patenting smart water?

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In a New York Times op-ed today, Charles Fishman argues that we should use the current severe drought to improve how we manage and distribute water, potentially achieving vast efficiencies. When I was in Israel recently, my group visited a startup company called TaKaDu that analyzes data already collected by water utilities and allows them to identify leaks, leading to impressive savings. We were taken to TaKaDu to investigate the problematic thesis that Israel is “Startup Nation.”* But my topic today is not Israeli entrepreneurship and Middle Eastern geopolitics–it’s the use of data to save water. TaKaDu made a strong case that immense amounts of water are wasted due to the failure to analyze available information. (Energy is also wasted in moving water that subsequently leaks.) We should do something about that. But to me as a political theorist, two aspects of their presentation seemed a bit troubling:

1. TaKaDu has a patent for their general approach of analyzing data on water and providing the information to their clients via a “user interface.” In other words, the US government has given them a monopoly on this whole approach. Their founder and CEO, Amer Peleg, was disarmingly candid in his response to my question about their patent, basically saying that it may be too broad for the public interest, but he got what US law allows him. Peleg said that no one else may use mathematical algorithms to analyze water utility data. A competitor would have to try something totally different, such as applying quantum mechanics to water. I don’t know if Peleg’s interpretation of the patent is correct, but if so, this seems like bad US public policy. TaKaDu will save money and water, but not as much as a field of competing firms would save.

2. Peleg said that big water authorities were the best clients of TaKaDu, whereas the myriad small water boards typical of the US were poorly positioned to take advantage of data. They have too little data and not enough money to invest in efficiencies. This is interesting because my hero, the late Elinor Ostrom, achieved her original insights about the value of decentralization and amateur leadership by studying water boards. She showed that a vast number of hyper-local, amateur-led, partially overlapping water authorities in Southern California did a better job of protecting a fragile aquifer than any corporation or bureaucracy could. Her model of an adaptive ecosystem of volunteers looks very different from Peleg’s ideal of big data applied to big problems. It’s possible that the two models could be combined, but that would require careful thought and due respect for the decentralized or “polycentric” traditions of local government.

*Mitt Romney invoked “Startup Nation” as an explanation of Israel’s economic lead over the Arab countries. But when we visited an extremely impressive Palestinian firm inside the West Bank–one that bends over backwards not to seem “political”–we learned that their whole future depends on a long-delayed decision by Israel to allow an access road to their site. Obviously, inequalities in power and resources are relevant here.

Making Civics Count: new book

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Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New Generation is a book co-edited by David E. Campbell, Meira Levinson, and Frederick M. Hess. The authors explore the civic development of adolescents from a variety of perspectives (they span a broad ideological spectrum but avoid predictable positions), and they consider all of the most significant subtopics, e.g., Michael Johanek on the history of civics and the traditional importance of school/community partnerships, Meira Levinson on diversity and civic education, Keith Barton on civics in ed. schools, Joe Kahne and colleagues on digital learning, Diana Hess on professional development for teachers, and Dave Campbell on private and religious schools–to name just some.

Yours truly has an argumentative chapter claiming that we’re doing OK at teaching kids about the constitution and the formal political system, but we need youth to learn how to participate in civil society.

Overall, this is the most current book on “civics” and, in my judgment, the most comprehensive and sophisticated.

the power of civic relationships

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Two friends have recently published HuffingtonPost articles that testify to the importance of civic relationships. I’ve argued that civic relationships form between people–not close friends or relatives–who talk, listen, and work together on public issues or problems, demonstrating a degree of loyalty (which means a commitment to collaborating with the other person, notwithstanding differences of interests and values).

Dorothy Stoneman, founder and CEO of YouthBuild USA (whose leadership programming we recently evaluated), writes:

Xavier Jennings, a graduate of the YouthBuild program sponsored by Mile High Conservation Corps in Denver, funded by the Department of Labor, vividly described the difficulties of his life living in public housing with his grandmother who was sick with heart disease and had lost her food-stamps because she could no longer travel to renew them. Surrounded on the streets by opportunities to make money selling drugs, he entered the lifestyle, got in trouble with the law, and was expelled from school. Nobody moved to help him, until a friend told him about YouthBuild, where he could earn money building affordable housing in the neighborhood while earning his diploma and preparing for college. A way to earn money, a diploma, and skills, sounded good. He joined.

He described a transformative moment that occurred in the first couple of weeks. He went with a crew of YouthBuild AmeriCorps students to renovate the back yard of a senior citizen. She didn’t welcome them warmly. He was sure their baggy pants caused her to stereotype them. But after the young people had restored her yard, she came out the back door with tears in her eyes, carrying a tray of cookies she had just made for them, thanking them from the bottom of her heart. Xavier also began to tear up, experiencing for the first time appreciation and respect rather than blame and rejection, from the same woman who seemed to scorn them when they arrived. That moment triggered his decision to seize the opportunity to turn his life around and become a person who helped others.

And Harry Boyte, National Coordinator of the American Commonwealth Partnership, writes with  graduate student Hunter Gordon:

Grant Stevensen, former president of ISAIAH, a broad-based community organization in the Gamaliel Foundation network for which Obama worked 30 years ago, directs faith-based organizing for MN United. He thinks polarizing politics reflects patterns that are hard to break. “There used to be mediating institutions like union locals, neighborhood schools, PTAs, or congregations where people interacted with a lot of diversity. Now we’ve lost them. People’s public identities are thin. I think that’s why they are held to so strongly.”

But campaign organizers knew polarizing politics had been proven ineffectual by a string of defeats. “There was a lot of soul searching” about changing the approach, said one. Stevensen believes that “just about every aspect of our life drives us away from relationship and deep conversation, but we are very frustrated with being ‘talked at’ by campaigns. For starters, in developing a more people-centered politics, MN United talked to people on the other side to find out why they opposed gay marriage — for the first time in any of the controversies.

They discovered that the language of “rights” and “benefits” and “discrimination” used in earlier efforts had done little to change undecided voters. They also discovered that faith communities were full of diverse views on this issue — and none of the earlier efforts had organized among them.

New York City Councilmember Brad Lander on participatory budgeting

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Here is Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) describing his own foray into participatory budgeting. (“Participatory budgeting” means recruiting deliberative groups of citizens to allocate capital spending on behalf of a government.) Lander does a nice job of presenting both the advantages and the limitations of this strategy. His is just one of 15 talks from “Frontiers of Democracy II” that are now online. They are wonderfully diverse in topic, format, and style, but all are concerned with engaging citizens in solving our most grievous problems.

the nucleus of our society (on Paul Ryan, liberals, and We the People)

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The nucleus of our society, of our economy, it’s not government, it’s us, it’s We the People, it’s the individual, it’s the family, it’s those of us who live in Racine, in Janesville, all across this state.

— Rep. Paul Ryan at a Racine Tea Party Rally (transcribed from here)

I agree with Ryan that some forms of liberalism or progressivism are excessively state-centered. For instance, in a recent post, I argued that the individual reader drops out of Martha Nussbaum’s work; the government is her only agent of justice, her only guarantor of rights and capabilities. Nussbaum says (in effect) “there should be a government that protects rights”–without explaining how we are going to get such a thing. If she implies a responsibility for us (her readers), it’s limited to forming correct opinions about the rights that individuals should bear and then voting for the policies and politicians that will deliver those rights.

That’s an example from high theory, but when I served on two 2008 Obama campaign policy committees, I observed that liberal policymakers and policy wonks also have little appetite for public participation and voice.

Thus I agree with Ryan that the nucleus of any democratic society is its people, and the government is just one tool among many. But note how Ryan equates “We the People” with individuals and families. It’s reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s remark that “there is no such thing as Society.” Libertarian-leaning conservatives, just like state-centric liberals, see only two things in the world: governments and individuals. They disagree about the relationship between the two sectors, but both miss the role of collective civic or political action. Collaborative action is the role of “We the People.” In turn, the government ought to be one of our collaborative projects.

To be fair, Ryan has said (through his official Twitter account), “Limited, effective government should do what it does well, not suffocate the economy and crowd out civil society.” Possibly he holds a robust conception of civil society to complement his economic theory. But classical libertarians and the Supreme Court, in Citizens United, view civil society simply as a collection of private voluntary groups, defined by their independence from the state. The Court has defined corporations not as people–that’s a myth–but as associations, thereby eliding the difference between markets and civil society. I suspect Ryan shares the same view. The missing alternative is civil society as the domain in which We the People deliberate and solve public problems together, choosing when and whether to use the state as our tool. One of the most eloquent proponents of that view has been Barack Obama, at least in his pre-presidential writings and speeches.