Still got the feeling:

— The City of Compton’s big comeback.

— Is long-term unemployment really declining?

— A pessimist manifesto (I actually regard this worldview as optimistic).

— Mark Kirk, deficit fraud.

— An individual mandate waiver in pursuit of a more socialistic alternative has always been Ron Wyden’s plan.

— I’d be more excited about this movie if the title were McPherson Square.

— DC has a lot of pathetically uncatchy Metro station names: “U Street / African-American Civil War Memorial / Cardozo,” anyone?

The worthy winner of top nineties track is “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang”.

(cc photo by takomabibelot)

Tad DeHaven today continues his bizarre crusade against more efficient provision of public services. He opens with a standard libertarian argument about how absent the profit motive, a public sector agency is unlikely to operate at maximal efficiency. This, however, is neither here nor there and then he offers this:

Therefore, the question of how efficiently government provides services is less important than deciding what services government should provide. For example, it matters little how quickly the USDA processes subsidy checks for farmers. More important is whether farmers should be receiving subsidy checks at all.

This is deeply confused. We can all agree, I think, that the government should provide the service of national security. But it would be ridiculous to think that the widespread consensus on this point constitutes a more important question than the minor issue of whether or not pursuing a grand strategy of perpetual global military domination is a reasonably efficient means of providing that service. If it’s actually true that such a strategy is integral to American security, then we’d darn well better pursue it. But if it’s not true, then we could use some massive policy changes.

Or consider the provision of subsidized rental housing to poor people. One way to do this is by having the government operate public housing in which poor people can live. Another way to do it is to have the government disburse housing vouchers to poor people that they can use to help with the rent. Now suppose switching to vouchers is much more efficient than public housing—that the same level of expenditures allows more people to house their families decently. Whether or not you think the government should be providing housing services, which option is chosen still has an important impact on human welfare.

Alternatively, consider something the government shouldn’t be doing—trying to brainwash teenagers into believing that having sex without being married is morally wrong. Evidence indicates that abstinence education programs don’t work, but I also see no reason to believe that persuading more people to abstain from sex before marriage would be beneficial. If the government developed a more effective brainwashing scheme that would be “more efficient” but bad.

Chuck Salter’s Fast Company article “Why America is Addicted to Olive Garden” neither explains why America is addicted to Olive Garden nor even establishes that American is, in fact, addicted to Olive Garden. It is, however, a really excellent profile of the company, Darden, that owns Olive Garden along with a few other restaurant chains.

To throw a couple of bold claims out there that probably nobody agrees with, brands, chains, standardization, and replication are some of the most underrated economic phenomena and single-establishment retail businesses among the most overrated. There’s an association between multiple-establishment restaurants and low quality, but I think that if you take a broad view you’ll see that this is both a contingent phenomenon and a waning trend. Darden’s own Capitol Grille chain is excellent and Olive Garden is better than you care to admit. Besides which, all the legitimately first-rate chefs are branding and franchising these days, they’re mostly just a bit hesitant to get entirely above-board about what they’re doing.

The point, however, is not to argue the merits of these restaurants but merely to observe that they’re successful. And in particular, they’re successful at exactly what our health care & university systems are terrible at, namely actually balancing cost and quality or even at times finding innovative ways to skimp on quality. I doubt anyone involved would try to convince you that the Olive Garden is the world’s greatest Italian restaurant. But the point of something like their “Culinary Institute of Tuscany” exercise is precisely to identify top-quality practices and then think if there’s some way to do something vaguely similar for radically less money. If you look at the trajectory of college tuition, it’s clear that we’re not going to be able to simultaneously stay on that pace and expand the number of people who go to college. But a college degree seems to be very valuable. If it were possible to provide even a fraction of that value to more people cheaply, we’d be making major progress.

I appeared on a panel at the American Political Science Association annual meeting yesterday about journalism and political science and one thing that struck me (apart from the relative rarity of this kind of sneering condescension) was that political scientists’ description of the incentive structure of their own profession was kind of bizarre. As I heard it explained to me, it’s not merely that taking time to help inform a non-specialist audience about political science findings isn’t specifically rewarded, it’s positively punished. And not simply in the sense that doing less research and more publicizing is punished; I was told that holding research output constant, getting more publicity for your output would be harmful to a junior scholar’s career because it would feed an assumption of non-seriousness.

That’s pretty nuts. After all, the state legislators and rich donors who give money to universities are presumably sponsoring research because they think it’s potentially important for people to know the results of good research. Interestingly, economists really don’t seem to have this problem. Obviously, lots of economics research is done on obscure topics or written in a way that’s inaccessible or intended for an expert, professional audience. And the formal economy of academic promotion is similar in both fields. But economists seem to me to overwhelmingly take it for granted that the world would be a better place if more people were better-informed about economic theory and reasoning and that economists who succeed in informing people are doing something praiseworthy.

At any rate, I really think this attitude is bad for the world. There are lots and lots of people out there working in the field of trying to alter public policy. And there are many other people doing descriptive writing for an audience primarily composed of those trying to alter public policy. It would be much better for the world if those people had a better understanding of how the American political system operates, of how foreign political systems operate, of how the international system functions, and other key political science topics. It’s not that I expect “sending emails to bloggers” to become Priority #1 for anyone in the field, but surely if people manage to do good work and also to convey the essence of that work to non-specialists they shouldn’t be punished for it.