(Syracuse, NY) I didn’t go on the Oxfordshire “research” mission described in my last post. Instead, I’m in my home town with my very sick father and my family. I don’t want to write about that–this isn’t a personal diary–but I can’t blog about other topics right now. I expect to return to regular blogging next week.

Tonight I’m flying to Heathrow and then traveling to a conference on “How Young People Form Political Views.” I’m looking forward to learning from international colleagues. I’m then staying in Oxfordshire for about 48 hours after the conference ends. My purpose is “research,” but not on youth or civic engagement. In the mid-nineties, I published a novel, Something to Hide. A few years later, I started to develop the outline of another book of fiction–much more intricate and complex–which I have recently started to write. It’s set in Oxfordshire during the renaissance. I am familiar with that territory from my childhood and then graduate school. Nowadays, there are amazing webcams, Google Earth, and other online tools that let you see parts of the City of Oxford from your desk in Washington. Nevertheless, I have a list of places I want to see for myself. On Sunday and Monday, I will be doing things like trying to determine whether one could see the Oxford Castle from a scaffold erected at St. Giles around 1590.

I’m not sure I will be able to post again until Tuesday or Wednesday.

Disclaimer: I doubt very much that anything in this post is original. This is popular territory, and I haven’t looked for other blog posts that make the same points better:

If Mike Huckabee plays a major role in the Republican nomination race, the impact will be quite profound. The conservative coalition, as many have observed, consists of Christian values-voters, pro-corporate tax-cutters, and professional politicos whose fates are tied to the Republican Party. (By the way, there are also people and groups whose narrow economic interests and career trajectories tie them to the Democrats.) The three components of the conservative coalition sit uneasily together. In particular, social conservatives like Rich Cizik and Randy Brinson do not view the Republican Party as an end in itself (or as a meal ticket). They do not like putting political expediency above principle; and they are not mainly interested in cutting taxes. In fact, their substantive goals can be advanced either by cutting bureaucracies or by expanding government programs, depending on the context. I strongly suspect that Cizik and Brinson have bigger grassroots followings than the Republican Party loyalists, because that’s the nature of all political movements. Grassroots activists don’t have narrow self-interests, so they care about principles. Meanwhile, professional party leaders are easily corrupted by strategic considerations because they are the ones who can get jobs, contracts, fame, and contacts if their party wins.

The traditional conservative coalition has been held together by anti-communism (and now Islamaphobia), by a sense that government bureaucracies are godless, and by fear of losing to liberals. Social conservatives get one obvious thing from their partnership with corporate types: cash for Republican campaigns, which helps them to win. But they want results in terms of policy, and they want to believe that principles are driving their movement, not expediency. They have very good reason to doubt that they’ve gotten a decent deal lately.

What’s fascinating about Huckabee is that he’s going straight to the conservative grassroots and saying that he won’t do anything to get corporate money or GOP endorsements. He is declaring independence–much like a Democrat who refuses to court labor. If Huckabee wins, the conservative coalition blows up, although conceivably a pure social conservative movement might prevail under his leadership. Even if someone like Romney or Giuliani ultimately defeats Huckabee, his strength in the primaries could be an effective warning shot.

Proponents of the national civilian service programs (AmeriCorps and its relations) tend to feel that the service movement has stagnated. AmeriCorps itself was based on a series of bargains struck early in the Clinton administration. For instance, the number of volunteers was capped to satisfy labor, which was concerned about job displacement. The Clinton-era programs also had a particular rationale: moving beyond entitlement programs and providing financial help to those who worked.

Today, each existing program is associated with a particular president, which means that no future president will get a lot of glory by expanding them. (Peace Corps = JFK; VISTA = LBJ; Points of Light = Bush I; AmeriCorps = Clinton; USA Freedom Corps = Bush II.)

If one assumes that voluntary national service should be expanded substantially–and there is evidence that the programs work–then we need a new bargain, a new rationale, and a new spirit to inspire a new administration.

One argument would go like this: Young people want to serve and address problems, but they are very entrepreneurial. They don’t want to serve in government bureaucracies or pile up specialized credentials in preparation for public work. Therefore, we should give them opportunities to work together on public problems through the national service programs. These programs will be training grounds or launching pads for social entrepreneurship. But then government needs to be reformed so that it is more open, flexible, and entrepreneurial. Otherwise, the training grounds will not train for anything. To reform government, we’ll need new policies:

1. Despite a somewhat mixed performance record, charter schools certainly provide opportunities for creativity and entrepreneurship within the public sector. Could they be improved, and could a similar approach be used in other areas of public policy? For example, foreign relations and international development are crucial issues today. Could the United States Agency for International Development (AID) use a “charter school” model to run overseas development projects?

2. The No Child Left Behind Act could be amended so that communities, with substantial public participation, are permitted to create their own assessments and accountability measures.

3. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are planning a national deliberation on how to respond in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak. Other agencies could use similar processes to address issues that involve serious value conflicts, thereby building genuine legitimacy.

4. AmericaSpeaks (on whose board I sit) has a detailed plan called “millions of voices” for a national deliberation on a public policy issue, using a variety of formats and methods. Congress could convene such a deliberation on an issue like climate change or health and promise to hold hearings on the results.

5. The rulemaking/regulatory process could be transformed if proposed rules were posted online in a format that allowed the public to create discussion threads and wiki-like documents.

6. Several countries have achieved enormous gains in efficiency and cut corruption by involving members of the public in auditing and monitoring government expenditures. This approach could be implemented in the US to improve the performance of schools, public health agencies, and other government programs. One tool for “public accountability” is participatory budgeting, wherein citizens are able to allocate portions of a local capital budget and then track expenditures.

7. FEMA could be required to create a process for convening broad public deliberations in the aftermath of any disaster. Then we would not only see tremendous outpourings of individual volunteerism (as in response to Katrina), but also public participation in setting policies and priorities.

8. Problem-solving courts, such as drug courts, are venues for social entrepreneurship and could be expanded.

9. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities could focus attention on collaborative, community-based projects.

10. All proposed legislation could be evaluated for its potential impact on civil society and public participation, as a kind of “civic impact statement.”

11. As proposed by Paul Light in 2004, each federal agency could have a “Citizen Liaison Office” that would review existing procedures and programs for barriers to citizen participation. (AmeriCorps members could serve in these offices.)

If, by sheer dumb luck, you happen to be born one mile north of the Rio Grande, you have economic advantages that you’d miss if you were born one mile south of the same river. According to estimates by the World Bank, the total wealth per capita in Mexico is about $62,000. It’s about $513,000 in the USA. If we imagine that everyone got an equal share of national assets, then simply by changing your citizenship from Mexico to the US, you would multiply your wealth eight-fold. Of course, that’s a false presumption: wealth is very unevenly shared. Merely receiving a US passport does not give you access to $513k in assets. However, lots of per capita wealth is floating around in the US, which offers some trickle-down benefits to the poor and allows the state to afford a lot of public services. Even for the least advantaged, it’s generally better to live in a country with eight times more per capita wealth.

Because one’s location at birth is an accident, this difference seems unjust. One response is to open borders so that people can move; another is to redistribute wealth across borders. Both ideas are highly unrealistic politically but worth considering as moral principles. The World Bank’s study, however, casts some doubt on both. That’s because the Bank attempts to disaggregate national wealth. According to its analysis, the vast majority of a nation’s per capital wealth is due to “intangible” assets such as education, social capital (trust and human networks) and rule of law. In the USA, for instance, natural resources contribute about $15,000 to per capita wealth, physical capital (including buildings, machines, and urban land) contribute about $80,000, but intangible assets contribute $418,000. In Mexico, natural resources contribute $8,000, physical capital adds $19,000, but intangible assets are worth $34,000. The big gap, in other words, is in education, social capital, and governance.

This means that the wealth gap is largely attributable to institutions and culture/society, not to natural resources or accumulated factories and machines. As Michael Edwards of the Ford Foundation wrote, “It’s the polity, stupid.”

This does not mean that we “deserve” the advantages we have. I didn’t build my country’s rule of law, education system, and social networks, any more than I put oil and coal under the earth. To profit from what other human beings have constructed is morally equivalent to benefiting from nature: it’s a matter of luck. Thus it seems to me that if we can make life better in Mexico, we have an obligation to do so, even if it costs us wealth. The World Bank study does, however, raise doubts about whether we could achieve much by simply transferring cash or opening borders. That’s because the path to prosperity lies through social and political reform. Cash would only help if it were very well invested, and emigration might hurt.