In Praise of Red Tape

Byoliveridley

In Praise of Red Tape

Is there any figure in American political discourse more reviled than the bureaucrat? Say the word and a potent caricature leaps to mind: the petty and shiftless paper pusher who wields his small amount of power with malice and caprice. Whatever the issue–from school reform to overhauling the nation’s intelligence apparatus–the bureaucrat is on the wrong side of it.

Hayes makes an argument that I try to make at mixed gatherings everywhere. Unfortunately, I do not make it as coherently as he does. The secret to any functioning government is a good mid-level bureaucracy that has enough technical experience to implement reasonably good policy, but isn’t overly politicized or corrupt. When I was growing up in India, one of the constant refrains was “Why can’t we be like the Americans? You can actually get a driver’s license without bribing someone!”

The DMV (which is low level bureaucracy) still works well in the US (yes, my American friends, try getting a license in India!), but the mid level bureaucracy has gotten overly politicized in its top leadership over the years. This leads to that vicious cycle I have blogged about previously:

  1. Appoint lackey to head agency
  2. Appoint viceroy to oversee regulation
  3. Rewrite rules to increase power of executive over legislative
  4. Shift burden of proof away from the regulated to the regulators
  5. Slash budgets so regulating agencies cannot do the work adequately
  6. Hound competent employees out of the agency
  7. Routinely bash said agency as an example of “big government”

Repeat steps 4-7 as often as necessary to ensure “success”

Well, it appears that the mid-level bureaucrats pushed back, and Hayes catalogs the results.

I leave you with a good truism:

Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim

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    Let all residents vote in Canada

    Byoliveridley

    BC has municipal elections in October this year and I will be voting for the candidates whose policies, values and voting records on housing affordability, harm reduction, and walk/bike/transit friendliness match mine the closest. I might even have an endorsement or three up my sleeve. This year, I will also be asking Victoria’s municipal election candidates where they stand on letting permanent residents vote in our elections.

    In the 2016 census, nearly 2.5 million people identified as non-citizen residents, out of which two million were permanent residents. The permanent residents live here, work here, play here, pay taxes, grow pensions, volunteer, commit crimes (yes, they’re like any other Canadian) and more, just like those with Canadian citizenship. However, they have no say in who represents them municipally, provincially or federally. I find this unfair, so do many people, including the Vancouver city council, who passed a resolution in 2018 (PDF) calling for the province to approve voting by permanent residents. This globe news article provides a good backgrounder.

    In short, municipalities have run into the conservative buzzsaw that is the state of our (mostly) conservative or liberal provincial governments. This won’t change unless more people speak up.

    The opposition is mainly that non-citizens are not sufficiently “invested” in the country, they’re too “new”. The more paranoid ones talk about divided loyalties, and bring up stories of foreigners being flown in to vote. Perhaps they should try getting a visitor visa to Canada (spoiler alert, difficult).  People who judge other people’s belonging or membership, however, usually have other items on their agenda. Let’s just leave it at that.

    From my perspective, extending the vote is common sense, fair and just, and that’s that.

    Permanent residents? The case is simple. They’re like citizens in all ways, except for voting, and having to renew every five years. If you want to make life difficult, you could ask them to renew voter registration every five years too, but really, you shouldn’t. Are you concerned about “loyalties”? If you are, then you should not be letting the thousands of dual British-Canadian passport holders vote.

    How about residents without the permanent residency paperwork? Don’t see why not? If you’re concerned about timing of residency, put a time limit on the voting registration. There are very few non-permanent residents in Canada, half a million at last count, so, impact is small.

    Undocumented? May be difficult, especially with visibility and its consequences. But, I would support it if we can find a solution that protects people while allowing for verifying identity for voting.

    Of course, giving people a vote does not solve most problems, but that’s not the point. We see conservatives south of the boarder ceaselessly chipping away at the right of non-white people to vote. We need to be be going in the opposite direction on representation.

    So, here are the questions on this issue I intend to ask Victoria’s municipal candidates in 2018:

    1. Do you support efforts to extend voting rights to all residents in Victoria?
    2. If you do, what are you willing/able to do to make this happen at the municipal level at least, then at the provincial level and federal levels?

    A “no” on #1 is going to make it difficult to vote for you. A “yes” on #1 without some coherent plan on #2 means that you need to think about it some more.

    Are you with me? Would you be willing to ask prospective candidates the same questions? Should there be additional questions? Do these questions make sense, or should they be reworked?

    Cross-posted from interrobang

     

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    Murray Langdon and the Role of Government

    Byoliveridley

    Murray Langdon of Victoria area radio and news outfit CFAX talks about municipal golf courses and tries to connect the Municipality of Saanich’s role in running a golf course with a much larger question around government, and “money”.

    I’ve already been inundated with a ream of people who have stated that rec centres, garbage pick-up, landscaping, etc, has always been done by the municipality. That may be true. What I’m asking is should cities and towns be doing that. For example, we know that rec centres lose money each and every year…

    via Murray Langdons Comment

    The role of government, whatever level it might be, is to maximise the welfare of the people it serves, not some of its people, but most of them. So, looking at government “costs” alone in deciding the role of government is dangerously incomplete. What you actually have to do is to total up the costs for government and the people being served by the government, and judge whether there is an overall benefit to a municipality providing a service. Trying to be pragmatic about it, here are some of the things I look at:

    1. Is the good/service provided discretionary? Meaning, would I be able to live a reasonably satisfactory life without the service?
    2. If the good/service is non-discretionary ( I need it for a satisfactory life), then does it show characteristics of moral hazard (if some people don’t participate, it affects everyone), and would the provision of the service benefit from risk pooling (it works better if we’re all in it together) and mitigate issues of adverse selection (people who need services most are least able to afford them)?
    3. Is the good/service market amenable? (despite what free market fundamentalists may have you believe, Adam Smith did not think that every good/service could fit into a free market paradigm). If market worthy, is there any additional benefit to having a “public option”?
    4. What parts of a good/service are a natural monopoly, and what parts are amenable to market based competition (highways vs. cars)?
    5. When looking at costs and benefits, it’s not enough just look at direct costs like construction, salaries, etc, but also at more intangible measures like decision fatigue,(after a certain threshold, every decision you take degrades the next one) social capital (community relations, cooperation and confidence), creative capital (the ability to attract people to your community), environmental capital and so much more.

    Immediately, dumping golf, recreation, and water and sewage services into the same pot makes no sense.

    Let’s look at golf, it’s discretionary, and given the proliferation of golf courses in the area, a reasonably competitive good/service (disclaimer: I don’t golf). If Saanich stopped providing golf services, some people would end up paying more, but this would not affect a vast majority of people in the area. So, I wouldn’t shed a tear if Saanich’s golf course was privatised (I would be happier if it became a park, but that’s a different argument!).

    Let’s look at recreation centres – Murray Langdon says this:

    For example, we know that rec centres lose money each and every year. But we have examples of private recreation facilities, (in Langford for example) that are not only affordable but actually make money. For some reason, people assume that if it’s not run by a municipality, it will be expensive. Well, I have news for you. It is expensive and it may be because it’s run by a municipality.

    I am confused, what Langford recreation centre is he talking about? (I don’t live in Langford, or hardly ever visit) The Westshore Parks and Rec Society runs the recreation centres, and it appears to be a joint effort by Westshore communities.

    West Shore Park & Recreation is governed by the West Shore Parks & Recreation Society’s Board of Directors  Each municipalities contribution, through tax requisition, assists in the operation of the parks and recreation facilities.

    Putting Langford aside, clearly, the public health benefits of increased physical activity make exercise a non-discretionary item (some may disagree!) Community based (whether run by the municipality or not) recreation centres have many benefits that are not measured just by their profit-loss statements. They are often the only option for family-centric, community centric (as opposed to individual centric) recreation. I can’t go to a private gym with my partner (real) and kids (hypothetical), and have all of us participate in  activities at the same time. My partner and I would have to schedule different workouts, then enrol the progeny in a separate swimming or soccer class, find/take turns in baby sitting, etc. So, not having community based recreation increases costs to society + government, while possibly (and not always) reducing government “costs”. The social capital of having community recreation centres, the public health benefits of encouraging exercise, I could go on, the intangible benefits are high. The YMCA, which I am a member of, is a non-profit community run recreation centre, and this model works as well.

    Water and Sewer – These are non-discretionary, monopoly driven services not really market based. Construction, some maintenance, value added services, may be amenable to competition, but not the management, oversight and long-term stewardship. While the BC provincial government and various Federal governments have been trying to privatise various commons resources, third-party evidence points to no cost savings.

    Here’s a test: Talk about BC Liquor!

    The job of a public policy analyst is to consider the costs/benefits of the society as a whole. One does not read government balance sheets the same way one would read a corporation’s balance sheet.

    Photo from GibsonGolfer Flickr photostream used under a Creative Commons License.

  • Facebook and deep customer tracking, I want my data!

    Byoliveridley

    To nobody’s surprise, Facebook, just like any other entity selling you stuff, or selling you to people who sell you stuff is trying to connect more and more sets of previously unconnected data. This particular case deals with brick and mortar store data that is linked with customers’ email addresses and loyalty cards.

    Facebook will be using Datalogix to prepare reports for its advertisers about who, if anyone, bought more of their stuff after they ran ads on the social network. But by matching your Facebook profile with your CVS bill, this means that Facebook has the potential to know some of your most intimate details (my, that’s a lot of bunion cream you’re buying!), and the privacy concerns are enormous. When DoubleClick attempted something similar to this, user-backlash ultimately led them to cancel the project.

    Can Facebook Possibly Build a Business Model That Isnt Inherently Creepy? – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic.

    Corporations (more than government, open data activists!) have been deep mining our data for years. It is part of creating the information asymmetry that enables profits to be made. You may remember this story about Target (coming to Canada as soon as we can learn to say Tarjay) and how they outed a teen’s pregnancy.

     About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

    “My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

    Companies’ ability to reduce us to a shopping probability statistic is only going to get better as they learn to connect more of our data and computing gets faster. Can regulation keep up? Can customer outrage keep up with companies offering us coupons to keep us temporarily happy as impulse centres in our brain are carefully triggered for profit? Can customer outrage even keep up with the barrage of occurrences?

    Receipt 2.0

    I don’t think we can keep up. So, I want my data. I want information on what I bought, when I bought it, where I bought it in a standardized open data format. No, not a paper receipt, not a paper receipt scanner, but something that can be beamed to my phone, or emailed to me. I want to know when I buy coffee. Can I correlate my shopping habits with my mood?  Do I buy more random electronics when I need a pick me up? What is the spread in the price I paid for my favourite cereal? Do some stores price it differently on Wednesdays? I want apps that can mine my data and tell me where to buy my cereal, or when not to buy. I want apps that can tap into a product database and give me a carbon footprint, or a fair trade pass/fail, or a local product breakdown.

    Also, I do not want to re-enter the same bits of data multiple times and increase error. A payment made to my dentist should be sent directly to my extended health “insurance” provider for a refund. It should also go to my tax receipts virtual pile and await reimbursement. Any tax deductions can easily be tagged and directly entered into my tax preparation software at the end of the year. if I want to expense something for work, I should just be able to tag them and send them along. I can’t imagine how much time and effort this will save in error checking, manual entry, auditing, so much more.

    Some of this is possible with systems like Mint, but they operate on a payment level, not on a line item level.

    The new mobile payment system Square (not in Canada yet) shows some potential, so does Intuit’s GoPayment, which is available in Canada. But these payment systems emphasize ease of payment on both sides of the transaction, not the ability to mine our own data.

    Can this happen via the market with no regulatory push? I don’t see how. Reducing information asymmetry is not in corporations’ interest. So it will have to be regulated. You have our data, just give it to us.

    Not to mention, this is the “free market” way to go. Think of all the innovation that can be unleashed on the consumer side. Think of the apps that can provide better financial advice, the apps that can collate data at city/regional level and help consumers make better decisions.

    Will companies have to spend money to make this happen? Yes. This will not be challenging for larger companies who already spend millions deep-mining our data. What about small business? This is where small tweaks to new systems like Square or GoPayment can be the game changer. Square already charges less for a swipe than a typical Visa transaction. So, I would see local business as saving money. When I buy local, I usually feel a bit more connection with the product. Imagine seeing my decision reinforced by data from Receipt 2.0. Small local business cannot data mine, but can generate enough goodwill with local consumers to get access to their data. Unlike Target, when my corner soap store does something unethical with my data, they cannot survive the bad publicity.

    Are there privacy concerns? Yes. But our privacy is already compromised the minute we pay anything other than cash, or use the internet (Tor users, stop smirking). Good regulation can address most concerns.

    My information is being used to make me a consume more, I want it to make me a better “consumer”. Open data efforts have focused intensely on public and government data, while privacy activists have tried unsuccessfully to stop private data gathering. I would like open data advocates to look carefully at liberating corporate mined data as well.

    Featured Image courtesy the Culturally Authentic Picture Lexicon used under a creative commons licence.

  • Income Inequality = Super VIllains

    Byoliveridley

    From the very awesome Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Website, a reminder that income inequality causes more super villains than science, and mashing DNA 🙂  Canada’s Conference Board, which no one would accuse of being socialist, came up with a report yesterday flagging growing inequality in Canada. They flagged inequality as “raising questions of fairness”, and declared it of “moral concern”.

    They are late to the party. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has been on this beat for years, and has an ongoing project called The Growing Gap about income inequality. Go read The Spirit level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Inequality Trust in the UK for an epidemiological look at inequality and various social conditions.

    Just wanted to share the awesome cartoon, that’s all 🙂

  • Americanize Me? No Thanks

    Byoliveridley

    The Tyee gets all feisty on the subject of American-Canadian “integration”.

    It all got me to thinking about just why on earth Canadians would want to integrate into the U.S.Let’s be clear. This goes way beyond just having a bad neighbour. It’s about moving in with them.Don’t get me wrong. We can actually feel sorry for folks next door. They weren’t always this bad. But there is just no question that today they are a dangerously dysfunctional family. A lot of them are ill, but the other half refuses to come to their assistance. The old man squanders the family’s considerable income on his gun collection. They foul their own nests and squander their resources.The family behaves as if the neighbourhood’s rules don’t apply to them: they are noisy, pushy and if you try to reason with them they bully you. Hey, it’s not just our neighbourhood — they bully people all over town.

    Americanize Me? No Thanks :: Views :: thetyee.ca

    One more highlight…

    But what about the two decade long increase in U.S. productivity, constantly touted by Bay Street as a model for Canada? According to Doug Henwood of the Guardian newspaper, much of that increase can be traced to the enormous amount of forced, unpaid overtime by both waged and salaried employees. Americans work longer hours per year than those in any other industrialized country

    According to this report, Canadians worked 4 fewer weeks per year than Americans in 2002, which is good. Canada’s right in the middle of industrialized countries as far as hours worked per year goes, no need to emulate the US in that regard.

    Blogged with the Flock Browser

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    Who is Local?

    Byoliveridley

    “Ahmadi is still months away from getting permanent resident status, putting him in the unlucky group of middle-class British Columbians who have found themselves targeted by a tax purportedly imposed to crack down on rich real estate speculators from overseas”

    I’ve never been this hopeless

    I would not call Hamed Ahmadi unlucky, he’s a victim of the all too common policy apparatus that confuses residency with visa status. The BC non-resident tax of 15% on properties is supposed to target “foreign” (read Chinese) investors buying in Vancouver with no intentions of living there. I presume there are multiple other ways to determine residency and “localness” for the purpose of determining who lives here and who does not. The BC government, in its haste to demonstrate it was doing something, took the easy route and used visa status as a proxy.

    Hamed lives and works in BC, which meets my definition of local. While a speculation tax on non-residents is a reasonable approach, using visa status to determine residency, and providing no sensible exceptions for locals with alternative paper work is lazy and thoughtless policy making, so is not providing exceptions for people with home buying applications already in process. It’s almost as if someone looked at the polls and press and wrote the law in a day.

    In many ways, this is personal for me because I lived in the US for 10+ years under various non-permanent visas that left me vulnerable to these poorly designed, thoughtless policy measures. I lived in the same town for 10 years, was very much a local by the time I’d left, with a stable set of friends, family, work, places I shopped in, hiked to, causes I supported, volunteer work I did, and more. So, Hamed’s story could have been mine, and in some smaller ways, was mine for other parts of my life.

    “CTV News spoke with BC Liberal cabinet minister Andrew Wilkinson on Wednesday and asked several times for comment on Ahmadi’s situation. Wilkinson responded by repeating a piece of blanket advice for the people impacted. “Those who find themselves affected by the tax should seek legal advice because individual circumstances vary,” Wilkinson said.

    This is typical of policy makers who are so removed from the day to day lives of the people whose behaviour they seek to regulate. The casual assumption that regular people can afford professionals who bill at multiple hundreds of dollars an hour speaks more about the types of people these ministers hang out with than anything else. But this sounds familiar too, I needed to consult lawyers multiple times to help me with immigration paper work.

    As someone with a high level of institutional trust, and who thinks governments can affect our lives for the better with sound and thoughtful policy interventions, these types of hasty policy making are deeply disappointing. There are multiple other policy measures to make housing more affordable. The CCPA just released a comprehensive document of policies, focusing on the actual problem, the lack of affordable housing. Investment in affordable housing with a focus on cohousing and social housing, and zoning changes that reduce the protections afforded to affluent property owners would go a long way.

    Originally posted on Interrobang 04-August-2016