bloggers remember what they wrote when the Iraq war started

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Blogging was still pretty new in March 2003, but I was already at it. This week, on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, veteran bloggers have been reviewing their own opinions when it started. (See, e.g., contrasting posts by Jonathan Chait and James Fallows). Reflection is a valuable activity because we ought to learn from mistakes. I don’t find a strong statement for or against the invasion on my blog, probably because I was a bit conflicted–and also, I rarely opine on anything unless I think my professional work gives me a comparative advantage that I ought to share. But I did post this on March 31, 2003, and it brings back vivid memories:

We’re back from a week in Greece. This is a civic/political blog, not a personal diary, so I will refrain from describing our many adventures. I can, however, file a report on how the current war looks from Greece. A few vignettes:

  • We’re staying in the medieval walled village of Kastro, on the island of Siphnos—at the opposite side of the island from the port. It would seem to be a remote and isolated spot (especially during the off-season, with all ferries cancelled because of gale-force winds), far from the world and its troubles. But when we go upstairs to answer the phone in our landlords’ apartment one morning, the whole family is weeping (quite literally) at al-Jazeera’s coverage of the first marketplace bombing in Baghdad. The father clutches his chest and says, “My heart is black, black. Bush—this all for money.”
  • A repeated scene, replayed in every taverna, coffee shop, ferryboat lounge, and hotel lobby we enter. A TV is on in the corner showing the al-Jazeera feed from Baghdad with Greek commentary that we can’t read, while Greeks, wreathed in cigarette smoke, sit watching and forming their opinions. These TV’s are often our only source of news, so we peer at the Greek text for clues about what is happening one time zone to the east, conscious all the time that everyone knows we are Americans.
  • Eating ice cream at the elegant cafe atop Lykavittos Hill, overlooking the Parthenon and hundreds of thousands of Greeks who are marching from Parliament toward the U.S. Embassy. We’ve picked this spot, in part, because we’re responsible for two kids whom we want to keep away from any rioting, and we don’t think that the marchers will possibly try to ascend Lykavittos. Chants, unintelligible to us, float up from the Athens streets.

And now we’re back. Time always seems to slow while you travel, or expand like a fan with all the details of each day still clear in your mind. It seems forever since you left your usual life. And then you return to your routine, and the fan snaps closed. You feel that you were gone for just a dimly remembered day or two.

young people most positive about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam

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This surprised me:


Negative views of each of our recent wars rise with age. Under-30s are the least likely to say that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam were mistakes. This surprises me because young people voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008, when he was seen as the most antiwar of the major Democrats. In contrast, seniors voted for George W. Bush in 2004, for John McCain in 2008, and for Mitt Romney in 2012. Yet they are more likely to see Iraq and Vietnam as a mistake than the under-30s, and for Vietnam, there is a 27-point gap.

(I acknowledge that nine years have  passed since 2004. Today’s 18-29s were far too young to vote in that election, and some of today’s seniors were just 56. But still, the age pattern seems strong and almost monotonic.)

the new manipulative politics: behavioral economics, microtargeting, and the choice confronting Organizing for Action

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In the era of digital networks, you can enable waves of innovation and creativity by inviting people to form their own groups and contribute their own tools and culture. In the era of digital networks, you can also manipulate masses of people into doing what you want them to do by maintaining and exploiting a vast merged database of human activities, interconnections, and expressions.

These are warring impulses and rival temptations. Each is enabled by recent technology, but each also reflects a whole philosophy or worldview that makes it seem exciting and desirable. Since 2007, the Obama team has been pulled in both directions. The President’s new grassroots lobbying operation, Organizing for Action (OFA), could still go either way. I don’t think the administration and its friends recognize that they face a fateful choice, nor do they understand the dangers inherent in the new manipulative politics.

Barack Obama has a special affinity for decentralized politics, rooted in his years as a community organizer, and he was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the populist power of the new digital and social media. Back in May 2008, Steve Teles and I wrote:

While [Hilary] Clinton has depended for support on large-dollar donors and existing Democratic Party organization, Obama has shown an ability to mobilize thousands of citizens for his campaign. He has raised money from over a million people, and his Facebook page has 800,000 supporters.

It is precisely this network, which connects the Internet to the grassroots, that will need to be activated to counter the furious opposition to health care reform by supporters of the status quo. Obama should say in no uncertain terms that as soon as he is elected in November, he will immediately make good on his promise that his campaign is about what “we” can do. He should commit to turning his remarkable electoral machine into the most powerful mass movement for policy change since the civil rights movement.

After the election, the administration did not engage Obama’s grassroots base to counter the fierce opposition we had predicted. I lamented that lapse in a 2010 Huffington Post piece and many others also observed it. Lately, the President has explicitly called his failure to engage supporters his worst mistake, recalling that the “energy just kind of dissipated, and we were only playing an inside game.”

The energy of 2008 had many sources–including the simple desire to vote the Republicans out–but it was sustained by citizens who invented their own messages and built their own networks. Again, this strategy was enabled by new technologies (the Internet, smart phones, and social networking sites), but it also reflected a philosophy that gave its proponents morale and inspiration. They saw themselves as pushing power to the edges of the network.

The 2012 reelection campaign, however, was won by “backroom number crunchers,” analysts with access to a vast national database. According to Time’s Michael Scherer, they could “run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first.” (For more reporting on what Reid Cherlin called the “whiz-bang technologies and startup geniuses” of the Obama campaign, see this summary.)

All this was possible because we now conduct so many of our routine activities online, where they can be saved and tracked. What we buy, whom we know, and how we vote can all be entered into databases that are sold and merged. Meanwhile, behavioral economics, prospect theory, the latest marketing science, and popular works by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Cass Sunstein tell us that: (1) people’s behavior is predictable, but it does not depend on rational calculations of benefits versus costs; (2) we can get people to do what we want by subtly shifting messages or the way we frame choices; and (3) this is all good  because we can attain desirable social outcomes without paying people or threatening people to do the right thing. Governments needn’t ban or tax harmful products; they can “nudge” citizens into avoiding them. Campaigns don’t have to raise billions of dollars for broadcast ads, but can instead hire a few computer geniuses to target messages to people who think they want them.

Indeed, the Obama reelection campaign got its voters out, including (as we find) young voters–notwithstanding evidence that they were relatively unenthusiastic during the campaign. We found in October that about 15% of young people had been contacted by a presidential campaign, about 60% of those by the Democrats. The targeting was efficient: young African American women in Southeastern states got relentless attention, for example, and everyone received messages tailored to their interests. West Coast females in their forties heard from George Clooney because, as Scherer reports, the actor “had an almost gravitational pull” on women “likely to hand over cash.”

These skills have evident value to private corporations who (Suzy Khimm reports today) are courting the Obama campaign’s “young geniuses.” But deep in her story is an indication that the campaign’s success was at least partly a result of sharing power rather than micro-targeting voters:

Sam Graham-Felsen, the “chief blogger” of Obama’s 2008 campaign, found that private audiences were so willing to pay for his insights that he was able to leave his post-election job at Blue State Digital for the speaking circuit. But he wasn’t always sure that corporations were thrilled about following his advice. “I talked about the freedom I was given as a blogger to really speak with an authentic voice,” he says. “But the main hurdle is a lot of corporate audiences are terrified of giving up message control.”

Now the same techniques and skills are being handed over to a formally independent grassroots lobby, the OFA.

One problem with that effort is the source of cash. In the LA Times, Matea Gold reports, “Obama stayed for two hours at the Organizing for Action dinner, whose attendees included wealthy donors who had been asked to give $50,000 each. During meetings last month between the group’s leaders and top campaign fundraisers, the idea was floated to name those who raise $500,000 a year to an advisory board that would meet quarterly with the president.” My former boss Fred Wertheimer argues–and I agree–that “President Obama has set out on a dangerous and unprecedented path as he begins his second term in office. … As far as I know, this is the first time a president has outsourced an important responsibility of his presidency to a private sector organization that is financed by unlimited private funds and that is, in effect, operating as an arm of the presidency.”

But it’s not only the source of money that is troubling. OFA may bring to governance and advocacy the methods of data-mining, micro-targeting, and experimentally tested messages that helped the President win reelection. I understand that the center-left doesn’t want to disarm unilaterally, and if these techniques work, they probably must be used in some form. But they pose serious dangers:

  1. You can use people for what you need and then ignore them. The campaign was eager to mobilize young African American women in Southeastern states last fall. But what incentive has OFA to solicit their opinions now? They don’t have a lot of money to contribute, and most live in safe districts that are sure votes for or against the administration in Congress. OFA will turn its attention to donors and persuadable people in swing districts. But what kind of a social contract is that? You vote for someone so that he can ask someone else’s opinion after the election.
  2. A candidate can say different things to different people without being accountable for his overall positions. To be sure, that has always been possible behind closed doors, and the Internet has in some ways made it more difficult. Mitt Romney’s “47%” remarks went to audiences he didn’t expect. But that was a blatant error. Now candidates can subtly shade their messages to increase their impact on the specific target audiences without anyone noticing.
  3. A combination of money and high-tech expertise now confers power. It’s only a matter of luck if the good side happens to have more of those commodities. And even the good guys may be over-influenced by the people who provide their money and tools.
  4. Campaigns and governments can get people to do what they want without the accountability that comes from spending money or making and enforcing rules. For example, if the government compels everyone to buy a certain kind of insurance, its power is overt and can be challenged. But if it enrolls everyone in the insurance scheme and allows them to opt out, it appears to have created a choice. Yet behavioral economics predicts that lots of people will end up with the insurance. In that case, the government shapes behavior without appearing to have coerced anyone. Likewise, if you get a personalized message from George Clooney asking you to contribute to Obama, it all seems very optional and inoffensive until you realize that data-mining and cluster analysis predicted you would open your wallet at the mere sound of his name (while someone else heard from Jay-Z).

Microtargeting is like using drones: it’s great if you’re the only one who has them. Of course, it’s a lot better to be microtargeted than to be hit with a drone strike, but in both cases, the only decision-maker is the one with the machinery. Even if OFA makes effective use of the new data analytics to advance good causes between now and 2016, they must also consider whether these tools are a net benefit for democracy, and if not, what to do about that.

a mechanism to explain bias in political reasoning

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Here are some troubling examples summarized in a paper by Edward L. Glaeser and Cass Sunstein:*

  • Presented with evidence that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before 2002, liberals become more likely to agree with that thesis, and conservatives become less so. In other words, for conservatives, the information provoked a backlash (Nyhan and Reifler 2010).
  • Presented with the fact that President G.W. Bush did not ban stem-cell research, liberals did not shift their opinion but continued to believe that he had banned it (ibid).
  • Given the same information about nanotechnology, economic conservatives became more enthusiastic about the new technology and less favorable to regulating it, while economic liberals became more concerned about the technology and more supportive of regulating it (Kahan, 2007).

Glaesser and Sunstein propose two mechanisms to explain these phenomena. I will focus on one, which they call (in a mouthful of a phrase) “asymmetric Bayesianism.”

You reason in a Bayesian way when you use what actually happens to estimate the general probability of its happening. For instance, you reach blindly into an urn and pull out a black marble. You form the tentative hypothesis that the urn is full of black marbles: the probability of another black one is 100%. But after you have pulled out 10 black marbles and 10 white marbles, you adjust the probability to 50%. This is a reasonable and common way of thinking and is particularly fashionable in the early 2000s because computers are very good at it.

Humans, not so much. In the political domain, we generally want the probability to be a certain way. For example, as a liberal Democrat, I want Democratic presidents to do a good job, regulatory policies to work, and neoliberalism to fail. As we pull marbles out of the metaphorical urn, we use the ones that show the expected color to confirm our prior beliefs and strengthen our convictions. When some come out the wrong color, we forget them or dismiss them on various grounds. Ignoring an actual shiny white marble would be idiotic, but rejecting a third-party account of a subtle issue like Iraq’s WMD or Bush’s stem cell policy is easy. You just tell yourself that the messenger is biased or the case is exceptional and irrelevant. Thus, the more marbles we pull out of the urn–no matter their color–the more we shift toward our prior convictions.

As a social phenomenon, this is problematic. CIRCLE has been rigorously evaluating some specific innovations that were attempted during the 2012 election, and I will discuss those results later this spring. None was a slam-dunk success. But clearly, it is possible for public opinion to shift, because history is rife with change. Democrats may generally share certain biases today, but they all believed very different things 50 years ago. We need to understand more about what makes large groups learn.

On an individual level, the message is clear. Unless you want your brain to ossify and your vision to narrow, you must pay special attention to the marbles that come out the wrong color. People like me, who are generally sympathetic to the impulses behind European and South Asian social democracy, need to focus on this kind of awkward fact: South Korea’s mean income rose 10 times faster than India’s between 1950 and 2000, giving South Korea the 12th highest human development index in the world today, and India the 136th highest (out of 187), despite the fact that their baselines were about the same in 1950. From 1950-1980, India was a diverse and pluralist social democracy; South Korea was a corporatist dictatorship. Of course, that’s not the end of the story, and the moral is not to drop our moral objections to dictatorship. But it’s an example of an awkward-colored marble. We mustn’t reject that kind of data as exceptional or irrelevant but must actually use it to adjust our views.

*”Why Does Balanced News Produce Unbalanced Views?” (see its bibliography for other studies cited above).

the Tufts strategic plan sets a new standard for the engaged university

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Tufts University has undertaken a strategic planning process. The effort is interactive and collaborative, so no one can fully predict the outcome. But the organizers have released a document called the “Prelude to the Strategic Plan” and they invite comments.

I was one of many people who contributed to this draft by serving on a task force. The idea that most inspires me is the explicit move from the traditional triad of “research,” “teaching,” and “service” (with “service” always relegated to a distant third place) to a new trio of teaching, research, and “impact on society” (see p. 26). Impact implies actual consequences, not just service activities–and hence accountability for results. The new language also breaks down the traditional separation between academic work and service. The best way for a professor to have “impact on society” may be to conduct research and to teach. But if we promise to affect society, we will ask different questions about all our academic work.

Here are some important passages. The PDF provides embedded links after each section for comments.

Active citizenship is a core component of the Tufts culture across all campuses, and among undergraduates, graduate students, staff, faculty, and alumni. With the maturation of Tisch College, and the university-wide emphasis on impact, Tufts is positioned to extend its leadership in these key areas (p. 9).

The university should aggressively pursue multi-method opportunities to comprehensively assess the impact of the university on individuals and society. The results would not only be important in debates about the value of universities, but they would also help the university focus its resources on opportunities that have significant positive returns. … Individuals need to know that active citizenship and impact activities will be applauded, recognized, and rewarded in important ways (p. 9).

Active citizenship is about “knowledge-based ethical and purposeful action in support of, challenge to, or revision of the institutions of civil society.” …Active citizenship is an important part of a curriculum that integrates real world experiences. Students need to understand they are members of a complex social structure which in order to thrive must have contributions from all its members. Tufts has established engagement in this domain as core to its identity and to the experience of its students, faculty and staff (p. 14).

Assessment is a critical component of a Tufts education. … [There is an] opportunity to create comparative information about certain university-wide themes. Active citizenship, for example, is such a theme. Tufts will obviously not oblige all faculty to adopt such aims in their courses or, even if they do so, to do so in the same way, it may nonetheless be of interest to create comparable questions that allow for assessment of courses’ contributions to this area (p. 17).

Tufts should … ensure that the tenure and promotion criteria of all schools explicitly include metrics that capture the value of teaching and learning, research and scholarship and impact on society (p. 18)

To reflect citizenship as a defining feature of Tufts University, evaluation criteria can include the real world impact of research and scholarship. Where appropriate include assessment of the societal impact of the faculty member’s scholarship in addition to the assessment by one’s peers within one’s field (p. 24).

As a privileged seat of learning, contemplation, creativity and exploration, we embrace our public responsibilities of service and leadership. Through this, we are committed to enhancing our ability to have a positive impact on society, and to being accountable for doing so. That positive impact should improve the human condition and quality of life, in a just and equitable manner, while living within the limits of local and global ecosystems (p. 26).

In its Strategic Plan, Tufts will [replace] service with impact on society. Impact will include the previous elements of service, but will extend much farther to include a wide range of individual and institutional active citizenship (p. 26).

Impact is by no means limited to science and technology, but also includes the arts, humanities, and social sciences. … In the humanities and liberal arts, “impact” often takes the form of enriching public dialogue about important issues (pp. 27-8).

Looking ahead, Tufts can encourage the choice of new activities at all levels that plan for positive social impact. This requires that areas of intended institutional active citizenship should be actively communicated and promoted, embedding them as part of the University’s culture (p. 29).

Activities that do emerge or already exist need to be identified, tracked, measured and depending on their impact both internally and externally, and then be either promoted or pruned. Pruning is always difficult. A determination of which activities Tufts should promote or prune requires a comprehensive review of activities, taking into consideration the full range of both impact and cost (p. 29).

In addition to recognizing and rewarding present impact, it is important to invest in the professional development of our faculty, staff, and students, to bring societal impact, where appropriate, into the thinking around performance, promotion, and a holistic education. There are ways in which a standard of excellence as active citizens can be built into the faculty promotion system. (p 29)

Simply measuring practical outcomes does not equate with measuring impact. … How often published work is cited, for instance, is a proxy for its impact. While it can be tempting for the University to assess its impact in easily quantifiable and immediate ways, both this and more nuanced forms of measurement will uniquely distinguish Tufts from its competitors (p. 32).