The Information Diet Part 10

-Governor Howard Dean [88]

Let's go back to those signs: "Enlist Here to Die for Halliburton" and "Keep your Government Hands Off My Medicare." For me, they were the signals that something was wrong with our democracy-that our nation suffers from an information obesity dilemma, especially in the world of politics.

To figure out what was going on in the information diets of partisan activists in the United States, I built a simple service that subscribed to the various political email lists that are sent out by politicians, advocacy groups, and other political organizations. The result is one of the larger compendiums of political emails that exists organized by political spectrum. I waded through the various emails we received, and began to get a taste of what both sides of the political aisle were talking about.

Figure 11-1 shows what might end up in the inbox of a conservative activist. Figure 11-2 shows what could end up in the inbox of a liberal one.

Figure 11-1. The potential inbox of a conservative activist.

Figure 11-2. The potential inbox of a liberal activist.

In a world where both sides have information diets like these, our democracy will remain completely paralyzed and divided. Moreover, charged up activists and the organizations they support will drive the public further away from the actual mechanics of power in government.

The "sportsification" of federal politics has made it so we treat elections like athletic rivalries, vilifying the other team at the expense of doing what's right for the country. If this was what motivated your const.i.tuents, would you listen to them? As Congress stops listening, people get more furious, building larger megaphones with which to shout at their representatives; and Congress, being unable to decipher what people are saying from the sheer volume of input, simply listens less. It's a destructive loop that causes a great chasm between people and the functions of government designed to listen to them: a partic.i.p.ation gap.

The partic.i.p.ation gap is the gap between people and the mechanics of power in their governmental bodies. Its cause is our desire to focus on large, emotionally resonant issues over practical problems that can be solved, and the disconnect between what people want out of their government and what it can actually do.

Because of the partic.i.p.ation gap, citizens are frustrated and take out that frustration at the polling booth, voting to "throw the b.u.ms out" and "elect fresh blood in Was.h.i.+ngton." As new members of Congress are elected, they must rely on the professional cla.s.s of Was.h.i.+ngton-professional staff, lobbyists, and consultants-in order to understand the mechanics of our government. The cycle then repeats itself, our satisfaction with Congress sinks to a new all time low, and we do the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result: Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity.

What we never do is look at how to close the partic.i.p.ation gap, to more closely connect people with the levers of power in Was.h.i.+ngton. Instead, we're distracted by issues du jour: the anger at Was.h.i.+ngton being unaccountable turns into debates over the debt ceiling, healthcare, abortion, guns, or gays. But it never turns into a discussion about how to make the United States government better at representing the interests of those who elect it or solving the great disconnect problem. No matter which side of the aisle you sit on, it's better television to watch pundits talk about polarizing issues than it is to figure out how to make governments work better.

The answer isn't as simple as firing the professional cla.s.s of Was.h.i.+ngton, either; banning lobbying in Was.h.i.+ngton will just create a newly named profession of "citizen activists" that will do the same thing. In order to treat the problem, we've got to figure out what causes it.

The Scalability Problem.

The first cause of the partic.i.p.ation gap is a problem that technologists would call scale. The underlying structures of government aren't designed to handle our present population as it is currently interacting with government.

If you take a look at the Const.i.tution, you'll quickly figure out that the framers couldn't have imagined a union with this many people in it. At our first census, the population of the United States was at less than 10 million people scattered across the 13 colonies that now make up the eastern seaboard. The population of Planet Earth was a measly one billion people. There is no way that the framers could have conceived of a country of 300 million people-roughly a third of the world's population at that time.

But the framers did something smart: they pegged the number of representatives in the lower chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, to be proportional to population. Our first Congress, in 1789, had 65 members of the House of Representatives for roughly four million people; each member represented approximately 60,000 people.

In 1890, our population had grown, and so did our House of Representatives. Each of the 325 members of the House represented roughly 200,000 people. Then at the turn of the last century, just before our population exploded, Congress came to the realization that the House of Representatives was getting unruly and incapable of getting anything done, so they put a cap on the number of total representatives that we have: 435.

The result today is a staggering 1:717,000 ratio. The only democratic country in the world with a ratio more unwieldy than ours is India. If you combined the populations of j.a.pan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and the UK, and had them all represented by just the number of members of UK's House of Commons, they'd still have a lower ratio than we have in the United States.

It's impossible for one person to accurately represent 717,000 people-it's why candidates have to raise and spend millions of dollars on television advertis.e.m.e.nts rather than getting to know their const.i.tuents. It's why members of Congress have to rely on lobbyists to get ideas on what to do, and it's why the media sensationalizes politics. Today, politicians must come out strong on polarizing issues in order to get the attention of the major media markets they're representing. Thus, it's easier for people to treat Republicans and Democrats like the Red Sox and the Yankees.

Granted, a lot has changed since that 1:60,000 ratio was created: we have gone through the media revolutions of the telegraph, the radio, the television, and the Internet, all of which should positively affect a member's ability to hear from her const.i.tuents.

We also have enhanced travel technology and infrastructure: planes, trains, and automobiles, combined with a strong civic infrastructure of roads, highways, train tracks, and airports, make it easier for a member to travel back and forth to hear from her district. But even with this new technology, it's clear that we're dealing with a scalability problem with our democracy.

So how do we solve this problem? The law placing a cap on members of Congress was invented 100 years ago for a good reason: Congress was getting unwieldy. If we reverted to our framers' 1:60,000 ratio, we'd now have over 5,000 members of Congress. It's unlikely they would be able to work as a cohesive legislative body at that level.

Sticking to that ratio would mean rebuilding the Capitol building into something that looked a bit more like RFK Stadium-congresses would look more like trade shows than what we see today-and it would mean a Congress that couldn't effectively get anything done.

It would also be impossible to make happen. Getting two-thirds of Congress to agree to dilute their power to less than 1/200th what it is today seems highly unlikely, and the other way to do it-getting two-thirds of the states to hold a const.i.tutional convention on the issue-seems equally implausible.

[88] http://books.google.com/books?id=TUjGk7nK1jsC&lpg=PA17&ots=ejqX-emCLg&dq=the%20biggest%20lie%20people%20like%20me%20tell%20people%20like%20you%20howard%20dean&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Transparency.

I started this book with transparency: the idea that governments, corporations, news organizations, and all of our information suppliers start opening up. Transparency is a necessary requirement for the reality-based community. To go on a healthy diet, we need cheap, healthy food options. The critical supply ingredient to a healthy information diet is transparency.

After spending a couple years working on transparency in government, I keep coming back to food. Not only do the changes in agriculture have significant parallels to our information production, but they also teach us a lot about transparency's effectiveness. Data-wise, food is very transparent.

In 1990, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act was pa.s.sed by Congress and signed into law by then-president George Bush. The act gave birth to the modern version of what we see on the back of nearly every food item we buy in the grocery store today: the FDA's Nutritional Label.

It's a very sophisticated label. On it, you'll find the caloric content of the food, the vitamins and minerals it contains, and even its ingredients. One can, should one choose to do so, make very effective choices about one's health armed with basic nutritional knowledge and the transparency-focused nutritional labels on food packaging.

But with the labels came the other adjectives. While the nutritional labels are standard on the back of our boxes, the front of our boxes started filling up with meaningless, but great sounding words and phrases, too-words like "all-natural" and "farm raised" and "part of your complete breakfast." The words on the front of the box are so much better than the words on the back. They're brighter, flas.h.i.+er, and much more wholesome sounding than those on the back. Who wants to read about Acesulfame Pota.s.sium when you can read about "Real CocaCola Taste and Zero Calories?"

No one would argue that these nutritional labels aren't a good thing and a positive direction for the food industry, but they certainly haven't prevented an obesity crisis. The labeling only affected those with the will to read it and the people willing to understand and constantly study what the words and the numbers actually mean.

In 2008, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country to require calorie labeling of food sold by restaurants with more than 15 locations. Since the law was pa.s.sed, a lot of research has been done to determine whether the labeling is having the desired outcome: consumers making more conscious decisions.

Two scientific papers provide a good overview of what's happened. The first, released six months after the law went into effect, measured the choices of lower-income residential neighborhoods and their purchase patterns before and after, at Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.[89] They then compared the purchase patterns of New York City to those of Newark, NJ, where there are no labeling laws, but the social and economic status of the neighborhood residents are comparable.

The results: more than half of the respondents in New York City said that they saw the calorie counts next to menu items in New York City, and 27.7% of the respondents who saw the calorie counts said that the labels influenced their choices, and more than 10% of respondents reported purchasing fewer calories.

But what did the actual behavior say? People in the locations sampled purchased an average of 825 calories before the nutritional labeling law was pa.s.sed, and purchased an average of 846 calories after the law was introduced. The difference is statistically insignificant and well within the margin of error. The labels didn't change anything.

Another study shows a different result. This time, instead of targeting low-income families and common brands, researchers from Stanford chose high-income groups shopping at a luxury brand: Starbucks. The researchers, with the cooperation of Starbucks, examined every transaction in 2008 from New York City and Seattle, where the calorie count laws went into effect, and compared them to Boston and Philadelphia, where there were no calorie count laws.

They found that the laws did have an effect. Where the calorie counts were posted, there was a decrease of 6% in calories purchased: from 247 calories to 232. While it's a smaller number than the fast food example, it represents more than twice the percentage difference of that in the fast food study, and is thus more statistically significant. Food calories dropped by 14%, and beverage calories remained unaffected. Further, they found that customers consuming more than 250 calories per trip to Starbucks had even more significant changes in their habits: they consumed fewer calories by upwards of 26 percent. Finally, the researchers found that the effect of the calorie postings was greater in higher income and higher education neighborhoods.[90]

With these two pieces of research, you can draw some interesting conclusions. The first is that people may be willing to make marginal changes. Shaving 15 calories off of your Starbucks purchase may be a more palpable change than shaving 50 calories off of your McDonald's purchase.

The second, and more substantial, conclusion is that maybe this form of transparency only affects wealthier and more educated people who are already trying to be healthy. You can certainly see this in the mostly affluent characteristics of the open government and transparency community.

Even amongst the wealthy, transparency alone won't solve the problem. While it's an improvement, the calorie consumption differences are still negligible in terms of fighting what they're intended to fight: obesity. Even if you shave 15 calories a day, or 5,475 calories a year, off of your diet, you're only talking about losing a little over a pound a year. If managing to reduce your entire 2,000-calorie-a-day diet by 6%, you're still only talking about losing a little over a half-pound per month. While it'd help in the obesity crisis, that alone won't solve any problems.

Yet in the face of the deluge of information and the changing standards of economics, we cling to transparency as a model for increasing our integrity. Writer David Weinberger once claimed, "Transparency is the new objectivity." It's convenient and easy: if our information sources are just transparent about their relative biases, then we'll all be better informed subjects.

Clinging to transparency as a replacement for integrity is a bad idea. The choice between transparency and objectivity is a false choice; what we want is for our journalists, our politicians, and even our athletes to be honest. While both transparency and objectivity are useful tools to draw out that attribute, they're no guarantee that any system or human being will be honest and act ethically.

Let's be glad the folks running our water sanitation facilities didn't listen to Louis Brandeis when he said, "Sunlight is the best of disinfectants," and just leave our water out in the sunlight before recycling it for our use. While he was speaking metaphorically, sunlight is a relatively poor disinfectant or remedy for disease. Ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, bleach-heck, even most of the stuff behind the bartender at your favorite watering hole-all tend to be better disinfectants than sunlight.

More bluntly: if you turn the lights on in a roach-infested apartment, it doesn't kill the roaches, it just makes them organize in the shadows. Sunlight only hides the infestation. To get rid of them, you should clean up the apartment and probably call an exterminator.

Transparency's Dark Side.

There is a dark side of transparency. Today, it's a tool used as much by the corrupt and dishonest as it is by those who are actually honest. It's used as an illusion to give the appearance of honesty without the intent of being honest. You can simply claim to be transparent, and create a halo of honesty about you, without actually being honest.

Two factors empower this dark side of transparency. We've discussed them a lot in this book. The first is our deluge of information and facts disguised as entertainment. Even the most open and transparent systems must compete with buckets of information that are more interesting. The second is our poor information diets-that we choose information we want to hear over information that reveals the truth makes the compet.i.tion all the more difficult.

Whether it is the press, the government, or businesses, without conscious and deliberate consumption, transparency does more harm than good. While it can be used as a means of disinfecting a system, transparency can also be used by the corrupt to create a false a.s.sociation with integrity and honesty. A member of Congress could become a public paragon of honesty and integrity by live-streaming video from his congressional office, yet privately be a crook by selling out America in the coffee shop across the street. When he's caught, he could say, "How dare you question my integrity! I have cameras in my office," and make the prosecution all the more difficult.

What's worse is that Joe Public becomes unwittingly complicit in the crimes created by unethical people being transparent about their dishonesty. If a crime is committed with all the sunlight and electric lights in the world shone upon it, then the responsibility for catching that crime gets, in part, placed at the feet of the public. Transparency in a system lets the real enforcement officials off the hook.

The legend[91] of Kitty Genovese is that she was stabbed to death in broad daylight in New York City, and not a single bystander called for help. The story itself is a bit of a myth (though no less tragic), but serves as an example of how sunlight, the electric light, and calls for help can't stop a crime if a public is either failing to pay attention or unwilling to take a stand. Today, America is much like Ms. Genovese, bleeding to death on the sidewalk while the nation is distracted by partisan rhetoric.

Take Recovery.gov, for example. The site was heralded by the Obama administration as an unparalleled view of a huge domestic spending package: the 2009, $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Its function? To combat waste, fraud, and abuse by the system-to ensure that the taxpayer's money was spent wisely and prudently, free from fraud and profiteering.

The Chairman of the Recovery Board, Earl Devaney, said upon the launch of the full Recovery.gov website on September 29th, 2009: "I believe that this historic level of transparency will help drive accountability in many new ways. While this Board and countless other federal, state and local oversight agencies will be looking for fraud and waste, every American citizen who clicks on this website has the potential to become what I'm calling a Citizen IG [inspector general]. That's right-we need you to help us identify fraud, waste or mismanagement in your community."

To date, Recovery.gov lists one account of fraud: an incident in South Carolina that ended in the conviction of five people, and saved the taxpayer a paltry two million dollars. Did a "citizen IG" find and report this crime using Recovery.gov? No. It came from "on-site agency officials."[92]

With our political information, it's the same thing. We can make all the lobbyist meetings, all the campaign contributions, all the electioneering, every vote, every committee hearing, and every c.o.c.ktail party open and available, online and in real-time, and even hand deliver them to every person's doorstep-we can even have a giant federal agency label all our info-nutritional information, carefully and ethically. But it's likely to be about as effective as our nutritional labels.

Like the calorie counts from food, transparency is ineffective at arming the ma.s.ses unless there's a strong will in the public to arm itself with the knowledge of how this information affects us, and how to effectively read the metaphorical labels. People will be no less obese-and no less ignorant-unless they have the will to consume less of the stuff that's bad for them, and more of the stuff that's good for them. While transparency can help the problem, it alone cannot fix it.

Transparency's Potential.

That's not to say transparency is always a bad thing. Used in the right way, it is a vital weapon in our a.r.s.enal against corruption, just like the nutritional label is a vital tool in our a.r.s.enal for a healthy diet. One cannot make healthy food choices without knowing what's in one's food, just as one cannot make healthy electoral choices without knowing whom one is voting for, and what kind of influences one has around them.

The other advantage of transparency is that it is, by itself, educational. Dissecting a car engine, and understanding its functions wholly, not only makes you a better mechanic, but is also likely to make you a better driver. Understanding the data that runs your company, and the factors that go into its success, makes you a better employee. And understanding the factors that go into the election of a candidate, and the motivations behind their votes, not only makes you a better citizen, but it also helps you understand government.

The promise of transparency is powerful in the world of government. It begs us to imagine a world in which everyone can see how the government is being influenced-in which our government has little privacy; investigative reporting is made easier because the dots that need connecting come preconnected; and the Pentagon Papers of today divulge themselves, through the miracle of the latest technologies.

But the truth is that citizen-focused transparency initiatives have a miserable track record of fighting corruption. And citizens have a miserable track record of using those initiatives to make rational decisions about the people they elect.

Transparency isn't a replacement for integrity and honesty; it's an infrastructural tool that allows for those attributes to occur-but only if the public is willing act upon the information that they receive as a result of transparency in a conscious, deliberate way. We can't let transparency be a tool for only the rich and well-educated to use to drive their decision-making. It must be woven into our civic fabric, and comprehensible by all.

[89] http://content.ny1.com/pages/downloads/Calorie_study.pdf [90] http://www.stanford.edu/~pleslie/calories.pdf [91] The social record of Kitty Genovese does not match up with the historical one. Neighbors did turn out to help and did pay attention to her call. Her story is more myth than legend.

[92] http://www.recovery.gov/News/featured/Pages/Criminal-Convictions-and-Significant-Monetary-Recoveries-for-Fraud-Schemes-Involving-Recovery-Funds.aspx.

Bridging the Gap.

The answer is to take the problem into our own hands. If we want to maintain our democracy, we've got to solve government's scalability problems, and the way that we solve them is by being active partic.i.p.ants in our democracy not just on the second Tuesday of every other November, but on the other 364 days of the year. To solve the scalability problem, we must become active partic.i.p.ants in our government.

This doesn't mean becoming a traditional activist. In my political career I've worked on a range of issues-from immigration, to healthcare, to more recently effective government and transparency. There are two big lessons I've learned.

The first is that there's a gigantic gap between the skills it takes to win an election and the skills it takes to govern a country. It turns out that electing people-the skills of people like David Axelrod and Karl Rove-are advanced, learned skills that require years of experience to get right.

The skills that it takes to persuade you to vote for someone are entirely different skills than the skills it takes to run a country. Managing the world's largest budget, determining how the government can buy things, figuring out how to take and use public comments-from the soldier in the army to the head of the White House's Office of Management and Budget-they're all skills that are necessary for the management of our government, and they're not political skills, they're governmental ones.

Yet all of our activism pours into the former skill, and none to the latter. If we really want to fix our government, we've got to be partic.i.p.ants in the way government works, not who it employs.

The second lesson I learned is that many of the nonprofits and advocacy groups are more interested in staying relevant than solving problems. The motives of many advocacy organizations are not to solve the issues they're working on, but rather to continue to raise money and make payroll. As a result, these advocacy groups tend to focus on larger problems that can go unsolved for years.

While some of these organizations do important work-pus.h.i.+ng the envelope to make the United States healthier, to make the environment cleaner and more sustainable, or to try and increase the effectiveness of education in the United States-there are smaller, non-partisan battles that could be won that could have long-standing benefits to the country.

Presuming that our government isn't going anywhere, what can we do to make it better?

Since the "great experiment" started, America's weakness, as de Tocqueville noted, was and still is the tyranny of the majority. My plea to you is to start sweating the small stuff at the expense of some of the big stuff. Was.h.i.+ngton isn't the land of vast, radical changes, it's a battles.h.i.+p waiting to be nudged in the right direction. Let the legions of information-obese fight on the front lines, and join me in nudging the small nuts and bolts that hold the s.h.i.+p together.

If you're worried about federal spending and the budget, don't concern yourself over the debt-ceiling debate. Work to change procurement laws so that government can get access to the same things the private sector has without paying an arm and a leg. We spend so much time figuring out what programs to spend money on, comparing their priorities to one another, and blanket cutting them when they're deemed too luxurious. It's the equivalent of trying to lose weight by cutting off your legs. Optimizing how government spends its money is at least as important as figuring out what our money gets spent on, and there are real, pragmatic solutions to getting there.

If you're interested in making government more accountable, work on making it so that the government's listening tools and policies are modernized. Many government agencies have legal teams that feel as though social media is an appropriate place for its communications team to publish press releases, but not an appropriate place to solicit real comments for regulations. It's mainly because of ident.i.ty issues: the government wants a physical address, and doesn't trust that a social media profile is fraud-proof. I'd suggest that it's just as easy to lie about your address as it is a social media profile.

Today, the feedback you give an agency through a website like Facebook or Twitter stops at the new media team inside the agency, and never gets involved in the regulatory process. If the Department of Energy is to publish press releases and invite people to interact with its communications department, it also needs to be able to legally take feedback for the regulations it proposes. It's a simple, nonpartisan problem that could be fixed with a few hundred people demanding that the government use the Internet to be real, active partic.i.p.ants with us.

If you're worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns' paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has pa.s.sed.

If you're worried about prisons and civil rights, or making America innovative again, take note of the fact that our laws are generally distributed and archived by for-profit corporations, making it so that even access to the laws that we must follow are behind paywalls. Federally funded scientific research also sits in archives only available to those that agree to pay twice (once with their tax dollars, once for the access) for it.

These are small, solvable problems that don't require millions of dollars or people to fix: they require thousands of focused, smart people to push the right levers inside of the government.

We can also improve our government without waiting on government to act. Organizations like PopVox.com, for instance, make it easier for people to translate what they want their representative to do into the language our representatives speak. There's a whole world of technology out there waiting to be used to help members listen to their const.i.tuents, and it's likely-now that much of our discussions about politics are public-that we don't need government to act: we can build tools that listen to what people are already saying, make that information public, and question our elected officials when they're voting against their const.i.tuencies.

At the local level, there are thousands of opportunities and willing partic.i.p.ants on the side of government. SeeClickFix.com, for instance, builds tools that integrate with various cities' request hotlines so when a citizen spots a problem-say a pothole-they can easily report it back to the government. And more importantly, if they spot something they or a group of people can fix themselves-like picking up litter in a park-they can use the site to organize people to help pick up the litter.

These are just examples of what I'd like to believe Governor Dean meant when he said, "You have the power." We mustn't rely on our government alone to solve our problems for us. We have the ability to do it for our neighbors, our communities, and our country as a whole.

Every issue-healthcare, the environment, immigration, even defense-has hundreds of small, nonpolitical, operational problems waiting for a solution, and fixing these small things can have a huge impact compared to combatting a vague foreverwar on issues built to perpetuate the system of donor dollars, consultants, and lobbyists.

The trick is the information diet: filtering out the nonsense meant to get us charged up on issues that will take years to solve, and becoming educated and smart about our government. If we want our government to change, we have to start taking responsibility for not just electing new people, or pa.s.sing big policies, but sweating the small stuff too.