I’m against progonistication. Our job is to decide who should win the election and what he or she should do in office, not who is most likely to win. Nevertheless, near the beginning of a long and very close race, who can resist trying to predict the outcome?

Many political scientists think that an election involving an incumbent president is a referendum on current economic performance. Everything else–debates and tv spots, scandals and endorsements–is mere atmospherics. But what is the relevant way to measure “economic performance”? Bob Dole claimed yesterday that President Bush has the advantage because “the misery index?the combination of unemployment and inflation?is actually lower now than it was at this point in 1996. And less misery is a good thing for incumbents.” But Professor Larry Bartels of Princeton conducted a sophisticated meta-analysis of 48 election models and found that while no single variable can predict an election, the single best predictor is the change in disposable per capita personal income (dpi) over the twelve months prior to the election. The more buying power people have (after taxes), the more they like the powers that be. Figure 1 in this article by Bartels makes the point pretty clearly. It suggests that incumbents need to preside over at least 2% annual growth in real per capita dpi to get more than 50% of the vote. Of course, that 2% figure has a large margin of error and is nothing more than a rule-of-thumb. Moreover, in a year when most states are considered safe for one party or the other, I’m guessing that the only thing that really matters is the change in dpi in “swing” states such as Ohio. If I could find current dpi/capita statistics for Ohio, I’d risk predicting the election outcome. I cannot find those statistics, but I do see that the growth in the nation’s real annual dpi over the six months ending this February was just $163 per capita, or 0.6% percent. That is dangerously low for the incumbent.

I think many people deeply want to be asked for advice. This is a way to influence the world, to put one?s own stamp on things, to express oneself, to gain standing and self-respect– all without coercing or bribing people.

Hannah Arendt argued that ?politics?–debating policies with other people–was not just necessary; it was a positive good. ?In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.? To have beliefs is to be fully human. Yet unless we argue publicly for our positions, Arendt said, we can possess only shadowy, inarticulate views. For Arendt, the paradigm of ?politics? was a competitive struggle to get one?s opinions endorsed by the community. I think that answering a request for advice is an even better way to express oneself and find oneself.

I realize that we sometimes ask people for advice for dubious reasons. For example, we might ask a potential funder in order to glean information about how to win a grant, or we might ask a professor in order to flatter him and get a better grade. These are more or less corrupted forms of dialogue. But there are also many occasions in which both the soliciting and the giving of advice is genuine.

At the risk of sounding like a self-help book, I think there are ways to encourage people to ask you for advice:

The Jane Addams School in St. Paul, MN is important to me. In the summer of 2001 (when it was 102 degrees in the Twin Cities), I visited the school. As on most nights, there were scores if not hundreds of people present: mostly college students and neighborhood residents. The majority of people who live in St. Paul’s West Side are new immigrants and refugees (Somalis, Hmong, and Latin Americans). I observed a staff meeting and then participated in a project, the “Hmong Circle.” We tutored Hmong immigrants to take the Federal citizenship test, and in return they told us about Hmong culture. I was so impressed with the buoyant, democratic, creative spirit of the place that I decided I wanted to start something similar in Maryland. When I found partners with similar motivations, we created the Prince George’s Information Commons.

Continue reading →

I’m at the University of Minnesota for a conference on public work and higher education. The schedule precludes blogging for today, but I hope to be able to file a report tomorrow.

Last fall, CIRCLE issued a call for groups of young people (adolescents, or people 20-25 who haven’t attended college) to study youth civic engagement, possibly in partnership with adult mentors. CIRCLE has the funds to support a few such projects. We are looking for genuine, high-quality research that really emerges from young people. We closed the competition some weeks ago and deliberated today about 75 applications.

Meanwhile, a different group of colleagues and I are in the last stages of planning our own youth-led research project–a study of geographical factors in our community that may influence healthy eating and exercise. Next Monday, 35 high school students will come to the University to discuss these issues and help us begin planning a series of mapping exercises that they will conduct. I have been spending a lot of my time working on issues like: how to rent a school bus, how much pizza to order, and where to get tape recorders with mikes.

It’s clear that our work is far from state-of-the-art. We adults have done too much of the planning before the kids arrive on Monday. However, I don’t know whether any of the true youth-led projects generate excellent research. There is presumably a tradeoff between research quality and youth leadership. To get both at once would take time; you would need cadres of young people and an infrastructure for serving them (regular classes, meeting places, community partners, etc.). So I hope that we are at least on the road to doing work like that proposed by the best applicants to CIRCLE.