William Straus and Neil Howe proposed that history followed a generational cycle, with an alternating sequence of Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist generations, each representing people born within 20-year periods. They started their story in 1433 and carried it through at least 2014, when the last of Generation Z will be born. Their evidence was mostly a series of examples of people who exemplified the ostensible spirit of their generation. They also proposed a logic for why the cycles would recur.

The danger is selection bias. For 2,000 years, physicians convinced themselves that leeches cured disease by sharing stories of patients who were bled and then improved. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis put that practice to scientific test, using what he called the “numerical method,” and found that it did not work. The essence of the “numerical method” is to create an appropriate sample and then look for the predicted patterns.

The Straus/Howe hypothesis says that all else being equal, a person is more likely to have the attributes of a “Prophet” (per their definition) if that person was born within a time span when prophets predominated–e.g., between 1945 and 1964. One’s generation should be a statistically significant predictor of one’s public character, even controlling for gender, race, education, class, region, religion, parents’ opinions, etc. Moreover, one’s generation should be a better predictor than one’s birth year: in other words, people should come in 20-year blocs divided by what Straus and Howe called “turnings.” Someone born in 1966 should more closely resemble an individual born 19 years later (since they are both Xers, who are Nomads) than someone born one year earlier.

Here is a proposal for how to test the hypothesis. The American National Biography is a reference book that describes 17,400 notable Americans. I would take a random sample of those entries and conceal their names, gender and race, and birth year. I would ask several people to read their brief bios and code them as Prophet, Nomad, Hero, or Artist. I would check the consistency of coding and retrain coders until they could reach the same conclusion at least 80% of the time. I would then add a dummy variable for generation and see whether there was a statistically significant relationship between that variable and the coding. Finally, I would control for at least gender, race/ethnicity, and birth year to see if any relationship survives (or emerges).

The Straus/Howe theory has enough plausibility–and a vast enough following–that it seems to deserve a test. I don’t want to do it, so the idea is available for anyone ….

Introducing the eJournal of Public Affairs, a free, online, peer-reviewed journal published by Missouri State University and affiliated with the American Democracy Project:

Although the title makes it sound as if this journal would cover any topic related to policy or politics, it is focused on “the following themes”:

• Considerations of citizenship and what it means to be a citizen, including global citizenship and eCitizenship
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, problem solving, and leadership related to citizenship and civic engagement
• Assessment of civic-engagement projects
• The relationship between social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and civic engagement

The journal is accepting submissions. With many colleagues, I’m on the editorial board.

A classic view of government presumes that its job is to make and enforce laws. If you break the law, agents of the government are allowed (with due process) to force you, if necessary at gun point, to surrender property, liberty, or even life. On this view, government is different in kind from other institutions. Further, it ought to be kept sharply distinct. Blurring the border around the government is dangerous because too much coziness between government officials and other people encourages corruption (which is the private exploitation of governmental power), and because other institutions would be distorted if they were too closely implicated with government.

This theory of government supports a range of reforms and safeguards. Separation of church and state keeps the government from remaking religion in its image. Ethics rules are often about preventing exchanges of goods and favors between government and private persons. Open meeting laws suggest that the government should not consult with members of the public except in public, where the interaction can be monitored.

An entirely different view shifts from government to governance. Here, the idea is that we govern by shaping our common world. Law is one instrument for that, but law is not sharply different from norms and incentives. Law isn’t merely executed by government; without broad and active popular support, it becomes a dead letter. Besides, government is not unitary. It comes in layers and separate offices and agencies. No part of government monopolizes any kind of power. In the end, government is a bunch of people, and they are not sharply distinguishable from other people. They usually wear several “hats” (legislator and parent, for example). Public employees appropriately act as organizers and entrepreneurs within agencies and routinely cross the line between government and non-government to get things done.

According to this view, the narrow definition of government is analytically unhelpful and encourages the wrong kind of reforms. Far from driving a wedge between government and society, we should encourage porous borders and collaboration. Public officials should learn to form partnerships and should support civic groups. AmeriCorps lets people work for a time as quasi-public employees so that they can take a private perspective into the government and vice-versa. Instead of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) that erects barriers whenever federal agencies wish to hold a meeting, we should enact what Lisa Bingham proposes: a Collaborative Governance Act that “authorize[s] agencies to use public participation and collaboration much differently, much more, and a lot earlier in the policy process.”

Government versus governance raises significant practical, definitional, and normative issues.

I probably spend 10-15 hours a week on the phone, and I like to do things that allow me to concentrate on the conversation–activities that fill enough of my brain that I am not tempted by distractions like email. My latest habit is to zoom to some exotic place on the Google world map, open the Streetview function, and go walking or driving along.

Most of the world’s poor cities don’t have Streetview, although they do have lots of “panoramio” photos, which are almost as good. It’s no surprise that you can’t go for a virtual Google tour of Tehran or Pyongyang. A few cities in the Global North, such as Athens, seem strangely missing. But cities as diverse as São Paolo, Cape Town, Sydney, and London can be fully explored. One can also meander down country roads in France or move back and forth across the US-Mexico border without slowing for immigration.

Sometimes ghostly human figures appear close up. Sometimes you follow a car or truck for a few blocks. Often streets are eerily empty. Every place is still.

The zoom function is logarithmic, I think: each step moves you ten times closer. That suggests that the world is far smaller than it really is. You can walk around Beijing for a while in Streetview, get bored of its ranks of concrete high-rises, zoom out a few notches, and plunge back down in Tokyo’s Ginza district as if the two cities were neighbors. Google Streetview also makes the world somewhat more uniform than it really is. Downtown areas of big cities in Brazil, Australia, and Europe all look fairly similar. I suspect if one could hear and smell those locations, feel the air, and see the sky, they would seem dramatically different.