Outsourcing the deliberative process
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE POSITION we take in the above editorial is an uncomfortable one. I say that not because using a “BRAC” approach to consolidate school districts is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great one. But it shouldn’t be.
Our system of representative democracy is all about the deliberative process: We, the people, elect representatives to go to Congress or the Legislature and study complex issues in detail, debate them, make tough decisions for the sake of the whole nation or state, and then come back and face the voters.
This proposal sidesteps that process: It empowers a separate body — not directly elected — to address a long-neglected statewide problem. The members of that body do all the studying and work out all the details — that is, the actual discernment. Then they hand the whole package to the elected body for a simple “yes” or “no.”
The tragedy is that this is apparently the only way that our small state can do away with the shameful waste of having 85 school districts — some of them incredibly tiny, each with its own separate administration.
Why? Because elected representatives won’t touch it. Why? Because they’re elected.
Anyone with common sense looking objectively at this can see that it would be insane not to consolidate districts. But any representative who advocates shuttering a local district faces the danger
of not getting re-elected.
So we find ourselves in a situation in which the most effective approach is to outsource the deliberative process. And school consolidation isn’t the only tough state issue that our delegates may choose to sub-contract.
S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell is proposing the same approach on tax reform. He would have a special panel draw up a list of sales tax exemptions to eliminate. Why? Because elected representatives don’t have the guts to face the narrow constituencies (from auto dealers to newspapers) whose tax breaks such a plan might eliminate.
The truth nowadays is that on some issues, our republic’s deliberative process freezes up and dies like a car engine without a drop of oil in it.
That’s how “BRAC” — for Base Realignment and Closure — entered the language to start with. It was impossible for Congress to achieve savings and efficiencies by closing and consolidating domestic military bases. Why? Because every member of Congress had to have one. Or two, or more.
Instead of an objective comparison of the relative merits of this or that military facility, followed by tough but smart decisions, the only sort of “debate” that occurred before BRAC went like this: “You keep my base open, and I’ll scratch your back, too.”
Our system is dysfunctional — at least on issues that involve sacred cows — not because representatives are out of touch, but because they are never out of touch with home long enough to collaborate seriously with their colleagues for the greater good.
Most advocates of term limits say lawmakers get “corrupted” by Washington or Columbia to the point that they forget the wishes of the folks back home. Hardly.
Syndicated columnist George Will has advocated term limits for the opposite reason. He says the only way lawmakers will stop listening to the folks back home long enough to think is if they cannot run for re-election.
I oppose term limits for various reasons, including the fact that I’d rather have laws made by people with some experience at it. But we’ve got to find some way to make critical decisions that politicians with their eyes on the next election refuse to face.
One good thing about a BRAC is that it can be seen as representative democracy the way it was intended to work: A group is delegated to study the issues with few distractions and deliberate until a rational plan emerges.
This may be the only way our elected representatives ever vote on a proposal that takes the whole state’s interest into account. A plan that makes the tough calls would probably never make it to the floor otherwise.
I like to think our system is timeless. But that reckons without technology: In the days before the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, cell phones and mass e-mails, representatives had a chance to concentrate constructively on issues and make decisions accordingly. The cacophony of modern communications makes that nearly impossible.
Some look at this situation and come up with a whole other way: skirting the republican system entirely. Gov. Mark Sanford would ask voters to curtail the Legislature’s power to appropriate, by setting an arbitrary constitutional limit on spending growth.
His reasoning sounds a bit like ours: The system isn’t working. When I asked how he could advocate undermining “small-R” republican ideals, he said: “You need to be more aware of the political environment that you’re operating in — be less, you know, idealistic, less, uh, you know, high and lofty, and just get down into the gears of how our government system actually works.”
Talk about being disillusioned. Of course, I can identify. But there’s a difference. While the BRAC idea reflects a lack of faith in the Legislature’s deliberative fortitude, it does not abandon faith in deliberation
itself. In fact, it gives the General Assembly a little help in that area.
The contrast between such a careful, studious process of objective decision-making and what the governor is proposing — a quick Election Day show of hands, yes or no, on an unfathomably complex fiscal question — could hardly be greater.
I’m still not thrilled about having to institute a “work-around” to set policy, but comparing a “BRAC” to setting future budgets in a single plebiscite makes me feel a lot better about it.
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I think the BRAC approach has its origins in the fast-track trade promotion authority. When the Congress grants fast-track TPA, the president can proceed to negotiate trade agreements knowing that Congress gets only an up or down vote, no nitpicking. That fact assists negotiations:
Congress granted Bush fast-track TPA in 2002, but it’s all based on the 1974 Trade Act. The House and Senate have 45-days after Bush signs a trade pact to deep six it.
As you noted, BRAC started with the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-510). It has the added advantage of insulating the executive branch too, so the approach could be used in other politically sensitive areas.
As a rule, taking decisions out of the hands of the representatives we elect to make them is a bad idea. Both “Fast Track” trade agreement authority and BRAC may give better results because they are tightly focused issues, but also with high potential impact on the voters. I noticed in this morning’s paper that the question of whether to do a study regarding the proposed stadium in NE Richland is being poo-pooed by some elected officials because “it’s our responsibility to study these issues” (or words to that effect). That rationale comes up with spending questions; when’s it’s a matter of taxation, watch the elected officials run in the other direction. I don’t have an answer for this asymmetrical system of accountability.
Signs of Hope
Even though I often disagree with Robert Samuelson, Thomas Friedman, and Brad Warthen, there are signs of hope. All three columnists have recently penned opinion pieces that acknowledge that our system isn’t working, and all three have well articulated their observations as to why our system isn’t working-without the usual rancor that has come to dominate the “debate” of corporate media.
Brad for example points out that having eighty-five separate school districts is unacceptable, and that it should be obvious that consolidation is in order. Brad also cogently states that politicians won’t do anything to work for the common good because they are beholden to narrow constituencies. So far, so good.
Robert Samuelson states that the American people want healthcare for all people, and the right to chose their own doctors while keeping costs under control. Mr. Samuelson is right that “managed care” was a failure and that we need political change concerning healthcare.
Thomas Friedman is absolutely correct by his assertion that if we do not soon switch to renewable fuels, then our way of life will be threatened.
Thank goodness that these folks at least understand that there is a problem. Brad has the best ideas of all three writers, and I am willing to consider his proposal.
Perhaps the most important statement of any columnist in the past few weeks is by Trudy Rubin concerning the recent “annual gathering of world leaders, CEOs, thinkers, artists and media” at the World Economic Forum. Ms. Rubin reports: “In the compact conference center, where you rub elbows with a few presidents, prime ministers, finance ministers and oil magnates in an hour’s time, the focus of Davos 2006 was on China and India. There was a dizzying sense that the future belonged to Asia, while Europe was bogged down by an aging population and an unaffordable social safety net, …”.
Therein lies the rub my friends-the extremely wealthy people who really run things are writing-off Europe and the majority of the American people. By now, surely everyone has noticed that a global, corporate cabal, whose only interest is consolidating their own wealth, is running the planet. Their methods are leading to a global catastrophe, and we all are going to pay the price. The professional middle class (along with just about everyone else) over the past thirty-five years has been hoodwinked into the new global economic fascism by a bunch of unctuous, money loving charlatans. Corporate control of government is a global problem, so corporatism can never be addressed and eliminated until the unfair monetary advantage in supposed democratic elections is countered, and until the pathetic collection of corporate sycophants who pose as government leaders are removed from power via legitimate democratic elections on a worldwide basis.
Only now, since it has become patently clear to the “guards” of the system that is doesn’t work and that it has become a threat to their own well-being, have they seriously questioned the system’s validity. Of course, most of their prescriptions for change are wrong, but that’s all they can do for now. I have faith in these smart people-they’ll figure it out. They’re going to have to eat a lot of crow however since they have been preaching all the wrong things for the past three decades. Better late than never, I say.
There still is a problem however. Instead of trying to make the system more democratic, Samuelson and Friedman want to further coerce people into changing their behavior rather than try to reform the system to make democracy work. These writers have a deep antipathy toward the inherent goodness of people through democratic action-pathos permeates their writings. The free market fundamentalist, pro competition mentality of these gentlemen has twisted their thinking to the point where they no longer have faith in mankind, let alone government.
Samuelson argues that the problem is us-that we want and demand too much concerning healthcare, and that ordinary citizens need to pick up more of the costs. His arguments are really hollow though, because he stills sees everything through the lens of free market capitalism: a supply and demand problem in what he still believes is a near perfect economic system (i.e., without government interference). Samuelson doesn’t realize that the invisible hand aspect of capitalism that he has been advocating for decades is itself the problem.
Extreme inefficiency is built into capitalism, as are egregious levels of wealth inequality. Capitalism exponentially burns through resources because so much wealth is taken from those who actually create the wealth and then is redistributed to a tiny minority, that the people on the bottom who do the work are left with so little that they can barely keep afloat. People such as Mr. Samuelson have for decades ignored the part of capitalism that does work however: divisions of labor. Good divisions of labor are the key. The problem though with divisions of labor in modern times is that they are hierarchal and based on the capital investment process (i.e., bosses and workers). Problems in modernity are too complex to solve via hierarchy because of the imperfect knowledge of those few who are making the decisions. Our system is still inductive in nature, so we inevitably end up making mediocre systems to begin with, and then we try to go back and fix the problems when it is already too late. It made sense to solve problems inductively in the 17th and 18th centuries because there was so little knowledge to work with, and because communications were difficult among people (requiring just a few leaders to make decisions), but today, the situation is reversed. We have mountains of information to work with and communications are virtually instant. We need many folks to sift through and interpret the data that we have. Today it makes sense to solve problems based on virtual a priori knowledge in conjunction with the ideas of everyone via democracy, yet we don’t do it because capital investment militates against it. We could fairly easily solve many of our problems given deduction through democracy. Mr. Samuelson doesn’t have a clue so he is hopeless.
Mr. Friedman wants to punish people for using gas by taxing it to death rather than by convincing the government to regulate Detroit, foreign car-makers, and big oil and energy companies in order to produce more efficient gas powered cars, and eventually, alternatively fueled vehicles. Fuel taxes are regressive taxes, and Friedman’s plan to use a regressive tax to buy back yuppies’ vehicles at full price, is not only unfair to us who drive modest vehicles, but is wrong in the sense that it punishes people rather than the corporations that perpetuate the problem. Government needs to tell auto makers to start producing alternatively fueled cars by such and such a date, by such a proportion, and it needs to tell big oil companies to start getting into the alternative fuel business because we’re going to limit the sales of gas powered vehicles at some prescribed date. That’s the entire argument: Are we going to have undemocratic corporations controlling the government, or are we going to have democratic government controlling the actions of corporations?
Mark –
A couple of points:
You seem to be describing a centralized economy, particularly the Soviet model, especially when you write:
This sounds like the Soviets of the 1960s and 1970s; they failed as would anyone who tried to do so today simply because there is know way to know all of the information. Sure, you can imprecisely estimate crop yields, hourly outputs, transportation capacity and costs, and on and on, but you can’t determine what folks want at any given instant, and you can’t really determine capacities and costs either. At one price point a transporter may be willing to convey something somewhere on one day, and refuse to the next. A free-market economy lets individuals and enterprises express their changing wants and needs. The waste of centrally planned economies are legend, the environmental devastation they wrought is almost beyond comprehension. For all its faults, a free-market economy is very efficient and it provides folks with choice.
I’m not sure what your point is about hierarchies, and we’ve gone around and around on wealth inequality. Individuals like Ray Kroc and Bill Gates created wealth because they had valuable ideas and leadership that allowed them to build great enterprises. Today we do have wealth inequality in part because we have a somewhat free market in labor. You will of course take issue with this, but jobs pay based on what you can do and what you know, not who you know. We are fragmenting into a information economy with those who can handle the information at the top and those who can’t at the bottom. There are exceptions, of course and some people have the skill and savvy to create their own jobs.
I’m not sure what you are proposing for employment arrangements, but I’m rather sure that it overlooks economic principles.
Here’s a good treatment of income inequality. It’s especially helpful because it drills down to describe what is being measured and what is not.
Key points are:
Mike,
I don’t want a Soviet style, centralized economy-no, far from it. I want corporations and government to focus on creating good divisions of labor through democratic means. My system would stress using the creativity and knowledge of all the people involved to create superior, low variation, high quality, high productivity systems. My system would involve small groups of people who would design their chunk of the process flow using knowledge they already have in conjunction with their own ideas in order to create new knowledge and new ideas.
Granted, many corporations have used something analogous to what I am talking about (by using brainstorming and pairwise voting among the management, for example) except their ideas originally come from Shewhart and Deming, and are ultimately inductive and hierarchal in nature. Deming in fact did introduce some measure of democracy to modern corporations, but hierarchal divisions of labor always win out in the long run because they are integral to capital investment. In my system, there wouldn’t be a distinct group of people in management who are separate from the rest of the workforce. Also, I want to extend my ideas to government.
Despite Deming’s shortcomings, one can cull a very useful idea from his repertoire given a new twist: reducing process variation not only increases quality, but it also improves productivity. Instead of creating an ad hoc system and then constantly going back to improve it based on inductive methods, I say create a superior system to begin with and then constantly design new and improved systems based on what you have learned, and based on the better goods and services that you have already created.
Draw a graph with vertical and horizontal axes. Label the vertical axis as “frequency”, and label the horizontal axis as “time”. Draw a bell curve on top of the horizontal axis and bisect it with a vertical line, which represents the mean time to complete some process. The distance from either edge of the curve to the mean represents the process variation. Since time will start at the same point for the sake of comparisons, the left side of the bell curve should be fixed at the graph origin. Now, reduce the process variation by reducing the width of the bell curve. When you do this, the bell curve becomes thinner and it shifts to the left. Bisect the new curve to represent the new mean time. The height of the line and the bell curve increase to represent increased frequency. So, when you decrease process variation, the average time it takes to complete the process necessarily decreases, and the frequency at which the process is completed becomes more predictable. Decreased process variation means increased productivity and increased predictability. This simple, yet powerful proof (it’s my proof, but I’m sure this same idea has been thought of before) is a key to understanding the power of good divisions of labor in modern terms because modern processes are comprised of many people performing their individual tasks. Notice that I’m not making an empirical judgment here.
I have to go now, but let me make a statement before I go: good divisions of labor outweigh differential ability (real or perceived), and good ideas from all are necessary to create the best arrangements of good divisions of labor in complex systems. That’s the way to fix healthcare and most of our other problems.
Any discussions about economic change are going to be moot if Americans don’t start saving more. Last year was the first year since 1933 that net private savings were negative; and in that year, government wasn’t spending nearly as much as a percentage of GDP and we weren’t borrowing money for every purpose under the sun from China. Anyone have good ideas?
Steve – I agree that folks should save more.
Mark –
If standardization and quality are the issue, that’s what ISO is all about. The firm where I work as all sorts of ISO-90XX certified elements. It’s necessary to do bidness in many areas. Outfits like this are more than happy to get organizations up to speed.
But apart formal certification, don’t you think that competition pushes most enterprises to achieve efficiency? A front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal describes how pizza delivery outfits are training hard in preparation for some football game that’s supposed to be played Sunday. There is no mention of Deming or ISO 9001, but the folks do seem to be concerned about customer service:
Dufficy sounds like the kind of guy who knows which side of the pizza gets the sauce, no?
I guess I don’t see where you are headed with this except to reinvent the wheel. Don’t lots of businesses get it, know that they’ve got to be lean, well organized, efficient, and all that? In the 1990s Ford Motor almost got down to the 18 labor hours per car that Toyota achieves, but then it let matters slide. Just one reason — a bland, overweight, product line is another — that it and GM are in trouble. Have no fear, Ford is re-tooling its culture. I would think that they might commit to building cars, but that’s just me.
I previously posted here the facts about labor efficiency and output of automobile factories, which show GM ahead of Toyota in the U.S. factories.
All the American cars are more complicated to build because there are so many more variations offered to the customer. They are also larger than most of the foreign cars.
GM’s and Ford’s problems are not so much in manufacturing as it is in some styling issues, (mis)marketing of products, and misperception of car owners who never have driven the products.
Their largest problem is the promises made by past management to pay huge pensions which were not funded out of current wages, but were hoped to be funded out of future wages of a larger GM and Ford.
All the defined benefit pensions need to be phased out, all corporate defined-contributions need to be eliminated, along with all government pensions, starting with those for elected officials.
Privatizing pensions and making them the personal property of individuals would solve a lot of problems in America, from lazy bureaucrats to unprofitable manufacturers.
I agree that American cars are more complicated, but they end up providing less to the consumer. A friend who ordered a loaded Pontiac Solstice before it was introduced is still waiting because the factory is concentrating on “popular packages.” The myth of custom ordering should be discarded – their information systems and factory practices never could handle them efficiently. Foreign manufacturers figured this out long ago – they had to because of the shipping lag.
Moreover, neither Ford nor GM really offers a base car that compares favorably with the competition. This comparison of the Pontiac G6 GTP Coupe and Honda Accord EX V-6 Coupe at first glance looks like GM’s $23,985 has Honda’s $27,400 beat handily. But the price as tested for the GTP is $28,270, which does include leather and a moon roof, but it includes other items standard on the Honda.
The complexity has been a bug, not a feature, of the domestic approach. Ford did hit 18 hours per vehicle with the Taurus, comparable to the Camry, but then took its eye off the ball. With the Fusion Ford is introducing a more sophisticated suspension, based on Mazda’s 6 series, the kind of complexity they should have been offering in the Contour. The Fusion looks like a winner and could help save Ford. The Five Hundred’s sales are not inspiring, the 2005 Mustang was a home run but low volume, the Focus is stale but adequate, the Windstar changed names to protect the innocent (which reminds me, what’s ever been up with GM minivans?), and the T-Bird is dead without paying back the investment.
If Ford and GM do have a $1500 per vehicle penalty for pension and healthcare liabilities, they still have to discount on average $3500 to sell their vehicles. And what are Ford and GM, the latter in particular, concentrating on? SUVs. Great timing. More discounts are on the way, as are new models from Toyota and Honda.
Ford’s hybrids are running into consumer resistance: folks aren’t getting the mpg they expected, so Ford is having to offer driving clinics. The small hybrid SUV Ford’s offering is not the best showcase for hybrid technology because it’s heavy and is probably being purchased by suburbanites for kid-hauling, a situation where hybrids offer little advantage.
Ford in particular has made bonehead decisions. Of all its acquisitions – Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston-Martin, and Volvo – only the last made any sense. They’ve given up on boosting Jag’s volume and won’t own up to what they’ve had to spend to transform the cat from steel to aluminum. But I’m getting redundant.
I’ve had several Tauruses, including a 1993 SHO — durn windshield wipers skipped over 120 mph — and a 1995 Contour V-6 stick that was almost as fast, but nowhere near as comfy. My wife drives a Windstar with the 3.8L stump-puller. I have a 2002 Alero that is fun to drive, but I’ve found out about the long-term issues of the 3.4L including the intake gaskets. I have had installed (post-warranty) the GM-engineered replacement gaskets that are really supposed to not leak. I’ve never owned a Japanese car — I’ve owned oodles of French and Italian cars, and a couple from the Huns, but my next car will be a Japanese brand. I want an RX-8, but will probably end up with an Accord or Mazda 6 or Subaru boxer, although a WRX would be peachy. Since I buy used, I avoid anything with a turbocharger and most WRXs are probably hammered. But I have gotten over my fixation on the lower prices of the domestics because I’ve found that inherent design tradeoffs produce higher long-term maintenance costs. Toyota and Honda, in particular, are better engineered.
Mike, I can’t disagree with anything you say, but will re-iterate that the average consumer has bought the anti-American bias of the news media which carries over into a bias against American products.
The American automobile companies, like many companies, are stuck in old business models and organizational formats which no longer work. Newspapers are a good example of denial and resistance to change.
GM will discontinue a model that sells less than 60,000 units a year. Volvo and Saab will give bonuses for hitting those numbers.
I am working now to bring a bankrupt Yankee company with great products to South Carolina. It would be so easy to make them profitable by consolidating all their operations here. Managers there and politicians here cannot get beyond their preconceived notions about just moving the obsolete business model to a new location, rather than changing the culture to dramatically increase sales to a loyal customer base.
To the topic of legislators abdicating their duties: it began when they were too lazy to write legislation, and began authorizing bureaucrats to create regulations. Any such politician is not fit to hold office. If you cannot write the laws and prioritize spending, resign and let those with ability and backbone take the job.
Lee –
Today’s WSJ has an article “As Detroit Slashes Car Jobs, Southern Towns Pick Up Slack.” It discusses some of the trials, tribulations, and success in industrializing the rural South.
This link should be good for seven days. You may find inspiration therein.
Thanks Mike. I read the paper version.
Unless Congress and our legislatures lower taxes and privatize pensions and medical care, the industry moving South will just be making a stop on the way to Mexico and Red China.