Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Government'

Past, Present, and Future

April 10, 2025 • #

Here’s a useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government, from Yuval Levin’s American Covenant:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past. These boundaries are not perfectly clean, of course.

How distinct this delineation of roles is between the branches of government is up for debate, but this is a useful way to think about the Framers’ intention in designing the balanced separation of powers.

  • Legislators frame laws for the future
  • The president acts on them today
  • Judges compare what’s happening today and planned for tomorrow against precedents set in the past

We tend to run into trouble when any of the branches strays outside its primary domain.

When the executive is designing Big Plans for the future, or when the judiciary is issuing punishments in the present, or (in what I’d say is our worst problem today) the legislative isn’t doing anything, we get into fraught territory.

While each of these has its primary focus on a particular time horizon, they aren’t the sole arbiters of decision making with respect to their domain. Our complex array of checks allows each to assert influence over other areas. I just find this a useful compression of the general model of the system.

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How the Constitution Can Bring Us Together →

June 12, 2024 • #

A great interview with AEI’s Yuval Levin ahead of the release of his latest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation — And Could Again.

Yuval is one of the greatest minds we have working today. He brings a particular mixture of sanity, seriousness, gravitas, level-headedness, and dare-I-call-it normalcy to political discussions. His explanation of what the Constitution does (and, importantly, doesn’t do) threads right into the idea of comfort with contradiction:

Would the system empower the small states or the large ones? It would empower both and leave them ever struggling for balance. Would the president be a glorified clerk or an elevated head of state? He would be both, and therefore neither. The few and the many, the city and the country, freedom and order, equality and excellence, representation and administrative efficiency–to each of these stark choices the Constitution says yes, both. And as a result, it creates a regime, a democratic republic, that as the very term suggests, lives in constant tension with itself, yet is capable of extraordinary feats.

When there are no options we can all agree on, go with the system that results in perpetual argument and compromise.

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The Two Enlightenments

February 20, 2024 • #

We learn about “The Enlightenment” as a singular entity, a historical age associated with rationality, scientific inquiry, humanism, and liberty. The Enlightenment and scientific revolution were defining moments that spawned an unprecedented period of progress and human flourishing. But in his book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch adds useful texture for better understanding the motivations of the Enlightenment’s contributors.

He divides the movement into two broad forms: the “British” and the “Continental”.

Both branches agree on the core principles of rationality, progress, and freedom. Where they disagree is on how to achieve these goals. They pursue the same ends, but disagree on the means. The British model builds on the concept of fallibilism: progress happens through conjecture, empirical evidence, and falsification. The Continental relies on pure reason, and our theoretical ability to find final, objective truth. Thinkers like Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire best fit in the Continental camp. The likes of John Locke, Edmund Burke, Karl Popper, and Adam Smith in the British.

Here’s a summary of qualities that differentiate these two approaches to pursuing human progress:

Continental Enlightenment British Enlightenment
Utopianism Fallibilism
Society can be perfected Society can only be indefinitely improved
Problems are soluble, NOT inevitable Problems are soluble, AND inevitable
Perfect the state through design Improve the state through gradual evolution
Top-down Bottom-up
Comprehensive reform of institutions Messy, improvement of imperfect forms

Deutsch himself favors the British form. As with issues of contemporary politics and philosophy, it’s important to understand not only the goals a particular philosophy seeks, but how it proposes we go about doing so.

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Against Centralized Power

August 30, 2023 • #

From Tom Sowell’s masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions:

While Hayek regarded some advocates of social justice as cynically aware that they were really engaged in a concentration of power, the greater danger he saw in those sincerely promoting the concept with a zeal which unconsciously prepares the way for others—totalitarians—to step in after the undermining of ideological, political, and legal barriers to government power makes their task easier.

This is one of the key dangers of centralizing power, and why I’m always interested in how people pursue goals versus what specifically they’re after. If, to achieve your objective, you have to bash down existing separations of power to get the work done, you have to be prepared for a successor (with whom you don’t agree) to deploy the same overconcentration of power to pursue ends you dislike. If you approve of presidential executive orders and the executive branch overriding legislative controls to “get things done”, you shouldn’t be surprised when your enemy does the same in the next term. But it’s less important whether you feel bad about or disagree strongly with a successor using the hammer. The lesson is to avoid centralizing authority as much as possible.

Scales of justice

A system designed with constraining barriers — like the American system of checks and balances — optimizes for something many people don’t realize. It’s not about enabling us to pursue maximum upside at all costs. Bureacracy is meant to slow things down, sometimes idealistic ends take decades. It’s about limiting catastrophic downsides: the tyranny of the majority, the slide into totalitarianism.

Sowell’s constrained vs. unconstrained vision model describes a framework for thinking about how certain psychologies will approach a problem solving or policy decision. The “constrained” has just that, a constrained view of what’s possible — of the innate intractability of the universe, of human fallibility. An environment defined by trade-offs. The “unconstrained” sees trade-offs as in our way, things to be disposed of or ignored to pursue our optimal path. Limited appreciation for the fact that we have no idea if what we think is optimal is actually so.

Constrained = seek first to explain the encountered Chesterton Fence.

Unconstrained = get annoyed by said fence, declare it an irritating obstruction, bulldoze.

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Don't Ban TikTok →

April 12, 2023 • #

I’m no fan of TikTok. But I’m with Tyler here that a government-imposed ban is the wrong prescription. Naturally, our government’s approach is to attempt to grant the central government more authority to do things very very not limited to TikTok-banning.

Should it really be possible that you could get 20 years in prison for using a VPN to bypass such a ban? 20 years behind bars is unlikely, but more broadly this is a sign that we are addressing the TikTok problems with very much the wrong policy instruments.

I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s possible there is no easy single-swing solution. But “it’s complicated” isn’t an argument that regulatory technocrats like to hear.

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The Lure of Technocracy →

April 4, 2022 • #

Jason Crawford lays out a theory for why technocracy (the idea that a technical elite can lead a nation to technological progress if given the top-down control of economic and scientific policy) fizzled out around the 1970s:

In the early 1970s, a perfect storm of events conspired to discredit the technocratic idea, including Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks. By 1973 it was clear that our leaders were unfit to govern, in terms of either competence or ethics: they could not handle affairs at home or abroad, neither the economy nor foreign policy, and they were plagued by scandal.

From the 1970s on, the conversation changed. The belief in progress was not totally dead. But the idea that it could be achieved centrally by the elites held much less sway, and there was a major new element of distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress—an element that has not gone away, and indeed by today has gone mainstream.

I don’t think the technocratic worldview is gone at all, though I do agree with his point that technological progress is seen with a skeptical eye by many in the west, especially over the last 20 years or so. Perhaps it’s that today’s technocrats retain their belief in their expertise and ability to dictate solutions from above, but those interests are less of a technical nature and focused more on socioeconomics or lifestyle.

Recently I’ve been reading Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies, so I’m deep in the roots of technocracy lately. That book presents a case for “dynamism” — the opposite being “stasism” — with “technocrats” and “reactionaries” being the two primary opponents of the dynamist view. Reactionaries want to bring things back to a time “in the old days” when things were better (read: predictable). Technocrats do want progress, but they want it at their own pace, dictated by their control and decisions. But to Postrel’s point, dynamism by definition bucks our attempts to control it directly.

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Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State

September 17, 2021 • #

đź“š The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App

Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.

The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates. Impressive.

🪧 Book Review: The Revolt of the Public

Scott Alexander reviews Martin Gurri:

People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn’t how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the “CAUSE MIRACLE” button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

Revolt of the Public was published in 2014, a time when most of his diagnosis of political discontent was prescient. But as SA points out, most of the subject matter is received wisdom in 2021.

I still highly recommend Gurri as a writer, and RotP for its analysis of root causes more than its predictions of things to come. More on Gurri here and here, and give a watch to his Revolt of the Public in 10 Minutes talk to get the precis on his work if you’re unfamiliar.

🏛 The Helicopter State

Jonah’s G-File is one of the rare read-every-issue newsletters, and this one is one of my recent favorites:

The government can’t love you, and when it works from the premise that it can, folly or tyranny follow. We need people in our lives, not programs. Because people give us the very real sense that we are part of something, that we’re needed and valued. Programs treat us like we’re metrics in some PowerPoint slide.

Helicopter parenting has a negative perception, as it should, but it’s still done all the time. Helicopter governing should be treated the same, but is also promoted and defended far too often.

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Science: The Endless Frontier →

October 21, 2020 • #

Vannevar Bush’s seminal report to President Truman, making the case for government support for foundational scientific research (and pushing to create the NSF).

Previously:

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Building a State →

September 22, 2020 • #

Historian Anton Howes on the push/pull dynamics between monarchs and parliaments, and the gradual building of state capacity in 16th century Britain.

It’s easy to imagine that governments were always as bureaucratic as they are today. Certain policies, like the widespread granting of monopolies in the seventeenth century, or the presence of a powerful landed aristocracy, seem like archaic products of a past that was simply more corrupt. The fact that governments rarely got involved with healthcare or education before the mid-nineteenth century seems the product of a lack of imagination, or perhaps yet another product of our ancestors’ venality – simply what happens when you put the war-hungry knights and nobles in charge.

In reality, rulers of the age had little central authority they could wield in building the state’s capacity. Sure they could will certain things into or out of law, but if they wanted to build a capability of the state to deliver goods or services, they were largely at the mercy of subjects.

In a world without bureaucracy, when state capacity was relatively lacking, it’s difficult to see what other options monarchs would have had. Suppose yourself transported to the throne of England in 1500, and crowned monarch. Once you bored of the novelty and luxuries of being head of state, you might become concerned about the lot of the common man and woman. Yet even if you wanted to create a healthcare system, or make education free and universal to all children, or even create a police force (London didn’t get one until 1829, and the rest of the country not til much later), there is absolutely no way you could succeed.

Gradually, convening parliaments (which weren’t always continuous, but called and dismissed on whims) was discovered to be a mediating function to delegate capacity needs like tax collection and other locale-specific functions.

It really is amazing how recent certain innovations are, that true state capacity in the modern sense isn’t more than a couple centuries old period, and really that capacity has expanded enormously even in the postwar era.

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Weekend Reading: The Hour of the State, Location AI, and Mapillary Acquired

June 20, 2020 • #

đź’¬ The Hour of the State or Explosion From Below?

Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Center’s “The Bridge.”

The American people appear to be caught in the grip of a psychotic episode. Most of us are still sheltering in place, obsessed with the risk of viral infection, primly waiting for someone to give us permission to shake hands with our friends again. Meanwhile, online and on television, we watch, as in a dream, crowds of our fellow citizens thronging into the streets of our cities, raging at the police and the established order generally, with some engaged in arson, looting, and violence.

On one side, a reflexive obedience to authority. On the other, a near-absolute repudiation of the rules of the system—for some, of any restraint whatever. The future will be determined by the uncertain relationship between these two extremes.

🤖 DataRobot Location AI

My friend and former colleague Kevin Stofan wrote the launch post for DataRobot’s latest product additions for spatial AI. Pretty amazing additions to their platform.

đź—ş Mapillary Joins Facebook

Good to see the Mapillary team add their computer vision tech and work with OpenStreetMap to Facebook. Big congrats to the team!

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Police and Road Safety →

June 9, 2020 • #

In the tumult going on the last few weeks about police power, corruption, brutality, and need for reform, this question has been kicking around. Alex Tabarrok has some interesting comments on the likelihood of separating the arms of state responsible for violent crime and routine rule enforcement, like traffic safety:

Don’t use a hammer if you don’t need to pound a nail. Road safety does not require a hammer. The responsibility for handing out speeding tickets and citations should be handled by a unarmed agency. Put the safety patrol in bright yellow cars and have them carry a bit of extra gasoline and jumper cables to help stranded motorists as part of their job–make road safety nice.

This “defund the police” term has been in the mediasphere lately, but I like Alex’s alternative better:

Defunding the police, whatever that means, is a political non-starter. But we can unbundle the police.

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Widespread Looting →

April 27, 2020 • #

Arnold Kling has been a great follow lately. On the Fed’s stimulus plan for COVID economic shutdown:

I have said all along that the checks being written to households and small businesses were just a fig leaf to cover a massive bailout of large corporations and the financial industry.

If we saw mobs breaking into stores, pulling items from the shelves, and walking out, we would recognize this as looting. But if we define looting as taking property without giving anything of value in return, then it is now widespread.

  • Tenants are looting landlords by not paying rent and not getting evicted.
  • Borrowers are looting banks by not paying mortgages or credit card debt.
  • Shareholders of airlines are looting the rest of us by getting bailout money.
  • The financial industry is looting us by getting bailout money from the Fed.
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Weekend Reading: Ancient Text, StarLink, and Chinese Origins

October 26, 2019 • #

đź“ś Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy

A project from DeepMind designed to fill in missing text from ancient inscriptions:

Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and is trained to predict character sequences comprising hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions (texts written in the Greek alphabet dating between the seventh century BCE and the fifth century CE). The architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations (Figure 2). This makes it applicable to all disciplines dealing with ancient texts (philology, papyrology, codicology) and applies to any language (ancient or modern).

đź›° SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites

They’ve only launched 60 so far, but it looks like SpaceX has big plans for their future broadband satellite constellation.

🇨🇳 The People’s Republic of China Was Born in Chains

I haven’t read much Chinese history, but its origins and the Mao years were one of the greatest tragedies. And it’s frightening how much of that attitude is still there under the facade:

China today, for any visitor who remembers the country from 20 or 30 years ago, seems hardly recognizable. One of the government’s greatest accomplishments is to have distanced itself so successfully from the Mao era that it seems almost erased. Instead of collective poverty and marching Red Guards, there are skyscrapers, new airports, highways, railway stations, and bullet trains. Yet scratch the glimmering surface and the iron underpinnings of the one-party state become apparent. They have barely changed since 1949, despite all the talk about “reform and opening up.” The legacy of liberation is a country still in chains.

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The Opportunity Project →

March 7, 2019 • #

We’ve spent the last 6 months or so working with the team at the US Census Bureau on something called The Opportunity Project, a recurring initiative quarterbacked by the Census to bring together creators, government, and local communities to collaboratively build tools to tackle various large issues in the nation. Specifically we’ve been testing out the ability for communities in need to deploy Fulcrum Community for collecting address data. While to an outsider it may seem like address data is a “solved problem,” that’s far from the case in certain locales and rural communities. Also, even in urban areas, the need for an address mapping toolkit and quality data rises up when disasters strike and throw municipalities into disarray.

This post from Bryan comprehensively covers what we’ve been doing and what the potential impacts look like for appropriate application of technology to specific problems:

Each year, The Opportunity Project (TOP) connects government agencies, technologists, and communities to collaboratively work through 12-week technology development sprints to tackle a variety of problem statements, using open data, and create digital tools that help strengthen American economic opportunity. Technologists work with stakeholders, end users, and product advisors to build tools and apps, which are unveiled at the end of the sprint during Demo Day, at the Census headquarters.

This past year, Spatial Networks had the privilege to work on a sprint team tasked with working closely with the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Transportation to help Tribal, State, and Local Governments with local address data collection. More specifically, our challenge was to develop resources to help stakeholders create and maintain open address point data.

Folks from FEMA, the City of New Orleans, several tribal councils, and other federal agencies are keenly interested in crowdsourcing tools like what we’ve been building, to apply to dozens of different problems where better data can play a role. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and are doubling down on Community in the coming months.

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HQ2: Understanding What Happened →

February 28, 2019 • #

This piece from Barry Ritholtz does a good job breaking down the real background behind the Amazon NYC HQ issues, how they were attracted and why they bailed:

The heart of the opposition to Amazon was how much the city and state bent the existing rules to offer a very generous package. The arguments are pretty clear: On the one side, net net the deal works to the city’s benefit, and $3 billion is not all that much.

The other side is less pragmatic and more philosophical. It is the same issue I have with taxpayers subsidizing Football stadiums. GBYOFS and stop asking taxpayers to subsidize your businesses and/or hobbies. The gaming of the safety net by Walmart and McDonalds to push their labor costs onto taxpayers. I railed against in during the financial crisis, and afterwards. Same with the Foxconn debacle — yet another example of corporate overreach combined with an ill equipped governor who got rolled. The taxpayers threw him out of office soon after.

What bothers me about the response to this fiasco is that both sides are complicit in the undesirable behavior: Amazon shouldn’t need to twist municipal authorities for benefits (nor should stadium-builders or anyone else), but those in the government are the ones responsible for caving and writing the beneficial legislation.

When any one company gets special treatment, its own sets of rules, taxes, incentives, kickbacks, etc., when specific rules apply only to some but not to all, well, that is much better described as Crony Capitalism.

The reactionary response that Amazon is an “evil corporation” that’s run by mean billionaires lets a lot of others off the hook for their own bad behavior. Relatedly, the latest EconTalk episode had Duke economist Michael Munger talking about this exact issue.

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It's Time for a Data Bill of Rights →

December 20, 2018 • #

This is a fascinating idea, arguing that we should shift our thinking about privacy and data away from “ownership.” Since owning / renting data doesn’t afford the privacy and agency control people actually want, the author argues for a broader set of rights

Clear, broad principles are needed around the world, in ways that fit into the legal systems of individual countries. In the US, existing constitutional provisions—like equal protection under the law and prohibitions against “unreasonable searches and seizures”—are insufficient. It is, for instance, difficult to argue that continuous, persistent tracking of a person’s movements in public is a search. And yet such surveillance is comparable in its intrusive effects to an “unreasonable search.” It’s not enough to hope that courts will come up with favorable interpretations of 18th-century language applied to 21st-century technologies.

A Bill of Data Rights should include rights like these:

  • The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable surveillance shall not be violated.
  • No person shall have his or her behavior surreptitiously manipulated.
  • No person shall be unfairly discriminated against on the basis of data.

These are by no means all the provisions a durable and effective bill would need. They are meant to be a beginning, and examples of the sort of clarity and generality such a document needs.

I’d be open to more arguments for how to bring about changes like this. Broad, sweeping new regulatory concepts tend to be short on realistic implementation details, so the jury’s still out. But it’s a subject important enough to keep iterating on and thinking about.

To make a difference for people like Rachel, a Bill of Data Rights will need a new set of institutions and legal instruments to safeguard the rights it lays out. The state must protect and delimit those rights, which is what the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2018 has started to do. The new data-rights infrastructure should go further and include boards, data cooperatives (which would enable collective action and advocate on behalf of users), ethical data-certification schemes, specialized data-rights litigators and auditors, and data representatives who act as fiduciaries for members of the general public, able to parse the complex impacts that data can have on life.

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Progress Report: The Federalist Papers

December 4, 2018 • #

I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton.

For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essays written by the trio of Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the populace of the need to ratify the then-draft US Constitution.

Up to Federalist No. 25, the focus is on a) the utility and importance of the “union of states” as a concept worth pursuing and cementing and b) the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation to do the job of maximizing the combined strength of the states (for various reasons outlined in the essays).

One of the biggest takeaways so far, somewhat unexpected to me, is the depth of research done by the authors to make their case. They draw on a rich historical record and present research to identify pros and cons of what’s been tried in past institutions, what’s worked, and what hasn’t. On the history of the Swiss Confederacy:

The connection among the Swiss cantons scarcely amounts to a confederacy; though it is sometimes cited as an instance of the stability of such institutions. They have no common treasury; no common troops even in war; no common coin; no common judicatory; nor any other common mark of sovereignty. They are kept together by the peculiarity of their topographical position; by their individual weakness and insignificancy; by the fear of powerful neighbors, to one of which they were formerly subject; by the few sources of contention among a people of such simple and homogeneous manners; by their joint interest in their dependent possessions; by the mutual aid they stand in need of, for suppressing insurrections and rebellions, an aid expressly stipulated and often required and afforded; and by the necessity of some regular and permanent provision for accommodating disputes among the cantons.

Looking to historical evidence to validate or reject aspects of governing models helped guide us to the right approach for our new government; the record of trial and error is immensely helpful if you respect and understand the context. The varied governance structures of history allowed the Federalists to make a strong case for centralization (but just the right amount of it). The Founders also sought to maximize freedom of individuals and the states they thought crucial to a stable system.

In Federalist No. 20, Madison even references this fact directly:

I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

“Experience is the oracle of truth.” Model new systems around what has previously worked, make adjustments, and ensure the system is an “anti-fragile” one that responds and gets stronger over time.

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Francis Fukuyama on The Origins of Political Order

November 29, 2018 • #

Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order was one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last 5 years. It traces the history of human social hierarchy and government from antiquity to the French Revolution. This talk is a great high-level overview of the ground covered in the book. Think of it as a preview and convincing teaser to the full work.

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Weekend Reading: CAC, Alexander Hamilton, and Flow

November 10, 2018 • #

đź›’ What is Customer Acquisition Cost?

This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business.

One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring various parts of your process, especially in SMB-focused SaaS. Marketing, early-stage sales, late-stage sales, customer success — it’s like a machine with separate stages you can tweak separately to make incremental improvements.

đź“ś The Legacy of Alexander Hamilton

On the similarities between Hamilton and Edmund Burke:

“There are several significant points of contact between the two thinkers. Both Burke and Hamilton used historical experience as the standard for judging the validity of ideas and policies. They rejected appeals to ahistorical abstraction, disparaging metaphysical and theoretical speculation. Historical circumstances were paramount in their prudential judgment. Consequently, they avoided ideological rigidity in their thinking because they understood that a priori rationalism could not account for the particular circumstances in which statesmen had to navigate the ship of state.”

đźš° Microsoft Flow

I didn’t realize Microsoft had an automation service akin to Zapier or IFTTT. Will have to check this one out and see what it can do with Fulcrum.

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