Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz's weblog

I have literally had a computer since birth; the Internet came not long after that: I still remember email addresses supplemented by UUCP bang-paths. Hardly a day has gone by in which I haven’t checked my email for what must be a decade.

The Internet has kept me connected to people—as a child, all my best friends were online; as an adult, all my coworkers are. My jobs do not take place in an office; they take place over email, where time and place do not matter. The upside, is that I can go anywhere and still do them. The downside, is I cannot get away from them.

I need to take a break. My life has become entangled with technology and pressure that I hardly know any other way of life. So I’m planning to spend the month of June (June 6 to July 4, to be exact) offline. I’m packing up the laptop and the cable modem and sending them someplace far away. I’m going back to the world of paper and books.

Of course, my phone is now a computer too, so that will also have to go. I don’t have a landline, so if folks want to talk to me they’ll have to write letters (here’s my address). I (amazingly) don’t have any clocks or calendars, so I won’t even know what time it is. All of which means no more meetings or coordinating to hang out with people. I suppose people could call on me, but honestly, I wish they wouldn’t — at least at first.

I don’t feel like the kind of person who could survive on Walden Pond — I’m a finicky eater and not a huge fan of animals in any capacity. So locking myself in my apartment seems about as close as I can get. There will of course be the clerks at stores and people on the street, but for the most part I’ll be alone.

I’ve experimented with it a little — both my phone and my laptop have died recently — and it’s liberating. Walking down the street or waiting in lines, I find myself checking my phone compulsively, using it to send my mind to some other world of email or news. Without it, I feel grounded. And my laptop is even worse — a beckoning world of IMs to friends, brain-gelatinizing television shows, and an endless pile of emails to answer. It’s like a constant stream of depression. A day without it made me feel like I was human again.

I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans.

What if there’s an emergency? Has there ever been an emergency? The biggest urgent things seem to be that my servers go down. Which sucks, but I need to be able to walk away from that. If you have things hosted on one of my machines, contact me now and I’ll try to get you enough privileges that you can fix things if they break. If something’s really an emergency, I’m sure you’ll find me.

This Month in Sociology

A new study finds that marriage has been making people increasingly unhappy for the past 30 years. Even when they say they’re happy with their relationship, married people are unhappier overall. Indeed, the effect is so large that it cancels out the happiness gains the unmarried population has made in the past 30 years.

Meanwhile, in Portugal the police have been arresting whole neighborhoods and transporting them all to jail. Now prisoners can serve with their old family and friends.

Rich countries tend to be more accepting of minorities, while most strippers have terrible working conditions. Moving increases crime, the DUI gender gap is narrowing, and media coverage encourages sports hooligans. Young people are increasingly critical of war.

Blacks are moving back to the south, while dual citizenship is increasingly permitted. Ugandans educated at foreign colleges and universities are twice as likely to be employed as equally-educated Ugandans who never left and three times as likely to be employed as foreign-born immigrants.

How Policy Gets Made: A Primer

Barack Obama’s campaign was a model of efficiency and foresightedness. Bill Clinton treated his campaign plans like marketing documents, poll-testing each proposed new idea, and forcing his administration to only begin seriously thinking about what to do once they were in office. Obama, by contrast, started early and put together a series of policy teams even before the campaign had begun in earnest.

Each policy team had a different subject — technology, health care, foreign policy — and was led by a top ally or fundraiser in the field. Let’s take technology, since it’s the case I’m most familiar with. Julius Genachowski was named Chairman of the Technology, Media and Telecommunications policy working group. Genachowski was a Harvard Law School classmate of Obama’s who had gone on to become a chief executive at Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (market cap: $2.1 billion). He went on to become a venture capitalist and sit on the board of numerous technology companies.

He used his wealth (annual income: $1.6 million) and influence to become the leading Silicon Valley fundraiser for his old classmate — indeed, one of Obama’s top fundraisers nationally. As a result, he was the obvious pick to define Obama’s technology policy. Genachowski canvassed his fellow Silicon Valley business leaders for policy suggestions and his team synthesized the results into proposed policy documents. These proposals were circulated among a wider circle for further comments before being published on the campaign website.

After the election was won, the teams were reassembled as transition teams. Genachowski was again leading the technology team, now named the Technology, Innovation & Government Reform Policy Working Group (TIGR). It was staffed by old government hands, like Thomas Kalil (Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Technology and Economic Policy, rode out the Bush years as Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at UC Berkeley). Also brought out were business leaders, like Andrew McLaughlin (Head of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs for Google), and business-affiliated academic experts, like Susan Crawford (UMich law professor and a former partner at a DC law firm).

The teams worked on converting the policy documents from the campaign into instructions that would be given to federal agencies or executive orders the President could sign. They fleshed out campaign proposals, interviewed potential candidates for government positions, and held audiences with various interest groups. I visited DC during this period and got to see the aforementioned names at DC cocktail parties or the diner outside transition headquarters that became the informal meeting-place of the team. “It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life,” Susan Crawford told me, clearly relishing the challenge.

After the inauguration, the teams disbanded and their members either returned to private life or were named to the administration. Genachowski, who obviously had his pick of positions, was named chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Thomas Kalil became Associate Director of Science and Technology Policy. Susan Crawford became Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. McLaughlin went back to work at Google, where his connections to the new administration are no doubt invaluable.

A New Kind of Writing?

There are two kinds of nonfiction: science writing and journalism. Science writing is when you’re trying to explain an idea. You have a concept in your head and you try to get it across. There are lots of tools you can use to do this: you can give an example, you can tell the story of how you thought of it, you can draw a picture. But the concept is the important thing.

In journalism, you’re telling a story. Someone did one thing, which led to something else, which led to this other thing. Occasionally you pause to take a step back and make some larger point: the story might have some moral or illustrate some larger principle or lead you to a conclusion. But the important thing is always the story.

Of course, this is how science advances. Something weird happened over here, so we measured it carefully and took detailed notes. (These are the experimentalists.) When you put all these weird things together, they kind of fit a larger pattern. (These are the theorists.) The theory then leads to more experiments and the new experiments lead to more theory. You inch forward, bouncing between experiment and theory, journalism and science writing, to a larger understanding of the world.

But, of course, just as science requires both, the best science writing requires both. This is what makes This American Life’s show “The Giant Pool of Money” still so unsurpassedly brilliant. It took a question everyone wanted to know the answer to — why did the economy melt down? — and explained it not by just illustrating the concepts, as many science writers did, or just telling stories of the people involved, as journalists did, but by doing both, moving between the two modes so you could understand not just the theory but how it worked.

It seems like an obvious idea, especially when you lay it out this way, but I really can’t think of any other good examples. Take three of my very favorite books: Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes, Robert Karen’s Becoming Attached, and William Foote Whyte’s _Street Corner Society_¹. All are absolutely brilliant, among the best examples of the genre while conveying facts of incredible importance. Jackall is very cinematic: his book consists of well-chosen scenes and all the theory comes in the cuts between them. (As soon as I finished reading it, I wanted to turn it into a movie.) But the two — scenes and theory — exist in a weird sort of balance. Neither of them (with a few exceptions) really take over and drive the work the way both do in “The Giant Pool of Money” but instead they water each other down: the scenes are always illustrating a theory and the theory consists largely of scenes.

Karen embeds the theory within his story by telling the story of the theory’s development. Because he does this without condescension, it’s as good an introduction to the science as can be imagined. It’s a very clever technique, and a very powerful one (I certainly wouldn’t change it), but it’s a different one and doesn’t have the same power.

Whyte, by contrast, spends his book telling the story of one example. From it, he draws out all the important theoretical principles (basically inventing every major branch of sociology for the next century) but the theory is always illustrating his one story, just as Jackall’s scenes are always illustrating his theory.

Malcolm Gladwell probably comes closest to a genuine mixture of the two, but his work is marred by the fact that he kind of makes up all his science. His stories are never illustrating some established scientific principle or even a new one he has that he wants to stand up to scrutiny, but instead his principles are always invented ad hoc to serve his stories, with the same fidelity a typical This American Life episode has to its theme. As Ira Glass comments on “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg”: “the article could be half the length and still hit all its big ideas, and it’s only longer because Gladwell has found so many things that interest and amuse him, and that’s the engine that drives the whole enterprise. … pretty much everything in the story after section five is, to my way of thinking, just there for fun.”

As I’ve hinted at before, I’m hard at work on a book of my own, and of course I plan to write it this way. But surely I can’t be the first. Anyone else have any good examples?

UPDATE: I’d forgotten how good a book Fast Food Nation is. It follows almost exactly this style. In general, it seems larger books written by magazine writers might, since magazine articles (story, story, moment of reflection) are the building blocks of the form, but I’m still having trouble thinking of other examples. Outliers is much better than the other Gladwell books on this front.

I wanted to say Robert Caro’s The Power Broker for the alliteration, but Whyte really is a better example because he doesn’t study an extreme outlier. ↩

Investigative Strike Teams

Journalists get mad at bloggers: “Without real reporting, they’d have nothing to comment on!” Bloggers get mad at journalists: “There’s a reason nobody reads newspapers anymore. They’re dry and dull and wrong.” But the gap is shrinking: bloggers are doing more real reporting, journalists are getting more humanized (with all the digressions, opinions, and biases that entails).

So what if you paired an investigative reporter with a blogger? Reporters didn’t used to write their own stories. (Why would a good investigator be a good writer?) The reporter would be out in the field, knocking on doors and taking notes, which they’d hand to a writer at a desk, who would turn them into a coherent, vivid story. (Newsweek still operates this way.)

Replace the writer with a blogger. They’d post the story as it unfolded, capturing the excitement of discovery: the big breaks, the wrong turns, the moment when it all comes together. Like any talented blogger, they’d keep people coming back: What happens next? I want to know more! They’d keep up a conversation with readers and other bloggers, sharing new leads with the reporter. It’d be a powerful duo.

But blogging isn’t everything. You also want to recap the story so far: for those just tuning in, here are the characters, here’s what’s happened, here’s why it’s important. Keep a summary article alongside the blog and update it in tandem. It would lay out the whole story in one place, with links to particular posts or source documents for more information. That way everyone can always get an overview of the bigger picture — including the reporters.

You’ll also want a tech person around to help out. Many stories involve databases; you need someone to work with the reporter to parse and process the data, then work with the blogger to put the results online. And there are plenty of other times where a small program or some tech knowledge comes in handy.

And you’ll need a lawyer on staff. Getting information isn’t easy. You’ll need someone who can file FOIA lawsuits and respond to legal threats. Maybe you can even file lawsuits against corporate malefactors and obtain documents in discovery. Then work with pro bono lawyers or public interest law firms to win the lawsuit in its own right.

Lawsuits are needed because modern investigations can’t stop at publication. If there was an era when a front page Times story could stop a scandal, that era is over. Ending abuses requires action. This makes traditional journalists uncomfortable. They see their job as reporting the facts, not changing them.

We may always need the detached journalist interested only in The Truth, but there’s room for more. Just as journalism needs to become more humanized, it needs to become more activist. Journalists uncover outrageous things, which gets people outraged, but they seem to think channeling that outrage into something productive is someone else’s responsibility.

Instead, a good investigative team needs a political organizer. They can build an email list of people who get outraged by their reporting and use it, along with blogs and the lists of other political groups, to put pressure on the bad guys, fundraise for further journalism, and collect a team of volunteers. The volunteers can help with aspects of the reporting — a modern investigation can get much further by crowdsourcing certain tricky aspects and depending on talented volunteers for particular tasks. A good political organizer knows how to get and manage volunteers.

But to make your organizing maximally effective, you’ll need (gasp!) a lobbyist. They’ll meet with representatives to encourage them to hold hearings based on stories you’re working on, where they can subpoena documents and testimony. They’ll ask representatives to introduce bills to address the abuses you’ve uncovered and work with them on legislative strategy to get those bills passed. And they’ll team up with the political organizer to get constituents writing to their representatives in favor of these bills.

The only way to get good at something is deliberate practice: trying various things and seeing how they work. But when it comes to making change, that’s very hard to do. Change requires so many people and takes so long that it’s almost impossible to say for sure that your doing X helped accomplish Y. Which means that it becomes very easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re more effective than you are.

But if you have one team — some reporters, a blogger/writer, a techie, a lawyer, an organizer, and a lobbyist — together, they form an investigative strike team: uncovering corruption, exposing it, and effecting change. They can watch the whole process unfold from a reporter’s suspicion to a writer’s story to a legislative fix. And they can get better at it. It’d be a powerful combination. That’s the kind of future-of-news that I want to see.

Transparency is Bunk

Adapted from an impromptu rant I gave to some people interested in funding government transparency projects.

I’ve spent the past year and change working on a site, watchdog.net, that publishes government information online. In doing that, I’ve learned a lot: I’ve looked at everything from pollution records to voter registration databases and I’ve figured out a number of bureacratic tricks to get information out of the government. But I’ve also become increasingly skeptical of the transparency project in general, at least as it’s carried out in the US.

The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations.

The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government. If you visit a site like GovTrack, which publishes information on what Congresspeople are up to, you find that all of Congress’s votes are on inane items like declaring holidays and naming post offices. The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure.

So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what’s really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a “success”: an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before.

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

But this is nothing new. The whole history of the “good government” movement in the US is of “reformers” who, intentionally or otherwise, weakened the cause of democracy. They too were primarily supported by large foundations, mostly Ford and Rockefeller. They replaced democratically-elected mayors with professional city managers, which required a supermajority to overrule. They insisted on nonpartisan elections, making it difficult to organize people into political blocs. Arguing it would reduce corruption, they insisted city politicians serve without paying, ensuring the jobs were only open to the wealthy.

These are some dark thoughts, so I want to add a helpful alternative: journalism. Investigative journalism lives up to the promise that transparency sites make. Let me give three examples: Silverstein, Taibbi, Caro.

Ken Silverstein regularly writes brilliant pieces about the influence of money in politics. And he uses these sorts of databases to do so. But the databases are always a small part of a larger picture, supplemented with interviews, documents, and even undercover investigation — he recently did a piece where he posted as a representative of the government of Turkmenistan and described how he was wined and dined by lobbyists eager to build support for that noxious regime. The story, and much more, is told in his book Turkmeniscam. (His book Washington Babylon is similarly indispensible.)

Matt Taibbi, in his book The Great Derangement, describes how Congress really works. He goes to the capitol and lays out the whole scene: the Congressmen naming post offices on the House floor, the journalists typing in the press releases they’re handed, the key actions going on behind the scenes and out of the public eye, the continual use of emergency procedures to evade disclosure laws.

And Robert Caro, in his incredible book The Power Broker (one of the very best books ever published, I’m convinced) takes on this fundamental political question of “Who’s actually responsible for what my government is doing?” For forty years, everyone in New York thought they knew the answer: power was held by the city council, the mayor, the state legislature, and the governor. After all, they run the government, right?

And for forty years, they were all wrong. Power was held — held, for the most part, absolutely, without any checks or outside influence — by one man: Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. All that time, everyone (especially the press) treated Robert Moses as merely the Parks Commissioner, a mere public servant serving his elected officials. In reality, he pulled the strings of all those elected officials.

These journalists tackled all the major questions supposedly addressed by US transparency sites — who’s buying influence? what is Congress doing? who’s in power in my neighborhood? — and not only tell a richer, more informative story, but come to strikingly different answers to the questions. In this era where investigative reporting budgets have been cut to the bone and newspapers are folding left and right, it’s fallen to nonprofits like ProPublica and the Center for Independent Media and, from a previous era, the Center for Public Integrity, to pick up the slack. They’ve been using the Internet in innovative ways to supplement good old-fashioned narrative journalism, where transparency sites are a supplement, rather than an end-in-themselves.

For too long we’ve been funding transparency projects on the model of if-we-build-it-they-will-come: that we don’t know what transparency will be useful for, but once it’s done it will lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities. Well, we’ve built it. And they haven’t come. The only success story its proponents can point to is that transparency projects have bred even more transparency projects. I’m done working on watchdog.net; I’m done hurting America. It’s time to give old-fashioned narrative journalism a try.

A Non-Local Revolution

The first point — that tech startups collect in Silicon Valley — is certainly true, just like car companies all tend to cluster in Detroit. This is because of a feedback effect set off by some random initial condition: Shockley Semiconductor was started in Silicon Valley, so when its employees left to start their own companies they did so there, and so on. Now everyone in the industry moves to Silicon Valley because that’s where everyone else is.

This isn’t a new idea; it was a central topic in Paul Krugman’s research, for example, and even before that you can see similar ideas expressed by social theorists like Jane Jacobs. (For more information, see the Wikipedia article Business cluster, Krugman’s Geography and Trade, and Jacobs’ brilliant book The Economy of Cities.) Industries tend to cluster together.

The second — that startups represent a new economic phase — may also be true. It’s a rather more extreme claim, but it would be pretty cool.

But I don’t think it combines with the first to create a local revolution. It’s true, tech startups have generated a lot of wealth, but they’re far from the only kind of startup to do so. The amazing thing about the Internet is that it makes all sorts of startups possible.

Previously, if you wanted to start a newspaper, you had to buy a building and hire a staff and get some printing presses and a delivery service and an ad sales team and access to the wire services. Now you just start a blog, read the wire services online, and link to the stories you like.

Previously, if you wanted to sell a new kind of soap, you had to build warehouses and a distribution network and a shipping infrastructure and make deals with retail outlets. Now you have Amazon Fulfillment Services handle all the physical details and just advertise your product on the Web.

And new startups are helping this process along all the time. One Y Combinator startup tries to make things easier for food producers, another helps you run an online magazine. More are surely close behind.

It’s tempting to think that a soap company which only sold through the Internet would always be a small concern. But why should it be any different from Internet companies? Reddit was small when it started, but it quickly grew through word-of-mouth. Sure, we had some tough nights making things scale, but in the end we were able to ramp up to a site with millions of users.

Similarly, I met some folks in Brooklyn who started a small salsa company in their apartment. At first they made the salsa in their kitchen and sold jars through their bedroom window. As business picked up, they got a bigger space and started selling more. Now they’re manufacturing in scale and you can find them at Whole Foods. This worked because New York City was a big enough audience that they had room to scale up. The Internet is big in exactly the same way.

As the Internet is everywhere and everyone knows how to use it, why won’t we see online startups in every industry? And then why not all across the globe? It may make sense for tech startups to move to Silicon Valley, but does it really make sense for soap startups? For food startups? No, it seems more likely that each industry will cluster the way tech companies and car companies have.

Silicon Valley may have had the first wave, but the next one belongs to the world.

What Are Intellectuals Good For?

There was once an era where great men strode among us. The Intellectuals, as they were known, had an opinion on everything and would share it, at length, with elegance and verve. Unfortunately, the explosion of information beginning in the sixties rendered them all-but-extinct and the electronic transformation of the past few decades threatens to finish the job. Still, we can’t but admire them and their milieu.

This certainly seems to be George Scialabba’s position. The greatest working book reviewer — when the National Book Critics Circle inaugurated their Excellence in Criticism award, he was their first recipient — collects his reviews of these grand men’s work and a sampling of his own in his new collection, What Are Intellectuals Good For? The result is a delightful introduction to this world of ideas.

Scialabba’s own position is best summarized by his dedication: “For Chomsky, Rorty, Lasch.” In other words, he is a man of impeccable left-wing politics, a refusal to believe in any philosophical verities, and a deep skepticism about the benefits of Enlightenment progress. This is not exactly a popular combination — surely Chomsky and Ehrenreich have more fans than Rorty and Lasch — but it is a provocative one. And Scialabba’s genius is that he can make such counterintuitive ideas, expressed by such Olympian intellectuals, seem not just clear but common sense. A dedicated follower of the left-rationalist-progressive tradition, I had to continually catch myself from nodding along in agreement.

Recommended for anyone who’s a fan of the Intellectual Scene and the men and women who inhabit it.

The Logic of Loss

Imagine someone offered you a 1% chance of winning a million dollars. How much would you pay for it? The natural inclination would be to say you break even at 1% of a million, which is $10,000. Even if you could scrape together the cash, this doesn’t seem like a very good deal. After all, there’s a 99% chance that you’ll have just thrown away ten grand.

Where did we go wrong? The problem is that calculating the average value this way only makes sense if you get to take the deal enough times to expect an average result. If you bought a couple thousand of these chances at $9000 each, then you might start to come out ahead. But buying just one doesn’t seem very bright.

Of course, the same logic applies to more pedestrian examples of risk. It probably doesn’t make sense to invest in just one startup, even if the returns on startups are huge. That’s why VCs invest in large numbers of startups; the returns from the wins balance out the flops.

This should seem pretty obvious, but some people seem to forget it a lot. Take the St. Petersburg paradox. Imagine this game: A dollar is placed on the table and a coin is flipped. If the coin comes up heads, the money is doubled and the coin is flipped again. Tails, the game ends and you take the money. How much would you pay to play?

The paradox comes about because the naive answer here is infinite. There’s a 50% chance you get a dollar (=fifty cents), a 25% chance you get 2 (another fifty cents), a 12.5% chance you get 4 (again), and so on infinitely. But, naturally, it seems insane to pay a fortune to play this game. Thus the paradox.

Folks seem to be genuinely stumped about this, but it’s just the first offer taken to the limit: instead of a 1% chance of making a million, you have an infinitesimal chance of making an infinity. If you got to play the game an infinite number of times, shelling out cash might begin to make sense, but if you only play it once it’s not worth much.

Margo Seltzer

Margo Ilene Seltzer was born in rural, upstate New York. “I like to describe it as a place with more cows than people,” she later told an interviewer. In her small town, she excelled in math and science, but wasn’t sure that this would translate when she began attending Harvard for college in 1979.

Graduating in 1983, she studied Applied Mathematics, with a computer science concentration. She took some time to work in industry before going to graduate school in Computer Science at Berkeley in 1988. Her dissertation, completed in 1992, was on “File System Performance and Transaction Support” and found that, due to the costs of garbage collection in most real-world uses, log-structured filesystems in the literature were not any faster than read-optimized filesystems.

At the time, Berkeley’s CS department was excitedly developing BSD, writing free replacements for all the Unix utilities. They needed a replacement for ndbm, the prominent Unix database manager, and hsearch, its hash search function, and Margo had just finished taking a database course. She decided to apply her new skills by writing hash for BSD. Someone else wrote btree and they both ended up getting packaged together as db185, which shipped with BSD 4.4.

BerkeleyDB, as it became known, was used in many places but among them was the University of Michigan LDAP server. Netscape built upon this server for their own directory product but found that since bsddb didn’t support transactions, multiple concurrent writes could lead to corrupted data. They noticed that Margo had once written a paper on the subject of adding transactions and gave her a call. It was 1996.

She said that it was simply academic work and wasn’t ready for use in production. They asked if she could get it ready for production. They could pay, they reminded her. It was the first time she’d ever done anything like this for pay, but she gathered together some friends and founded a company to make the product for Netscape. They relicensed it from BSD (which allows anyone to integrate it) to their own GPL-style license which would allow them to continue to separately charge Netscape for using it. Their company was called Sleepycat, and Margo was its CTO.

The company was a major success, with BerkeleyDB being used in everything from SQL databases to behind-the-scenes at Amazon and Google. In 2006, as Oracle was acquiring all the open source database companies, they acquired Sleepycat and Margo went to work for Oracle.

At the same time, however, she was pursuing a parallel career in academia. In 1992 she became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. She became an Associate Professor in 1997, was named Gordon McKay Professor in 2000 and received tenure, occasioning a Crimson editorial on how a woman “beat all the odds”. From 2002 to 2006, she was also Associate Dean. A widely-respected professor in the field, she’s published over a hundred papers and served on numerous committees.

She is also noted as an inspiring teacher. She received two awards, Roslyn Abramson and Phi Beta Kappa, for excellence in teaching. And her course receives a 4.9 out of 5 in student ratings. Computer science students around campus often remark with surprise at how open and welcoming she is to young students as such a famous and respected professor.

Nor has she sacrificed her family, taking her children with her to the office and reserving time to spend with them at home.

A standout in so many ways, it seems the one struggle left is finding a new struggle. “Now that the pressure’s off,” she told a reporter, “I’ve started to ask myself: What’s my next goal? I won my black belt in karate a year ago. I’ve got tenure, a wonderful family, and a thriving business. It’s time to figure out what’s next.”

Who Really Rules?

Who Really Rules?, by G. William Domhoff, is one of my very favorite books. But explaining why will take some background. In the 1950s and 60s researchers were looking at what they called the “power structure” in American cities — the people who really pulled the strings and called the shots. Foremost among them was Floyd Hunter, whose study of Atlanta practically invented the field. Naturally the whole notion that anyone was pulling the shots behind the scenes in America offended the deans of mainstream liberal political science and so their leader, Robert A. Dahl, set out to defend democracy’s good name.

He argued that one could only figure out who was in charge by doing careful case studies — looking at controversial decisions and seeing who was involved in making them — that and only that could tell you where true power lay. And, in his most famous work, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City he aimed to do just such a case study in his hometown of New Haven, where his employer, Yale University, resides.

Dahl proposed a theory called pluralism in which no small elect is in charge but power is instead shared across conflicting groups, each marshaling its own resources on the issues it feels strongly about. Democracy, although perhaps in a more sophisticated form, is vindicated, and the ridiculous notions of a shadowy elite disproven. As Dahl writes:

Of course that wasn’t quite true. Domhoff was skeptical of Dahl’s results and decided to request access to his source material and reresearch the matter for himself. In going through Dahl’s interview notes, Domhoff found these choice comments:

But, of course, Dahl wanted to disprove Hunter, not sound like him, so he never followed up on these leads. But Domhoff does. In the intellectual battle over which version of how cities work is more accurate, he scores a decisive victory over Dahl. He not only takes Dahl’s method, he also takes Dahl’s town and indeed his specific case study and shows how the decisions were made by a sinister cabal after all.

And his results are much more convincing. Dahl, after all, was trying to prove a negative: that there wasn’t anyone pulling the strings. Whereas Domhoff can simply point out who was. Dahl’s central case study is the question of New Haven urban renewal. A bold Democratic mayor, he claims, came into office and proposed a plan, dragging local businessmen and Federal officials along with him to get it done.

Nonsense, says Domhoff. The plan for urban renewal was drafted by the local chamber of commerce years before. And when the new mayor got elected, the Chamber of Commerce invited him to lunch and explained the whole thing. They even told the mayor who to hire to carry the plan out and, in the end, got exactly what they’d wanted all along.

But Domhoff doesn’t simply prove Dahl wrong. He gives an engrossing case study of how powerful businessmen get things like this done, based on extensive archival research and contemporaneous notes. And he tells an entire alternative history of American urban renewal, showing how big business turned a plan to build housing for the poor into an excuse to expel them to make room for upscale businesses.

The result is a tour de force: a complete demolition of one of the most influential books of political science, an engrossing case study of how power really operates, and an example of how to do research into the people who, after all, really rule.

Journalistic Capture and Fixing CNBC

Sometimes the government will set up a new regulatory agency, like a Mine Safety and Health Administration or something to keep watch on the mining industry. And off they go, investigating the mining industry to make sure they’re being safe.

Only something funny happens. It turns out all the people they talk to all day are mining industry officials. And whenever they hold meetings to ask for advice, the only people who show up are mining industry officials. When they make proposals and ask for public comment, all the comments are from mining industry officials. And pretty soon, they start thinking like mining industry officials.

Academics call this regulatory capture — an office was put in place to regulate an industry, but it ended up just being a tool of the industry.

But what’s striking is that the problem isn’t just limited to regulation; the same thing happens to journalists as well. Call it journalistic capture. And there are few examples of it more obvious than that of CNBC.

CNBC, a channel supposed to cover economic news, basically acts as a full-time cheerleader for the financial industry. When the market was booming, this wasn’t so noticeable. Whole swaths of the country started daytrading and checking the CNBC ticker regularly to feed their buy-sell trigger fingers.

But now that the market’s gone belly-up, it all seems a whole lot less appealing. Which is what Jon Stewart has been getting at with his critiques of the network.

Well, it’s less satisfying to complain when you can actually do something about it, so some friends and I have started a new campaign: Fix CNBC! As HuffPo reported, we’re demanding CNBC commit to holding Wall Street accountable, starting with hiring someone who was right about the economic crisis.

output

A Life Offline

This Month in Sociology

How Policy Gets Made: A Primer

A New Kind of Writing?

Investigative Strike Teams

Transparency is Bunk

A Non-Local Revolution

What Are Intellectuals Good For?

The Logic of Loss

Margo Seltzer

Who Really Rules?

Journalistic Capture and Fixing CNBC

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