Month: August 2009

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Pathbreaking Green Government

The guy sitting next to me from the Post Office told me that he was in process of renewing the fleet of delivery trucks.   They were thinking about alternative fuels and maybe electricity.  This is where government can foster some real progress, by both leading by example and breaking a path for others to follow. 

Below is a marketplace at Clarendon Metro.  I got a flat tire on my way to work, so I locked up the bike and hopped on the Metro to get to work. This was in operation when I went to pick it up.  People were selling vegetables, bread & honey.

A problem with translating small time innovation to big time application is usually a kind of chicken and egg dilemma.   For example, you cannot deploy alternative fuel vehicles unless you have a network of alternative fuel stations to service them.   On the other hand, you don’t want to build a network of alternative fuel stations until there are enough vehicles to justify the expense of building them.   The government is big enough to do both at the same time.

This is the kind of infrastructure path breaking government should do.   It is always hard to be the first down the path.   After that it can be easy for others to follow.   Unfortunately, this is not a very interesting thing for politicians.   The path breaking function is just a slog and once it’s done everybody thinks it would have happened anyway.   The bureaucrat who authorized the spending looks like he wasted the government’s money, since he pays the money and those who follow ride almost for free.  Worse yet, it is hard for politicians to target the benefits to their own constituents or contributors.   Yet some still make the hard and right decision and they should be praised. 

One thing that might help is looking at the whole value chain and considering the longer term.   I wrote a post about the ecological value chain and there is a similar calculation possible for any sort of investment.   You learn in business 101 about break even analysis.   That just shows how much must be sold or how long it will take for an investment to pay off.   In a simple example, you might pay an extra $100 for a boiler that pays off in energy savings in two years.   It makes a lot of sense to think ahead and pay a little more now to get a bigger payoff later, but the future is always uncertain and our government budgets tend to be short term.  

 It takes a wise and unselfish manager to pay more today out of his budget for something that will pay off a little at a time for his successors.   Making the value chain more apparent helps it become more a part of decision making.   Managers need to think of things like energy usage more like long term investments that pay dividends rather than just overhead. 

I learned and thought about these things during a breakfast on “green government” sponsored by “Government Executive” magazine.    You learn a lot when you go to these things, not only from the speakers but also from the people you sit next to.   And you get to eat breakfast too.  Sweet.

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Changing Priorities

Switzerland’s forests are taking over the countryside and they are abetted in their march up the mountain slopes by global warming.   It is strange to think of forests as a threat, but take a look at the article at this link.   A more nuanced view of nature makes sense to me and tracks with what I have learned over my lifetime.  It is not only Switzerland, BTW.  It happens in America too.  Above is the area around the Manassas battlefield, just outside Washington as it looked in 1861. It needed more trees then. Look at the bottom picture to see how it looks now.  

See the forest SYSTEM, not only the trees

When I was young, I thought that more trees were always better.  That kind of idea made good sense in 1968 because there seemed little chance there could ever be too many trees or too much land covered in forests.  Since then, I have learned to look at the total system.   I can now more clearly see the forest instead of just the trees and I can also understand that the forest is part of a larger system that includes forests, water, wildlife grassland, brush and even some bare sand & rocks … and people.    The most pleasant and productive systems are those that have a variety of different types and a lot of transition edges among them. Nature tends not to produce these sorts of places for very long.   

Solving one problem creates the next

Switzerland had developed a beautiful and ecologically sustainable land use that allowed for bountiful agricultural production as well as superbly managed forests.  Too many trees or forests that are too thick with trees threaten that sustainable balance.  You can have too much of a good thing.  BTW – take a look at the Swiss picture gallery.  It really is a nice place.
The seeds of this dilemma were planted more than 100 years ago. There was not much real forestry being practiced back then.  Instead there was the kind of denuding timber mining that is almost never now done anymore in rich developed countries but remains depressingly common in places w/o good regulator regimes and strong property rights. The bare slopes caused soil degradation, erosion and disastrous flooding, so back in 1876 the Swiss enacted a sensible law to prevent deforestation.  It worked.  That problem was solved.  And since yesterday’s solutions are often today’s problems, the results presented a new challenge.  

It goes up but never comes down 

Set in motion was a kind of ratchet.  In the normal course of things in an agricultural/forestry system, forests expand and are cleared.  Crop of pasture land might take the place of forest and forests might grow on lands previously occupied by crops or pasture.  If it becomes illegal to clear forests once they are established, the areas covered in trees inexorably expand at the expense of meadow and other uses.  Imagine how this happens.  A pasture is neglected for a few years allowing trees to fill in.  Now it is a young forest, which you cannot clear.  You don’t need this ratchet mechanism to produce similar results, BTW. Forests in the U.S. have also been expanding over former farm fields.  As agriculture became more efficient, less land was needed in meadow and field.  You can see this clearly in the eastern United States.  If you look at old pictures and compare them to what you see today, you notice that there are a lot more trees today than there were a century ago.  But the ratchet rules make it much harder to manage the land. 

Build on success

We really have to shift our paradigm. We are no longer the embattled preservationists we were a generation ago.  We won that battle. Now we have to be clever in land use and mange what we have preserved and what technology improvements have preserved for us.   The need to be good stewards of the land is as important as ever, but doing a good job requires a much more nuanced understanding of the overall ecology.   It will never end for us.  There is not finished state for the environment.  But it is time to move to the next stage. 

Below is what Manassas looks like now.  I like it better now.  The balance of forest in meadow is good, IMO.  Left alone, the trees, initially mostly tulip poplar, red maples and some cedars, would be around thirty feet high within fifteen years.  

Remembering that yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems, we have to assume the today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems.  That does not imply failure.  A good solution under particular circumstances is less useful when conditions change.  We just need to be smart. It never ends.  Perfection and final solutions are impossible, attempting to create them is undesirable and despite all this we manage to persist.  That is what makes life interesting.

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The Four Ps of Marketing (and Public Diplomacy)

I was talking to some marketing guys the other day who told me that we should market America like a brand.  We should listen to our customers and make sure we create products the market wants.   I understand this, but there are a few problems with this formulation, not least of which is that America is greater than any brand.  We are something special and we should not prim and trim ourselves to win ephemeral popularity. But that aside, government, especially the U.S. government has fewer “marketing” options.    

Marketers used to talk about the Four Ps: product, price, promotion and place.  Executives supposedly control those four things and can deploy them and rearrange them to maximize the attractiveness and sales of their products.    As a government “executive” I control none of those things. 

Our “product” the U.S. and its policies, is determined by forces way beyond our small ability to add or detract.  I don’t have the ability to alter it to suit changing or local conditions and probably would not want to.   Our product will not always be popular and sometimes very unpopular.  People engaged in actual armed conflict against us or our interests are probably signaling that they are not happy with the “product” on offer, which illustrates the other important difference in the product category.  A marketer never has to appeal to everybody while government is stuck with everybody in the marketing universe.  The private sector supports many options and people can choose.  If you don’t like Coke Zero, don’t drink it. Opting out of government is not so easy.

How about price?  We don’t have one.  We usually think of price as something that limits or stimulates demand, but its most important function is the information it conveys about relative scarcity and attractiveness of the product and its components.  People can easily lie to pollster and often deceive themselves, but when they have to put down the cash, they tend to reveal their true preferences.  Price is a better indicator than polling but we just don’t have that information and have to look to proxies and polls, which are always imperfect and usually behind the curve.

Place is determined by policies (above) and geography.  Conditions and adversaries often determine where we have to engage.  But we do have some flexibility in location.   We can choose to emphasize particular things in particular places.  Of course, we suffer significant leakage.    Information markets are not separate and we rarely have the luxury of being ignored by those not in the target audience.    We also have the problem of having actual enemies who refuse to stay in the places we would prefer of them.    In fact, a significant amount of overall governmental energy involves fixing some of these guys in place (often followed by neutralizing them, but that is not my department).

Promotion is what is left most for us and that is closest to what we do.  Of course, we are not unconstrained even here, but this is the area of greatest freedom of action. Public diplomacy could be included as a subset of national promotion.   

So we are essentially left with two of the four Ps (place & promotion) and not even in firm control of either of them.  Next time you hear somebody talk about the the American image as something that can be branded or marketed as a product, remind them of how real marketing works and the real marketing constraints.   Despite it all,  we still manage to produce some successes. It reminds me of the Samuel Johnson saying about a dog walking on two legs.  “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

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Reopening My Favorite Passage

They closed the gates of Ft Meyer after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.   I didn’t know they were reopened.  Actually they are not open to through automobile traffic, but bikes can use the bike route that goes through Ft Meyer and Arlington Cemetery. 

Going this way saves me around ten minutes riding and it lets me avoid ten minutes worth of the least pleasant and most dangerous part of the ride.  To transit Ft Meyer, I need only show my government ID and be polite to the guards. As you can see in the picture above, Ft Meyer is nice to with well kept period architecture.  After riding along the quiet streets of the base, you come out into Arlington Cemetery and it is all downhill from there. 

I like the idea of going through and past all the monuments.   My ride now takes me through Arlington Cemetery, across Memorial Bridge, past the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument and then down the Smithsonian Mall in sight of the Capitol.   I often stop to read the plaques and later look them up on the Internet.  The whole idea of a memorial is to remind visitors of the event or concept.   Daily exposure to history really does work, at least for me. 

A good example is the statue above.  It is Phil Kearny.  I knew about Ft Phil Kearny, which guarded to Bozman Trail in Wyoming.  The Bozman trail is essentially I-90 these days and we stopped off at the fort on one of our cross country trips.  But I never knew much of anything about its namesake.  After seeing the statue, I did a little reading.  Phil Kearny was a respected professional soldier and Union officer killed in the Battle of Chantilly, not long after uttering the ominous words, “The Rebel bullet that can kill me has not yet been molded.”

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Racism and Beer (& Brat) Consumption

Equality can sometimes debase into a type of leveling that is the enemy of real diversity of variety. That was clear in an article in the Washington Post on “The Racial Politics of Beer” decrying the fact that “American brewing was and largely remains a white man’s world.”   What a supremely stupid thing to worry about.   But it is even worse than ordinary stupid.  It betrays that leveling mindset that find discrimination and conspiracy in every human difference that makes life interesting and enjoyable.

None of us has the same culture as our parents, because culture is in a constant state of change, but we can see the persistence of habits & values.  It would be very surprising – and very bad – if everybody just reacted the same way to everything. The basis of true diversity is difference and when you get differences you get different results. Let me write that in a separate line.

The basis of true diversity is difference and when you get differences you get different results.

Let’s think about beer.   They say that the ancient Egyptians brewed a type of beer, but we are heirs to a beer culture that originated in Central Europe in the lands that used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire.  This includes Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, along with parts of what is now Poland, France & Northern Italy.   The Germans even had a beer purity law called the Reinheitsgebot.  The English and the Irish also have a significant beer culture, as do the Danes and to a lesser extent other Scandinavians.   It tapers off from that home area.  What do you notice about the people living in these places?  Now people drink beer all over, but they still don’t always do it the same way or with equal enthusiasm.  Beyond that, many consumers of beer are not really part of the culture of beer.

Beer culture was not merely a matter of chance.    Beer is consumed in between the places where they can easily grow grapes for wine and where it is too cold and people consume hard booze.  Europe traditionally had essentially three zones from south to north and from west to east from wine to beer to vodka.   Water was not consumed much in pre-industrial days because it was so polluted and carried diseases.   People, even children, instead drank beer or wine, although the daily beer was a weaker version – small beer.

I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which was a center for the American beer industry.  The other center was St Louis and there were significant smaller centers in Cincinnati and Western Pennsylvania.   What these places all have in common were lots of German immigrants. (I still drink beer.  I also eat bratwurst and liverwurst.  I guess that is just because I am privileged.)

In the early part of the 19th Century, one of the criticisms against immigrants was in fact that they were beer drinking boozers.  Beer drinking was not always a cool thing to do.   It still is not.

If you analyzed beer drinking, I am sure you would find significant geographical differences.  I am sure you would also find big difference based on ethnicity.     Big deal.   These differences are based on different preferences.

If you look for them, you can find differences in everything.  This is the way everything is. If you believe racism exists everywhere, you can find it in all of life’s variation and joy.  It is really true that people’s habitual view of the world is a confession of their own characters.  Maybe those who see crooks, racists, shirkers and idiots everywhere are just looking in the mirror.