Open Data are the basis for government innovation. This isn’t because open data make government more transparent or accountable. Like Tom Slee, I have serious doubts about whether it does either of those things. In any event, shining a light on the misdeeds of ineffective institutions isn’t as imperative as redesigning how they work.  Instead, open data can provide the raw material to convene informed conversations inside and outside institutions about what’s broken and the empirical foundation for developing solutions together.

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“Tyler Cowen”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/david-gordon-emails-me-on-the-workplace.html thinks he has a gotcha.

bq. David Gordon emails me on the workplace

bq.

I enjoyed reading your excellent post on the Crooked Timber workplace coercion piece. Many of their complaints also hold for the university classroom, e.g., limits to free speech, students have no say in what work is required, etc.; and often there are costs to refusing to enroll in classes the student finds onerous, such as failing to obtain the desired degree. But I doubt Bertram and his friends would regard this situation as coercive.

bq.

Best wishes,

bq.

David

bq. Nor is it always easy to switch schools…

and who knows – when Chris, Corey and Alex start advocating for students to be penalized for having (or not having) abortions, being monitored at home, making, or failing to make, the right political donations, supporting (which was _far_ from a hypothetical question for Corey in his own graduate student experience – he notoriously was the victim of retaliation by one of his professors) or failing to support unionization drives or the like, it might actually _become_ a gotcha. But in the universe that we inhabit at the moment, this continues an extended (and indeed rather _ostentatiously_ extended) exercise in refusing to get the point, let alone addressing it.

Still, if Tyler is in the market for analogies of this sort, I do have one for him. He suggests in his “previous post”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/libertarianism-and-the-workplace.html that the problem is on the side of the employees rather than the employers:

bq. I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece. How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the context of a boss wishing to search an employee? … When I was seventeen, I had a job in the produce department of a grocery store. … I did observe … massive employee shirking … If I ponder my workplace at GMU, I see many more employees who take advantage of the boss, perhaps by shirking, or by not teaching well, than I see instances of the bosses taking advantage of the employees.

But let’s draw the comparison out a little. What would the world look like if GMU economics professors were treated similarly to workers in low-paid jobs with little protection? No offices – at best open cubicles, so that a supervisor could stroll by, making sure that the professors were doing the job that they were supposed to be doing. Monitoring of computers to prevent random websurfing. _Certainly_ no air conditioning. Compulsory random drug testing. Body searches, in case professors were sneaking office supplies back home. Monitoring – at best – of bathroom breaks, and written demerits and termination of employment for professors who took too many of them. Perhaps Tyler might want to argue that such pervasive distrust and supervision would hurt productivity rather than help it – but it would seem difficult plausibly to reconcile such an argument with his prior claim that mooching, slacking and skiving off is endemic among his colleagues.

Knowing professors quite well, including economics professors, I can very safely predict their reaction if they found themselves subjected to such vigorous supervision, (perhaps as a result of some general bill attacking academic privileges passed through the Virginia legislature). And it wouldn’t be a careful consideration of contracts, and a measured conclusion that given the inevitable incompleteness thereof, they would have to put up with it until they could find a job at some more enlightened institution. It would be sputtering, semi-coherent outrage at what they would perceive as a humiliating and direct assault on their professional and human dignity. Indeed, they’d have a point. But it isn’t only professors who have dignity as workers and human beings. And that’s a rather important point too.

Oh Christ. IMAGINATIVE EMPATHY FAIL. The imaginative empathy fail button at CT headquarters is turning around and blaring and stuff and I am sick so I don’t have time to deal with this plus it’s an annoying sound. Everyone, please try to imagine you are a poor person for at least 45 seconds at a minimum. Also, if you look at an 80-comment thread and only one commenter with a visibly female handle has said anything, would you please just, go get someone off the street or something, or like maybe the woman next to you at Starbucks, to comment? Don’t tell her it’s about libertarianism!! Don’t be hitting on her either. Unless you’ve got mad game like Kells. Tell her I asked you to. Anyway.

Do you know how becoming a Jesuit differs from taking on a job that is unpleasant? You don’t need to become a Jesuit to get money to buy food and clothes for your family! For real! You’re not even supposed to have a family! So is there an issue there, about whether one can potentially contract oneself to SeaOrg or the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and come out missing your freedom? Yes, and that is what separates cults from churches in most people’s mind. This could be an interesting sidebar discussion but it has nothing to say about the “putting up with awful things to have a job” issue.
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Ongoing debates over open data remind me of Cory Doctorow’s short story, “Human Readable”:http://craphound.com/?p=3275, which depicts attitudes to technology through a disagreement between lovers. Reiner is a classic hacker – he thinks of the world in terms of technological fixes for technological problems, and has difficulty in believing that the algorithms can be systematically skewed. Trish is a classic lefty, who thinks of the world in terms of power relations, and, specifically, in terms of how smart powerful people figure out ways to gimmick the system so that it works to their advantage. They don’t understand each other very well but end up, sort of, figuring out a way to cooperate. Clearly, real life people have more complicated views than Doctorow’s characters – even so, he’s put his finger on an important tension. When I went to Foo Camp a few years ago, I found it incredibly intellectually exhilarating – meeting a bunch of people who were both (a) smarter than me, and (b) intensely practical, interested in figuring out how to do stuff rather than study it. But I was also a bit nonplussed by how enthusiastically many of them believed that the Obama administration was going to usher in a new era of Big Data led technocracy. A lot of them (not all of them) didn’t seem to have any very good idea of how politics actually worked. They were mostly Reiner, without much admixture of Trish.
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This post is mostly by way of trying to make Bertram, Robins and Gourvitch’s post sticky, as it deserves to stay at the top for a while. If you haven’t read their post yet, do so. If you are already reasonably conversant with their points, proceed under the fold, if you like, for what is really just a Hayek-inflected restatement and reinforcement of some of their main points. (Also, it’s effectively a late, long footnote to the Red Plenty seminar): [click to continue…]

The open data movement is a hammer which has gathered the support of many nails. There are the curious taxpayers, who feel their annual checks mean they deserve a peek at the interesting facts the government has collected. There are the ambitious business owners, who see an opportunity to privatize profits from work with socialized costs. And there are the self-styled activists, who believe that if we reveal the data on what the government is really doing, we will arrest corruption by exposing it to sunlight.

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It being the season, some recommendations for entertaining fiction – feel free to castigate my narrow tastes in comments, to make your own recommendations, or both, as suits you best.

Charles Stross – _The Apocalypse Codex_ (Powells, Amazon ). The new Laundry book, and the best one imo since the first. Without giving anything major away, things are really beginning to move …

China Mieville – _Railsea_ (Powells, Amazon). Again, China does his best to lose me, this time writing a novel which could easily be mistaken in a dim light for young-adult steampunk. Again, he fails completely. Enormous fun – you’ll never think about naked mole rats in the same way again.

Josh Bazell – _Wild Thing_ (Powells, Amazon). Only very good, in contrast to its prequel, _Beat the Reaper_, which was an excellently funny macho asshole thriller, but still entertaining. The footnotes are good value too (how many popular thrillers have footnotes with short discussions of spandrels?), up to, and only up to the point where the author starts expounding his views on Middle East politics (he’s an Alan Dershowitz fan – enough said).

Paul McAuley – _In the Mouth of the Whale_ (not officially available in US; though if you have a Kindle you can gimmick your address). A sequel to his Quiet War duet. I need to write something on the way that these books use evolutionary theory to drive their argument.

Paul McAuley – _Cowboy Angels_ (Powells, Amazon). A very different novel – hard sf meets the paranoid Cold War thriller. Imagine an America (not ours) which discovers how to build gates to recently branched alternative realities, and starts to play out the game of empire-building and neo-liberalism, not with other countries, but with different versions of itself.

Tim Powers – _Hide Me Among the Graves_ (Powells, Amazon). Vampirism, Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelites. Among Powers’ best – not as good as _Declare_ or _The Anubis Gates_ (but then: what is?), but just as good _Last Call_, and better than the rest (which is to say – very damn good indeed).

Nick Mamatas and Brian Keene – _The Damned Highway_ (Powells, Amazon) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – the H.P. Lovecraft mix. I’ve speculated before that there is no subgenre of fiction that cannot be spatchcocked with Lovecraft, but Hunter S. Thompson blends _particularly well_, and amidst the comedy, there is one moment of genuine loathing and horror (tentacle porn and Richard Nixon, aloof). The graphic design person who thought of Steadmanizing the Ian Miller illustration for At The Mountains of Madness and using it as the cover art, deserves an award.

Harry Connolly – _Child of Fire_ (Powells, Amazon). Lovecraftian urban fantasy. Fun, fast-paced braincandy, found via Charles Stross (the first of a series, which unfortunately appears to be in hiatus).

Felix Gilman – _The Rise of Ransom City_ (Powells, Amazon). But you’ll have to wait until the fall/autumn for that one (more in due course …).

Oh, I know what y’all are going to say. You’re going to say it’s wrong to like R. Kelly because his music is bad. No. Unnnh huuh. “But it’s got T-Pain in it!” You like “I’m on a Boat,” don’t you Sherlock? Further, “I’m a Flirt” is insanely catchy. Now you object that the Venn diagram of insanely catchy and bad has a large overlapping area, because you wrongly hate hillbilly-from-the-future Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” but nonetheless, “I’m a Flirt” is just a good song. No. You know why else? Because I told you so. Also, everything silly you wanted in a video. Expensive cars? Stupid big jewelry? Honeys up in the VIP room? So many honeys. I’m gay for this video.

But it might seem as if it’s wrong to like R. Kelly’s music because he’s committed statutory rape on multiple occasions.
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tl;dr The Open Data movement is good at improving service, but bad at
rooting out corruption

Tom Slee has done us a favor by “kicking”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/why-the-open-data-movement-is-a-joke.html “off”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/open-data-movement-redux-tribes-and-contradictions.html a conversation about the values, goals, and coherence of the Open Data movement. I share his sense that the movement has been a disappointment to date. However, as my principles differ from his, my sense of disappointment, and of what to do about it, differ as well.

Before I get to that, I want to position myself relative to Slee’s three summary assertions about the Open Data movement. (The points are Slee’s; the reactions mine.)

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[This post was co-written by Chris Bertram, “Corey Robin”:http://coreyrobin.com/ and “Alex Gourevitch”:http://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/ ]

“In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 79

Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. When they do try to address that unfreedom, as a group of academic libertarians calling themselves “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” have done in recent months, they wind up traveling down one of two paths: Either they give up their exclusive focus on the state and become something like garden-variety liberals or they reveal that they are not the defenders of freedom they claim to be.

That is what we are about to argue, but it is based on months of discussion with the Bleeding Hearts. The conversation was kicked off by the critique one of us—Corey Robin—offered of libertarian Julian Sanchez’s presignation letter to Cato, in which Sanchez inadvertently revealed the reality of workplace coercion. Jessica Flanigan, a Bleeding Heart, responded twice to Robin. Then one of us—Chris Bertram—responded to Flanigan. Since then, the Bleeding Hearts have offered a series of responses to Chris and Corey.

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Amazon is having a $2.99 MP3 album sale [SALE’S OVER] that includes a surprisingly large number of really good selections, should your collection lack them (and if you are an old-fashioned fogey, like me, who still pays for music.) Get your Dark Side of the Moon, or Speaking In Tongues, or Heroes, thereby closing that gap in the list. May I recommend: [click to continue…]

I’ve met someone at the SAP-conference this weekend, whom I never met before, but with whom I had corresponded quite intensively over a period of two years. And now it turns out that this person is a man, whereas I had assumed he was a woman. He has a name that I am not familiar with, but I had just somehow assumed this was a woman’s name.

Reflecting a bit on this, I notice that I see two patterns in my sex-to-name-attributing habits.
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The Society for Applied Philosophy celebrates its 30th anniversary at its Annual Conference in Oxford this weekend. I delivered earlier today a plenary paper on the conceptualization of the rich, on which I may or may not write another post in the future (you can see that I’m writing this after a long wine reception and being in combative spirits!). Earlier today we had a roundtable on the nature of applied philosophy, which was very interesting. There were a few panelists opening with some statements, but a large part of the session was simply the philosophers present in the room voicing their views and concerns about the nature of applied philosophy and its interaction with society at large.
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In the practical community of professional journalists writing about political events, the term “open data” is hardly ever in circulation. And yet, to those who are doing the best work it’s an invaluable tool. David Simon succeeded in turning the idea that information age journalists need to learn to “do more with less” into a national joke, but the underlying concept makes perfect sense. The very same information technology revolution that’s undermined the business models of traditional newspapers has done an enormous amount to increase the productivity of working journalists. Open data is an enormous part of that.

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