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Sometimes you read something that makes you challenge your opinions, in a positive way. Steve Landsburg’s piece on government spending vs government debt did that for me today. His argument: it’s not government debt that is problematic, but government spending.
I am interested in the potential of boosting wages in slums by setting up IT centres so that locals can work via Mechanical Turk, and similar services. Although these jobs pay below UK minimum wage, it would be multiples of a typical slum-dweller’s income. It appears that this is not a new idea. Some firms have gone a stage further and distributed this work by mobile phone, broadening reach. However the benefit of a single location is that you don’t rely on the worker having a phone, and that you could combine work with education and IT literacy classes.
Via Tim Harford’s Twitter feed, I came across this interesting piece from Chris Blattman on national variation in bargaining strategies, a.k.a. how to negotiate your taxi fees. A good example of a thread where the comments add as much value as the post.
My top overseas taxi tip: When you arrive at an airport, go by foot from the Arrivals concourse to the Departures concourse. Collect a taxi there to save yourself roughly 50% of the price of a waiting taxi. (Plus you know they are a real taxi, you just saw their last Westerner fare arrive unmolested.)
As a legacy of my work with MTM London, I am very interested in how technology can change business models. Crowdsourcing seems very in at the moment. Some of the developments I have been following include:
All of these are Nathan Barley creative ventures. Can/does crowdsourcing work as well in other sectors? I am aware, of course, of Wikinvest and Knol, but I am not sure they are in the same category.
I have just finished this book, by Dambisa Moyo. It’s a very simple argument. So simple that the preface by Niall Ferguson means you can skip the majority of the book. After an hour, you’ll have the idea. As Niall points out, it’s slightly annoying that these arguments are taken more seriously when they come from Dambisa, an intelligent, attractive Ghanaian, rather than from older, whiter (but equally intelligent) critics of aid, such as Bill Easterly. But that’s not to the discredit of Ms Moyo or the arguments. Somebody needs to get the fact that aid is not the answer on the radar. Moyo does a good job as the ‘anti-Bono’.
You know that you have been studying too hard when one of your policy case studies comes from The Wire.
In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!
I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.
Mike Simpson, a developer of the Total War computer game series, has come out fighting after the latest game in the series, Empire, continues to take flack. The post (reproduced below in its entirety) is a good glimpse into the realities of game development.
Our guiding principle with design is that we make the game we want to play, and trust that other people will like it. That inevitably means we make the TW games for the hardcore fans rather than for the more casual gamers that are possibly the majority of our customers. We believe that if we succeed in making a game that the fans like it will by definition be a great game, and the because of its quality casual players will like it too, so long as we make it accessible. We need both groups (casual and hardcore) to get enough money in to allow us to keep making the games, so one of the tightropes we walk is the balance between accessibility and depth. Great design manages both, and that’s what we strive for (occasionally successfully!).
We do however also have another customer who we make the game for, and in one particular way they are the most important of all. It’s our publisher, who is driven by the grim necessity of commercial reality. Those necessities tend to be short term compared with the dev time of a game or the lifetime of a series. They are also necessities that we cannot ignore – if we do it’s Game Over. Empire: Total War happened the only way it could – it had to be in a box in Feb 09. Damned stressful for all concerned, but it’s so much a fact of life it’s almost not worth talking about.
I think some people think that when “commercial reality” wins, they lose. If the car parks at Sega or CA were full of Ferraris, I might agree. But they are not. When “commercial reality” wins, we live to make another game.
I have mixed feelings on this. Yes, commercial goals and gamer goals can (and should) be compatible. Yes, there will be some trade offs. But the quality of the product should be the last thing a value-add, creative company lets slip. They should lose features before releasing broader, buggier games. There is no excuse for selling buggy software. This approach (shall we call it the ‘Microsoft approach’?) can only work long-term if you have the commercial advantage and customer lock-in to support it. Even then, it will vanish as soon as higher-quality alternatives appear.
I love the Total War series and own three games (of which Rome is my favourite). But I haven’t bought Empire, and probably won’t. When the next installment, Napoleon, arrives, I won’t be rushing out to buy it either. I’ll hang on until the bugs are fixed and the price drops. I don’t want to be paying top dollar for whatever work in progress “has to be in a box by date X”.
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.
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.
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.
