Hillary Clinton gave the second major speech of her State Department tenure this week on the importance of Internet freedom throughout the world, a popular theme in the wake of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East that now seem impossible to imagine pre-Twitter. “Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly and association online comprise what I have called the freedom to connect,” Clinton said in comments at George Washington University. “The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same.” Her remarks ... Read More
Applying the Doha Debates to Egypt
February 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Dear Wael Ghonim and fellow travelers: Let me tell you how impressed I am with your accomplishments. Wael’s interview on Dream TV (to see the video with short translation, click here and scroll down two-thirds) was the most impressive interview in a year. Unlike you, I grew up in Europe, but I have always been close to my Egyptian family. Ever since I became politically aware, President Mubarak governed your country. Political life was stagnant, corrupt and oppressive — so much so that some of my closest relatives had come to view politics as a dirty game from which they wanted to ... Read More
Probing the Depths of the ‘Submerged State’
February 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In 2009, when President Obama negotiated a stimulus bill that included $288 billion in tax cuts, his advisers decided to structure their "Making Work Pay" tax credits so that workers' regular paychecks were a little bit bigger, and the money would flow back into circulation gradually, rather than all at once. They believed it would have a greater economic impact that way. Without running the counterfactual, it's hard to know whether the tax credits had the desired economic impact. But one thing is clear: It was just about the worst-advertised tax cut ever. One year later, just 12 percent of ... Read More
Dietary Guidelines Include a Helping of Politics
February 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services this week released the latest edition of the "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," a collection of largely common-sense nutrition advice (drink more water, switch to fat-free milk, eat more fruits and vegetables) that every five years produces cackles from the food industry. This year, the Peanut Institute is pleased. The Salt Institute is not. The American Meat Institute — well, it's spinning the latest emphasis on "lean" meat and poultry as a positive. In the middle of all this, the USDA in particular is ... Read More
I Gave It a Nudge But It Won’t Budge
January 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein and behavioral economist Richard Thaler unleashed an incredibly seductive idea in 2008 with their popular book Nudge. Many of society's biggest problems, they suggested, from poor public health to environmental degradation to lousy retirement planning, could be solved without expensive interventions or intrusive regulation. All policymakers have to do is alter the environments in which people make decisions, gently nudging them toward the choices that would improve their lives — away from the potato chips, say, or toward that corporate 401(k) match. "To ... Read More
Toasting Government’s Good Ideas From 2010
December 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
There have been a lot of bad ideas from government officials this past year, knee-jerk responses to national crises or hotheaded proposals that cooled in the wake of the midterm elections. There was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's ferocious embrace of sand berms, the man-made islands designed to protect his state from the Gulf oil spill that wound up wasting millions of dollars and invaluable time. There was the sudden rallying cry to rewrite the 14th Amendment, the Virginia attorney general's witch hunt of academic research, and that dubious scheme to spend stimulus money on stimulus road ... Read More
Sticking to Your Resolutions, With Uncle Sam
December 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Government has been getting a bum rap this year for trying to help us be our better selves. Eat less salt. Drink less soda. Turn off the lights. Exercise more. Be better parents. Don't text while driving. The goals are admirable, although, to some, the government nudging is not. "Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician's wife's priorities, just leave us alone," Sarah Palin recently snapped, "get off our back, and allow us as individuals to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own ... Read More
The Ultra-Imperial Presidency
December 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Back in 2006, Bruce Ackerman co-authored the "Liberal Manifesto," a document of protest signed by dozens of prominent intellectuals who condemned the "illegal, unwise and destructive" Iraq war and the "politics of panic" of the administration of President George W. Bush. But Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale and the author of the new book The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, is worried about more than one unenlightened man in power. He believes that a runaway U.S. presidency could someday be the springboard for an authoritarian takeover. He wants to shake ... Read More
The Magic of Re-reinventing Government
December 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Last summer I got pick-pocketed in Chicago. I was walking back to my hotel room after dinner when, mid-block, I reached down, found nothing where my wallet should have been and went straight to panic mode. Thanks to FedEx and my passport, I was able to make it onto an airplane and back to the West Coast, where the pocket-picking gave me a delayed lesson in governmental competence, via the seemingly simple and parallel tasks of replacing a Social Security card and a driver's license. The Social Security office in Santa Barbara, Calif., is located in an outdoor mall downtown, but it's not at ... Read More
