Tag: public policy

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I got email today from one of my senators, with the text of a truly appalling letter to president Obama from the senator and eleven of his colleagues.

The letter (here’s his press release on it) calls on the president to ensure that “no refugee related to the Syrian crisis is admitted to the United States unless the U.S. government can guarantee, with 100 percent assurance, that they are not members, supporters, or sympathizers of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).”

It’s obviously intended to be an unattainable threshold, but that’s really beside the point—the whole thing is completely wrong-headed.

I was moved to respond, and sent him this message via the contact form on his website:

I wanted to say that I was appalled by the letter to president Obama that you shared with me.

Since 9/11, the number of refugees who have committed terrorist attacks in the US is exactly zero—which suggests to me that keeping refugees out of the US is a complete waste of time and effort.

Targeting refugees—the most helpless and vulnerable among us—is not only pointless, it is also heartless and cruel. It is a failure to live up to our obligations under international law. It is also, in my opinion, terribly unamerican.

There are far better, far more effective ways to protect US citizens than by heaping yet more misery on those who have already faced the violent extremism of ISIS—those Syrians who have been forced by it to flee their own country.

I urge you to write to the president and let him know that you repudiate your entire letter, and to suggest that existing US policies on refugees, established in accordance with international law, should remain in place.

Another eleven senators signed the letter. If yours was one of them, you might want to contact your senator and say something. Feel free to borrow from my text, if it speaks to you.

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Jackie and I rode the yellow bus into campus yesterday evening and attended a reception for and talk by Rick Bell about Active Design—using architecture to encourage people to move more, to eat better, etc.

We enjoyed it, and found the ideas very interesting, even though the talk itself was only fair—a long series of slides with pictures of places that exemplified one or another aspect of what he’s talking about, arranged geographically rather than according to the principles he’s suggesting. (The talk would have been more interesting for me if it had been organized by idea, rather than by place.)

One focus throughout the talk was on staircases. Of course any multilevel public space needs to have elevators (to make the space available to people who can’t climb stairs) and perhaps other things as well—ramps, escalators, and so on. But stairs are required too (for fire safety, if nothing else) and Bell points out that staircases can be done well or badly. In a bare concrete box closed in behind fire doors, they’re pretty uninviting. Brought out front and center, they can be wonderful. They can be beautiful design elements—glass stairs can float in the space, mirrored risers can reflect the space, etc. Staircases—if they’re broad enough—can also be places where people gather in small groups to stand or sit together. He had a photo of what I guess is a famous red staircase being used that way. (The talk was for architecture students, and was full of references to famous architecture and architects that mostly meant very little to me.)

He also had some photos of places where these things had been done badly, such as a second-floor fitness center with escalators to the entrance, and no sign of where the stairs might be, even if you wanted to use them.

There’s a lot to Active Design besides staircases—walkable spaces, bicycling infrastructure, creating (often re-creating) multimodal transportation infrastructure (like having bike paths and foot paths lead to and from the bus station, and having the bus station co-located with the train station and a bicycle rental place), seasonally appropriate spaces (like skating rinks), bringing food production into the city center, etc.

I’m glad we went. I’m glad we went by bus, rather than driving.

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Backyard Eggs
Backyard Eggs

So, the Champaign City Council legalized backyard chickens a while back. You have to file a form, pay a one-time fee, and get a notarized permission slip from your landlord (if you’re a renter), but it all looks quite doable. As I’d mentioned when I wrote about the issue before, this would have been a determining factor in my willingness to buy a house in Champaign, and now it isn’t. The fee isn’t cheap ($50), but figured into the cost of buying a house, it’s insignificant.

But thinking about the fee got me to thinking about why one raises chickens in the first place.

Probably most of the people in Champaign who want to raise backyard chickens are yuppy locavore types looking to reduce their food-miles to minimize their carbon footprint and know that they’re eating organic and cruelty-free. More power to them. But there’s another category of people who might raise backyard chickens: poor people.

Someone who’s poor—someone whose budget barely stretches to cover their other expenses, someone who’s on food stamps, someone who uses a food pantry—is another person who might find raising backyard chickens very attractive. Eggs don’t cost much, but someone who raised chickens might be able to save a few dollars a week and get some high-quality protein and have a surplus that they could share or trade. But a $50 entry fee just about blocks this reason to raise chickens.

I guess I’m not really surprised. Local politicians in Champaign have a lot of incentive to help upper-middle class people eat local and organic—those people vote. They probably don’t feel the same pressure to help poor people get a little high-quality food as cheaply as possible, because poor people don’t vote as much—and when they do vote, the legality of backyard chickens probably isn’t a top issue.

It does bug me just a little that Champaign (which thinks of itself as conservative place) has created this whole big-government scheme with forms and approvals and fees and regulations on chicken coops, while Urbana (which thinks of itself as a liberal place) doesn’t have any of that stuff, just a general rule against letting your animals become a nuisance. But that’s just me, asking for consistency from politicians.

So, half a cheer for Champaign legalizing backyard chickens, even if they came up with a way to do it that only helps yuppy locavores and not poor folks.

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In his dedication to educating the public about the zero bound, Paul Krugman has asked several times (most recently today):

. . . what calculation leads to the notion that a target of “close to but less than 2%” is appropriate, as opposed to, say, 3 or 4 percent.

I think I know the answer: An inflation rate of 2% is small enough that price changes due to inflation are unnoticeable in the noise of other price changes, even over periods of a few years.

Among the costs of inflation are those that come from uncertainty about not only future prices, but also about current prices.

When inflation is under 2%, the price of a cookie at the local bakery might remain unchanged for years at a time. I can stop by the bakery with exact change, and be reasonably confident that I’ll be able to buy one. The costs of flour, sugar, and chocolate will vary over time—but some will rise and others will fall, and the bakery will be able to hold the line on the price of a cookie. This is a convenience for me. It’s also good for the bakery, because people who are confident that they have enough cash in their pocket to buy a cookie are more likely to stop and get one. If they had to make a stop at the ATM first to get cash—or worse, be sent away to visit an ATM mid-transaction—they might not.

At some point—and I assert that the point turns out to be slightly above a 2% inflation rate—stores find that it’s necessary to raise prices at least annually, just to keep up with inflation.

Even if the inflation rate is known and not a surprise, there’s still the threshold effect of one day the price is $x and the next day it’s $x+3%.

When the inflation rate is below 2%, prices can remain stable for years at a time—long enough for people to learn what they are. And that knowledge can make their day run more smoothly. They can be sure they have appropriate cash on hand. They don’t need to check prices ahead of each transaction.

When the inflation rate is above 3%, stores might need to raise prices twice a year, to avoid falling behind. When the prices of a hundred things are all being raised more often than annually, it becomes impossible to learn what prices are, and impossible for that knowledge to make the day run more smoothly. All of a sudden, you have to pay attention to price changes, because they’re happening all the time. In advance of every transaction, you need to allow for the fact that maybe today is the day that prices went up several percent.

Some prices change all the time anyway, especially where the item being sold is a single commodity, such as milk or gasoline. For exactly this reason, prices of those items are often prominently displayed—to reduce the transaction effort of the consumer who wants to know what the price is going to be.

I think that’s why 2% inflation is different from 3–4% inflation: Because price changes due to inflation begin to stand out from changes in relative prices, adding another whole layer of informational costs on every purchaser, on every purchase.

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I was one of the first people to try to sign up for insurance on healthcare.gov. That turns out to have been a mistake. At least, that’s my theory.

With considerable effort, over a period of a couple of days right at the beginning of October, I’d gotten through the first part (where you verify facts about yourself to confirm that you’re you). Then I’d done the part where they ask about your income, etc.

At that point—when I’d entered all the info about my and Jackie’s contact info, race, ethnicity, income, and so on—I clicked the last “submit” button. . . and waited.

After a long time, the submission timed out.

Not wanting to have to go through all that entering again, I just backed up a screen and clicked submit again. . . and waited again. And it timed out again.

I did that over and over again, hoping that eventually I’d get a successful submission. And at some point I did get one. In fact, I got a bunch—many of those failed submissions had apparently gone through before they failed. But (I now believe), something about them had gotten corrupted at some point.

On the first visit after that, I’d gotten through to the point of seeing what policies were available to me and how much they’d cost. I printed the list and reviewed it with Jackie and investigated the networks offered by a few plans and picked a policy (sticking with Health Alliance, but going for one of their new Silver plans). But when I returned, there was a glitch: I could no longer sign up for insurance for Jackie and myself; it offered me a policy only for myself, with no sign as to whether I’d be able to get Jackie signed up after.

Yesterday, I finally gave up on making my way through the signup process, and called the telephone interface.

Turns out, the people on the other end of the phone go through the exact same interface. So, of course, they ran into the exact same problem I did.

After escalating to the senior tech guys, the proposed solution was to reset my account and have me start over. (Something I would have done a long time before, if that interface were available.)

Sadly, I couldn’t make that work either.

Finally, I started over completely. I created a new account (with a new login name, using a new email address), re-verified my identity, and re-entered all the info about me. This time, having already selected a policy, I pressed straight ahead and enrolled.

So, I have successfully signed up for insurance through Obamacare. It took about an hour, once I started over from scratch. I suspect it would have worked pretty smoothly, if I hadn’t tried so persistently to sign up in those first few busy days.

Despite the aggravations of getting signed up, I’m pretty pleased. Obamacare is going to save me hundreds of dollars a month. Our insurance bill had been our largest bill—quite a bit higher than our rent. Now it will be just another monthly expense—bigger than our phone bill, but less than rent or groceries.

And yet, the cost savings is far from the most important thing. Before, I worried constantly that any major medical problem would ruin us—make it impossible to get affordable insurance; trap us in a policy that all the healthy people had fled, with premiums spirally inexorably higher until they consumed all our money. Now, at last, we have some security on that front. Cheap or expensive, at least our insurance is actually insurance. A major medical problem would still be a big deal—one of us would no longer be healthy. But at least it would just be that, and not that and a financial catastrophe too.

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During the 1970s, there was a big push to hold corporations accountable for crimes they committed. Resistance to the idea came from people who thought that any crime would be committed by specific individuals, and that those individuals, not the corporation, should be held accountable.

Activists pushing for direct criminal sanctions against corporations pointed out that the obvious tactical response by the corporations to a policy of only holding individuals accountable would be to hire a “vice president in charge of going to jail.” That person could be put in charge of whatever activities might end up being found to be illegal—and be compensated appropriately for the extra risk he was taking. (How much would they have to pay you to take a 3% chance that you might have to spend 2 to 5 years in a minimum-security prison? One hundred thousand dollars a year? A million? Ten million? Many people have their price, and it tends to be surprisingly low, at least for risks perceived as being fairly low.)

I was reminded of this in the wake of Marissa Mayer’s statements that Yahoo and other corporations were unable to reveal that they were caving in to US government pressure to turn over customer data, because they’d go to jail if they did.

What those corporations needed was a VP in charge of going to jail: Someone hired specifically to speak out if the company receives a National Security Letter—and appropriately compensated for the risk that they might have to go to jail.

Sadly, it’s tough to get the incentives right. The corporations that the 1970s activists were concerned about were engaged in things like illegal waste disposal. Their “VP in charge of going to jail” had two goals—dump the waste as cheaply as possible, while making the activity look like it might be legal. As long as it was close enough to being legal to avoid going to jail, all that extra compensation was free money—but if looking like they might be following the law wasn’t a lot cheaper than actually following the law, the board was going to figure that there was no point in employing the expensive VP.

In the case of being the VP in charge of going to jail for revealing that the company had received a National Security Letter, the extra compensation would be received in advance, when the VP wasn’t even doing anything illegal. It would be awfully tempting to pocket all that money—and then when the National Security Letter came, to say, “You know, upon reflection, I think in this case my conscience requires me to follow the law and keep quiet.”

I’ve tried to come up with some mechanism to get the incentives right. Maybe paying the extra money into a trust that pays out promptly if the VP goes to jail, but otherwise only after many years, when there’s reason to believe that there was no National Security Letter—and of course, if it turns out there was a National Security Letter and the VP didn’t speak up, the money goes to charity instead. But that has too many problems with being unenforceable due to being contrary to public policy.

It’s too bad. A VP in charge of going to jail seemed like a perfect solution.

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I’ve always admired the way reporters come together when a reporter is messed with. It reminds me of the way the police engage in a big show of force when a policeman is killed.

Once when running a quick errand, I found that I’d put myself on the other side of an hour-long police funeral procession. It did not endear the police to me, but it did make a powerful statement that the police are not just willing to make people suffer when a policeman is killed, they want to make everyone suffer. They think it gets the incentives right. They think if everyone suffers just a little bit when a policeman is killed, everyone will have just a little bit more interest in keeping that from happening.

I think that sort of tactic is ill-advised—almost all people are much more strongly motivated by decency and compassion than they are by intimidation. But I understand that the police are motivated more by grief than by thinking a show of force will make a difference. Their legitimate feelings make it hard to argue with their tactic, even when its results will be mixed.

Reporters are better at being circumspect and targeted with their reaction, but when anybody within the power structure messes with a reporter, a vast swath of the journalistic community sits up and takes notice. They write stuff about what happened. They point out governmental overreach. They remind one another that they’re all on the line if this goes unchallenged—and they remind ordinary people that the same powers being used against reporters are available to be used against ordinary people.

It’s really good to see. It’s not perfectly effective, but it is effective.

It’s the right response.

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I’ve been very disappointed by many friends’ cavalier attitude toward both our government’s invasions of our privacy and its use of the most extreme forces of legal process against those who would tell us the truth about what the government has been doing.

One specific disappointment has been the various versions of “I don’t care if the government listens to my calls. I’ve got nothing to hide.” (Usually with some lame joke about how tedious it would be to listen to their conversations.) It’s as if they know nothing about what led to the American revolution. Didn’t these people go to high school? Don’t they know that each of the privacy-related rights spelled out in the constitution was there for good and specific reasons—because of actual abuses suffered by ordinary people?

The most disturbing of the recent revelations is not how much data that they’re sweeping up (pretty much everything) nor the incredibly lax standards they seem to have about exposing the data (my data and their own!) to a surprisingly large number of people. It’s that they’re sweeping up everything and then keeping it for years.

There are several problems here, but I want to focus on two of them.

It’s not okay just because it’s still secret

At one level, I understand people who trust the government enough to think that it’s okay (or at least less bad) to have the government sweeping up all their private information—as opposed to, let’s say, Google or Facebook or Microsoft (or Monsanto or ADM) doing it. I can accept the ideal of government as a force for good. We’re still reasonably close to having a functional democracy—a few tweaks to campaign finance law and we might very well get back a government that was responsive to the desires of its citizens.

But even if you trust the government not to use your information inappropriately, I think recent events prove that you can’t trust them to keep it secret. We’ve just seen a large leak of exactly the information that the government has been trying it’s very hardest to keep secret. But we only know about it because a brave leaker went public and because a free press published what they’d learned. How many leaks were not to the public, but instead to a foreign government or a criminal organization? We don’t know, because those leaks go unreported. We can’t know. Even the government doesn’t know, and if it did know it wouldn’t tell us.

If the government can’t keep the details of its own most secret programs from becoming public, why would you imagine that it could keep your details secret? For all you know, your information has already been leaked to criminal organizations, to foreign governments, to domestic corporations, to lobbying organizations and other influence peddlers—to anybody who could get an advantage by knowing secrets.

Maybe massive amounts of your information collected by the NSA have already leaked. The next time there’s an unauthorized charge on your credit card, maybe it’s because the NSA leaked your credit card number.

And of course that would just be true information about you. Maybe there’s a bunch of false information about you in the giant NSA databases. The next time you get turned down for a credit card or insurance or a job, maybe it’s because false information about you leaked to people who used it to make a decision about it.

And here is where we get back to why the idea that “I’ve got nothing to hide” is such a terrible idea.

It’s not okay just because you have nothing to hide

One friend made a short list of every “crime” he could remember having committed—a couple of youthful indiscretions, a couple of protests, a couple of harmless acts that were circumstantially appropriate but perhaps violations of some code or another. He was willing to own up to those—”If you want to prosecute me, go ahead!”

But, of course, that’s not how it works. The federal government doesn’t care about such things—or, at least, it doesn’t care until you become a “person of interest” in some other matter.

I don’t know whether my friend has committed any other federal crimes or not. But I do know that he has crossed international borders several times in the last few years. Did he fill out the requisite paperwork correctly each time? Did he carry anything across the border that he shouldn’t have, such as an agricultural product? Did he declare in the section on agricultural contacts that one of his running paths was also frequented by feral pigs? Is he sure that none of his financial dealings falls under the ambit of any federal laws?

In the real world, the federal government goes out and checks these sorts of things if they suspect you of something. Worse, they go and check these things if they suspect one of your friends of something (because it gives them leverage to get you to incriminate your friend). But now they’re going to have another whole bunch of things to check—all your phone calls and emails for the past 5 years.

And don’t forget that it’s trivially easy to convict you of conspiracy. All it takes is a single “overt act,” such as lending a friend bus fare or taking in his mail when he’d on vacation. (Well, technically it also takes an agreement and criminal intent, but apparently it’s okay if the only person in the conspiracy with those is the FBI informant.)

Don’t imagine that you’ve “done nothing wrong” just because you’re not aware of it. Unless you’re a federal prosecutor or defense attorney, you have no idea the vast array of actions that turn out to be federal crimes. One of our biggest protections has been that it’s a lot of effort to investigate and look for those crimes. If all your phone calls and emails are recorded it’s going to be a lot less effort.

As I say, I don’t dismiss out of hand the idea that the government is overall a force for good. I think our government (at all levels) has been pretty effective these last 150 years or so in reducing all sorts of bad things—there’s less poverty, there’s less casual violence, there’s less abuse of vulnerable people. But I don’t think giving the government audio recordings of all our phone calls, the texts of all our emails, or lists of every web page we visit will be much help in those things. And I think it will do real harm in those (fairly rare, but not rare enough) instances when people acting under color of law decide that somebody must be guilty of something, and make use of these new tools to prove it.

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Since there scarcely any thought of building them in the US, it’s silly to worry about the downsides of real high-speed trains, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to worry about. After all, the math is kind of scary.

It’s only 135 miles from Champaign’s Illinois Terminal to Chicago’s Union Station. If your trains can average 135 mph, you could make the commute in an hour—a long commute, but well within the range that many people find acceptable.

On a train that fast, you could depart Champaign at 6:45 and get to your desk anywhere in the Loop by 8:00. Another train that left at 7:45 could get you to Union Station in time to be at your desk at 9:00. Combine those with similar trains that departed shortly after the close of business and got you back to Champaign in time for supper, and suddenly Champaign offers all of its regular attractions plus all the attractions of Chicago.

Personally, I think that would be awful. It could easily attract thousands of new residents to Champaign—and Champaign does not need thousands of new residents.

Happily, the high-speed rail network that the US is actually building operates at a top speed of 110 mph—fast compared to highway speeds, but nothing like an average of 135 mph. I don’t know what sort of average speed that would produce, allowing for congestion and stops along the way, but let’s just pick a number and say we could average 90 mph. That would mean that it would take one hour thirty minutes to get to Chicago.

Suddenly the math for making Champaign a bedroom community is much less compelling. At 90 mph, the furthest you could live from Chicago and still have a one-hour commute would be Gilman. As a practical matter, people who found the idea attractive would probably live in Kankakee instead. Not that I have anything against Kankakee, but better they get thousands of downtown Chicago workers than we do.

While averting the downside of turning Champaign into a bedroom community, moderately high-speed rail service is still great for non-commuters. Amtrak service to Chicago is already pretty good—fine for a day trip to Chicago. I can catch the City of New Orleans at 6:00 AM and get to Chicago before the museums open. After a day in the city I can either leave around 4:00 PM on the Illini and get home in time for supper, or I can have an early supper in Chicago, leave around 8:00, and get home by bedtime. Imagine if those trains averaged 90 mph.

Better, imagine a couple of 110 mph trains making evening runs designed to allow people in Champaign to head into the city after work, arrive early enough for a late dinner—or, if they ate dinner on the train, a show—and then return in time to spend the night in their own bed.

The more I think about it, the happier I am with the (objectively pretty lame) moderately high-speed rail taking shape in the US. It has great potential to make Chicago accessible for half-day or evening visits without the downside of turning Champaign into a bedroom community.

(All these meditations prompted by Andrea Mayeux‘s article Researchers say high-speed rail could fuel U.S. real-estate, economic booms, via Tobias Buckell’s post High speed rail could spark a real estate boom in second tier cities.)

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I had the great good fortune to learn early on that anything posted to the internet is there forever. That knowledge has guided my internet activities for twenty-five years now, and keeping it perpetually in mind has stood me good stead so far. My basic rule is simple: I don’t post anything to the internet unless I’m intending to publish it to the world at large.

So, I’m happy to post the articles and stories I write, and happy to post links to them. That information is deliberately made public. I also post about things I do (and share links to things other people write), but only with the knowledge that each such post is part of my permanent public persona.

The exceptions (commercial, banking, credit card, insurance, and medical sites) are carefully considered, minimized as best I can, and monitored so that I have some hope of detecting and limiting the harm from failures. I expect the information that I share with them will remain private—but I use the word “expect” in much the same way an eighth-grade teacher might use it when telling her students “I expect each one of you will be well-behaved during our field trip.”

Because of this perspective, I pay very little attention to the “privacy” settings of social media sites. Whatever I post is intended to be public, so it makes no sense to constrain it. I do try to keep a grip on things that I don’t intend to be public. For example, I only attach location information to my posts on a case-by-case basis.

As I say, this has stood me in good stead up to this point. But, as Bruce Schneier points out, we’re already well past the inflection point between a past when such efforts mattered and a present and future where they do not. I carry my phone with me most of the time, so my location is already known to a third party—which means that, as a practical matter, it can be known to anybody who cares enough to get the information. Cameras are nearly ubiquitous—even before drones make it possible for them to be actually ubiquitous (and social media sites have already gathered ample data to support any facial recognition effort).

Anybody who’s working on the public policy aspects of these issues who’s not familiar with David Brin’s Transparent Society work is making a mistake. Privacy has no future. It hasn’t for a long time. Transparency is our best hope for keeping this fact from making the unequal power relationships in society much worse.

[Update 22 May 2011: I found the post from 2003 where I tell the story of just how I learned this lesson, back in 1990.]