Some things I've read, Q2 2024
ft. rethinking government's policy vs implementation divide, star-crossed romance in post-war Hong Kong, studying economics
Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America is one of the best public policy books I’ve read. It’s about why the US government struggles to effectively use digital tools to improve public service delivery. The fundamental problem, she suggests, is a policymaking culture which overemphasises policy design and neglects policy implementation.
There’s a hierarchical ladder in many civil services. Its top rungs are occupied by ‘policy people’, responsible for crafting policy visions and fine-tuning policy details — but don’t pay much attention to the nuts and bolts of implementation. These are left to ‘implementation people’ down the ladder, such as IT departments and frontline service delivery managers.
This hierarchy is problematic, especially when it comes to the digital age. The disconnect between policy designers and implementers often results in over-complicated policies that overwhelm technical systems, create poor user interfaces and slow down service delivery. Tech professionals also lack the authority to challenge unrealistic and unhelpful policy requirements, because they often simply see their job as translating policies into code.
This policy design vs policy implementation divide creates poor outcomes and a system of broken incentives. To illustrate: California’s unemployment insurance system accumulated a 1.6 million claimant queue during COVID-19. This stemmed from overly stringent fraud prevention policies which caused many claims to be rejected. These had to be investigated by a team of claims processors, who had to assess claims against an 800-page manual, and navigate a poorly-designed IT system to process these claims. Yet, tech leaders handling the unemployment insurance system only saw their responsibility as maintaining existing software requirements and processes. They were more vested in the process, rather than outcomes.
So tech modernisation isn’t about governments adopting more modern tech infrastructure and capabilities. It’s about dismantling this hierarchical ladder and giving tech professionals — the ‘implementation people’ — a seat at the table. They should be more engaged in the policy design and development process, and encouraged to identify policy requirements that create implementation bottlenecks. This ensures that policies can be implemented easily and effectively.
It’s also about taking user experience and user research seriously — to ensure that digital platforms are easy to navigate and create best value-add for users. The book has this powerful anecdote about a tech professional tasked with investigating the reasons behind low enrolment in California’s food stamp programme SNAP. He decides to apply for the programme himself to better understand the programme. He first struggles to complete the 212-question application form (with many redundant and repetitive questions) on a mobile phone interface, as many applicants do. He fails, and then tries to do it on a slow library computer. And then he lives on SNAP for a bit:
“But it wasn’t until he was grocery shopping for a date that Alan felt he finally got a real glimpse of what it can be like to depend on SNAP. He was at a store near his apartment, buying a few things he needed to cook dinner for a woman he’d recently met, when he suddenly realized that he didn’t have the receipt from his last swipe with his EBT card. That receipt had his balance printed at the bottom; without it, he didn’t know how much money was in his account. His items were on the conveyor belt at the checkout stand, his date was on the way to his apartment, and he was quickly approaching the moment of truth: the possibility that his EBT card didn’t have sufficient funds. He’d have to take items off the belt and return them to the cashier, one by one, while angry customers he was holding up judged him.
It was the kind of thing you don’t think much about, the awkwardness of checking your balance on an EBT card. In most states, there’s a number on the card you can call, but the number goes to an automated phone system, and it can take a while to navigate it and find out how much money is left for groceries that day. (For people with prepaid, metered phone plans, the call also uses up valuable minutes.) There was no way Alan could find out his balance before he got to the front of the line. In the seconds before he would have to step up to the cash register, anticipating the groans of impatience that were sure to come from everyone behind him, Alan started to sweat. It no longer felt like “user research.” His anxiety gave way to shame, followed by a flash of anger at being stuck in this position… in that moment, he got a glimpse of what it can feel like to use a service that technically does what it is supposed to but ultimately has little regard for the people who use it.”
Pahkla’s discussion of bureaucracy and digital government dovetailed with some of the things I’ve been wondering about for a while. I’d been curious about what it means to adopt a ‘Silicon Valley mindset’ in government — what lessons can be learnt, and what lessons can’t possibly be carried over from the private to public sector. I’ve read about Open Government Products and its fascinating forward-leaning tech culture, and I’ve also done a class / defence consulting project that adopted the Lean Startup Method. All this dabbling, and now Recoding America, makes me wonder if the essence of the Silicon Valley mindset lies in its emphasis on product ownership and continuous product innovation.
So, what if we reframed policymaking as product development, rather than policymaking per se? This leans on product development’s focus on user-centricity and user value-add, its emphasis on continuous innovation and iteration, and its sense of ownership over the entire vertical’s lifespan: ideation, rollout, user feedback, DevOps, maintenance.
It’s a heuristic and thought experiment, but a policy-as-product approach might collapse the policy design vs implementation barrier in interesting ways. Perhaps encouraging more digital-first solutions, with tech professionals leveraging their digital expertise to shape the entire policy development process. Perhaps inviting a greater emphasis on user-centricity, with policymakers using UX research and A/B testing to better understand how citizens actually interface with public services and government policies. Perhaps seeing policies as agile, living projects — always iterative, with teams proactively seeking opportunities for innovation and growth to create that value-add.
There are some limitations, of course, in drawing analogies between policy reforms and digital tech platforms’ product updates. It’s hard to wipe the slate clean with a wholesale policy revamp; you need to account for previous generations of citizens ‘grandfathered’ on old government schemes. You can’t amend policies too often because you’ll end up with many confused and frustrated citizens. But if we take seriously Pahlka’s point about collapsing the policy design vs implementation barrier, I think policy-as-product is interesting to ruminate about.
I’ve tried to stay away from the cottage industry of book titles, mainly written by liberal-leaning authors, trying to explain the rise of the Trump Era. Many of their points are repetitive. Some illustrations of Trump voters, especially the mythical white working-class, are also quite reductionist. But I picked up Evan Osnos’ Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury. I’m a big fan of Evan Osnos’ writing, and loved his previous book on China. Wildland discusses how America became fractured and polarised. The book’s answers won’t be unfamiliar. Financialised capitalism, corporate greed and political self-interest caused America to become more unequal. This undermined America’s sense of common purpose, with Americans more alienated from each other. This inequality and mass discontent allowed a new vitriolic politics to take root in the 2010s, fuelled by popular distaste for political and economic elites (and other moral tribes), culminating in the election of Donald Trump.
Osnos explores these changes through the lives of ordinary people in three places that have been part of his own history — Greenwich CT, a rich hamlet where he’d grown up in; Clarksburg WV, a coal mining town where he’d gotten his first job at the local newspaper; and Chicago, where his grandfather had once been robbed and attacked at gunpoint. All three have become part of this new American story in different ways. Greenwich has become a hedge fund capital and a symbol of America’s new capitalism, with many of its wealthiest residents responsible for reckless lending practices and trading in the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. Clarksburg has become unrecognisable, ridden by both the opioid epidemic and new mountaintop mining techniques which have destroyed its natural landscape and polluted rivers. Chicago is in some ways, the same — a city whose residents remain ‘stuck in place’, with decades of racialised segregation and neglect political neglect of black communities in the South Side.
The discussions of Clarksburg’s evolution were the most interesting. Osnos writes about the decline of Clarksburg’s newspapers as a mirror of its eroding sense of locality and community. Local newspapers, like The Exponent Telegram he’d worked for, had been largely non-partisan and firmly local. The local media market was too small for local papers to lean Democrat or Republican. Instead, local newspapers spoke to local concerns and spoke up for local communities, with correspondents proud of their closeness to the subjects they reported on. But across decades, more people began turning to cable news and Internet-based news sites which lacked the same incentives for non-partisanship. Instead, these outlets focused on national political controversies and indulging in sensationalism to provoke emotional responses and keep people watching. This altered the ‘geography of the mind’, with Americans ‘learning less about people in their local communities and more about the distant figures, abstract disputes and entertaining memes of national politics’. As historian Neil Postman observed of the telegraph, the rise of cable news and digital media had “made the country into ‘one neighbourhood’, but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other”. This all made me curious enough to go around small-town Wisconsin hunting around for a local newspaper. Perhaps it was bad timing, or evidence of local newspapers’ decline, that I wasn’t able to find one.
I’ve long maintained that America is a country of storytellers, a country made and shaped by narrative. Despite its fractures and divisions, politicians and writers of all stripes still speak of the same imagery and tropes — about the Founders and their experiment in democracy, of pioneers who travelled west, the enduring idea of the American Dream. It’s as if this imagery marshals people together into a civic unity, into a country united by these ideals.
But it’s striking that justice doesn’t get enough mention in this arc of progress and possibility. Justice — distinct from the charity often lauded at Greenwich’s dinner parties and galas, because justice seeks to address the underlying cause of these inequalities and discontents. Many books about the rise of the Trump Era talk about an era of polarisation and disunity — but perhaps the lesson of the Trump Era is that the ideals of civility, unity and justice are inextricably linked. Justice is the necessary condition of that civility and unity — only when all Americans are treated fairly and with dignity can they come together to tie themselves in a ‘single garment of destiny’, to realise this more just society. Osnos writes about North Carolina pastor Reverend Dr William Barber, an icon of the contemporary civil rights movement who advised Biden’s campaign. Maybe only a civil rights icon knew about the importance of putting justice first.
“Barber was a fellow traveler on the path of unity, but he was vigilant against the trade-offs that could occur in the pursuit. When they spoke, Barber recalled, he told Biden, “Our Constitution does not start with ensuring tranquility. It starts with establishing justice.”
I’d finally read Han Suyin’s A Many Splendoured Thing. I’d first come across Han Suyin while doing my undergraduate dissertation research and known of this as her most famous work. It’s about a star-crossed romance between a Hong Kong Eurasian doctor and a British journalist in post-war Hong Kong, but I hadn’t realised that it was also partially auto-biographical. Han becomes the narrator and character in her own novel, and unambiguously so — it’s written from the perspective of the Hong Kong doctor, also named Han Suyin in the book. The plot’s romance between the novel’s Han Suyin and British journalist Mark Elliot mirrors the real-life relationship between the real-life Han and Australian journalist Ian Morrison, which transpired when she’d been based in Hong Kong in the late-1940s.
Yet this romance becomes the mere backdrop for Han Suyin’s introspection on questions of cultural identity and cultural translation. It’s the story of a protagonist, a romance and a city which straddles ‘East and West’, and whether the pulls of culture and politics make this straddling no longer possible or comprehensible. Han Suyin, born to a Belgian father and Chinese mother, grapples with her Eurasianism which defies neat categorisation. I’d never thought much about the category of Eurasianism — in Singapore, after all, it’s just known as the archetypal ‘O’. Han’s Eurasianism allows her an invitation to European expatriates’ dinner parties, only to squirm at disparaging remarks about Chinese migrants and businessmen. Many English women in Hong Kong ‘would consider that [her] race rendered me unfit to marry Mark’. Han embraces her Chineseness, but grapples with a deeper ‘intellectual Eurasianism’, as a Western-educated social elite navigating her position of relative privilege in a colonial society filled with squalor and injustice. Yet her mind remains divided into two: ‘In our work, efficient replicas of the scientists and scholars of the West. In private, keeping loves and friendships safely dark… a safe sombre house for the ungrown child in us, free from encroachment, a refuge from the prying intellect of our Western sojourns’. She embraces China’s Communist Party and its vision for New Democracy too — leaving her romance with Mark Elliot to straddle between her desire to return to China and help with its nation-building, and his position as a ‘a journalist, a front-row spectator, a looker-on not involved in the revolution of Asia’.
I enjoyed the descriptions and discussions of post-war Hong Kong the most. Hong Kong, till today, markets itself as a place where ‘East Meets West’. But in post-war Hong Kong, East met West in the most stark of ways — or avoided each other altogether. There’s the inequality between the two worlds. Han writes about there being two kinds of streets in Hong Kong. The smooth level main streets parallel to the shore are populated by Western expatriates and some idle Chinese businessmen, dazzling with splendour and shops crammed with imported American goods. The narrow, vertical, staircased streets where the masses of poor Chinese live — if not in cramped tenements, then on the streets outside. There’s also the carelessness, and sometimes naïve earnestness of the West. There are longtime colonial elites and businessmen who host opulent parties, but also Christian missionaries who’d fled China and still speak of it longingly — ‘stranded in a world tight and small, now that China, their China, was no longer theirs’.
The structure of contemporary Hong Kong society is slightly different now. I’ve long heard about the echelon of Western expatriates living very comfortably in Hong Kong and occupying senior positions in MNCs’ offices, now joined by a new wave of younger, highly-educated mainland Chinese professionals. How many of them consider Hong Kong home? Even in today’s Hong Kong, ‘East Meets West’ in strange ways. Perhaps, as Han Suyin points out, Hong Kong is still a transitory place: ‘this is the most permanent fact about the Colony: with few exceptions, those who come regard themselves as on the way to somewhere else’.
Reading A Many Splendoured Thing made me think about an excellent FT column by Janan Ganesh from earlier this year. It’s about Vietnam’s ‘art of not choosing’ and straddling the divide between the United States and China. Not choosing is about transcending dichotomies, embracing ambiguity — while trying to “‘and’ the world away”. So Vietnam becomes ‘a socialist republic and a prolific signer of free-trade deals’, a host for the likes of Putin and Kim Jong-un and one of the US’s most important partners in East Asia. As with Vietnam, so much about A Many Splendoured Thing centres around Han Suyin’s and post-war Hong Kong’s attempts to “‘and’ the world away”, how tenuous and fragile these attempts are — of clinging onto her politics and her relationship, of straddling between East and West.
Some articles:
On FT’s Janan Ganesh, who’s very much becoming one of my favourite writers. He wrote this piece on how he seeks interesting conversations to generate ideas for columns. One way to find interesting people to talk to is the Dubai Test:
“Soon after meeting someone, mention Dubai. If it provokes a smirk, and a jibe at the crassness of the place, that is useful. You can filter that person out.
Knocking Dubai took over long ago from knocking LA as the blandest opinion in the world. The case for the Gulf city? The transfer of power from the west is visible there as it is nowhere else: in the Asian big-spenders, in the Russian sanction-dodgers. You needn’t like the place, but to not find it stimulating is to not find this century stimulating.”
The Dubai Test sifts interesting people from those with heads in the hivemind — maybe they are interesting people and conversationalists because they have the ability to find things interesting, not because they have the ability to talk about interesting things. I’ll admittedly fail the Dubai Test nine days out of ten. Not that I’ve been there, but it seems like an awfully artificial city dominated by expatriates and dotted by the most ludicrously showy infrastructure projects, all in the middle of a desert. So don’t come finding me for ideas to write a column. What’s Singapore’s equivalent of the Dubai Test? I’m still figuring it out, but SH proposed Sengkang.
Maybe he thought of this himself, or maybe it’s someone who passed the Dubai Test, but Janan Ganesh also wrote one of the most interesting critiques of DC liberal talking heads I’ve come across. He argues that there’s a liberal obsession with eloquence — which makes liberals valourise politicians with rhetoric and vision, rather than those who master the mechanics of lawmaking that gets things done. Liberals still think that political leadership is about inspiring people, even as governments took on greater economic and social responsibilities and leadership assumed a more managerial role. So we overrate Obama’s flourish and underrate Biden’s mastery of the messy business of political negotiation — even if Biden’s dealmaking abilities pushed through the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act and aid to Ukraine. Why this mismatched obsession? ‘Because people overvalue what they themselves are good at, the educated politico-media class overvalues eloquence’. Ouch.
I’m not sure if eloquence is as overrated as Janan Ganesh suggests. I think that you can be a good politician by sheer mastery of dealmaking and policy, but you can only be a great politician if you frame these as part of a wider vision and articulate it clearly — politics, at its highest form, is not just about policymaking, but about mobilising people into new senses of community and mutual obligation, to see themselves in a new way. You can’t do that through the art of dealmaking and policy alone. But the observation about how the ‘educated politico-media’ class overvalues what they themselves are good at has gotten me thinking — what are other fields which are afflicted by similar dynamics, where a group of people overvalue their own skills and sets these as its criteria for success? It’s probably not possible to break out of this syndrome, but a first start is to encourage a diversity of backgrounds and career paths. So fewer JDs in US political circles, fewer PPEists in the UK, and fewer ex-civil servants with Econs / Engineering degrees in Singapore….
I’m no Economics student, but enjoyed some old pieces on new approaches to teaching introductory economics classes, which eschew the traditional focus on foundational economic theory — that of supply and demand curves, firm theory and market failure. All of these tend to teach that markets work without much intervention, and that market failures are improbable anomalies rather than a common occurrence in contemporary economic life.
One alternative to this approach is an empirics-centric approach. This old Vox article talks about this evolution in Harvard’s undergraduate economics classes. Harvard undergraduates have traditionally taken Gregory Mankiw’s Econ 10 — he writes the world’s most famous economics textbook, so it’s certainly filled with supply-demand curves and the like. Raj Chetty’s Econ 1152: Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems, instead introduces students to statistical methods that can be used to analyse economic and social life, including problems such as racial inequality and social immobility. It focuses on teaching how different research tools should be used, to better assess the mechanics of causality between variables. This redefines what economics is, pivoting away from the usual emphasis on concepts and theory — in Chetty’s own words, ‘it depends upon if you want to define a field based on the questions or based on its tools’.
Another alternative is a political economy-centric approach sketched out in this piece, which looks CORE — Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics, a free online resource used in a growing number of universities. CORE takes history and political economy more seriously, to present a fuller version of economic and social life that can’t be understood from the abstractions of theory. Written in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, its textbook suggests that markets are usually imperfect and thus warrant greater government intervention in its functioning. It further suggests people are not simply rational self-interest-maximising agents, but also motivated by concerns such as altruism and reciprocity. It takes economic history a lot more seriously, taking a longer view of economic history since the Industrial Revolution and stressing technological progress as its key driver.
What’s interesting about both approaches is that these attract a greater diversity of students — this diversity has interesting implications for the evolution of economics as a discipline. Econ 1152 and CORE attract a far greater proportion of women and minorities than traditional economics classes. One possible explanation is that women and minorities are less attracted to traditional economics classes’ abstract nature and inattention to social issues. This breeds a vicious problem of self-selection: ‘the sorts of people who might change economics become less likely to study it in the first place.’ So these new approaches might portend a greater and wider revolution in the way we study and think about economics, and that’ll be interesting to watch. But the most hilarious and interesting economics class I’ve read about in these pieces has to be this. From the Vox article:
“From 2003 to 2010, Stephen Marglin taught an alternative, heterodox, lefty introduction to economics at Harvard. Marglin had once been a solidly mainstream economic theorist, and a bit of a prodigy. But shortly after getting tenure, in one of the truly great pranks in the history of academia, he came out as a radical supporting the abolition of capitalism. In an influential couple of papers shortly thereafter titled “What Do Bosses Do?” his answer was, basically, “steal from workers.”
Marglin’s class offered a simultaneous introduction to and critique of the basic assumptions of mainstream economics. Required readings mixed classic texts like Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy with more qualitative fare like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and an article on the importance of community in Amish culture. Unsurprisingly, the class lacked any buy-in from the rest of the economics department. Marglin was joined by only one colleague in voting for the course to be listed in the economics department; in the end, it didn’t even count toward an economics major.”