Oooof, I'm a terrible magpie. But I loved this -- just tossed off by Len Bullard in a comment thread -- on his Life Among the Mammals. The main post is about key features characteristic of social networks, and why they're great for some organizations at certain stages, but they've got their drawbacks.

The social network is undeniably effective as a negative feedback loop used to keep a system stable. But when innovation is required, such stability is the last thing one encourages. The Zen thing is to be ready to grab the stone as it drops, not to hold one's palm over the fountain.

Definitely to be worked into my EmergingInfoMarket structural dynamics thinking somewhere. I've just got to find a place for it.

In the meantime, it's bright and shiny....

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Another shiny object from Len Bullard on organizational structure and innovation -- dividing the world into "competitors" and "innovators."

The competitors believe business is a chess game and they have to beat the other players. The innovators believe business is a means to get the bees to dance together, so they cooperate with them. Command and control is replaced by converse and learn. "Readiness is all."

Blog of a Bookslut -- reminds me why I should check her out more frequently. The Wonkette of the bibliophiles crowd.

It turns out that the "Books for Babies" program is not structured like the "Toys for Guns" programs, so if you show up with babies, you can not exchange them for books. Completely blows my weekend plans.

Just a week ago, Eric Martin speculated: "Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of an internet-driven phenomenon: revisionism in real time." And now it seems real-time revisionism has already reached Ukraine, with the bloggers who covered the Orange Revolution back at it again!

From Neeka -- so up-to-the-moment it can't really be called part of her "backlog":

Everyone - RIA Novosti, Gazeta.ru, Obozrevatel, Ukrainska Pravda, Korrespondent.net - are now quoting this little paragraph posted some four hours ago at Kuchma's official website:

Leonid Kuchma, president of Ukraine, has sent a letter to the editor of The New York Times, in which he expressed surprise at the use of twisted facts and incorrect commentaries not supported by the quotes from the Head of the state, by the author of the article based on the materials of an interview with Leonid Kuchma.

I can't wait for the New York Times to publish this letter - I'm very curious about the specifics of Kuchma's discontent.

I'll certainly be interested in reading it too!

I'm feeling like a bear of very little brain this morning. Usually I get right away the points Matt Yglesias makes. This time, however, I think we've got a leap of faith in here somewhere in his two recent posts on university education.

Matt first asked -- not all that rhetorically -- "What is college good for?" if it produces these sorts of results, quoted by Timothy Burke:

"New information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the growth rate of the income gap between those with an undergraduate degree and those with only a high school degree has come to a stop. It had been slowing for a while after dramatic growth in the 1980s and 1990s." {ed., sorry the Burke link's not working}

Not surprisingly, he got a full blast of counter responses along the lines of -- as characterized by Matt -- "shut your trap non-academic ignoramus-man, universities don't exist to serve their students, they exist to serve the cause of advancing human knowledge!"

Apparently something about the surge in the past few days of psychic vibes from the influx of gleeful Republicans to DC has made our Matt feeling a bit out-of-sorts. His response to the responders:

If you don't think your institution should take the education of 18-22 year-olds seriously as a mission, the obvious thing to do is to have your institution join the ranks of the many, many, many not-for-profit organizations that don't educate 18-22 year-olds. Perhaps more fundamental than the question about the mission of any one institution is the question of social design. If colleges don't really exist to teach undergraduates, and if they don't do a very good job of teaching undergraduates, then how much sense does it make for we, as a society, to have turned four-year colleges into the gatekeepers of the American managerial-professional elite. Maybe everyone should just go get a job when they leave high school. If, after a couple years in the workforce which let you get a little seasoning and perspective, you decide you want to be a lawyer, you could then go to law school which might have to be, say, a four year program instead of a three year one. One could imagine similar extended versions of medical school or MBA programs. And your mother wears combat boots, so there. [ed., oops, that last sentence wasn't Matt's]

Setting to one side the unusual but understandable crankiness Matt displays, I think we're in the presence of a non-sequitur. Evidence that status differentials aren't continuing to grow is evidence that a central piece of our society's meritocracy myth is at risk. Something's not working the way we expect -- the implicit promise that a university degree will produce higher status. It isn't, however, necessarily evidence that universities are failing to educate their students.

The factors producing an historical correlation between university attendance and higher status may, or may not, have something to do with whether university graduates are well-educated. Over the past decades, a basic operating assumption of the American political-economic-cultural system has been that the reason why graduates get higher paying, higher status jobs is in part due to the intellectual capital they have accumulated as part of the process of attending college. So we've assumed that the quantity/quality of the education received by an individual is a causal factor of status.

But there are other factors with potential explanatory power, having little to do with what graduates have learned at university or how well they have learned it. Off the top of my head, I'd put on the list of "factors to be investigated" some of the following: changes in the structure of the US and global economy, job content, the evolution of "knowledge workers" as a class of employees, geographic availability of jobs and personal mobility, the shift in distribution of the employed population across age cohorts (etc etc). There might be something going on in each of these areas that is contributing to the flattening of status differentials that have previously been highly correlated with college attendance. Some of these changes might force us to challenge our basic assumption that earlier status differentials correlated with college attendance were "due" to the quantity/quality of education received, that is, whether teachers did a good job of "educating" their students.

If we shift our attention to another country's educational system, it seems like it's the same as saying that the fact that the hordes of university attendees in Egypt can't find jobs - that a university education isn't delivering the return on investment these students hoped for - is because of the poor quality of the teaching faculty. That may be a bit of the puzzle, in the sense that attendance at one of the Egyptian scrums that passes for a university may not be a very good way of acquiring skills valued by the marketplace. But most analysts of the social problems reflected in the poor correlation of improved status with college attendance in Egypt would probably point to some other factors as being more powerful: primarily, the overall structure of Egypt's economy and its ability to absorb college graduates and put to use the skills they acquire at university. We could dramatically improve the quantity/quality of what is taught and what is learned and see virtually no impact on employment prospects for young Egyptian graduates -- and hence very little impact on status differentials.

Returning to the US, let's reframe the issue in the business lingo Matt trots out. Even if we accept that it is legitimate to say that a "product" the university is selling to students is to produce improved ROI for its graduates, it seems to me we are conflating that "product" with another, which the university is also selling: learning. Each "product" has quite different performance outcomes and metrics. One of the best take-aways from my lessons in the conduct of monetary policy applies equally in the context of business strategy: a good rule-of-thumb is to avoid using the same "tool" to try to achieve simultaneously multiple objectives. Otherwise, performance metrics, performance incentives, and strategic choices are going to get mighty muddled.

None of my remarks should be taken as a defense of American universities. Matt raises core problems that need fixing, they just need fixing for reasons other than those Matt poses. And since policy answers we propose usually have a good deal to do with the way we pose the questions we think need solving, this isn't simply a theoretical nicety.

For example, on the question of the quality of teaching. Should universities specialize more than they already do -- some emphasizing teaching while others emphasizing research? There's already a basic product differentiation along those lines as between the liberal arts colleges and the universities with the huge graduate schools. Should that bifurcation be more explicit? Are there faculty incentives -- such as the growing specialization and professionalization of the humanities and social sciences -- that are undermining the priority they have traditionally given to teaching even in the liberal arts settings? What do we mean by "educated" graduates if the instrumental link between a degree and a higher salary is eroding? How does all of this relate to the growing phenomenon of life-time education through both formal and informal institutions, with the informal knowledge-sharing and learning functions internet increasing its "marketshare"?

The question of what is taught and how well it's taught in our colleges and universities is vitally important and should receive a great deal more attention -- it's just a different question than the one Matt has actually posed.

Take a lesson from the Thais and toilet train him!



Courtesy: Yahoo! most emailed photos ,Jan 20 2005, AFP

Bush, today:

"We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance - preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal ...In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak.

Reality:

President Bush's choice to take over the Department of Health and Human Services steadfastly refused yesterday to rule out budget cuts for Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor.

In two otherwise cordial confirmation hearings, Mike Leavitt, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, argued that Medicaid is "inefficient" and could serve more people with better management and some ingenuity.

Wanker.

Mark Schmitt has a wonderful post that has an interesting set of comments (including from prak and Billmon). Although not explictly such, the post can be seen part of a related series The Decembrist has been publishing about how Democrats think and communicate policy.

The most recent installment is on the phenomenon of Democratic consultants and politicos of all ilks who are eagerly embracing the advice found in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.

You can get an idea of Mark's take on the Lakoff-phenomenon from the title of his Decembrist post: No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code." Yet this post is as much a defense of Lakoff as a take-down. He puts primary blame for the epidemic of silliness on the people doing the embracing, rather on Lakoff himself.

My comment at The Decembrist was sufficiently lengthy and "standalone" that I republish it here [minor edits made only for readability]. I'm rather pleased with the title I've given these remarks, even if I do says so myself.

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My favorite Lakoff -- and where I think the best nuggets of insight are found -- are where he doesn't try to apply his cognitive approach to politics per se.

I'd reach even further back in time than Mark -- to the seminal Metaphors We Live By. It was one of the core applications of related ideas in Berger & Luckmann's equally seminal The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's "metaphors" were an epiphany. By now, the perspective they presented has been thoroughly incorporated into how Americans see things in their information marketplace, even if some of us aren't totally "fluent" yet in metaphors, narratives and frames. Certainly this stuff is mothers milk today for the successful marketing and advertising hacks Billmon's talking about, whether they work in the political sphere or are just flogging commercial products.

The research program of Lakoff and his co-authors over the past few decades, or of cognitionists (somebody help me out, what's the right term?) who are heavily influenced by his core ideas, is similarly rich with ways of understanding how the process of talking about what we think has such a reciprocal effect with the way we think, and even what we think/believe. Those concepts have endless application to politics.

The giant Lakoff-hug happening now just illustrates that we always need somebody to be the popularizer of these sorts of ideas. Most political hacks -- Democrats or Republicans -- aren't going to trawl through the rather dense pages of current debates on such relevant issues as epistemology, heuristics and decision-making in quick-time, and how all of that is being affected by the acceleration of the unintermediated horizontal flow of information and ideas represented by the internet.

We need the Malcolm Gladwells and James Surowieckis to do that for us, as in their week-long BookClub discussion in Slate earlier this month. But even that step isn't enough. We then we need another round of popularizing -- to take the concepts and insights that have been boiled down and reframed by the Gladwells et al and then show how they apply in a particular setting. In the case at hand, the realm of domestic politcs.

This process isn't somehow unique for the fighters and their managers in the arena of political combat. It's the same for the business managers and marketing professionals who apply new insights emerging from cognitive neuroscience and its various "liberal arts" counterparts -- whether linguistics, rhetoric, neuroeconomics, etc. The business-types have one big advantage over the political-types, however. The B-schools produce first-rate popularizers of these concepts. The B-school professors do the trawling for nuggets for the managers, and do the digesting, synthesizing and finding real-world case studies to apply these ideas.

Business types and politicos have this behavior in common: thinking they've found the guru and the silver bullet when all they've found is the "flavor of the month." A favorite object of B-school studies is the company that got screwed up by management's over-eager embrace of "lessons" taken out of context from the latest business-best-seller. So the fact that practitioners of Democratic strategy and communication think they have found the recipe for gold shouldn't come as a surprise.

I certainly agree with Mark that we need people who digest insights "...like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them." I also think he makes a very important point that it takes an old-fashioned cross-disciplinary "liberal arts" mentality to do that. We all pay a price for the narrowing academic professionalization/specialization of the humanities and social sciences.

I'd add that it's not just a matter of finding people with the right breadth of mind to do the digesting and thinking for the vast majority of us who aren't going to do it ourselves. I'd suggest an equally important part of the overall problem is the absence of a group of competent popularizers who can do the same thing for politics as the B-school professors do for business and marketing.

As Mark points out, it's really rather unfair to Lakoff to expect him to be intellectual innovator, applied research scientist, and popularizer all in one. Unfortunately, I think Lakoff's not applied some lessons from his own important work to himself. But he's not the first intellectual to be blinded a bit by the bright lights of the public stage.

Maybe while we're talking about expanding Democratic-oriented policy centers and think tanks we should add a "Policy Center for Epsitemology and Rhetoric" to do the popularizing?

George Bush, today:

One lesson of history is that free societies do not export terror.

Richard Armitage, last week:

[I]n the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world.

Clearly, this man hates America.

(thanks to Tim Dunlop for the link)

From ArmsControlWonk comes news of an interesting-sounding new book entitled Code Names:

The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today.

From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand.

Regular readers of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News may already be familiar with issues of overclassification in American government, but in my first Homeland Security class on Tuesday, I got a bit of a first-hand account of it from my professor, who was a former Air Force intelligence and CIA officer for many years. Part of your training as an officer involves learning the process of classification, and not suprisingly in the CIA's secrecy culture (where even widely known information like the intelligence budget is never "confirmed") it is an extremely easy thing to do: your officer sitting at a desk stamps the top and bottom of the document with "Secret", and then adds on the line the reason for classification, which comes from a list of various coded categories. The biggest is, not suprisingly, the catch-all in-the-name-of-national security category, although he said that a newly popular one these days was "Sensitive But Unclassified" — information which people have been actually prosecuted for distributing, even though it is not technically "secret". And as for at what future date the classification of material can be later reevaluated, "ImpDet" — Impossible to Determine — is literally built into the stamps they use.

This is all on the first day, so I only have broad anecdotes to share right now, but I think it's going to be an interesting class. (P.S. to Nadezhda - Can you add new categories for my four new courses this semester? Thanks!)