Category Archives: deliberation

pay-for-success in government

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Let’s say you represent a program that would really save the government money as well as serving a social need. For instance, your program can cut the number of felonies, thereby saving $31,000 per person/per year in incarceration costs while reducing human suffering and injustice.

You’d like to ask the government for funds. You can’t get money from the executive branch at any level, because government budgets are committed to specific current activities, such as incarcerating a predicted number of inmates or fielding a certain number of police officers. Most agencies lack discretionary budgets for prevention, even if an investment would save them money later.

You could get funding from a legislative appropriation, but legislatures are not well set up to distinguish between truly effective preventive programs and those that just lobby well. In a crowded environment with tight budgets, your odds aren’t especially good.

You could offer the executive branch a contract that would commit the government to pay you from the savings that you actually achieve later on. They could measure the size of the savings using the most rigorous methods, such as random control groups. Then they could afford to pay you out of the savings in their planned budgets in future years.

But how can you operate your program until you deliver the savings and get paid? That apparent conundrum may have an answer: private third parties could invest in your program and get their money back–with a profit–once the government pays you for saving it money.

This is the pay-for-success model. Last week, we heard about it at a Tisch College panel with Jeffrey Liebman of the Harvard Kennedy School (the intellectual leader of this movement, who also provides technical support to governments); Molly Baldwin, Founder and CEO of Roca Inc., which has a pay-for-success contract to cut incarceration among highly at-risk young men in Massachusetts; Jeff Shumway of Social Finance, who sets up these deals; and Brian Bethune of the Tufts Economics Department and a Tisch College Faculty Fellow for 2015-16.

The evidence seemed compelling that Roca will save Massachusetts money while helping young men get on a better track. But I am a civic engagement/democratic participation guy, so I am supposed to ask, “Where are citizens in all of this?” I would say the following:

First, pay-for-success is value-neutral. It is an efficiency measure that could be used for a wide range of purposes. A dictatorship could use it to round up human rights protesters more effectively. Reducing incarceration in Massachusetts sounds much better than that, yet it could possibly legitimize the prison system. I don’t really agree with that critique, but I would acknowledge that any social intervention is a value choice. As such, it should be informed and reviewed by the public.

We already have the power to elect the high officials who preside over Massachusetts’ state government. But an election presents a binary choice (the Republican or the Democrat), which is a crude device for influencing subtle choices, such as whether to fund Roca, Inc. We can lobby and advocate on such matters, but there is an inevitable tendency for most advocates to be biased by self-interest or strong ideology. So we need more deliberative forms of civic engagement that get a wider range of people involved in making difficult value choices.

But increasing civic engagement seems fully compatible with using a pay-for-success model to get the government’s own job done. In fact, pay-for-success is wonderfully transparent. If citizens are asked to pay for 10,000 jail cells, we have no way of knowing how that will affect crime, safety, or fairness. But we can review the Roca, Inc. agreement and decide whether it offers what we want. And we don’t pay a dime unless it delivers.

A different question is how citizens should be involved in the programs themselves. I would hypothesize that in general, programs that produce good results have been designed and built through collaborations that involve the affected communities. Social policy is not like medicine, where chemical compounds that were invented in labs can cure (some) diseases in the real world. Social interventions operate in complex contexts with lots of conflicting values and interests, so they typically work only if they have been co-constructed. That is true, by the way, of Roca; Molly Baldwin emphasized that youth in the program have influenced its design.

Finally, if you want a robust democracy, one element has got to be a reasonably effective government that is capable of delivering what the people choose after due reflection. Eighty years after the New Deal, the US welfare state is not well designed for that purpose. It can’t, for example, make sensible investments in prevention. Even when it pays for activities that should have preventive effects (such as education), it doesn’t pay for success; it just funds the activities, some of which are ineffective. So I believe that pay-for-success is one step toward restoring confidence in government as the people’s instrument. Confidence is not an end in itself, but it is an important means to reengaging citizens in public life.

But see also: “qualms about a bond market for philanthropy”, “can nonprofits solve big problems?” and “innovation and civic engagement.”

Peter Railton on why meetings are essential

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The American Philosophical Association’s John Dewey lectures are autobiographical remarks by senior philosophers who draw lessons from their whole lives as scholars and people–much in the spirit of Dewey. University of Michigan Professor Peter Railton exemplifies the genre with his 2015 lecture, Innocent Abroad: Rupture, Liberation, and Solidarity, which is a wonderful reflection on a life of thought integrated with action.

What I want to quote is his defense of “meetings,” which is strikingly similar to the arguments I offer in We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. Railton writes:

Oscar Wilde is still right—because the cost of building a society where the people have more say in how their lives are run is still many, many meetings. What is a meeting, after all, but people deliberating together with a capacity to act as a group that is more than just a sum of individual actions, and this sort of informed joint action is a precondition for significant social change. Come together, decide together, act together, and bear the consequences together. We must own our institutions or they will surely own us. As Aristotle told us, one becomes a citizen not by belonging to a polity or having a vote, but by shouldering the tasks of joint deliberation and civic governance. And there is no civic or faculty governance, no oversight of discrimination in hiring and promotion, no regulation of pollutants, no organization of faculty or students to initiate curricular reform, no mobilization by professional associations to protect their most vulnerable members or to promote greater diversity, no increased humaneness in the treatment of animals and human subjects, no chance to offset arbitrariness and bullying within offices and departments, no oversight of progress and revision of plans in response to changing circumstances, without actual people who care spending long hours in the work of planning, meeting, and making things happens. The alternative is for all these decisions to be made at the discretion of those on high—or not at all. …

Of course, I am using ‘committees’ and ‘meetings’ as stand-ins for countless forms of joint deliberation and action. It needn’t fill the streets with banners or occupy buildings—sustainable activism is the work of a lifetime, not just of youthful bravado. What most impresses me about the activism of today’s youth is that it persists, indeed, flourishes, in countless ways that are more integrated with the ways of working of the world. As I look around me from the vantage point of Philosophy, I see colleagues and students investing countless hours trying to enhance the inclusion of women and other under-represented groups, or to build collective bargaining for graduate student instructors and term lecturers, or to reach out beyond the university to promote equitable trade, or to support humane and ecological practices in agriculture, or to bring new resources to under-served communities. These efforts involve personal sacrifice, and often made by those within the academy whose positions are the least secure. Moreover, they are making these sacrifices without a movement at their backs, or a Zeitgeist to buoy them from below. So it behooves those of us who are more secure to revive our spirit of activism. To lend a hand, and to use whatever leverage we might have to provide badly-needed support.

I agree with every word above. I’d only add that opportunities to talk, listen, and work with fellow citizens have weakened. The proportions of Americans who said that they attended community meetings, worked with neighbors to address problems, and belonged to organizations fell between 1975 and 2005.

These trends were not accidental but reflected intentional moves to sideline citizens. For instance, jury trials were replaced with plea-bargaining. The proportion of Americans who served on public boards declined by about 75 percent during the second half of the twentieth century, due to consolidation of local governments and the replacement of lay bodies with professional managers. The decline of unions meant many fewer union meetings and collective bargaining sessions; it also meant that labor was no longer a force that could demand public discussion of issues.

It follows that democracy not only takes a lot of evenings. It also requires a fight for the right to use our evenings to govern ourselves–against people who would rather govern us.

a method for mapping discussions as networks

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Two Quebecois scholars, François P. Robert and Pierre Mongeau, have developed a valuable method for modeling the “socio-semantic network” formed when people discuss an issue.* I can envision this method used to assess deliberations, to give real-time feedback to moderators during conversations, and even to reveal patterns of discussion in fictional texts as a contribution to literary criticism.

The article is in French and it uses a lot of terminology from network analysis, so unless you already know how ideas like “directed degree centrality” are expressed in French, you may find it hard going. Since I worked my way through it, I will provide relatively extensive notes below. But here is the shorter version:

Individuals form a social network if they know one another. Each link is a relationship, such as an experience of having talked one-on-on together. Meanwhile, individuals form a “socio-semantic network” if they use the same or highly similar phrases in a conversation on a common theme. “Each word or phrase that two people use in common is a link.” They need not know each other to have a socio-semantic link.

The social relations among people and their socio-semantic networks are different but not necessarily independent. One could affect the other. For instance, we might find that people who are central in a social network disproportionately affect the ideas that are expressed throughout that network. Their prestige may give them influence. Or we might find that people who express ideas that are frequent in the network become more socially central: holding popular ideas may give them prestige.

Robert and Mongeau involved 95 Montreal residents in discussions of a public policy topic: college tuition. Some of these discussions occurred in a large group using formal procedures. (I imagine Robert’s Rules or some variation thereof.) Other discussions occurred in small groups that were less rule-guided.

Some participants knew each other before the experiment. The authors identified all the social links that existed before the deliberation and also found out who had talked to whom during the event. They could thus chart the changing social network of the participants. Meanwhile, the authors asked participants to write about the issue both before and after the deliberation, collected the writing produced during the discussions, and looked for similarities of phrases between pairs of participants. That allowed them to chart the changing socio-semantic network of the group.

They found: “The conventional method [a large group deliberation using formal rules] favors the emergence of a link between social centrality and socio-semantic centrality, while the alternative method [small group discussions] favors the emergence of a negative relationship between these measures.” Apparently, in large group discussions, people who are socially central—knowing many others or interacting with them one-on-one during the meeting—increasingly dominate the views expressed by all the participants. But “in the alternative deliberative format that uses discussions in small groups, the emergence of differences is promoted by providing a space for expressing views different from those of the socially central people.”

The authors draw a lesson for organizers of events. “In practical terms, these results suggest that it would be advantageous for a democratic organization to first use alternative methods so as to promote the expression of a diversity of views and then to continue the deliberation in a conventional manner (like that prescribed in codes of procedure) to develop consensus positions.”

Maybe–although the design of deliberative formats involves more criteria that these. I am more interested in the methodology, because I believe it could be developed and applied for other purposes. To me, the fact that opposite results emerged from different kinds of deliberation validates the method, especially since the authors have a plausible explanation for the patterns they found.

* François P. Robert and Pierre Mongeau, Caractéristiques sociosémantiques des méthodes conventionnelles et alternatives de deliberation, Revue internationale comminucation sociale et publique, no 12, Dec. 2014, pp. 101-120

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diagramming Sarah Palin’s Iowa speech

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Northeastern political scientist Nick Beauchamp has developed a remarkable, free tool (Plot Mapper) that identifies keywords in a stream of text and plots them on a two-dimensional plane. The words are placed automatically but meaningfully (using a form of principal components analysis), and a line traces the order in which the ideas unfolded over time.

Beauchamp’s analysis of the 2015 State of the Union was covered in the Washington Post. He demonstrated the neat arc of the president’s rhetoric:

I wanted to try the tool, so I looked around for another recent speech that might contrast with the SOTU. Sarah Palin’s Iowa speech has been widely panned on the right as well as the left, being called a “tragedy”–or at least “an interminable ramble.” I pasted the text into Plot Mapper and this is what I got:

Screen Shot 2015-01-27 at 11.37.14 AM

I actually think the quality gap between these two texts is a little obscured by this form of analysis. “America,” “country,” and “people” seem to play similar roles in both speeches. We also see an actual organizing structure to Palin’s words: she moves from nationalism through right-populism (real people are conservative) to conclude with the local (veterans in Iowa). Finding such an arc may be giving the speaker a bit too much credit. Nevertheless, the tool has enormous potential for comparing discourse. I’d be especially interested in using it to analyze how people affect each others’ ideas when they deliberate.

Charlie Hebdo, American academia, and free speech

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David Brooks begins today’s column: “The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.”

It’s critical to distinguish between two questions: 1) How should I (or a small group) manage a forum of communication that is under my or our control? and 2) What rights do people have to run their own fora?

A forum might be a newspaper or a magazine, a course, a speaker series, a website, or the wall outside my office. If I (either alone or with colleagues) am responsible for that forum, then I must decide how it should be run. It can be an open forum in which anyone may post anything. But that is a choice, not an obligation, and often it’s a bad one. I much prefer the edited and curated homepage of the New York Times to an unmoderated chat. Assuming we choose to manage a space, we must make constant decisions about what and whom to include and exclude. It is appropriate to consider questions of relevance, quality, impact on various people, diversity, consistency, fairness, and more.

A society, however, should not be a forum with one set of rules and values. It should include an enormous array of quasi-autonomous fora under many different managers, rules, and value-systems. Individuals and voluntary groups should have very extensive rights to create and run their own fora in their own ways.

Thus there is no contradiction at all between saying (a) I would rather not post an anti-Islamic cartoon on my website or invite an anti-Islamic speaker to address my class, and (b) the cold-blooded murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff was a fascistic assault on human rights and liberty. These are actually closely related ideas, because both stem from the fundamental principle that forums of communication must be plural and autonomous.

Thus I am not concerned or embarrassed that American academic institutions may be reluctant to invite inflammatory anti-Muslim speakers. That’s a reasonable judgment by the organizers of those particular fora.

One thing that does worry me is the gradual evolution of each American university from a plural array of fora into a singular forum. In some ideal world, a university would be a space in which tenured faculty and students can exercise a high degree of free speech, creating their own mini-fora: diverse classes, speaker series, associations, and publications. To be sure, certain aspects of the university–such as the annual commencement address–must be chosen by the institution and thus must be governed by uniform criteria and processes. But in a healthy university, those centralized fora do not crowd out all the diversity.

I see increased centralization of control over a university’s discourse and inquiry, due to: the influence of external donors, the severe shortage of tenured positions, the rising share of contingent faculty, IRB review, multiplying layers of administration (so writes an associate dean for research), increasingly sophisticated PR efforts, and the growing role of metrics and assessments. Campus speech codes and other explicit regulations of speech may also play a role–and I am skeptical of these interventions–but I don’t think they represent the main threat to pluralism.