH: Frankly I passed most of my life as white, until I had a racial awakening and discovered my Mohonk blood. My grandmother on my father's side, her mother was a quarter Mohonk.
TONY: And all this happened when the casino bill got passed, right?
SMITH: Better late than never.

Survey: 34% of white Americans who applied to colleges or universities admit to lying about being a racial minority on their application

Six- Page Paper

 Choose one:

• In chapter 11, Schuck lists a number of policy successes.  Having read Stone, you know that one person's success story is another person's horror story.  Explain an alternative frame for one of Schuck's policy successes, showing how a critic would take a dimmer view.  Which side would you agree with?
• Pick an example of policy feedback since the 2016 election.  Explain how an existing policy has created the political conditions for its own survival, growth, decay, or evolution.  Examples could include the Affordable Care Act, renewable energy, Head Start, SNAP, SSI, and farm subsidies -- among many others.
• Pick any chapter of Responsive States and write an update.  That is, how have the patterns that Karch and Rose describe persisted or changed in recent years? Do shifts in the partisan composition of state governments require revision of the analysis?
• Write an essay on any relevant policy topic, subject to my approval.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Instructions

• Document your claims. Do not write from the top of your head.
• Essays should be double-spaced and no more than six pages long. I will not read past the sixth page.
• Cite your sources with endnotes in Chicago/Turabian style. Endnote pages do not count against the page limit.
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you.
• Turn in essays to the class Sakai dropbox by 11:59 PM, Friday, November 12. I reserve the right to dock late essays one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

Bureaucracy

 Most of it is not in Washington:

But there is a catch  (Schuck, 324-325):

Duplication and Overlap:  The Case of Disability Employment:

Political appointees v. Careerists

Iron Triangles, Issue Networks ... and "The Deep State"

Layering (Schuck, 317).  Why? Control  -- the case of MMWR

James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989), ch. 9, cited in Schuck, 323-324

Outputs: what employees do on a day-to-day basis.

Outcomes: how the world changes because of the outputs

	Outputs are visible to managers	are hard for managers to see
Outcomes are easy to measure	production organization (tax system) simple repetitive stable tasks; specialized skills.  Easy to stress measurable outputs & outcomes over hard-to-measure (satisfaction)	craft organization (Forest Service, wartime military) application of general sets of skills to unique tasks, but with stable, similar outcomes. Relies heavily on ethos and sense of duty of workers.
are hard to measure	procedural organizations (OSHA, peacetime military) specialized skills; stable tasks, but unique outcomes. SOPs are especially important	coping organization (colleges, police departments) application of generic skills to unique tasks, but outcomes cannot be evaluated in absence of alternatives.  "

Kludges

For ordinary citizens, bureaucracy is a wilderness of acronyms

Another flowchart

Law

For Thursday, October 21: Schuck, ch. 10

Finding the law:

• Statutes: US Code or state law
• Other legislative documents
• Regulations
• Federal Register
• Code of Federal Regulations
• State law codes
• Other executive documents
• Presidential executive orders, 
• Signing statements
• Gubernatorial executive orders
• "Bill jackets" (New York)
• Court decisions
• US Supreme Court
• Lower federal courts
• State courts

Reasons for administrative regs:

• Statutory ambiguity as a legislative lubricant.
• Recognition of conditions that will change (e.g., the composition of pollutants)

The children of Bill:

The Reg Map 

(Stone:  "Who gains the right to participate in decisions?")

Complexity, Simplicity, and Accountability in Statutes and Regs

Attorney Sam Mazzeo explains the problem with "Plain English" law.

Another reason for complexity:  assuring vertical and horizontal equity.

Centralization, Decentralization, and Discretion

• Local knowledge v. broader view
• Experimentation v. standardization
• Local autonomy v. "grassroots tyranny"

Interia and Finality

Lincoln:

We oppose the Dred Scott decision in a certain way, upon which I ought perhaps to address you a few words. We do not propose that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the court, we, as a mob, will decide him to be free. We do not propose that, when any other one, or one thousand, shall be decided by that court to be slaves, we will in any violent way disturb the rights of property thus settled, but we nevertheless do oppose that decision as a political rule, which shall be binding on the voter to vote for nobody who thinks it wrong, which shall be binding on the members of Congress or the President to favor no measure that does not actually concur with the principles of that decision. We do not propose to be bound by it as a political rule in that way, because we think it lays the foundation not merely of enlarging and spreading out what we consider an evil, but it lays the foundation for spreading that evil into the States themselves. We propose so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.