‘Politics’ Category

Or, The High Cost of Subsidies

A few weeks ago there was an arti­cle in The Wall Street Jour­nal, What’s a Degree Really Worth. In it the reporter Mary Pilon dis­cussed the esti­mated dif­fer­ence in the aver­age life­time earn­ings between indi­vid­u­als with and with­out the col­lege diplo­mas, and she men­tioned a few prob­lems – but only a few of the prob­lems – with some of those calculations.

We don’t have much to say about those bad cal­cu­la­tions other than the esti­ma­tion meth­ods aren’t very sophis­ti­cated. The one method involved mul­ti­ply­ing some over­all dif­fer­ence in aver­age annual earn­ings by 40 years – the pre­sumed length of one’s work career. Among other things, that sim­ple prod­uct doesn’t include oppor­tu­nity costs – e.g., wages lost while not work­ing dur­ing time in col­lege – or dif­fer­ences in growth rates of com­pen­sa­tion through time or time-​value-​of-​money considerations.

So, while we don’t have much to say about the cen­tral idea in the arti­cle, we do have (1) a com­ment about tuition infla­tion and (2) a related cri­tique about col­lege as white-​collar, vo-​tech train­ing (and the impli­ca­tions of that).

1. All things equal, gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies to con­sumers increase prices – in this case tuition – which can then spi­ral upwards.
2. All things equal, higher tuition costs induce stu­dents to become more professionally-​oriented, and that has sev­eral impli­ca­tions, includ­ing a de-​emphasis of the lib­eral arts, and that per­mits anti-​social and silly behav­ior and the­o­ries to per­sist in what has become the fig­u­ra­tive back­wa­ter of the academy.

(1) Gov­ern­ment Sub­si­dies & Tuition Increases

In the arti­cle, Ms. Pilon briefly men­tioned that aver­age, annual, under­grad­u­ate tuition and fees at pri­vate col­leges increased from $15,518 to $26,273 dur­ing the past ten years.

That 70% increase is twice as great as the change in con­sumer prices– of about 35% – and that’s noth­ing new. This table at http://​www​.finaid​.org/​s​a​v​i​n​g​s​/​t​u​i​t​i​o​n​-​i​n​f​l​a​t​i​o​n​.​p​h​tml shows that tuition infla­tion has been greater than gen­eral infla­tion for at least the past 50 years.

Hmm, now what other indus­try has shown per­cent­age price increases greater than the rate of infla­tion for a long period of time? You know, that indus­try that com­prises about 16% of GDP? Could it be health-​care? Why, yes, it could – although to be pre­cise, health-​care infla­tion has been sub­stan­tially less than tuition inflation.

So, is it a mere coin­ci­dence that two of the indus­tries that have his­tor­i­cally been the most-​subsidized in the U.S.A. are also two indus­tries with very large and sus­tained price increases over a long period of time? We don’t think so.

Here is an exam­ple of how sub­si­dies increase prices.

We recently had a con­ver­sa­tion with the par­ent of a high school senior. He told us that he had bud­geted a cer­tain amount for his child’s tuition next year; let’s say it was $7,500.

Any tuition cost above that amount would have to be funded with grants, loans, work-​study pro­grams, and scholarships.

By the way, the reader should think of schol­ar­ships from col­leges as noth­ing more than dis­counts from list prices. Often, they are awarded based upon merit and are called aca­d­e­mic schol­ar­ships, but that’s not always the case. Col­leges have much more pric­ing flex­i­bil­ity than most par­ents know, and for what­ever arbi­trary rea­son, col­lege recruiters can con­sider some stu­dents more desir­able than oth­ers and offer those prospects price con­ces­sions.¹

Any­way, con­sider some­one like our acquain­tance who has $7,500 per year to spend on col­lege. To keep it sim­ple, assume no other sources of funds – no sub­si­dized loans – except a pos­si­ble fed­eral grant of, say, $2,500.

With­out the grant, the max­i­mum that any col­lege could get from the fam­ily is $7,500 per year. With the grant, the max­i­mum is $10,000.

With­out the Grant

Let’s con­sider our acquain­tance as an aver­age par­ent. If on aver­age, fam­i­lies have up to $7,500 to pay for col­lege expenses, then on aver­age, col­leges have to find ways to oper­ate (as going con­cerns) with $7,500 per stu­dent. Actu­ally, due to their abil­ity to price dis­crim­i­nate, col­lege would charge more and then have to offer schol­ar­ships to more stu­dents. That’s because stated tuition rates are noth­ing more than list prices, and one would expect the list price to be greater than $7,500. In that way, the col­leges can find ways to charge higher prices to wealth­ier fam­i­lies with above-​average bud­gets and offer dis­counts – err, we mean schol­ar­ships – to every­one else.

Regard­less, col­leges wouldn’t be able to get more than $7,500 from our aver­age parent.

With the Grant

Now, it’s quite pos­si­ble that an aver­age par­ent could say to his college-​bound child, “we had $7,500 to spend for col­lege but luck­ily you have a grant for $2,500; so, we’ll only spend $5,000 of our own money, and your tuition bud­get remains the same: $7,500.” It’s pos­si­ble, but it seems unlikely. Unless tuition is less than $10,000, we’d expect that fam­i­lies who com­mit $7,500 would be will­ing to spend that amount under many circumstances.

So, if the fam­ily spends any­thing above $5,000, then the col­lege gets more than with­out grants. If par­ents com­mit their entire $7,500, then the col­lege gets $10,000. That increases the incen­tive for the col­lege to raise tuition to extract the entire amount avail­able from the fam­ily. So, it seems rea­son­able to con­clude that the tuition rates would be higher than they would be with­out sub­si­dies. Clearly, the col­lege would still try to get as much as pos­si­ble from wealth­ier fam­i­lies (and from every­one else, too).

In those instances, where the fam­ily com­mits the entire $7,500, it is no bet­ter off, but the col­lege cer­tainly is.

How­ever, it’s worse than that when the gov­ern­ment “attempts to help make col­lege afford­able” over time. Imag­ine the first year after the gov­ern­ment begins offer­ing grants, if our think­ing is cor­rect, then one would expect col­leges to increase tuitions. That means that the dif­fer­ence between tuition rates and parental bud­gets – say, a con­stant $7,500 – would grow. If that dif­fer­ence causes Con­gress and the Pres­i­dent to offer larger grants, then we have the begin­ning of an infla­tion spi­ral. The fam­i­lies that con­tinue to spend $7, 500 are no bet­ter off than with­out sub­si­dies. The fam­i­lies that spend less ben­e­fit some­what, but we’d expect that they would be in the minor­ity. The col­leges are def­i­nitely better-​off (and fat­ter) and tax-​payers are strictly worse-​off (as usual).

From each family’s per­spec­tive, given that grant pro­grams exist, then receiv­ing a grant is obvi­ously ben­e­fi­cial because it pro­vides more flex­i­bil­ity and capac­ity to meet high tuition pay­ments. How­ever, col­lec­tively, if every­one – or enough stu­dents – receive grants, than no one is better-​off because tuition demanded by the col­lege is higher only because those grants are avail­able, and the col­leges get fatter.

(2) Spec­u­la­tion on High Tuition Costs, Career Train­ing & their Unin­tended Implications

Or, Does Out­ra­geously High Tuition Doom the Lib­eral Arts to a Ghetto of Anti-​social Silliness?

Note up-​front that like much of what we write this cri­tique is rather spec­u­la­tive and requires sev­eral assump­tions. Admit­tedly, we ignor­ing many impor­tant gen­eral eco­nomic and demo­graphic fac­tors, and we make sev­eral, very gross gen­er­al­iza­tions, but (obvi­ously) we think our analy­sis is com­pelling nonetheless.

Note also that:

• From this site, one can see that government-​provided finan­cial aid began in the 1940s for vet­er­ans and was revised in the 1950s. It then expanded to seg­ments of the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion in the 1960s and ‘70s and expanded beyond grants to include sub­si­dized and guar­an­teed loans.
• From the link near the top of this post, the reader can notice that tuition infla­tion has out­paced gen­eral infla­tion for at least fifty years.

As we explained above, we think that the sec­ond point is an impli­ca­tion of the first. So, we’ll assume that such sub­si­dies increase the cost of higher edu­ca­tion. (It would be truly remark­able, would it not, if sub­si­dies to fam­i­lies reduced tuition rates and made col­leges more effi­cient than they oth­er­wise would be – whether that sub­sidy is via a grant or a cheap, guar­an­teed loan. In many ways, the long-​term phe­nom­e­non is no dif­fer­ent than the early 21^st cen­tury hous­ing price bub­ble cre­ated by Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac’s loose and sub­si­dized credit standards.)

So, what could be the unin­tended con­se­quences of very high tuition costs? We have two in mind, though the sec­ond one depends upon the first one.

Col­lege as White-​Collar, Vo-​tech Training

We think that it is pos­si­ble to argue that higher col­lege costs, along with the asso­ci­ated large sac­ri­fices and bor­row­ings by house­holds and stu­dents, have induced many of them to take myopic, careerist approaches to higher edu­ca­tion, e.g., “we’re spend­ing a lot of money and bor­row­ing a lot of money, so you bet­ter get a good job when you’re done.”

If that per­spec­tive is ram­pant and con­sumers of edu­ca­tion over-​emphasize career train­ing, then col­lege is not a place – or is less-​of-​a-​place – where one can gain gen­eral knowl­edge and the abil­ity to think clearly about a vari­ety of prob­lems and pos­si­bly – just pos­si­bly – a bit of wis­dom. In fact, if that is the case, then col­lege becomes lit­tle more than white-​collar, voca­tional train­ing that requires a few other required courses and elec­tives.²

That’s not a new com­plaint and per­haps we’re just pro­ject­ing our own youth­ful moti­va­tions and expe­ri­ences as an under­grad and MBA stu­dent – so we imag­ine that every­one is as money-​hungry as we were – but there does seem to be a ter­ri­ble empha­sis on how “use­ful” a course will be, where “use­ful” is usu­ally defined as some­thing related to some task that one hopes to per­form for some prospec­tive employer.

Unfor­tu­nately, (1) the une­d­u­cated – i.e., stu­dents – by the nature of their igno­rance are usu­ally not in good posi­tions to deter­mine what’s use­ful or not (or what should be taught or not), and (2) “rel­e­vant” or “prac­ti­cal” white-​collar voca­tional train­ing often reverts to a kind of monkey-​see, monkey-​do mimicry.

Such thought­less mim­icry isn’t nec­es­sar­ily opti­mal for stu­dents, their prospec­tive employ­ers, or soci­ety. For exam­ple, con­sider the very bad finan­cial mod­el­ing that helped cause the world­wide finan­cial cri­sis in 2008. Many col­leges taught – and con­tinue to teach – tech­niques and algo­rithms that were in use, but weren’t/aren’t par­tic­u­larly use­ful (or appro­pri­ate). So, rather than empha­size strengths and weak­nesses of dif­fer­ent tech­niques and abstrac­tions, the empha­sis was on teach­ing tech­niques because that’s what stu­dents and employ­ers wanted – but not nec­es­sar­ily what soci­ety needed (or needs): yet another form of myopia.

So, read­ers sym­pa­thetic to our posi­tion may read­ily accept our sup­po­si­tion. For those unper­suaded we have a ques­tion: of every for­mer, cur­rent, and prospec­tive col­lege stu­dent (and their fam­ily) that you know, how many have men­tioned a rea­son other than salaries or careers as their rea­son to attend­ing col­lege? Be hon­est and con­sider the percentages.

Note that all things equal, given the fixed num­ber of cred­its that need to be earned to grad­u­ate, an over-​emphasis on sup­pos­edly “prac­ti­cal” career train­ing almost always means an under-​emphasis on other courses that could increase gen­eral knowl­edge and help develop think­ing skills as well as (per­haps) help stu­dents acquire a bit of wis­dom.³

And what are the costs of that careerist, vo-​tech approach to col­lege study? Many are well-​known and frequently-​made com­plaints about MBAs and engi­neers and other pro­fes­sion­als: short-​sighted, lack the abil­ity to learn and adapt and syn­the­size, etc., but we don’t want to focus our atten­tion on stu­dents who become employ­ees. Instead, let’s con­sider what that careerist per­spec­tive does within col­leges and universities.

First, we’ve already men­tioned – or at least insin­u­ated – it “dumbs-​down” stud­ies within par­tic­u­lar fields, par­tic­u­larly in pro­fes­sional schools and for pro­fes­sional degrees where the focus is often on what’s done (or what’s to be done) rather than what is known (and unknown) about the world or a phenomenon.

The Irrel­e­vancy of Lib­eral Arts

Sec­ond, the enhanced inter­est in sup­posed prac­ti­cal, job-​oriented train­ing has led to an under-​emphasis on non-​professional courses and areas of study. (You know, those required courses that enter­pris­ing stu­dents view as the col­le­giate chaff of the pro­fes­sional , vo-​tech wheat that they seek.)

To us, that lack of inter­est and the view that such course­work is a “nec­es­sary evil” of get­ting a degree (and a job) means that (many) stu­dents take those courses less seri­ously and view par­tic­i­pa­tion as a cost min­i­miza­tion prob­lem to solve, rather than as a value max­i­miza­tion prob­lem. In oth­ers words, they pre­sume such courses are worth­less and attempt to find the eas­i­est ways to sat­isfy require­ments and other con­straints (while attempt­ing to main­tain a high GPA, because, you know, “that’s what employ­ers like to see”).

That has a num­ber of impli­ca­tions, includ­ing a desire by pro­fes­sors to pan­der to stu­dents via the offer­ing of silly and worth­less courses, which, of course, turns the stu­dents’ ini­tial per­cep­tions into self-​fulfilling prophe­cies and per­mits the such profs to (cor­rectly) view most stu­dents as short-​sighted, money-​grubbers with no intel­lec­tual curiosity.

But those oppos­ing neg­a­tive opin­ions are not the only con­se­quences of the bad equi­lib­rium. Worse is that such indif­fer­ence (by stu­dents and oth­ers, includ­ing employ­ers) per­mits rad­i­cal­ized and poorly-​trained fac­ulty to flour­ish and hire oth­ers with sim­i­lar tastes and predilec­tions. They’re not chal­lenged within the acad­emy, because, frankly, other than a few crit­ics on the right, nobody cares. (Did you hear JP Mor­gan is on cam­pus today?) That’s true of admin­is­tra­tions that empha­size careers, stu­dent ameni­ties, and NCAA Divi­sion I sports teams.

In our mind, that’s why so much thought­less, knee-​jerk rad­i­cal­ism has thrived within (that por­tion) of acad­e­mia since World War II.

Such rad­i­cal­ism and silly inquiries and teach­ings are come at quite a cost to soci­ety; how­ever, we think that their effects are over­stated, and, again, that’s because the vast major­ity of stu­dents are too busy seek­ing career train­ing and sum­mer intern­ships. (Did you hear GE is on cam­pus today?)

And, that’s the true tragedy. The high cost of col­lege – par­tially to due gov­ern­ment involve­ment – induces stu­dents to obsess about career fac­tors, so they don’t get the edu­ca­tion that they deserve. Well, they don’t get the edu­ca­tion they could have received in a dif­fer­ent real­iza­tion of the world, and that edu­ca­tion would include, well, an edu­ca­tion, includ­ing exten­sive expo­sure to the clas­si­cal, lib­eral arts.

P.S. Like many of our longer posts, we’ll likely edit the errors and typos and pos­si­bly expand our analy­sis as we think more about the issues.

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Foot­notes:

And So Is ‘Gay’

In fact, stu­dents of his­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics could tell you that many other words are homo­graphs, too, and those stu­dents could also explain seman­tic change, includ­ing the pejo­ra­tion and recla­ma­tion of words. (Don’t be a fool, you know where this is head­ing.)

We doubt that we have much in com­mon with Pres­i­dent Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, but we do sym­pa­thize with him for the grief he is tak­ing for using ‘retarded’ as a pejorative.

Was it poor judg­ment? Sure. Should he have known bet­ter? Of course. Are we ital­i­ciz­ing homo­graphs? You know it. (Actu­ally, because we are lazy and didn’t major in lin­guis­tics, only the homo­graphs that are easy to iden­tify and only the first time, but we’ll stop now.)

So, while polit­i­cally we tend to agree with his crit­ics like Sarah Palin, in this case we think that she and all the other cyn­i­cal or pious grievance-​mongers should grow-​up, shut-​up and go away.

If you are aggrieved by some­thing that a stranger said about some­one else in a place where you weren’t approx­i­mately six months ago, then you, dear reader, are either a cyn­i­cal, politically-​motivated d.b. or you are a humor­less scold – pos­si­bly a bit too sen­si­tive and pos­si­bly with deep emo­tional problems.

In fact, it would do every­one – indi­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively – much good to remem­ber that on occa­sion, every­one behaves like a butthead, but there is a huge dif­fer­ence between mali­cious behav­ior and sim­ply mak­ing a mis­take in the heat of the moment.

In our mind, that dif­fer­ence is nearly anal­o­gous to Saint Fran­cis de Sales’ dis­tinc­tion between sin and imper­fec­tion; how­ever, in this case we have a dif­fer­ent ‘Fran­cis’ quote in mind. That would be one spo­ken by Sargeant Hulka in the 1981 movie, Stripes. When one of the recruits states, “… Any of you guys call me Fran­cis, and I’ll kill you,” the good sergeant replies, Lighten Up, Francis.”

So, lighten up, Sarah and posse. There are too many impor­tant issues where he is on the wrong side to worry about a silly one like this one.

What if It Were Luck?

Update: This arti­cle, White House Tough­ens Tone, from Monday’s (Jan­u­ary 25^th) edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal sup­ports our hypoth­e­sis. Yeah, blame Bush from your bud­get deficits. That will get you far.

We don’t mean Scott Brown’s amaz­ing vic­tory. We mean Pres­i­dent Obama’s, and we write it quite sarcastically.

For awhile, it seems that all we heard and read was that team and can­di­date Obama were bril­liant and dis­ci­plined and ran excel­lent cam­paigns against Hillary Clin­ton in the Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary and then John McCain in the gen­eral elec­tion – as if he and his staff had solved com­pli­cated opti­miza­tions prob­lem and had picked the best strategy(ies) from many avail­able ones (to achieve their goals).

But, what if it wasn’t bril­liance and amaz­ing problem-​solving abil­ity? What if it were sim­ply good luck? What if those cam­paigns were the only type of cam­paign they could run and it just turned out to be the right cam­paign at the right time, given the nation’s econ­omy, mood, etc.

Recently, we’ve heard many com­men­ta­tors – not just con­ser­v­a­tives – ques­tion the gen­eral wis­dom and judg­ment of Pres­i­dent Obama and his admin­is­tra­tion on any num­bers of top­ics, but espe­cially with respect to judg­ing the “mood” of the nation. Many of those com­men­ta­tors have also men­tioned that the Pres­i­dent and his sub­or­di­nates have been far less flex­i­ble, adapt­able, and thought­ful than orig­i­nally perceived?

What if that’s because they are not? Like a blind pig that finds an acorn or the bro­ken clock that is right twice a day or a one-​hit won­der, what if he/​they aren’t very robust and don’t learn very quickly and were just lucky? In that case, his oppo­nents and his allies may have both over-​estimated him (and his advisers).

Regard­less of the reader’s pol­i­tics, it’s kind of dis­con­cert­ing isn’t it?

It’s a repudiation!

We applaud Google and its threat to leave China as a response to recent hack­ing attempts.

Last month, we wrote about A Rise in Inter­net Hack­ing Attempts at this site, and all of those hits seemed to orig­i­nate from within China. (Whether they were spoofed or not, we can’t tell.)

The num­ber per day peaked over the Christ­mas break and has since decreased.

We have no idea if there is a rela­tion­ship between what Google dis­cov­ered and what we noticed here. We doubt it because we’re tiny and have almost no fol­low­ing and in two years have writ­ten only four or five posts crit­i­ciz­ing China. How­ever, we have not seen sim­i­lar attacks at any of the other sites that we maintain.

We would like Google to pub­lish a list of offend­ing IP addresses to shine fur­ther light on the issue and so that folks like us can see if there are any matches.

“Those who do not learn from his­tory are doomed to repeat it.”

—George San­tayana

Pref­ace: on Mon­day, we wrote Human Error (ver­sus Sys­temic Fail­ure), which sup­ple­mented our longer post from Sun­day: Intel­li­gence Fail­ures and Bad Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem Design. Much of that ‘Human Error’ post was devoted to men­tion­ing that within orga­ni­za­tions, most fail­ures, includ­ing human fail­ures, are sys­temic fail­ures. You can’t blame it on your sub­or­di­nates!

In the Sun­day post, we hypoth­e­sized and spec­u­lated that bad infor­ma­tion sys­tem design could be the cause of the recent intel­li­gence fail­ures. We based those sup­po­si­tions on our knowl­edge of infor­ma­tion sys­tems, com­mon design flaws, and the dys­func­tional nature of the fed­eral bureau­cracy but with no real or spe­cific knowl­edge of the cir­cum­stances. We don’t work for the gov­ern­ment, and we’re too lazy and too busy to inves­ti­gate on our own, but we fig­ured our hunches were cor­rect (and were will­ing to stake our mea­ger rep­u­ta­tion on them).

So, in the Mon­day post, we used L. Gor­don Crovitz’s col­umn, Intel­li­gence Is a Ter­ri­ble Thing to Waste, which appeared in that day’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal, to pro­vide some anec­do­tal evi­dence to sup­port our con­jec­tures of the overly-​centralized and overly-​rigid nature of the systems.

We closed Monday’s post with: “Sad, but true.”

Unfor­tu­nately, an arti­cle in Friday’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal, Years of Spotty Data-​Sharing on Sus­pects, pro­vides addi­tional evi­dence to sup­port much of the crit­i­cism that we levied on Sun­day (based upon our speculation).

We write “unfor­tu­nately,” because this is one of those cases where we hate to be right, but read it (the arti­cle) and weep. Here are sev­eral items men­tioned in the arti­cle and our comments.

Pres­i­dent Obama ordered agen­cies to bol­ster infor­ma­tion technology.

• It’s unlikely that the fail­ures are about tech­nol­ogy or inad­e­quate bud­gets. Note, using open-​source web apps, our database-​driven site and e-​mail costs less than $150 per year to oper­ate. It is a state-​of-​the-​art pub­lish­ing sys­tem that could be eas­ily used by depart­ments and agen­cies to post (and cat­e­go­rize) qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion and leads. Those cat­e­gories could include sub­stan­ti­ated ver­sus unsub­stan­ti­ated claims.
• More likely it’s about sys­tem design. We’re not under-​estimating the vol­ume of data for some agen­cies, but we are ques­tion­ing the need to cen­tral­ize its stor­age and man­age­ment. More on this below.

A pre­vi­ous inte­gra­tion attempt, appro­pri­ately called the Infor­ma­tion Inte­gra­tion Pro­gram, failed.

• Is any­one sur­prised by that result?
• We sus­pect it is overly-​rigid and centralized.
• We also sus­pect that if such an inte­gra­tion attempt were to ever suc­ceed, it would be imme­di­ately obso­lete–most likely because some such agency upgraded one of its data­bases, and it is no longer integrable.

Sup­pos­edly, another inte­gra­tion attempt won’t be com­plete for two years.

• Remem­ber: the last attempt failed. So, why believe the two-​year deadline?
• It likely involves many indus­tri­ous and very hard-​working con­sul­tants spin­ning around on the lit­tle ham­ster wheels and sweat­ing pro­fusely, but with no real chance of suc­cess. It would be a Greek Tragedy if it weren’t an Amer­i­can one.
• There are needs for large sys­tems, but we sus­pect far fewer than presumed.
• The issue isn’t how to accu­mu­late all infor­ma­tion and data, it is how to access infor­ma­tion as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble. So, why should a mid­dle­man aggre­gate it when indi­vid­ual agen­cies could pub­lish it and searchers (with proper clear­ance) could imme­di­ately find it.

Empha­sis on con­nect­ing e-​mail systems

• Please see our post, Inex­pen­sive but Valu­able Web-​based MIS, espe­cially the sec­tion, ‘E-​mail as the Cen­tral Ner­vous System.’ No need to repeat the argu­ment here, but e-​mail is an inef­fi­cient man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem. Bet­ter and inex­pen­sive sub­sti­tutes exist.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion should be about be about pub­lish­ing facts, spec­u­la­tions, and opin­ions, and let­ting oth­ers search those posts or reports (and/​or receive feeds of future ones).
• E-​mail is archaic for these pur­poses. We ask, dear reader: do you know any one of our sev­eral e-​mail addresses? Unless or are a friend or acquain­tance, no, you don’t. Yet you can read our cur­rent and past spec­u­la­tions and be auto­mat­i­cally informed of future ones.
• Why shouldn’t intel­li­gence ana­lysts, within their own com­mu­ni­ties, have the same capac­i­ties that you, dear reader, have through­out the world­wide com­mu­nity that is the web? Pro­vided you live in a free, uncen­sored soci­ety, you have the capa­bil­ity at lit­tle or no cost. You can search for items of inter­est and read and eval­u­ate them based upon your knowl­edge and per­spec­tive. You can think we’re a fool or not, but you can make that assess­ment your­self for your par­tic­u­lar prob­lem or need. Why shouldn’t ana­lysts be able to do the same on their intranet?

National Intel­li­gence Library per­mits searches of fin­ished reports

• That’s good, but it’s not enough.
• How much sub­jec­tive and unsub­stan­ti­ated and unver­i­fied data are elim­i­nated from those fin­ished reports? Again, that’s the stuff of new leads and threat identifications.
• How long does it take for such reports to be “fin­ished” and avail­able for gen­eral consumption?
• If agen­cies or work groups had their own (secure, intranet) pub­lish­ing plat­forms, why bother con­sol­i­dat­ing? Let poten­tial users, with the right clear­ances, surf. Another way to ask: why bother con­sol­i­dat­ing when the con­sol­ida­tor can­not nec­es­sar­ily antic­i­pate the needs of users? Also, each blog on the web has its own sys­tem of per­mis­sions for access to pri­vate and password-​protected infor­ma­tion. Has any­one inves­ti­gated whether a cen­tral clear­ing­house is more effi­cient than main­tain­ing access to data at local lev­els. We don’t have many sub­scribers, but we know when we have new ones, and can grant var­i­ous lev­els of per­mis­sions to them.

Prob­lems search­ing unprocessed infor­ma­tion, espe­cially clearances

• See Sun­day or Monday’s post.
• Regard­ing who has access to which data­bases, secu­rity clear­ances are a major issue for a vari­ety of good rea­sons, but dis­tinc­tions should be made between data about cit­i­zens and for­eign­ers, and there is no rea­son to endow for­eign­ers with our rights; so, infor­ma­tion about for­eign­ers should be more eas­ily accessed.

Secu­rity clearances

• Obvi­ously nec­es­sary, clearly a con­straint. In fact, by def­i­n­i­tion, they are con­straints on sharing.
• We don’t have an answer to this issue, but we do have ques­tions: Is clear­ance a status-​symbol? Should lower level inves­ti­ga­tors and ana­lysts have greater access? What are the costs and ben­e­fits of greater access? How could leaks com­pro­mise var­i­ous inves­ti­ga­tions? Obvi­ously, records of vis­its, queries, etc, can be kept (just like we have at our site and most other web pub­lish­ers have).

Ter­ror­ist Iden­ti­ties Data­mart Environment

• We ask: who, other than a gov­ern­ment (or cor­po­rate) bureau­crat (or par­a­sitic con­sul­tant), could like that name? Seriously? Is it that cru­cial to cre­ate a word from the acronym?
• Does the man­gling of Eng­lish imply any­thing about the con­struc­tion of the sys­tem? We wonder.
• It’s clearly a cen­tral­ized sys­tem, and based upon the Crovitz col­umn we men­tioned above, it seems very dif­fi­cult to get on the list. We sus­pect it is harder to get off of the list.

What would we do?

For cer­tain stan­dard­ized mon­i­tor­ing and detec­tion sys­tems, there is a clear need for large data­bases. These are sim­i­lar to record-​keeping sys­tems for trans­ac­tions and events, i.e., not much dif­fer­ent than, say, keep­ing track of check­ing account trans­ac­tions or pur­chases and returns at Wal­Mart. In a world-​wide endeavor like ter­ror­ist detec­tion and mon­i­tor­ing, such sys­tems need to be search-​able web appli­ca­tions (on a pri­vate intranet). That very much reduces the need for con­sol­i­da­tion into one ginor­mous database.

In fact, the web is noth­ing if not one, large, search­able data­base (made of mil­lions of small ones). How­ever, the con­sol­i­da­tion and aggre­ga­tion is inher­ent and organic, rather than com­manded or centrally-​planned. In fact, mod­ern sites are database-​driven, and a visit to a page is the call to an (actual) data­base. Every time a Google search is per­formed, the web surfer is run­ning a query, and has access to some sites but not other, password-​protected ones.

More­over, the search engines have devel­oped algo­rithms to present the results in par­tic­u­lar ways, and they are incred­i­bly good at it. (At least on those searches where we rank high.) That is where time and effort should be devoted – not in attempt­ing to phys­i­cally con­sol­i­date dis­parate databases.

In that respect, let the dis­par­i­ties grow so that each agency can best serve its own mis­sion, yet pro­duce and pub­lish intranet-​accessible reports and notes.

We’d imag­ine that many of inves­ti­ga­tions are ad hoc and involve a bit of serendip­ity. We would imag­ine that with slightly dif­fer­ent mis­sions, the agen­cies have slightly dif­fer­ent data and infor­ma­tion require­ments and emphases and tra­di­tions and cul­tures. So, why try to cen­trally con­sol­i­date (and there­fore homog­e­nize) the unique sys­tems that may have evolved for spe­cific and good reasons.

How­ever, small, idio­syn­cratic sys­tems that com­prise a secu­rity intranet, can be index-​able and search-​able – just like the web.

So, we say har­ness the power of exist­ing web appli­ca­tions and tech­nol­ogy to pro­tect our nation. Allow inves­ti­ga­tors and ana­lysts be entre­pre­neur­ial pub­lish­ers of their idio­syn­cratic views, facts, and sup­po­si­tions. (All pri­vate and all secure on an intranet.)

Let inves­ti­ga­tors and ana­lysts pub­lish their reports and spec­u­la­tions for them­selves and other agen­cies, join forums, and con­verse with their col­leagues – even anony­mously. (We reit­er­ate: all pub­lished securely and pri­vately on a huge intranet, of course.) Let them use their intel­lects and train­ing to behave entre­pre­neuri­ally, not bureaucratically.)

Use cen­tral resources to develop search algo­rithms and secu­rity clearance/​permissions appli­ca­tions that oper­ate seam­lessly in a secure envi­ron­ment. Inte­grate intel­li­gently, not by con­sol­i­da­tion, by query. User man­age­ment and per­mis­sions are immensely impor­tant, but mil­lions of sites have solved such prob­lems. With a bit of guid­ance and in time, we think the gov­ern­ment can, too.

Infor­ma­tion: it’s like the econ­omy (and wealth) stu­pid. Try to cen­tral­ize it, and you’ll kill it and destroy the incen­tives to pro­duce more. In that respect, see The Wall Street Journal’s Review & Out­look, ‘A Fail­ure to Con­nect the Dots’, for more cor­rob­o­rat­ing evi­dence and perspective.

We’ll likely edit this post in the morn­ing. (We did, and will likely do so again.)

Is There a Dif­fer­ence? Sometimes.

After inter­mit­tently pon­der­ing the attempted Christ­mas Day bomb­ing of North­west Flight 253, yes­ter­day we pub­lished Intel­li­gence Fail­ures and Bad Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem Design.

Per its title, we spec­u­lated that bad infor­ma­tion sys­tem design could have been the cause of the fail­ure. In par­tic­u­lar, if the sys­tem is overly-​centralized and overly-​rigid intel­li­gence fail­ures can occur. (It’s a long post, but we think that it is well worth reading.)

Shortly after pub­lish­ing it last night, we saw today’s (Jan 4) opin­ion col­umn by The Wall Street Journal’s L. Gor­don Crovitz. His col­umn is enti­tled Intel­li­gence Is a Ter­ri­ble Thing to Waste.

In it, he quotes the head of the FBI’s Ter­ror­ist Screen­ing Cen­ter, Tim­o­thy Healy, and Mr. Healy’s expla­na­tion of “rea­son­able sus­pi­cion,” which is what it takes to get on a “list.”

“Rea­son­able sus­pi­cion requires ‘artic­u­la­ble’ facts which, taken together with ratio­nal infer­ences, rea­son­ably war­rant a deter­mi­na­tion that an indi­vid­ual is known or sus­pected to be or has been engaged in con­duct con­sti­tut­ing, in prepa­ra­tion for, in aid of, or related to, ter­ror­ism and ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties, and is based on the total­ity of the cir­cum­stances. Mere guesses or inar­tic­u­late ‘hunches’ are not enough to con­sti­tute rea­son­able suspicion.”

Mr. Crovitz then goes on to explain that if Mr. Healy’s expla­na­tion sounds like legalese that’s because it is and that it is silly and dan­ger­ous (our words) to treat poten­tial for­eign ter­ror­ists and enemy com­bat­ants as domes­tic criminals.

That’s very sim­i­lar to we wrote yesterday:

…In par­tic­u­lar, we could imag­ine that unver­i­fied and unsub­stan­ti­ated reports are among the least generally-​accessible data – until they are ver­i­fied, reviewed or accepted by the bureau­cracy, regard­less of whether that involves a sin­gle agency or an over-​seeing umbrella group.

BUT those unsub­stan­ti­ated reports are the ones that are most likely to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about new ter­ror­ists like Abdul­mu­tal­lab, (and that is the prob­lem with treat­ing for­eign­ers who are threats to our national secu­rity as crim­i­nals rather than enemy com­bat­ants.) If our hunch is cor­rect, then one should expect future “intel­li­gence fail­ures” to arise in sim­i­lar situations.

More­over, if our hunch is cor­rect, then a cen­tral­ized, data­base administrator’s (rather arbi­trary) rules – or worse, some lawyer’s rules – sub­sti­tute for the indi­vid­ual knowl­edge and dis­cre­tion of var­i­ous field agents and super­vi­sors.³ As such, fields agents may not have the oppor­tu­nity to syn­the­size the infor­ma­tion until it is too late. (It’s a case of the per­fect being the enemy of the good.)

By the way, Mr. Crovitz con­cludes with:

We have a choice. We can limit how infor­ma­tion is used or we can allow smart use of infor­ma­tion to pre­vent attacks. If we con­tinue to choose to limit how infor­ma­tion can be used in our defense, we shouldn’t be sur­prised when our defenses fail.

In that clos­ing para­graph, he suc­cinctly states the prob­lem that we more pre­cisely explain (in terms of infor­ma­tion sys­tem design) and our rec­om­men­da­tion to make security-​related infor­ma­tion sys­tems more like the inter­net and blogosphere.

When Human Errors Are Sys­temic Errors

Please note our foot­note (#3) in the third para­graph of the above excerpt from yesterday’s post. It reads: In this post, we won’t pro­vide any sup­port for the fol­low­ing state­ment , but, like errors in bank­ing and the finan­cial ser­vices (and almost every­thing else), we pre­fer errors to be idio­syn­cratic rather than sys­temic. (See Sys­temic Risk Reg­u­la­tion and Irony and espe­cially Idio­syn­cratic and Con­cen­tra­tion Risk, Again for our per­spec­tive in those areas.)

We noticed an arti­cle in today’s Pitts­burgh Post-​Gazette, Bomb attempt blamed on human error that describes Deputy national secu­rity adviser John Brennan’s expla­na­tion for the secu­rity fail­ure.¹ To para­phrase, he said it was human error.

Blam­ing some­thing on “human error” makes it seem like an indi­vid­ual, rather than the sys­tem, failed – like the sole check­point oper­a­tor arrived late because he was hung-​over from a Christ­mas party. However, unless some device or dog fails, all errors are human errors. In fact, one could argue that device and canine errors are human errors, too, because the plan­ner or designer did not have the fore­sight to antic­i­pate and mit­i­gate those errors or failures.

So, one – that would be us – could argue that fix­ing the blame on human error isn’t very descrip­tive or use­ful. If at some level, all such errors are human errors, then we haven’t been told much or learned much. We don’t know if those “human errors” are truly idio­syn­cratic or sys­temic. Did a poorly-​designed sys­tem induce higher lev­els (or prob­a­bil­i­ties) of human errors (than what could have been)? We don’t know.

When it seems rea­son­able to assume that near-​perfect detec­tion is demanded, we won­der why the sys­tem designer or admin­is­tra­tor would per­mit truly idio­syn­cratic errors, and we won­der if con­tin­gen­cies have been devel­oped in case of failures.

We’re not call­ing for over-​complicated solu­tions, just a lit­tle fore­sight. In that sense, it’s not dif­fer­ent than plan­ning for the failure-​related activ­i­ties in man­u­fac­tur­ing or any other field of endeavor. Such plan­ning should occur ex ante, rather than ex post, but does it?²

So, unless there was egre­gious, crim­i­nal, or trea­so­nous behav­ior by a mem­ber of one of our secu­rity forces, blam­ing human error doesn’t answer the ques­tion of what went wrong, and does little-​to-​nothing to pre­vent such prob­lems in the future. More­over, it val­i­dates what we wrote yes­ter­day (imme­di­ately below the excerpts shown above):

Unfor­tu­nately, that prob­lem is exac­er­bated once those rules and poli­cies are set. Later admin­is­tra­tors may be unwill­ing to “rock the boat” and ini­ti­ate worth­while changes because there is a chance of being blamed for sub­se­quent fail­ures but lit­tle chance of being rewarded for success. (Those acco­lades would most likely go to the “eagle-​eyed” agent who noticed some­thing was wrong.) By the way, as we often argue, it is dif­fi­cult to cat­e­go­rize such a choice – not to act – as irre­spon­si­ble behav­ior, espe­cially when it is induced by poorly-​designed poli­cies and a lack of man­age­r­ial dis­ci­pline. That’s why it is a bureau­cracy, after all.

So, rigid poli­cies self-​perpetuate and infor­ma­tion, hunches, and rumors are not passed along.

Sad, but true.

Update: What tim­ing! Moments after we pub­lished this, we saw this col­umn, Intel­li­gence Is a Ter­ri­ble Thing to Waste, by L. Gor­don Crovitz at The Wall Street Journal’s web site. It nicely com­ple­ments our post and val­i­dates a few of our spec­u­la­tions – although we must admit that his col­umn has a catch­ier title.

In this rather long post we spec­u­late about a pos­si­ble under­ly­ing cause of the “intel­li­gence fail­ure” involv­ing Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab, the Niger­ian accused of try­ing to blow-​up North­west Flight 253 on Christ­mas Day. Of inter­est is how he was cleared to fly despite his father noti­fy­ing U.S. author­i­ties of his – the son’s – extrem­ism and poten­tial for terrorism.

Note that we have absolutely no pri­vate infor­ma­tion regard­ing either the inci­dent or gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems; so, we spec­u­late based upon our knowl­edge of other large, bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions with rigid, poorly-​designed systems.

We real­ize that incen­tive prob­lems – which result in the unwill­ing­ness of agen­cies and indi­vid­u­als to share data and infor­ma­tion across juris­dic­tions – and our free­doms and rights con­strain the effec­tive­ness of inves­tiga­tive efforts, but for the most part, we’ll ignore those issues to focus on infor­ma­tion systems.

Com­mon MIS Issues & Problems

A few weeks ago we wrote Inex­pen­sive but Valu­able Web-​based MIS. Besides describ­ing those ben­e­fi­cial sys­tems, we men­tioned that many so-​called “man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems” are, in fact, merely data-​processing and record-​keeping sys­tems (for trans­ac­tions and events).

Such sys­tems rarely pro­vide infor­ma­tion – decision-​altering con­tent – for the types of strate­gic deci­sions made by senior man­agers, and unfor­tu­nately, they may not be well-​designed to pro­vide use­ful tac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion, either. That’s the case if the systems:

1. Pro­duce use­less stan­dard­ized out­put (reports);
2. Are dif­fi­cult to fully access or query; or
3. Don’t adapt quickly or well to changes in the envi­ron­ment, oper­a­tions or insti­tu­tional knowledge.

In Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s case, we sus­pect that it is the inher­ent rigid­ity of the data­base appli­ca­tion and/​or the rigid­ity of the design­ers’ thought processes that are to blame. (Note that for new infor­ma­tion sys­tems, use­less stan­dard­ized reports result when sys­tems design­ers don’t ask users the cor­rect ques­tions or do ask the right ques­tions, but don’t really under­stand the replies. See Details Are Not Infor­ma­tion for more on this topic. One of our MIS friends often remarks that her key func­tion is to serve as a trans­la­tor between sys­tem users and sys­tem devel­op­ers, and that role is crit­i­cal but too often ignored. For older sys­tems, irrel­e­vance and obso­les­cence usu­ally result when the sys­tem isn’t easy to change.)

What Went Wrong on Christmas?

When bad things hap­pen, i.e., when some­one like Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab squeezes through the detec­tion sieve, it is pos­si­ble that noth­ing failed. One must con­sider that the detec­tion sys­tem – the net, the fil­ter, the web – may not have designed to catch every­thing and that the designer or owner con­sid­ered a cer­tain level of error or mis­clas­si­fi­ca­tion to be accept­able. The designer may have con­cluded that a per­fect, error-​free sys­tem is too expen­sive to develop and main­tain.¹

How­ever, the fail­ure in the Abdul­mu­tal­lab case was so egre­gious that it seems far more likely that either the detec­tion sys­tem was either incom­pe­tently designed or administered.

Now, it is quite pos­si­ble that a gov­ern­ment sen­try or sen­tinel fell asleep or neglected his or her respon­si­bil­ity. In that case, it is both a human error – because a per­son failed – but also a sys­temic error because there was no redun­dancy or backup mit­i­gate such error. How­ever, rather than crit­i­cize gov­ern­ment employ­ees involved with the nation’s secu­rity, we’ll assume that they are earnest, capa­ble, and hard-​working as we believe that is true.

In that case, it must be that despite their best efforts, the detec­tion sys­tem failed, and one rea­son for the fail­ure could be the improper design of the government’s infor­ma­tion system.

One obvi­ous weak­ness in the ter­ror­ist detec­tion sys­tem – and it is by design – is the government’s unwill­ing­ness to use con­di­tional prob­a­bil­i­ties to assess the like­li­hood that some­one is a ter­ror­ist, espe­cially if the per­son is a for­eigner and is not pro­tected by our Con­sti­tu­tion and Bill of Rights. As we wrote in The Absur­dity of Has­sling Grandma but not Nidal Hasan, we do blame the gov­ern­ment (and Pres­i­dent Obama) for main­tain­ing poli­cies and pro­ce­dures that ignore infor­ma­tion, i.e., prior and pos­te­rior (con­di­tional) prob­a­bil­i­ties that some­one fits the well-​defined pro­file of a terrorist.

How­ever, other than crit­i­ciz­ing his unwill­ing­ness to “pro­file,” we don’t blame Pres­i­dent Obama for the fail­ure on Christ­mas, and we think that it is silly for oth­ers to blame him.

We do think that his pref­er­ences and mind­set for large, cen­tral­ized, mech­a­nisms – e.g., nation­al­ized health-​care, bail-​outs, etc – are sim­i­lar to the prob­lem we dis­cuss below, but in all like­li­hood, the sys­tem pre­dates his tenure.²

So, despite the sys­tem hand­i­capped by the unwill­ing­ness to pro­file, if the intel­li­gence fail­ure was not Pres­i­dent Obama’s fault (and not for­mer Pres­i­dent Bush’s fault) and it is not the fault of those man­ning the sys­tems, than who or what is to blame? We sug­gest that the reader con­sider a poorly-​designed, overly-​rigid database/​information system.

Too Rigid

By def­i­n­i­tion, in an overly-​rigid infor­ma­tion sys­tem, both the input and out­put func­tions may be less flex­i­ble and user-​friendly than required. Given the fed­eral government’s pen­chant for large, cen­tral­ized, stan­dard­ized solu­tions, it is easy for us to believe that such an infor­ma­tion sys­tem (or sys­tems) has (have) been employed in the war against ter­ror­ism and that such sys­tems increase the like­li­hood of “intel­li­gence fail­ures” and ter­ror­ists evad­ing detection.

Rigid Input: Round Holes, Square Pegs and Worse

Con­sider the idiom of “putting a square peg in a round hole.” For data­bases that means that cer­tain facts that should be recorded may not be eas­ily cat­e­go­rized into avail­able fields because proper, descrip­tive fields do not exist (and can­not be eas­ily added). For exam­ple, con­sider cen­sus or EEOC forms where there is no appro­pri­ate box to check: where it is required to select a sin­gle “nation­al­ity” or “race” when you are ¹⁄₁₆ of this and ¹⁄₈ of that, et. al.

If such metaphor­i­cal “square pegs” could con­sis­tently be jammed into “round holes,” there would not be an issue because users would likely have devel­oped heuris­tics (rules-​of-​thumb) to cre­ate well-​formed sub­sti­tu­tions and work-​arounds. In all like­li­hood, those rules or map­pings would not be for­mal­ized in any offi­cial man­ual or doc­u­men­ta­tion, but they would be well-​known and trans­mit­ted dur­ing both for­mal and infor­mal train­ing sessions.

Unfor­tu­nately, real-​life is often not so sim­ple, because the so-​called “square pegs” may not be of, say, uni­form size, color, and shape.

In fact, other than cer­tain fields like names and addresses, we sus­pect that many of the facts that should be recorded can’t be eas­ily or suc­cinctly described in a word or two – that they are more nuanced and qual­i­ta­tive and grad­u­ated and require length­ier, usu­ally sub­jec­tive descrip­tions. Actu­ally, they may not be very dif­fer­ent than blog posts, and we would hope that writ­ers and recorders of those posts would have the flex­i­bil­ity to cre­ate new fields and cat­e­gories on-​the-​fly – like we do every time we add a new tag or category.

Unfor­tu­nately, we sus­pect that leads to many “cod­ing” errors and incon­sis­ten­cies and extremely long descrip­tions of fields (to pre­vent such “errors”.) We also sus­pect that it leads to too much over­sight; many lay­ers of approval by supe­ri­ors (and there­fore much edit­ing and chang­ing); and overly-​restrictive input poli­cies, e.g., “he doesn’t have the per­mis­sion or author­ity to write that.”

More­over, we also sus­pect that these prob­lems are exac­er­bated when inves­ti­ga­tors and field agents aren’t involved in the infor­ma­tion sys­tem design process.

Rigid Out­put

Other prob­lems with rigid, poorly-​designed sys­tems include (1) not pro­vid­ing use­ful, stan­dard­ized out­put or (2) not hav­ing the capac­ity for users to eas­ily search and access stored data for ad hoc queries.

Note again that we have no knowl­edge of actual, rou­tine TSA, FBI, CIA, and Home­land Secu­rity reports, and if we did, we prob­a­bly couldn’t write anything.

1. Too Cen­tral­ized and Uniform

That being said, we could imag­ine that there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of secu­rity clear­ance, and that access to the data could be overly-​restricted based upon those clear­ances. In par­tic­u­lar, we could imag­ine that unver­i­fied and unsub­stan­ti­ated reports are among the least generally-​accessible data – until they are ver­i­fied, reviewed or accepted by the bureau­cracy, regard­less of whether that involves a sin­gle agency or an over-​seeing umbrella group.

BUT those unsub­stan­ti­ated reports are the ones that are most likely to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about new ter­ror­ists like Abdul­mu­tal­lab, (and that is the prob­lem with treat­ing for­eign­ers who are threats to our national secu­rity as crim­i­nals rather than enemy com­bat­ants.) If our hunch is cor­rect, then one should expect future “intel­li­gence fail­ures” to arise in sim­i­lar situations.

More­over, if our hunch is cor­rect, then a cen­tral­ized, data­base administrator’s (rather arbi­trary) rules – or worse, some lawyer’s rules – sub­sti­tute for the indi­vid­ual knowl­edge and dis­cre­tion of var­i­ous field agents and super­vi­sors.³ As such, fields agents may not have the oppor­tu­nity to syn­the­size the infor­ma­tion until it is too late. (It’s a case of the per­fect being the enemy of the good.)

Unfor­tu­nately, that prob­lem is exac­er­bated once those rules and poli­cies are set. Later admin­is­tra­tors may be unwill­ing to “rock the boat” and ini­ti­ate worth­while changes because there is a chance of being blamed for sub­se­quent fail­ures but lit­tle chance of being rewarded for success. (Those acco­lades would most likely go to the “eagle-​eyed” agent who noticed some­thing was wrong.) By the way, as we often argue, it is dif­fi­cult to cat­e­go­rize such a choice – not to act – as irre­spon­si­ble behav­ior, espe­cially when it is induced by poorly-​designed poli­cies and a lack of man­age­r­ial dis­ci­pline. That’s why it is a bureau­cracy, after all.

So, rigid poli­cies self-​perpetuate and infor­ma­tion, hunches, and rumors are not passed along.

2. Search­able? We Doubt It.

As we have repeat­edly men­tioned, much of this post is mere spec­u­la­tion. A few of our con­jec­tures are pro­jec­tions based upon our own expe­ri­ences. Given that, we could imag­ine that inves­ti­ga­tors, ana­lysts, and agents can­not query or search the entire data­base (if it exists in one place).

Most likely, they receive exported sub­sets of the data, and those sub­set do not arrive imme­di­ately upon request. (The deci­sion to grant the request is prob­a­bly made by a data­base man­ager or admin­is­tra­tor and may require detailed spec­i­fi­ca­tions and pos­si­bly mul­ti­ple approvals – a whole process. Again, that’s why it is a bureaucracy.)

Now, we’re not sure of the ben­e­fits of such a bureau­cracy and sus­pect that such processes con­tinue to exist because “that’s how we’ve always done it,” which could be trans­lated as “we don’t know any better.”

Regard­less, there are costs to such pro­ce­dures. Besides the pos­si­ble lack of time­li­ness, there is a reduced oppor­tu­nity of dis­cov­er­ing any­thing – pat­terns, what not – acci­den­tally or serendip­i­tously. When a sub­set or export is requested and jus­ti­fied it must be com­pletely spec­i­fied; so, the requester needs to know exactly what he or she plans to inves­ti­gate before com­plet­ing a request and there is lit­tle chance of expand­ing or redi­rect­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion with­out re-​submitting requests for addi­tional fields.

In addi­tion, if the entire data­base is not fully-​searchable, then inves­ti­ga­tors are less likely to find matches and pat­terns across fields. Recall our crit­i­cism above: with rigid input fields, and vary­ing “square pegs,” agents in dif­fer­ent loca­tions and depart­ments may input sim­i­lar facts in dif­fer­ent fields. If some of those fields are not avail­able and search­able, then inves­ti­ga­tors will get fewer hits and matches and that will reduce the chance of mak­ing con­nec­tions and discoveries.

Our Rec­om­men­da­tion

So. the dili­gent reader, who has made it to this point, may ask: if your hypothe­ses and spec­u­la­tions are cor­rect, then what’s your solu­tion? (Alter­na­tively, they may note that the sell­ers of ham­mers tend to see a lot of nails.)

We reply with a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion: why can’t such sys­tems or con­glom­er­a­tions of sys­tems be more like the web and blo­gos­phere? By that we mean why can’t they be unfet­tered, completely-​searchable, accept respon­si­ble com­ments and ques­tions, and even per­mit writ­ers with vary­ing degrees of cred­i­bil­ity to post entries. (If the gov­ern­ment already has such a sys­tem, then kudos to it.)

Why not decen­tral­ize the process and empower secu­rity inves­ti­ga­tors, ana­lysts, and agents to use their idio­syn­cratic beliefs, opin­ions, infor­ma­tion, expe­ri­ences, posi­tions, and knowl­edge to iden­tify prob­lems and to adapt the data­base as threats and knowl­edge change?⁴

We imag­ine a mini-​version of the inter­net (with the abil­ity to search the entire inter­net, too), where indi­vid­ual agen­cies pub­lish blogs and news reports for them­selves and other agen­cies. (Geez, they could even sign-​up for each oth­ers’ feeds.

Of course, such a sys­tem would need to be at least as secure as on-​line bank­ing, but more pri­vate, but all such sys­tems must be.

Note, also, that noth­ing pre­cludes the run­ning or har­vest­ing of rou­tine reports from such sites. That’s what search engines and their bots and a host of sites already do. They stan­dard­ize the out­put of many dis­parate sys­tems. In fact, our rec­om­men­da­tion does not require any new or advanced tech­nol­ogy – just the appli­ca­tion of exist­ing plat­forms that are freely and read­ily avail­able to any­one with a few bucks and an inter­net connection.

Granted, it’s on a much larger scale than our blog, but it need not be expen­sive.⁵ More­over, we sus­pect that access to exist­ing sys­tems could be incor­po­rated eas­ier via web apps than through cus­tom pro­gram­ming for­ays that attempt to merge or con­sol­i­date exist­ing data­bases. For exam­ple, every Google query searches mil­lions of MySQL and MSSQL data­bases all with slightly dif­fer­ent struc­tures and fields.

Maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re right. How­ever, even if our diag­no­sis is cor­rect, we doubt that the gov­ern­ment would act on our rec­om­men­da­tion. It would most likely try a cen­tral­ized “fix” of the iden­ti­fied prob­lems or would try a pilot-​program that (due to its lim­ited nature) would be des­tined to fail. In that case, hop­ing for con­tin­ued good luck might be the most rea­son­able and viable strategy.

In clos­ing, note that we are not dis­parag­ing the efforts of our fel­low cit­i­zens or the nation’s allies in their defense of our coun­try and way of life. Instead, if our spec­u­la­tions are cor­rect (or nearly so) we are rec­om­mend­ing a change in strat­egy and tac­tics so that their earnest effort yields more pro­duc­tive results.

As usual with long posts, we’ll likely make cor­rec­tions and edits that clar­ify our prose dur­ing the next few days.

Copy­right © 2010 Spero Consulting.

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Foot­notes:

Tonight, we saw an ABC news story and an arti­cle in The Wall Street Journal that reported that the FBI and the Army knew that Army Major Nidal Hasan, the accused shooter at Fort Hood, had many con­tacts with rad­i­cal Islamic cleric and recruiter, Anwar al-​Awlaki.

Noth­ing was done about it. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, “The com­mu­ni­ca­tions between the men appeared related to Maj. Hasan’s work at Wal­ter Reed Med­ical Cen­ter and his pur­suit of a master’s degree…”

So let’s try to under­stand this. It’s okay to be a U.S. Army offi­cer and con­tact a rad­i­cal cleric who tries to recruit for the jihad on his web site…if it’s for “edu­ca­tional” pur­poses. (We imag­ine that one “edu­ca­tional” pur­pose would be, say, “I want to learn more about the jihad and what I can do to help.”)

Geez, we recall when Pete Town­shend (and a few oth­ers) were caught with kiddie-​porn on their com­put­ers, and their defense was that they had it for “research” (read edu­ca­tional) pur­poses, only. Not very com­pelling there, either.

Think of the bil­lions of dol­lars and mil­lions (if not bil­lions of man-​hours) used to harass hon­est cit­i­zens at the nation’s air­ports. Folks for whom the prior prob­a­bil­ity that they are, in fact, ter­ror­ists is as close to zero as prac­ti­cally pos­si­ble. (We ask, how many zeros are to the right of that dec­i­mal point for you, dear reader?) Folks who have never con­tacted rad­i­cal cler­ics for “edu­ca­tional” rea­sons or any other rea­sons. In fact, folks who would pre­fer that the gov­ern­ment take actions to block or remove such sites – even if it means tak­ing down the power grid in Yemen. Folks like you and us and your grand­mother or your children’s grandmother.

As a cit­i­zen, Major Nidal has rights, but as an Army offi­cer, he doesn’t have the same free­doms as civil­ians, yet the FBI and Army are too emas­cu­lated and weak-​willed (and polit­i­cally cor­rect) to play the probabilities.

What’s the prob­a­bil­ity that some­one has ter­ror­is­tic or severe anti-​Western ten­den­cies GIVEN that they sought out and con­versed with a rad­i­cal Islamic cleric and jihad recruiter?

It seems to be quite a bit higher than the prob­a­bil­ity that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment can effec­tively man­age health care – by at least one order of magnitude.

While we’d like to close with the pre­vi­ous sen­tence – we think it’s kind of pithy – we must ask: how many other indi­vid­u­als like Major Nidal, have the agen­cies ignored, deemed harm­less, or not bother with? Won­der if any of them live near you, or us?

Last night, we caught a glimpse of one of the evening talk shows where some­one com­plained to the host that no Sen­a­tor or Con­gress­man has the time to read and under­stand pro­posed amend­ments and bills that are often longer than one thou­sand pages.

It’s a valid com­plaint, and reminded us to write a sec­ond time about our pro­posed solu­tion to bureau­cracy. We first wrote about it last Decem­ber 24, but it turns out that inter­est and read­er­ship isn’t very heavy on Christ­mas Eve. (Hey, we write when we can.)

The com­plaint about long bill length and short delib­er­a­tion time isn’t new, but it seems to have been made more fre­quently dur­ing the past few weeks and months when mas­sive changes (gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tions) have been pro­posed. In par­tic­u­lar, Repub­li­cans leg­is­la­tors (and cit­i­zens, too) have demanded addi­tional time to read the details and intri­ca­cies of bills that they are expected to vote on involv­ing top­ics like health care and the envi­ron­ment. Many of the Tea Party and Town Hall protests dur­ing this past sum­mer arose because of this rush-​to-​passage.

We are com­pletely sym­pa­thetic to their com­plaints. Our motto–thought before cal­cu­la­tion–and our Hip­po­cratic mantra–first, do no harm–point to our cau­tious nature, but it’s really our utter dis­dain for the very dam­ag­ing unin­tended con­se­quences of big gov­ern­ment that induce us to remind read­ers of our solu­tion to gov­ern­ment bureaucracy.

We first wrote about it here: Our Solu­tion to Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Bureau­cracy.

We real­ize that unless the fed­eral gov­ern­ment suf­fers a deeper cri­sis, there is lit­tle hope that our idea will be imple­mented. That’s because our solu­tion is dra­con­ian and would destroy the leg­isla­tive bureau­cracy that has arisen and grown dur­ing that past sev­eral decades. For exam­ple, the bud­get to oper­ate Con­gress is over $4.4 bil­lion per year, and more than 20,000 folks work are employed in var­i­ous leg­isla­tive offices. Sen­a­tors have bud­gets of sev­eral mil­lion dol­lars apiece.

That being said, we think our solu­tion would be far more effec­tive than term lim­its and requires no change in any­thing other than the fed­eral bud­get. It would have the imme­di­ate effect of elim­i­nat­ing the leg­isla­tive bureau­cracy and would seri­ously crip­ple the lob­by­ing indus­try that many cit­i­zens on both ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum dis­like. More impor­tantly, it would have the long-​term effect of reduc­ing exec­u­tive branch bureau­cracy because Con­gress­men and com­mit­tees could no longer del­e­gate over­sight to staff work­ers; so, they would have to be more thought­ful when writ­ing and pass­ing bills.

Limit leg­isla­tive staffs to three peo­ple. (If we were a gov­ern­ment or cor­po­rate bureau­crat, we would have writ­ten three “FTEs” for “full-​time equiv­a­lents.”) In a fit a gen­eros­ity, we’ll per­mit large com­mit­tees to have one sec­re­tary but no other employees.

We rec­om­mend two office work­ers in D.C. and one worker in a sin­gle home office, and we don’t dis­tin­guish between rep­re­sen­ta­tives and sen­a­tors. That seems about right to us.

The job would be much less glam­orous and regal, and at the mar­gin that might reduce the num­ber of dbs that run for office. More­over, leg­is­la­tors would actu­ally seem like the pub­lic ser­vants they are sup­posed to be.

More impor­tantly, leg­is­la­tors could no longer rely on staff mem­bers to pre­pare reports and write speeches and tell them what to say. They would have to “do their own home­work” so-​to-​speak, and at the mar­gin, that means that they would either: (1) have to be bet­ter stu­dents or (2) be more poignantly exposed as igno­ra­muses or (3) learn to speak less. In our mind, those are all pos­i­tive outcomes.

Over­all, we see no way that 1,000 page bills could be pro­posed with small leg­isla­tive staffs, and in our mind, that is a very good thing (and that would greatly reduce the size of the exec­u­tive branch.)

For those who think that exec­u­tive branch bureau­cracy would sub­sti­tute for the elim­i­nated leg­isla­tive branch bureau­cracy, we argue the oppo­site. Con­gress was will­ing to expand the exec­u­tive branch pro­vided it was able to expand its own over­sight capa­bil­i­ties and retain its power. If that over­sight were elim­i­nated, we think Con­gress would starve the exec­u­tive branch by sub­stan­tially reduc­ing the size of the gov­ern­ment. That would be partly due to the fact that con­stituents could no longer be assured that they could get “their fair share” of the bud­get and more of them might then pre­fer to send fewer tax dol­lars to Washington.

Finally, there would be far fewer leaks and far fewer staff mem­bers and press sec­re­taries with whom reporters could speak. That should reduce the num­ber of reporters, and that doesn’t sound like a bad thing to us.

We will con­tinue to think about the issue and will likely update this post dur­ing the next sev­eral days, but wouldn’t it be lovely if next year can­di­dates for the 435 house seats and 33-​or-​so sen­ate seats were forced to take a pledge about lim­it­ing staff size?

By the way, the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and the 27 Amend­ments com­bined con­sume less than 20 pages (at 12 point, Times Roman, left-​justified, with decent mar­gins in OpenOf­fice Writer).

Tend to the Extra­ne­ous Events!

Reg­u­lar read­ers may be sur­prised that we heartily encour­age Pres­i­dent Obama to travel to Copen­hagen to lobby for Chicago to host the Olympics. Go Mr. Obama! Go! (We won­der: is the Olympic com­mit­tee ‘racist’ if one of the other cities wins?)

Lest those read­ers think we’ve changed, we’ll explain our rea­son­ing. We are com­pletely and utterly indif­fer­ent about Chicago host­ing the Olympics. How­ever, we strongly pre­fer that Mr. Carter, err, we mean Obama, work on such rather harm­less tasks – for those out­side of the Windy City – than his day job, which seems to involve attempt­ing to social­ize med­i­cine, pla­cat­ing dan­ger­ous tyrants, and increas­ing our taxes.

So, if there were any­thing worth­while about going to the U.N. and host­ing the G20 sum­mit, then that was it. Those events, like the Olympic lob­by­ing divert his atten­tion, from (unin­ten­tion­ally) weak­en­ing our nation and reduc­ing our freedom.

In March, in Abject Silli­ness, we wrote about a sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­non regard­ing uni­ver­sity pres­i­dents and their over-​emphasis on sports:

Now before con­tin­u­ing, it’s worth not­ing that we’re rarely con­fused with apol­o­gists for the NCAA or fanat­i­cal col­lege pres­i­dents or alumni. Our PhD is from a small, rig­or­ous uni­ver­sity, and our first aca­d­e­mic posi­tion was at a sim­i­lar school. Sub­se­quently, we spent a few years at a large, state insti­tu­tion that over-​emphasized sports. (No, it wasn’t prison, but there was no short­age of back-​stabbers, shanks or bee-​atches.)

While at the state school, we saw what we had missed in our prior Divi­sion III envi­rons: the over-​emphasis on sports. (Now, our Alma mater seems to be overly-​fixated on its incred­i­bly shrink­ing endow­ment. Per­haps if they had focused more on sports, they would have done less dam­age to them­selves.) While we write that par­en­thet­i­cally and as a joke, we’re quite seri­ous about the converse.

At the state school, we real­ized that if in the administration’s judge­ment, the most impor­tant areas to focus their atten­tions were sports and sport facil­i­ties, which really are inessen­tial to the true pur­pose of higher edu­ca­tion, then work­ing on those tasks were, in fact, the very best places to focus their atten­tion. In other words, given their poor judg­ments would you really want them to focus on edu­cat­ing the youth? Or in still other words, thank God for decen­tral­ized insti­tu­tions that basi­cally run themselves.

We only hope that our nation is able to remain a decen­tral­ized insti­tu­tion that basi­cally runs itself. Ergo, we say, bon voy­age Mr. President.

And, the Best Sen­tence that We’ve Read in a Few Weeks

The G20 cir­cus is com­ing to Pitts­burgh this week, and unlike when the other cir­cus vis­its, there’s no enter­tain­ment and no parade of elephants. The excre­ment left behind will be the male, bovine vari­ety and not from pachy­derms, but we doubt that the vol­ume will be any smaller or less noxious.

Last week a friend asked if we were goin’ dawntawn dur­ing the “sum­mit” to protest n’at. (Yinz know that’s how the locals talk dawn n’ere, but he doesn’t in real life. ) Any­way, our response was that we didn’t know who to protest against. We’re equally dis­dain­ful of the politi­cians, the press, and the protesters.

Like Buridan’s Ass, we’re too indif­fer­ent to decide; so, we’ll sit nearly inchoate nearly twenty miles away and note that there is a cer­tain jus­tice to it. All three groups do deserve to spend a few days with each other in the nearly aban­doned city. (The G20 is only exac­er­bat­ing the empti­ness for a few days.)

We’ve writ­ten about the Pitts­burgh Dias­pora a few times; so, it’s worth men­tion­ing a sim­i­lar (and good) arti­cle in this past weekend’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal: Dream­ing of Pitts­burgh. Like yours truly, it was writ­ten by native, Stew­art O’Nan, who had left and then returned. (He’s actu­ally writ­ten a lot more than us.)

Our only quib­ble: we think the lack of opti­mism far pre­dated the com­plete anni­hi­la­tion of heavy indus­try and the moving-​away of over 600,000 peo­ple (since the early 70’s). We also think that pes­simism is why – ignor­ing labor issues – many democ­rats in the region tend to be nearly as con­ser­v­a­tive as con­ser­v­a­tives. And, it’s prob­a­bly also why many of us also cling to God and our guns.

Any­way, at the tail end of the arti­cle, we find the “Best Sen­tence that We’ve Read in Awhile.”* That sen­tence was: “Already the city has plas­tered signs tout­ing our new pros­per­ity over the empty store­fronts where our favorite places used to be.” We couldn’t have said it bet­ter our self, and we tried. Good job, Mr. O’Nan.

*The phrase is in quotes because it: (1) is a semi-​regular fea­ture; (2) turns out that “awhile” is only a few weeks this time; and (3) has pro­vided us with a num­ber of hits from Hun­gary. (The best we can tell, in Hun­gar­ian “mon­dat­fordító” means “best sen­tence,” or some such thing, and for some rea­son a more than a few Hun­gar­i­ans search for it. Hey, if you speak Hun­gar­ian, please let us know what it actu­ally means.)

The “Czars” Are Proof It’s Broken

We have to admit that we never heard of Van Jones before last week. Now that we’ve heard about him, it’s great to know that we’ll no longer be pay­ing the salary of some­one who believes that ⁹⁄₁₁ was an “inside job,” but that’s not really why we’re writing.

As we under­stand it, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has 33 “czars” who have not been sub­jected to any con­fir­ma­tion process. While it’s pos­si­ble that many of the folks were offered “czar” posi­tions rather than cab­i­net posi­tions because they would not be able to with­stand the scrutiny of con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings, let’s assume that Mr. Jones was a sin­gu­lar anom­aly. In other words, let’s assume that the other 32-​or-​so “czars” would have breezed through the con­fir­ma­tion process. (Yeah, we know it’s a stretch, but let’s run with the supposition.)

In our mind, that indi­cates and even big­ger prob­lem: the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is unman­age­able and does not work.

Why do we reach that conclusion?

From a quick search of the web, it seems that there are over 500 appoint­ments that require con­fir­ma­tion, includ­ing the fif­teen depart­ment secretaries.

So, why is it that the gov­ern­ment needs 33 uncon­firmed “czars” on top of those sec­re­taries and mil­lions of fed­eral employ­ees? Shouldn’t the fif­teen sec­re­taries and their min­ions of assis­tant sec­re­taries and under sec­re­taries and assis­tant, under sec­re­taries be suf­fi­cient or does the sys­tem just not work?

So we ask: would a well-​functioning sys­tem need 33 “czars” work­ing out­side the nor­mal chain-​of-​command? What would you, dear reader, think if your firm – in an ad hoc man­ner – hired a few dozen very senior advis­ers to get things work­ing, again? Wouldn’t you hope that your chief exec­u­tive would attempt to reor­ga­nize and stream-​line and elim­i­nate the inef­fec­tive and inef­fi­cient depart­ments and man­agers? Wouldn’t you hope that the CEO would replace – rather than just sup­ple­ment – the dys­func­tional units and depart­ments? Why does that seem too much to ask of our pub­lic ser­vants?

What do we get instead? Big­ger gov­ern­ment and more chiefs?

But they’ll be able to effi­ciently and effec­tively man­age health care? Yeah, right.

We had daw­dled about renew­ing our sub­scrip­tion to the paper edi­tion of National Review mag­a­zine. The sub­scrip­tion expired in the late Spring, and we just didn’t get around to that oner­ous, sixty-​second task of renew­ing on-​line. No protest, just our usual sloth. You know, sum­mer­time, and the livin’ is easy and all that.

For­tu­nately, the mag­a­zine gra­ciously con­tin­ued to send issues dur­ing our lapse. (Though it is doubt­ful, per­haps it ben­e­fits from the pres­tige of hav­ing us as a subscriber.)

Any­way, the Sep­tem­ber 7^th issue arrived today, and we renewed even before open­ing the cover. You see, at the very top, above the red “National Review,” we read: “Rob Long: Arlen Specter’s Highly Enjoy­able Torment.”

That was enough to imme­di­ately send our nearly $60 for the year.

In fact, the arti­cle, Town Hall Sum­mer, nearly jus­ti­fies the annual sub­scrip­tion fee all by itself. (It’s sub­ti­tled, “It’s about health care, sure; it’s also about watch­ing Arlen Specter look like he’s about to cry.”)

Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not avail­able on-​line, but in it Mr. Long likens the Town Hall meet­ings to very mild, very short-​term ver­sions of com­mu­nist régime house-​cleaning, e.g., the Cul­tural Revolution’s treat­ment of var­i­ous intel­lec­tu­als and artists. Pos­si­bly the best sen­tence: “Who among us, deep down, doesn’t think that, say, Sen. Arlen Specter (D. Pa.) would ben­e­fit from a lit­tle forced radish farming?”

By the way, if you are con­ser­v­a­tive and spend your day in an office per­form­ing quite tedious and bor­ing forced labor, besides our site, there’s few bet­ter places to while away the hours than at the magazines’s main blog, The Cor­ner. It kept us sane when we toiled for others.

The Nuclear Option

As usual, James Taranto’s daily col­umn ‘Best of the Web’ is both infor­ma­tive and entertaining.

In today’s col­umn, Ardent Par­ti­san­ship, we are par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the sec­tion, Split­ting the Bath Water. In it, Mr. Taranto notes that (1) it seems unlikely that all sixty (60) Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­tors would vote to end a Repub­li­can attempt to fil­i­buster the health-​care bill, and (2) Democ­rats may attempt to change Sen­ate tra­di­tion to get a sim­ple major­ity (rather than a 60-​vote super-​majority) to close debate and vote on the bill (or oth­er­wise re-​jigger the bill and the process to get what they want).

Mr. Taranto states, “If they suc­ceed, they will have imposed an unpop­u­lar, hugely expen­sive, pos­si­bly deadly new law – and they will bear total respon­si­bil­ity for it. It’s a bril­liant plan for restor­ing the GOP’s squan­dered polit­i­cal fortunes.”

Strength in Num­bers & the Converse

We agree with Mr. Taranto but want to also con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that Mr. Obama and his fel­low Democ­rats won’t suc­ceed. In other words, we won­der whether the Democ­rats have fifty (50) reli­able votes if they choose to do some­thing as con­tro­ver­sial as avoid a clo­ture vote.

They cer­tainly have a sub­stan­tial num­ber of lib­er­als (from lib­eral states) who will vote for the bill, regard­less of the process that is fol­lowed, but what of more mod­er­ate Democ­rats and Democ­rats from con­ser­v­a­tive or neu­tral states? (Yeah, we know that states aren’t mono­lithic, but we’re try­ing to be brief.)

Let D be the num­ber of Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors who will vote for the bill regard­less of the impli­ca­tions. Let’s assume that D is less than 50.

Pre­sum­ably, not all of the 60 Democ­rats sup­port clos­ing dis­cus­sion, which means that it is unlikely that all 60 sup­port the bill. It is pos­si­ble – but unlikely – that only one Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tor will vote against the bill. How­ever, if that were the case, one would expect that he or she could be bought off by his or her col­leagues, i.e., you would hear some­thing like: “My fel­lows cit­i­zens, I know that you are angry about my vote, but I did get X bil­lions in new appro­pri­a­tions for the state.”

Using that logic, it seems that one could extend the argu­ment to another two or three or four senators.

So, let’s say that 55-​or-​so Democ­rats would vote for clo­ture, but (55 — D) sen­a­tors aren’t reli­able votes for the actual bill. The Democ­rats would need (50 — D) of those unre­li­able Democ­rats to vote for the bill. (Percentage-​wise, they need (50 — D)/(55 — D) on the unre­li­able ones.)

Now, if all 60 would vote for the bill, it would seem to pro­vide cover for the mar­ginal sen­a­tors. How­ever, when other Democ­rats vote “No,” then it seems that con­stituents who oppose the bill can point to the inde­pen­dence of those other sen­a­tors as an appeal for their own sen­a­tor or sen­a­tors to vote “No.”

We think that sit­u­a­tion would bring addi­tional atten­tion and put addi­tional pres­sure on the uncom­mit­ted sen­a­tors. In fact, one would expect the atten­tion to increase dis­pro­por­tion­ately if the num­ber isn’t 55 but is some­thing smaller and closer to fifty.

So, it’s counter-​intuitive, but we won­der – given Mr. Taranto’s assess­ment – whether enough Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors will reach the same con­clu­sion that he did and choose not to face those con­se­quences. (Not every sen­a­tor is as prin­ci­pled as our own sen­a­tor, Arlen Specter. Hah!)

Finally, we liked our own con­nec­tion of nation­al­ized health-​care with PA’s state stores, but we like Mr. Taranto’s pithy “postal­iz­ing the med­ical sys­tem” more.

The quote below – cour­tesy of a tran­script pro­vided by The Wall Street Jour­nal–was stated by Pres­i­dent Obama at his health-​care reform rally in Grand Junc­tion, CO.

What you can’t do — or you can, but you shouldn’t do — is start say­ing things like, we want to set up death pan­els to pull the plug on grandma. I mean, come on. (Applause.) I mean, I just — first of all, when you make a com­ment like that — I just lost my grand­mother last year. I know what it’s like to watch some­body you love, who’s aging, dete­ri­o­rate, and have to strug­gle with that. So the notion that some­how I ran for pub­lic office, or mem­bers of Con­gress are in this so that they can go around pulling the plug on grandma? I mean, when you start mak­ing argu­ments like that, that’s sim­ply dis­hon­est, espe­cially when I hear the argu­ments com­ing from mem­bers of Con­gress in the other party who, turns out, spon­sored sim­i­lar provisions.

So, let’s take the Pres­i­dent at his word – that he didn’t run for office to specif­i­cally imple­ment national poli­cies in favor of euthanansia.

Unfor­tu­nately, by them­selves, good inten­tions alone are insuf­fi­cient and can lead to more harm than good. (We do love that quote about the road to hell by St. Fran­cis de Sales.) Is there a bet­ter place than the mas­sive, inef­fi­cient, and intru­sive fed­eral gov­ern­ment to find sup­port­ing evidence?

What Pres­i­dent Obama needs to real­ize – and what we wish he and his leg­isla­tive allies would con­sider – is that his pro­pos­als could very well lead to such “care-​giving” poli­cies and other such “unin­tended con­se­quences.” (Yes, scare quotes are aptly named.)

That is, we wish he would live by a motto of some­thing like “thought before action.”

At a min­i­mum, we wish that Mr. Obama would push for a small-​scale exper­i­ment of his plans, in, say, a will­ing state or region, before propos­ing it for the nation as a whole. Oh that’s right, it’s been tried in a few states like Mass­a­chu­setts and doesn’t seem to be work­ing out very well.

By the way, any plan that requires simul­ta­ne­ous adop­tion through­out the nation is a bit trou­bling to us. The claimed neces­sity for such a tac­tic reminds us of those amor­phous and gos­samery and poorly-​understood, explained, and real­ized syn­er­gies that have been so often used to ratio­nal­ize large cor­po­rate acquisitions.