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When I first reached this article on ‘Why-Because Analysis’ I thought it was an over-intellectualisation of the three-year old’s game (“But why mummy?”). But the attached diagram does contain rigour and insight. I had never heard of this type of basic analysis before.
In a chapter of Winning that appeals to the consultant in me, Jack Welch thinks that you can sum up strategy in five slides.
If you run all or part of a large business, buy this book, of which Warren Buffett says: “No other management book will ever be needed.” Now to try and apply this thinking to public policy…
Being a fan of both the Eels and the Many World Interpretation of quantum physics, I was interested to read that:
Hugh Everett III (November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he called his “relative state” formulation.
Discouraged by the “scorn” other physicists heaped on MWI, Everett left physics after completing his Ph.D. Afterwards, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers in operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He enjoyed commercial success for a while, although at the time of his death he was facing financial ruin. He was married to Nancy Everett née Gore, with two children: Elizabeth Everett and Mark Oliver Everett, frontman of the band Eels.
I don’t think that this is one of those ‘Wikipedia facts’ either.
Dionne Owen and Catherine Milner – friends from my Year 6 Primary School class (pictured) are arranging a class reunion on the 5th February 2010. It will be about 16 years since this photograph. I am not in the photo – I left year 6 early when my family moved from Essex to Dorset. I wonder who I will recognise, and who will recognise me?
Oh dear, it appears that Kiva has suffered another defaulting partner. This time, it’s Kenya’s Ebony Foundation that has stopped paying back loans – apparently using last year’s violence a a convenient reason to shirk its obligations. The organisation’s leaders are playing hide and seek. Unfortunately, this gives microfinance (and Kenya!) a bad name. I won’t be putting any more money into Kiva: this is not the first time a partner has failed to repay monies owed. This does not show Kiva’s due diligence in a good light. I would be much more understanding if it were loan recipients who were defaulting – but for a large partner to walk off with more than half a million dollars, well, as the saying goes, fool me once…
I volunteered to do a summary of a piece of non-core reading for my MPA class this week. The piece I chose was:
Goodin, R. (1982) ‘Rational Politicians and Rational Bureaucrats in Washington and Whitehall’, Public Administration, Vol. 60, pp. 23-41.
This paper is a discussion and reformulation of Niskanen’s model of decision-making. This model has apparently been very influential, especially with Keith Joseph.
First, the paper outlines what it was that Niskanen thought:
The bare bones of Niskanen’d model are very simple indeed. Basically, there are two types of actors: bureaucrats and politicians. The relationship between them is one of bilateral monopoly. The bureaucrats are the sole suppliers of public goods and services, and politicians are the only buyers of bureaucratic outputs. The goals of each actor are equally simple. Bureaucrats are aiming to maximise theor agency’s budget…. Politicians, in turn are aiming to maximise the votes cast for them at the next election….
Niskanen’s thesis is that, owing to special features on both sides of this bargaining game [namely the way that Congressional committees that authorise budgets are stuffed with those who benefit disproportionately from those budgets] public goods and services are oversupplied at a rate of anything up to twice what would be optimal in terms of citizen preferences.
As the paper discusses, this model leads Niskanen to recommend many NPM style government reforms, to enable bureaucrats to compete for resources.
Goodin applauds this model for its simplicity, but doesn’t think that it offers a good description of decision-making, for a large number of reasons, such as:
As a result of these criticisms, Goodin offers an alternative model in which bureaucrats and politicians collude to overload oversight bodies with information, and use the ensuing confusion to bid for higher budgets. This results in the skewed spending around core programme areas, leaving too little for cross-cutting or broadly defined issues.
In general, this is a refreshingly clear article. However, I found it odd that it did not pick up on the one obvious criticism of Niskanen’s model that occurred to me straight away: Niskanen posits that as a monopoly provider of bureaucratic goods and services, bureaucrats would oversupply and overcharge. Indeed, it appears (from Goodin’s discussion) that he confused the two, or saw them as synonymous. But this is odd, given that it is a standard tenet of economic theory that monopolists undersupply and overcharge. If one grafts this assumption to Goodin’s rebuilt model, you get the worst of both worlds – a collusive bureaucratic-political machine that under-delivers and overcharges in core areas, and doesn’t deliver at all in non-core ones. Impartiality prevents me from commenting on whether this is an accurate picture of Washington or Whitehall.
American-born Colin is a seasoned gringo who blogs of his new life in Latin America at Expat Chronicles. He’d just written a PDF guide for gringos. The guide is no Lonely Planet: focusing on drugs, sex, love and violence, it’s by turns lurid and sordid, with many detailed descriptions of sex and violence. For this reason, it comes across as honest, and, frankly, captivating; mixing the ethics of stabbing prisonmates with theories of Latina love-psychology. I would not, however, consider it workplace or family reading.
Incidentally, Google Reader ‘found’ this for me – suggesting that I might like it. If its recommendations for what I might enjoy reading continue to be so accurate, I may no longer need to use Tyler Cowen as my human information filter.
Over on Cheap Talk, Jeff recounts being taught game theory by Matthew Rabin:
As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying was connected to reality, every game we analyzed in class was given a name according to his system of “stochastic lexicography.” Stochastic lexicography means randomly picking two words out of the dictionary and using them as the name of the game under study. So, for example, instead of studying “job market signaling” we studied something like “rusty succotash.”
I like this idea. To some extent, it reminds me of the operational names used in military and police circles, such as the Met’s ‘Operation Bumblebee’ or ‘Operation Trident’. Working in the government policy process and knowing the degree to which a scheme for X may end up actually being a scheme for Y (but still called the X Scheme) I would welcome the neutrality of abstract nomenclature.
I was very pleased to complete the Lexus Croydon 10k just inside my target time on Sunday morning. Although 0:49:03 will break no records, it was in the first half of the field (208th of 501 finishers) which is an important psychological factor for me. It also continues my record of beating my target times by narrow margins; in the Spring I completed the Stafford half-marathon in 1:59:50 against a two hour target.
I should thank Helen for coming out to cheer me on at the 7km mark, even though the chilly morning meant she needed to wear two fleeces to do this! Congratulations also to the other members of my running club, Striders of Croydon, especially Richard Lees-Smith, whose 0:35:54 I can never hope to beat.
Race photos are not yet online, but I do have another participation medal to add to the meagre collection under the bed.
A few months ago, I was standing next to the doors of a Tube train from Canary Wharf to Westminster. By my feet was a large bag. The bag was large, bulging and had paint splattered on it. I imagined that it was a painter or decorator’s bag. However, I looked up and down the carriage and didn’t see any painters or decorators. In fact, everyone (including myself) was wearing suits. I wondered if this bag was a bomb, and considered whether I should ask others if they owned it.
This is not interesting, in itself. What is interesting is that this experience made me think, from my perspective, does it matter if it’s a bomb? If this bag had exploded, I’d have died instantly and without knowing. Ignoring any consideration that others that could be harmed directly and indirectly through mourning, would an explosion of the bag matter to me? I figured not: either it wasn’t a bomb, and I would be fine, or it was, and I’d die instantly, but be fine up to that point. What I find interesting (and surprising) about this is that I appear to be fairly indifferent to instant, unknowing death. I think that this is entirely compatible with my standard, human fear of painful, knowing death, and, indeed, any form of unwanted human suffering. I think this view may be widely shared, although I doubt many people have thought about it in detail. After all, people generally report that, had they the option, they’d drift of quietly in their sleep.
I write about this now because I have just read Galen Strawson, who writes on something similar in The Philosophy Magazine. I also wonder about the wider implications: for example, is working in a bomb disposal team actually better than fighting on the front line, because although your risk of death is higher, so is the ‘quality’ of death (i.e. instant and unknown)? On the other side of the equation, at what point does becoming a suicide bomber became preferable (in terms of utility) to being dragooned into fighting as an insurgent?
And it turns out people in suits do occasionally take decorator’s bags on the Tube with them: the owner and his bag alighted at Canada Water.
