Does Solitaire threaten our country?

Hmm, this photo seems to be making the rounds on blogs and e-mail threads:

Here's the accompanying text:

House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, pictured standing, far right, speaks while colleagues Rep. Barbara Lambert, D-Milford and Rep. Jack F. Hennessy, D-Bridgeport, play solitaire Monday night as the House convened to vote on a new budget. (AP)

The guy sitting in the row in front of these two....he's on Facebook, and the guy behind Hennessy is checking out the baseball scores. 

These are the folks that couldn't get the budget out by Oct. 1 (last year) , and are about to control your health care, cap and trade, and the list goes on and on…. 

Should we buy them larger screen computers - or - a ticket home, permanently? 

This is one of their 3-DAY WORK WEEKS that we all pay for (salary is about $179,000 per year).

Okay, it is a funny picture, and it very well could be real. A few points, though. First, this is the Connecticut statehouse, not the U.S. Congress. And legislators there are only paid $28,000 per year. I'm not saying that justifies goofing off, but whoever wrote this text clearly thinks this is the U.S. Congress.

Also, if you've ever served on a committee or attended a seminar of any sort, you know how boring business can be at times. Solitaire and Facebook strike me as pretty minor offenses, and they don't necessarily impact productivity, particularly when the only other thing members might be doing at that time is listening to some other member go on and on about a youth baseball team in his district. Still, it's bad form to be photographed doing this.

Bigger or smaller chambers?

Dan Smith points me to this recent item in Stateline:

Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral Legislature, and lawmakers there are debating what size it should be. Competing bills call for increasing or decreasing the number of seats. Senator Bob Krist would like to decrease the number from 49 to 45 in order to save money. But Kate Sullivan would like to see Western Nebraska acquire an additional seat, making the Legislature an even 50. Minnesota, too, is debating its size. Bills in both chambers would eliminate 11 Senate and 22 House seats; currently the House has 134 seats and the Senate 67.

As it happens, I was recently speaking with someone in Nebraska who used to be very involved in the state government and is highly critical of the small size of the legislature there. He argued that having only 49 legislators makes it very easy for lobbyists to control the place. It's easy for them to know every legislator quite well and to build majority coalitions.

Personally, I would have thought the opposite would be true. A small legislature means that reporters and voters can relatively easily follow events in the chamber, which makes things somewhat harder for lobbyists, who thrive on voter ignorance.* A very large legislature, spread across multiple chambers, however, provides lots of different players with different preferences and lots of barely visible veto points.

It may be that a small legislature is good for lobbyists who are trying to push legislation through, while a largely legislature is good for lobbyists who are trying to stop legislation.

At any rate, it sounds like the proposals currently under consideration in Nebraska wouldn't affect legislative performance all that much, although one could certainly see how they matter for representation of groups and areas that currently feel marginalized.


*I can see how this phrase might sound pejorative toward lobbyists. I certainly don't mean it that way. Nonetheless, there's a good deal of evidence suggesting that lobbyists are more powerful when voters have a harder time paying attention to politics. Legislators are understandably less likely to vote the way a powerful lobby wants them to if they believe there will be electoral consequences for it, and that can only happen when voters have information about their roll call records.

More on government not being a business

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), speaking about high-speed rail:

If you can't prove it's viable from a business plan, it's not a (project) the government should be funding.

I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of true. If something is viable as a business, it does not need government funding. Such funds should be reserved for things like education, health care for the poor and elderly, police, a military, etc., that are inherently unprofitable.

(via Calitics)

Wisconsin's parties

I'm kind of kicking myself that I haven't been devoting my sabbatical time to researching partisanship in the Wisconsin statehouse. As it happens, this is on my research agenda, just not for this year. I've been interested in the state for some time since -- like California, Colorado, Nebraska, and others -- Wisconsin is a state where Progressive anti-party traditions run strong yet the parties have developed ways of adapting to rules designed to weaken them. Wisconsin was home to the first open primaries and campaign finance restrictions, yet it has one of the most polarized legislatures in the country.

I don't have a full grasp on the sources of legislative partisanship in Wisconsin yet. I conducted some interviews with legislators and lobbyists there a few years ago, but I really have a lot to follow up on. The stories I was hearing from respondents suggested that the source of partisanship could primarily found within the chamber. There is a great deal of party discipline actually enforced by party leaders within the legislature. Now, that perspective could be an artifact of the location of my interviews -- Madison. But it's being backed up today. Bringing an entire party legislative caucus out of the state and keeping them there away from their families requires party discipline. Voting for a dramatic change in labor policy when public opinion screams not to requires party discipline.

In the next year or so, I hope to investigate this further. If, say, a Democratic Wisconsin senator were having second thoughts about continuing to hide in Illinois, what's keeping him there? Is it the fear of disappointing his colleagues? The fear of a recall by disappointed Democrats in his district? The fear of labor unions who would never back his campaign again? (Similarly, what fate will befall Sen. Dale Schultz, the one Republican who opposed the effort to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights?) I'm sure all of these things play a role, but I'm just kind of curious why party discipline is so much greater there than in almost any other state.

What It Takes

At the repeated urging of Jonathan Bernstein, I finally read Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes. And you know what? It's excellent. It's a very detailed behind-the-scenes look at most of the major candidates in the 1988 presidential election, including Dole, Bush, Gephardt, Biden, Hart, and Dukakis. The stories are wonderful. The candidates' backgrounds are fascinating -- I was surprised how many of them dealt with a serious illness or death of a loved one (Bush's daughter, Biden's wife, Dukakis' brother, Gephardt's son), not to mention Dole's own personal travails.

The book is very much not political science, but it contains a ton of evidence that political scientists would find useful. I got the impression that there's enough material there to write another The Party Decides, although the book just isn't organized that way. Take, for example, this discussion of Gephardt's campaign:

When you got down to it, [Gephardt] meant to run Jimmy Carter's campaign -- twelve years later, different issues, new wrinkles, but still, he meant to hike the trail that Carter blazed. He would come out of nowhere, win Iowa... get the bump... and then the hot light would hit. Dick had to be ready. He had to know how to run in the South, how to make his campaign truly national; had to know what the press would do, how to get the money while his name was hot, how to tie down the pols who meant to ride with a winner... how to build momentum until his nomination, like Carter's, could not be stopped.

So he sought Carter's advice, and he followed it. He started early. He made sure his contact with Iowans was not only broad, but deep -- and deeply personal. Thought his money was tight, he staffed not only Iowa and New Hampshire, but offices in several southern states. He picked his campaign team, and he backed it -- even in the worst times, he never second-guessed. He worked small towns, and corn boils, church picnics, county fairs... he did everything, in short, that Jimmy Carter did... did it just as hard, and much longer... and with two months before the Iowa caucus, he could see... it hadn't worked worth a damn.

Others, including the authors of The Party Decides, have pointed out how the 1970s were an atypical era in presidential politics where a bandwagoning candidate could actually put together a campaign on his own and win the nomination, and how that approach stopped working by the 1980s. And here's Cramer hitting the same point back in 1988. Pretty cool.

Now, Cramer grants a much more powerful role to the media than most political scientists do today. And the media really do not come off very well. Respected journalists like E.J. Dionne are depicted buying into pack journalistic mentalities and grilling Gary Hart about his affairs because "everybody knows" he has a problem. What's more, the candidates seem to react to this press coverage. Hart and Biden are seen as pulling out of the race because the media would not leave them alone about Donna Rice and plagiarism, respectively. You can almost see Bill Clinton reading this book in 1990 and saying, "So all I have to do is ignore them and I can still win the race? Piece of cake."

The political media clearly have their own agenda separate from that of the parties, and they can seem quite feckless at times. But these stories aren't always wrong. Bill Clinton really did have a character problem, one that ended up dominating much of his second term in office. But Cramer presents evidence of pretty good people being driven from public life by nasty, personal media coverage based on little factual content, and it's hard to defend that.

Anyway, the book is definitely worth the read.

Rural values

Ezra Klein is in top form in a recent series of posts about urban and rural America. This post on the innovative contributions of cities apparently prompted a rejoinder from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who had this fascinating discussion with Ezra. Vilsack seems to feel that rural America is constantly put down by urbanites, who don't appreciate rural Americans for their work ethic, their decent values, and their contributions to the military. He seems to feel that these values justify subsidies for rural Americans. Ezra later followed up with this excellent post, summing up:

I have no problem paying taxes to expand broadband access from sea to shining sea, but I do have a problem when the rationale for that subsidy shifts from helping people live good and productive lives or viewing broadband as a public good to supporting rural Americans because rural Americans deserve a subsidy by dint of their decency and work ethic. That doesn’t scan as affirmative to rural America to me, though I know Vilsack means it as such. It scans as divisive for those of us who don’t live in rural America.

Readers will hardly be surprised to learn that I've spent very little of my life in rural environments. I make no apologies for that. Indeed, I'm willing to put my neighborhood's values up against those of any rural neighborhood. But that's a silly contest to have, and it's a terrible way to determine where public resources should be spent.

(h/t Hans Noel)

Update: I wonder how much of Vilsack's perspective has to do with the fact that he's a rural Democrat. So when he gets together with other national Democrats, who are predominantly from urban areas, he mostly hears people dissing Republicans in a way that might sound pretty snobbish and anti-rural. Whereas if he frequented Republican conventions, he'd be hearing suburbanites extolling the virtues of farmers while dissing the urban elites.

Approaching singularity

Doctor Glitter links to this nice graphic from Time, showing the growth of computing power over the past century:

The variable on the vertical axis -- calculations per second per $1,000 -- is a clever one (assuming they've adjusted for inflation). It's not totally obvious to me that the data points create a curve. It could easily be a line, but the editors clearly wanted to project a curve. Regardless, it appears that computing power is increasing exponentially, and we will soon approach The Singularity, whatever the hell that is.

I'm often surprised just how bad our forecasts for technology are. I recently watched "Back to the Future II," where Marty visits the distant future of October 2015. It's pretty funny, really. It was a world of flying cars and hoverboards, but no cell phones or Internet, as far as we could see. At one point, Marty Jr. actually walks past a payphone! So I don't know whether the next fifty years will give rise to a Singularity or Skynet or what, but as long as I can someday run probit on my smartphone, I'll be happy.

Good thoughts on forecasting the future from Patton Oswalt:

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