(Philadelphia) In preparation for his visit to Tufts on March 17 (which you should attend if you are in the area), I have been re-reading Doug McAdam’s book Freedom Summer. It is one of my favorite works of social science, combining sensitive and moving narrative history with a persuasive quantitative method to generate numerous important insights.

One of McAdam’s significant themes is the role of the roughly 1,000 Freedom Summer volunteers in creating the New Left and the Counterculture of the late 1960s. In 1964, the volunteers were deliberately recruited from high-status universities and well-connected, rich or comfortable families. (The goal was to bring media attention and federal assistance when such elite students were arrested and beaten.) They arrived in Mississipi in chinos and short hair, often motivated by mainstream religious doctrines, and believing in the essential soundness of national institutions. They left radicalized, not only in their political opinions and diagnoses, but also in their career commitments and their ways of life. They literally left Mississipi in blue jeans, ready to form communes on their home campuses, where they were received as heroes and leaders.

Take the blue jeans: McAdam explains that seasoned SNCC staff wore denim in Mississippi to fit in with the agricultural workers whom they were trying to register. There was nothing cool about jeans in mainstream youth culture in 1964. But the SNCC staff seemed enormously cool to the 1,000 Freedom Summer volunteers, who imitated their clothes and idioms. Pretty soon they were back at Harvard and Berkeley, wearing denim and saying “dig it.”

And the communes: McAdam writes that the original plan was to place the volunteers in African Americans’ homes. That worked in some cases, but because of the violence or threats that host families suffered, it became necessary to house some volunteers together in group homes. Under conditions of exhilaration, terror, anger, and constant internal struggles among volunteers and staff, these homes became hotbeds of conversation and exploration. From cans of shared food money, to midnight meetings, to sexual experimentation, the Counterculture was born.

McAdam received attention recently for his study of Teach for America, which found disappointing effects on the participants. Comparing TFA and Freedom Summer only goes so far: nothing can (or should) rival the impact of joining a mass political movement that is the major national news story of the season and that–following the murder of three participants–changes American politics. I am struck, however, by the differences between being young in 1964 and 2008. No recent event compares to the intensity of experience, the deep generational fault-lines and generational identities, or the comprehensiveness of the changes that young people led in the mid-1960s. Many Millennials’ parents weren’t even born in 1964, yet I think the hangover lingers even today.

The Administration has sought the help of Edward Tufte in designing Recovery.gov. Tufte is the genius expert on how to present information visually. His books are visually stunning and persuasive. As a result of his guidance, Andrew Romano writes in Newsweek, Recovery.gov is “perhaps the clearest, richest interactive database ever produced by the American bureaucracy.” It quickly tells you, for example, that very little of the money has been spent so far and that tax cuts are a bigger component than “contracts, grants, and loans.”

It seems important for Americans to know these things, so that they can properly judge the use of their $787 billion and the Administration’s stewardship–and perhaps also improve the performance of government through their advocacy. But in general, we are asking ever more of citizens and expecting them to be able to absorb ever more information. Disclosure of stimulus funding is one example; another is the Supreme Court’s assumption that shareholders can discover the political positions of companies and withdraw their investments when displeased. (Apart from other problems with this decision, the duty to survey companies’ political positions will impose steep new cognitive demands on citizens.)

I think better displays of information are promising and should be saluted. But using public information also requires skills and motivations (no matter how clear and attractive the graphs may be). Civic skills are very unequal and inadequate in the United States, and motivation is uneven. Although some individuals just happen to enjoy using public data, most people are motivated only when they are recruited into organizations or movements that have political or public agendas. Such movements are scattered and relatively weak today. So the paradox is better information, presented better, to a smaller number of interested people.

In China, the Communist Party has held supreme power since 1949. Its original ideology was Marxist and anti-capitalist. Today, the Communist Party is strongly opposed to independent trade unions and favorable to corporate interests. The Communists appoint a leader for Hong Kong who opposes strong labor reforms and supports big business against the wishes of the more popular parties, which are to his left. The poorest 20% of the whole nation’s population collects less than 6% of national income (just about the same as in the United States).

From 1974-88, the only legal party in Burma was the Burma Socialist Programme Party. The military seized power in 1989 and took “socialism” out of the country’s name, but the same ruling class continues to govern. Today, children age 10 and 11 work 84 hours/week for $6/month, and the junta has jailed at least 30 trade unionists as political prisoners. The junta is now selling national assets to allies in the private sector.

In Vietnam, the only legal party is Communist, and its official ideology is Marxist-Leninist. Yet the country saw the second-fastest GDP growth in the world through much of the 1990s and 2000s, due to heavy foreign private investment and privatization. All workers are enrolled in state labor unions, and the government decides when strikes are legal. The poorest 20 percent of the population gets 7% of income, and almost all of that group are below the poverty line of $1.25/day.

These cases reinforce a general and important lesson. It doesn’t matter what the original leaders of a political movement say. It doesn’t even matter what those leaders privately think and want. What matters is the incentive structure that they create. The communist revolutions monopolized power, and monopoly creates incentives for private exploitation. Justice requires pluralism. That lesson can be hard for people to swallow because we align with the explicit values of one institution (such as the state, the market, or the law), and we don’t fully accept the legitimacy of the others. But balance is essential even if that means preserving the power of sectors you don’t much like.

President Obama took office during a terrible recession whose main scourge has been unemployment. He signed a $787 billion stimulus package, billed as a strategy for creating jobs. One year later, the unemployment rate is still almost 10%.

According to the CBS/New York Times poll conducted on Feb. 5-10, just six percent of Americans believe that the stimulus bill has created any jobs so far (although almost half think it ultimately will). Results in PDF are here. And according to Gallup, Americans believe that 50 cents of each dollar of federal spending is wasted. Since the federal government spends $3.7 trillion per year, that implies $1.85 trillion in total annual waste, or more than $6,000 of waste per person (adult or child).

You would think that a president who presided over a federal government that was understood to have spent three quarters of a billion dollars to create no jobs–a government that annually wastes $24,000 per family of four–would be profoundly unpopular. Yet the president’s average favorability rating remains at 52.5%, with 40.5% unfavorable. How can this be?

» Barack Obama’s personal style evidently appeals strongly to people. They are blaming Congress, not the president.

» They may show some tolerance for government waste because they also think that other sectors are profligate. (I would like to see a poll that asked what percentage of your power bill, your bank fees, your kid’s tuition, or your car’s sticker price was wasted.)

» Since the tax code is progressive, the median American is not spending $12,000 on federal taxes. The rich spend much more and pull the mean up. Perhaps people feel that they are wasting a few hundred dollars on ineffective new federal initiatives during the Obama years, and the president is not fully responsible for that cost.

Still, the fact that they observe all this waste explains the headwinds the Administration has encountered. No critique of their strategy or tactics is necessary.

(When I consider how I would answer these poll questions, I come up with the following responses. The stimulus has created jobs, as many as 2 million so far, but other trends are so bad as to leave us near 10% unemployment.

The government wastes money. Interest payments are basically waste, and that eats up 5% of federal spending. The government does not directly waste much money on health care, but it funds a wasteful private health care system to the tune of $829 billion, or 22% of the federal budget. If you assume some waste in other areas (such as defense, which consumes 24% of the budget), you can get to 25 cents of waste on the dollar. Fifty cents seems too high, however, since 26% of the federal budget is simply written as checks for Social Security and Unemployment benefits–and at least some federal medical and defense spending must be valuable. Popular areas like education are so small that they can hardly affect the level of waste.)

I will spend today in a meeting with representatives of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, the White House Office of Public Engagement, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and various foundations. We are meeting in the White House’s conference center across the street from the main building.

I am on the record with a pretty sharp criticism of the administration’s civic engagement work so far. See the longer version; the Huff Post summary; and a relevant C-SPAN broadcast from last summer. But of course I will be listening with an open mind, learning, and trying to be helpful in the meeting today.