Some real grassroots politics

Podcast about Home Owners Association

I happened on this, and I thought I'd share yet another non-obvious angle on things going wrong. I don't know how you guys can stand how good I am to you.

It's about an hour, but here are some highlights. The short version is that home owners associations are independent powers, with extraordinary abilities to screw over home owners. Local governments are complicit with the HOAs. One of the consequences is that in a bad economy things get worse.

Libertarian ideas get blamed (in some detail), but so does Obama, I think for believing that money can be pulled out of the economy here and spent there and somehow things will get better.

Speaking of libertarianism, apparently the laws inspired by Kelo (that private property can't be taken by a government to give or sell to a private interest) are dead letters-- the claim is that more such takings are going on.

The general idea is that some sort of collective action by homeowners is needed (approximate quote: "Elections are the least disruptive form of collective action"), but exactly what the collective action is supposed to aim at is not defined. Maybe that information is elsewhere on the site.

A flaw in a lot of a libertarian thinking is that there's no sense of process-- an honest free market is supposed to just happen. Once you see a flaw like that, you start seeing it everywhere (and occasional examples of the opposing virtue). These guys seem to think that good government can just happen.

HOAs are compared to Nazis and to the Soviet Union, but I think the closest analogy is those corrupt small town governments in John MacDonald novels, including some violence. I'm sure a good mystery novel or three could be written about murder committed by an HOA. Are there any?

Why were the contracts written so that it took 2/3 of the homeowners to change provisions, when it's nearly impossible to get that many to show up, let alone vote in the same direction? Originally, the fear was of all the crazy homeowners. *sigh*

Anyway, the 2/3 provision meant that the homeowners couldn't get rid of the (eventually Federally unenforceable) racial restrictions, so judges completely set aside the contracts, meaning that the HOAs had even more power.

A sense of process-- The Checklist Manifesto

In my previous post, I was complaining about people who expect things to go right just because they have an idea that things going right ought to happen.

http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288710329&sr=1-1 by Atul Gawande was a real pleasure to read because he doesn't have that delusion.

He talks about the complexity of medical care, and the disasters which result or nearly result because obvious, standard methods aren't used to prevent them. The problem is that obvious is in the mind of the beholder, and there's a limit-- a fairly low limit-- of how much people can remember to do in complex, urgent situations.

Instead of going at it with the idea that the medical profession is just awful, he looks at the power of checklists to function as an external memory. He then discovers that you can't just make up a checklist and have it work because checklists are good.

Developing a usable checklist for a group of people doing something complex can't be done off the top of your head or entirely by theory. It takes hard thought and meticulous testing and judgement calls.

And once he had a promising checklist, he didn't say checklists are good, and hospitals are bad for not using his lovely checklist. It was a non-trivial chunk of work to carefully introduce his checklist to 8 assorted hospitals (all over the world, and in situations ranging from wealthy to very poor) for testing.

Checklists for groups require social engineering-- it's essential for low status people to be able to tell high status people that something was missed, and be heard and obeyed. Surprisingly, it turns out that just having people introduce themselves to each other at the beginning is very helpful.

The checklist caused a substantial drop in complications in all the hospitals-- a double-digit drop in 7 out of 8.

Checklists are pervasive in the building trades, not just to make sure all the usual things are done, but to make sure that if modifications are needed (this is very common), all the relevant people sign off on them.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to each other and take responsibility. That is what works.

The result is unexpectedly democratic, and it has become standard nowadays, even in building inspections. The inspectors do not recompute the windforce calculations, or whether the joints in a given building should be bolted or welded, he said. Determining whether a building like the Russian Wharf or my hospital's new wing is built to code and fit for occupancy involves more knowledge and complexity than any one inspector could possibly have. [Note: this is just about the plans, it doesn't cover actually looking at the physical construction.] So although inspectors do what they can to oversee a building's construction, mostly they make certain the builders have the proper checks in place and then have them sign affidavits that they themselves have ensure that the building is up to code.

Gawande goes on to explain that the best rescue work after Katrina was done by organization which permitted people on the ground to make decisions, and the worst was done by those which retained centralized control, with examples from business and government on both sides.

This may be an oversimplification-- iirc, there were some very bad localized decisions made by police.

However, it's very tempting for some people to say that all of business is wicked because it's profit-driven, and only tight regulations will lead to decent treatment of employees and customers. There are others (more like me than the first batch) who will say that government is wicked because it's all arbitrary authority.

The truth as far as I can tell is that quite a high proportion of people want to do good work if they're in an environment which permits it, and what creates that environment isn't obvious. You can't make people want to do well through rewards and punishments, and to much emphasis on reward and punishment just distracts them.

Oh, well, back to Gawande-- he's also got a detailed description of the cooperation needed to land that plane safely on the Hudson, and how the media tried to make it into a one-hero story, and somewhat about how a few successful high-end investors make good use of checklists.

The idea of libertarian charities, a ramble.

A ramble is something like an essay, but less organized.

Some 20 or 30 years ago, I was struck by an idea from Peter Breggin (a libertarian psychologist)-- that libertarianism would never succeed until there were libertarian charities.

This seemed very odd, and I don't know exactly what he meant by it.

Still, I'd bounce it off people, and the usual response is to ask me what a libertarian charity would be. My answer was, "It wouldn't take government money, and it would have "libertarian" on the letterhead."

This wasn't terribly helpful, though I still think it's a reasonable minimum.

What I've come to believe is that a good bit of how people organize themselves is done through government, and (aside from government's natural inclination to preserve themselves), people are more likely to want to cut back on government if they can see a clear alternative method of having a good society.

Um, I used to believe that, but the Tea Party is something of a counterexample. I guess we'll find out something about how big the tea party movement is-- I'm guessing it's smaller than it looks, but it's only a guess. I've been applying a discount factor to the more flamboyant left-wing worries ever since GW left the presidency without attempting a coup. I bet I'll be right until and unless I'm disastrously wrong.

I expect that only a few of my readers know that Ayn Rand hated libertarians. Her politics were disappointed Republican. R's would say things she liked, and then not follow through when they were in office. She thought libertarians were too unphilosophical, though I don't remember the details of what she thought they were neglecting. Tea Partyers are a lot less philosophical than libertarians.

When the USSR fell, I wished that Ayn Rand had been alive to see it. Not so many years further out, I wondered how closely she would have predicted that the fall would work out badly for a lot of Russians, or what she'd have to say about the whole thing. I was certainly expecting things to get a lot better, and in retrospect, I was expecting them to do a much better job of self-organizing than they did. Please try to refrain from gloating-- I bet anyone who takes a crack at predicting how the world will go has seen a few surprises.

Anyway, back to societies organizing themselves. I think libertarian charities would do a lot to convince people that government was less necessary. There's no reason why there shouldn't be libertarian charities for pre-natal and infant care, for example. Suzette Haden Elgin has written about what a valuable sort of care that is, and I haven't heard of any flavor of organization taking a crack at that one-- maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a project which would be of manageable size on a local scale.

I'm inclined to think that the Objectivist streak in libertarianism makes it hard to self-organize, and I'd be interested in what people have to say about what makes useful self-organization feasible.

The only libertarian charity I know about is the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

"A man should approach revolution as carefully as he should perform an operation on his father." A quote I've seen attributed to Edmund Burke, but which I haven't been able to track down.

Is Obama a Keynesian?

Or... Pattern matching, threat or menace?

From Marginal Revolution, where a commenter pointed out that there was some fudging on the pronunciation of Keynesian.