In his latest typically sharp column, Jonathan Rauch coolly analyzes the biases that lead to excessively pessimistic coverage of Iraq's reconstruction. Here's one that will sound familiar to readers of The Future and Its Enemies:
Planning bias. Again and again, critics charge the government with having no plan or strategy. Whenever the Pentagon or administration changes course, they charge it with having planned poorly. Headlines speak of events "out of control" in Iraq.
More than just hindsight bias is at work here. Many people, particularly the sophisticated sort, hate messiness. They like to know that smart managers are in charge, figuring out everything. Surprises are defeats.
In truth, the planning mind-set is exactly wrong for Iraq. Anything might have happened after the war: a flood of refugees, a cholera pandemic, a civil war--or, for that matter, the discovery of an advanced nuclear program. The fact that the Bush administration keeps adjusting its course, often contravening its own plans or preferences, is a hopeful sign. The administration's decisions to raise rather than reduce troop levels, to ask for $87 billion that it never planned on needing, to go looking for help from the United Nations--all this suggests not that the Iraq effort is failing but that the administration is more flexible than its rhetoric.
Only trial and error, otherwise known as muddling through, can work in Iraq. There is no other way. Muddling through is not pretty, but never underestimate America's genius for it. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington never enjoyed the luxury of planning, but they were two of the finest muddlers-through the world has ever known, and they did all right.
Whether Bush will prove a gifted muddler is at present unclear, to say the least. Bush might be a better president if he took fewer risks. But risk-takers must be judged by their results.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2003 • Comments
Design writer Jessie Scanlon looks at how California might make its ballots less confusing--starting with actually using graphic design principles.
The California Election Code stipulates the use of specific typefaces, minimum and maximum point sizes and margins, and other specifications--but these requirements aren't based on any accepted design principles. The result is the confusing sample recall ballot distributed by the secretary of state's office last month. On the sample ballot, the candidates' names are listed in alphabetical order according to a randomly chosen alphabet (RWQOJMVAHBSGZXNTCIEKUPDYFL). The order of the list rotates from district to district, like a batting order, so as to offset what's called "the primacy effect"--the natural advantage lent to candidates appearing near the top of a list. From an information-design perspective, this is insanity.
The customary A to Z, like any form of standardization (miles, dollars, pounds) helps us navigate the world. While a random R to L order might be democratically fair to candidates, it makes it harder for voters faced with finding their chosen candidate on a list of 133 names. As almost any designer would tell you, it would be far better simply to rotate through the trusty A to Z from district to district. This would ensure that no one candidate benefited from being at the top of the list and also that no frustrated voter gave up on finding the name she was looking for.
Then there are the ballot's myriad typographical missteps. Changes in typeface usually are a way of signifying meaning--this is a chapter title, this is for emphasis, this information is less important than that. Here, the "OFFICIAL BALLOT" headline, rendered in bold-faced capital letters, is followed by several lines of graphic schizophrenia: One line consists of condensed caps, the next of bolded lowercase, still another is shrunk to 9 point. One sample version of the Oct. 7 ballot uses 16 sizes and styles of type. Greater consistency of type would allow us to immediately pick out the words styled differently and grasp their significance.
The story includes some alternative ballots produced by well-known graphic designers and a final recommendation that could have come out of The Substance of Style:
The reality is that the whole voting experience could use a redesign. Election officials should spend some time at Starbucks, the company that turned an overpriced commodity into an empire by focusing on its customers' experience. Imagine if all polling places had an inviting, recognizable logo; if they were well lighted and comfortable; if they offered an intuitive environment with clearly presented information. Maybe voters could get a free cup of coffee, too.
Why won't that happen? I explained the underlying problem in this NYT column.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2003 • Comments
I'm disappointed but not surprised that Republican partisans like Hugh Hewitt and wannabe partisans like Andrew Sullivan--both of whom I respect--have rushed to defend Arnold Schwarzenegger, mostly by attacking the L.A. Times. The LAT is undoubtedly biased against Arnold and Republicans. That doesn't mean its stories are untrue.
Arnold's whole persona is of a bigger-than-life figure who gets his own way, likes an audience, and makes jokes at other people's expense--the sort of guy who'd grab a woman's breast in public and laugh at her discomfort. (Probably not the type of man who'd attack a woman in private, however. The audience is key.) And Hollywood is not a place of refined manners. It's not exactly surprising that a lot of women say he bullied and fondled them, nor that these women don't want their names in print, lest they offend a well-connected superstar.
Age and fatherhood may have improved him. People do change, and I assume Arnold wouldn't approve of a man similarly grabbing and intimidating his daughters. But the stories are creepy, the general pattern is believable, and that pattern suggests that Arnold is, or was, a person of bad character.
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be governor, given the circumstances and alternatives. Good character is desirable in a governor, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. I don't countenance poisoning one's enemies at dinner, but Machiavelli had a point. The essential public virtues are different from the essential private ones. And which public virtues matter depends a great deal on the political system. I wouldn't want a man of Arnold's private character to wield power in a illiberal system.
Roger Simon, who understands California well, has several good posts on the subject. An excerpt:
I will be voting for Arnold tomorrow, but with a heavy heart. The recent disclosures of the way he treated women are deeply repellent, even if only some of them are true and even if they were disclosed in a reprehensible manner. I can only hope and assume that we will see nothing of this kind of activity if he is elected. But if we do, I will do everything I can to support his immediate recall or worse....
I am stuck with Arnold. He's about as imperfect as you can get, except for one thing in his favor--he hasn't spent his life as a politician. Perhaps when he gets to Sacramento he will remember why he was sent there and apply an intelligent amateur's common sense (and a little of his movie charisma) to moving the State of California in a postive direction. I also hope he will abjure party politics and stick with the kind of pragmatism for which many of us voters would be electing him.
And from another of Roger's posts:
I will go one step further with what those conservative minds (and I chose that adjective deliberately) at the LA Times don't get. The very things that they are publicizing in Arnold are the very things the public loves about him--not that he was a groper or mistreated women--but that he is AWAKE. Unlike the others competing against him (Davis, Bustamante, McClintock), he is a vibrant personality that interests and attracts people. The LA Times is the opposite of that--a paper that is so gray it out grays the "gray lady" NY Times by miles. In the city that gave the world Hollywood, these folks don't realize how much the public craves theatre. If they had, they might have known the best way to defeat Schwarzenegger was quietly, reducing a larger than life figure to the humdrum world of the state politician, peppering him with obscure questions of budget and tax law, not by sliming him with outtakes from the Enquirer.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2003 • Comments
Chief Wiggles has begun to receive the packages of s for Iraqi children. The site has further information, including new addresses. I used Amazon's s R Us store to send several sets of Legos, and they seem to have gone through fine. Some of the Chief's comments have other ideas for sources.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 04, 2003 • Comments
Hugh Hewitt catches NPR in a very funny error:
SHOCK JOCK? Shock jock? Yes, that's how NPR referred to me this morning in an account of Arnold's campaign trip yesterday: "AM radio shock jock Hugh Hewitt quickly prompted the crowd to see what they thought about the Los Angeles Times."
I think they ought to have described me as "Long time public television personality and host of the PBS series Searching for God in America Hugh Hewitt..." But that might have caused heart attacks across the NPR landscape.
Hugh is fierce Republican partisan who loathes the L.A. Times. That doesn't make him Howard Stern, though I must admit that the comparison occurred to me during my visit to his studio. Like Howard, Hugh has a studio full of guests, only some of whom are scheduled. But no one strips.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 04, 2003 • Comments
It turns out that the Walnut Creek B&N that canceled my talk last night in fact received the 40 copies of TSOS on Tuesday but hadn't yet unpacked them. Unfortunately the community relations manager who arranged the appearance was out recovering from a heart attack. The guy in charge in his absence didn't check the stockroom before telling me not to come. No wonder authors go crazy. B&N is relatively well organized for the book business, and this store is ordinarily one of their best.
Again, my profuse apologies to local readers who had planned to attend my talk, and even more profuse apologies to those who showed up without seeing the last-minute posting about the cancellation. I will be at the Stanford bookstore (on campus, not the one in downtown Palo Alto) tonight at 7:00 p.m.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 02, 2003 • Comments
Reader Brady Cusick, a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, writes:
I am doing a dissertation about volunteering following the Kobe earthquake and did fieldwork last year in Kobe and Osaka. Sean Kinsell was right about many things but I would add a few things. Along with thick tile roofs and wood walls, typical Japanese houses are not built on foundations so they are even more susceptible to earthquakes. Also, many urban Japanese live in large concrete apartment complexes (dubbed, ironically enough, "mansions") rather than houses. These complexes, especially those built in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, are poorly made and floors are liable to collapse on each other in a strong earthquake.
Government planning was of course terrible, particularly because nobody expected that the next big quake would happen in Kobe. Also, it was centrally-planned from Tokyo and they moved extremely slowly. Strangely, in a country prone to earthquakes, they have very little in the way of disaster relief planning. They don't even have the equivalent of FEMA. The government also initially rejected any outside help, such as from the International Red Cross or American military stationed in Japan, because the bureaucrats thought they could control everything.
Outside of the government, there were no local institutions or national NGOs that were qualified or experienced enough to help coordinate the disaster relief. Over a million people volunteered, which was remarkable in a country that lacks a history of voluntarism, but it was extremely difficult to effectively use these volunteers without proper coordination.
Here's a 1998 Reason piece on the aftermath of the Kobe quake. I commissioned it after the LAT ran early stories on the problems of reconstruction but didn't follow up. I wanted to know what happened, and one great thing about being a magazine editor is that you can assign people to find that sort of thing out. Here's a Gary Becker column on a more positive assessment by George Horwich of Purdue University (citation: George Horwich, "Economic Lessons of the Kobe Earthquake," Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 48, no. 3 (2000), pp. 521-542.).
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 02, 2003 • Comments
Taxes are high in California, but they are also easy to notice and, hence, to cut (witness the brouhaha over the car tax) or defeat. Regulation is a lot harder to stop in the first place and almost impossible to roll back. Take a look at this list of bills the state legislature just passed. These folks never met a bossy business idea they didn't like. (Link via Kausfiles.) No wonder I keep meeting homesick Californians who've moved to Texas to do business.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 01, 2003 • Comments
In TSOS, I talk about the many ways in which information technology has become aesthetic technology. One example I mention is Frank Gehry's adaptation of CATIA software, originally designed for the aerospace industry. In the current BusinessWeek (an unusually strong issue), Chris Palmeri expands and updates the story:
That's where the 74-year-old architect's new business, Gehry Technologies, comes in. The enterprise, which launches this month, builds on his firm's 13 years of experience with CATIA, a design software originally developed for the aerospace industry by Dassault Systemes of France. Years ago (but not long enough ago to have been of full use in designing the Disney Hall), James Glymph, a senior partner at Gehry's firm, was looking for a way to help contractors better understand the demands of Gehry's increasingly complicated designs. He chanced upon an aerospace engineer who recommended the CATIA software; the computer programmers on Gehry's 130-person staff have since modified it for architectural work. Now the software brings Gehry's curvy roofs and walls to life in three dimensions: After he designs his buildings, still using just cardboard, wood, and paper, a specially developed tool traces his models and translates them into 3-D images.
Perhaps more crucially for other architects, the software can also be used by contractors to produce exact measurements of the steel, wood, and other materials needed in a project. By linking dozens of such suppliers on a single software platform, the construction of complex buildings becomes vastly more efficient. "They have reconceived the process of construction," says William Mitchell, a longtime Gehry collaborator and dean of the school of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which hired Gehry to design a computer center that is now under construction. Gehry Technologies was formed to provide training to architects who buy the software and related programs, and the firm will work with IBM to market CATIA. "We couldn't do what we do without it," says the architect, who doesn't actually use a computer himself.
While he's at it, Gehry would also like to see more cooperation between architects and contractors. In many cases, architects hand over designs to builders, who often prefer to have as little contact as possible with them thereafter. Some contracts even prohibit architects from going to construction sites. This, they say, is the best way to prevent the architects from trying to make expensive changes, the cost of which is borne by the construction company. Gehry, however, works with the builders and contractors to cement, so to speak, the design and budget early on. "We spend a lot more time with the subcontractors so when we get to the final drawings, we solve most of the technical problems," Gehry says. "You know where you are going before you start construction, so you minimize the surprise from the owner's standpoint. You get all the bad news up front."
Aesthetics is already a major source of demand for IT, and that demand will only grow--good news for computer and chip makers who need reasons to entice people to buy more-powerful machines.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 01, 2003 • Comments
The story doesn't seem to be getting much coverage outside the area, but animal rights terroristssay they planted bombs that exploded at two Bay Area companies. And they've sent out an e-mail promising to escalate the violence and kill people, including the families of executives who offend them:
On the night of September 25th volunteers from the Revolutionary Cells attacked a subsidiary of a notorious HLS client, Yamanouchi. We left an approximately 10lb ammonium nitrate bomb strapped with nails outside of Shaklee Inc, whose CEO is both the CEO for Shaklee and Yamanouchi Consumer Inc. We gave all of the customers the chance, the choice, to withdraw their business from HLS. Now you all will have to reap what you have sown. All customers and their families are considered legitimate targets.
Hey Sean Lance, and the rest of the Chiron team, how are you sleeping? You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom. Who knows, that new car in the parking lot may be packed with explosives. Or maybe it will be a shot in the dark.
We have given all of the collaborators a chance to withdraw from their relations from HLS. We will now be doubling the size of every device we make. Today it is 10lbs, tomorrow 20....until your buildings are nothing more than rubble. It is time for this war to truely have two sides. No more will all of the killing be done by the oppressors, now the oppressed will strike back. We will be non-violent when the these people are non-violent to the animal nations....
The rest of the email is here. KGO-TV had a background report on the group a week ago; its report of the recent news is here.
I look forward to the vigorous condemnation--not "we do not condone" but "we unequivocally condemn"--of this terrorism not only from "respectable" animal rights groups but also from all the people who routinely (and rightly) condemn anti-abortion terror.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 01, 2003 • Comments