Category Archives: Politics

Chicago newspaper reaction to Mayor Daley in Wheaton

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After attending Mayor Daley’s speech on campus yesterday (my thoughts here), I was intrigued to see how the local newspapers portrayed the talk. Here are the headlines:

1. Daley: We’re a ‘country of whiners’ – Chicago Tribune with the story on the Clout Street blog.

2. Together, we’re strong, Daley tells suburbs – Daily Herald.

3. Daley: U.S. is a nation of “whiners” – Chicago Sun-Times (just repeating an AP story).

4. Daley reviews tenure as mayor during event at Wheaton College – mysuburbanlife.com.

The fourth headline seems most accurate to me while it is not surprising that the Daily Herald would emphasize the suburban angle. If you do a quick search on Google News, it appears that the “country of whiners” line seems to dominate the headlines.

This is interesting: Daley’s quote about being a “country of whiners” was in response to a question at the end about how America could get back on the right track. Throughout his talk, he said Americans needed confidence, we needed to push ahead in new directions (like Chicago has in the past), and that we need to continue to compete, particularly in the field of education. But the “country of whiners” quote seemed to a less-guarded comment.

In my opinion, the primary message of the talk was about education and Daley’s role in trying to reform it. The Daily Herald ran a separate story about this emphasis on education. While the “country of whiners” line might be a good soundbite, the bigger question we could be asking is whether the Chicago Public Schools have improved in Daley’s 22 years as mayor.

And I still haven’t seen any mention of Daley’s final line of the day when asked by a student what he thought of Jay Cutler. Daley said something like (paraphrase here), “Both Jay and I get beat around by the media.”

Mayor Daley on campus

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Influenced by his connection to former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was on the Wheaton College campus today for a lecture and fundraiser. Daley gave the kind of speech you might expect at the end of a politician’s career: he highlighted his successes and how much he enjoyed being a public servant. Here are a few things that he said:

1. Chicago is a world class city. He cited a few recent publications (Standard and Poors, Foreign Policy) that have called Chicago a top ten world city.

2. Chicago has been successful because it was “never afraid of changing” and “never lived in the past.”

3. About government spending: the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget while other forms of government (state, counties, municipalities) do. Government spending has to level off. To help America move forward: we “need confidence,” we need to move away from being “a country of whiners,” and we can compete if we all sacrifice a bit for the common good.

4. Daley said his biggest issue to face was the education system and he hopes the improvement of this system is his enduring legacy. When he first became mayor, he helped stop social promotion. The Chicago schools today teach Chinese, Russian, and Arabic to compete on the world stage. Teacher’s unions have a responsibility to give more (he cited their 6 hour contractual work day while also saying he knows lots of good teachers and he is not blaming them). He said, “education is the cure of all the social ills we have.”

5. The success of Chicago has always been a public-private partnership. He cited Millennium Park as an example. This is what is behind his efforts to make connections with China so that Chinese businesses will see Chicago as the friendliest American city to them.

6. He said he had worked with mayors in the Chicago region, throughout the state, and around the world to discuss common issues. He said numerous times that the common issues they face are not partisan issues.

7. When asked what advice he would give to Rahm Emanuel, he said something to the effect of don’t give advice to people if they don’t ask for it.

Seeing him in person, I was reminded that he can be quite funny, personable, and can connect with a crowd as an “everyman.” He consistently illustrated his larger points with personal stories and interactions he had. His policy recommendations seemed fairly centrist: better education, government has to add value or other contract out or privatize certain services, working together across the region is necessary, government has to work with business leaders to get things done, elected officials and all government workers (teachers, police/fire, etc.) have to work for the people. He told a number of jokes and also several times mentioned advice he had received from his father.

Some other issues were not addressed: the population loss in Chicago in the 2000s, the perception that the city has a crime problem (even though crime has been down – I thought he might highlight this as a success), budget problems in Chicago and where the money from privatization has gone (parking meter deal, the Skyway), corruption in city government, persistent segregation and inequality, the limited number of public housing and affordable housing units (even with the notorious projects, such as Cabrini-Green, being closed), Daley’s legacy of building (outside of mention of Millennium Park and Chicago as a world leader in “green roofs”), whether Chicago’s educationally system has improved dramatically or significantly, and regional issues that need attention such as congestion and expanding O’Hare.

Federal budget issue: increased fuel effiency, reduced revenues from the gasoline tax

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Amidst discussions about infrastructure and the price of gasoline, Obama’s administration has called for an increase in transportation spending. But where exactly the money will come from to fund this increase is unclear:

[Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood] said Obama is not in favor of raising the gas tax in a “lousy economy.”

The new tax would be necessary, in part, because the gasoline tax used to fund the highway trust fund is collecting less revenue than projected due to increasing fuel efficiency.

The exchange between Sessions and LaHood degenerated into a shouting match, with the Transportation secretary emphasizing that infrastructure can be improved and jobs created while paying down the debt.

This is one negative consequence of increased fuel efficiency: less gasoline will be purchased so without a gas tax increase, revenue from this source falls. This might call for some new ways to derive tax revenue from driving. How about more tolls? Or taxing drivers per mile driven?

Claim: Obama wants higher gas prices. Is this necessarily bad?

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Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (a rumored Republican presidential candidate) suggested today that Obama wants higher gas prices:

Barbour…accused the Obama administration Wednesday of favoring a run-up in gas prices to prod consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars…

Barbour cited 2008 comments from Steven Chu, now President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, that a gradual increase in gasoline taxes could coax consumers into dumping their gas-guzzlers and finding homes closer to where they work. Chu, then a Nobel Prize-winning professor, argued that higher costs per gallon could force investments in alternative fuels and spur cleaner energy sources.

Barbour said Obama’s energy team wouldn’t be happy until gas prices reached $9 a gallon.

Barbour goes on to say that there are two primary negative consequences of higher gas prices: it hurts workers and it hurts the larger economy. In a troubled economic period, Barbour is suggesting that Obama is willing to risk a prolonged economic crisis in order to promote things like electric cars and clean energy.

But this is really a larger issue and affects multiple dimensions of American life. Let’s assume that raising gas prices cuts down on driving and gas consumption overall – and there is evidence to back this up. There could be some benefits to this:

1. This would limit our dependence on foreign nations for  oil. What has happened in the Middle East in recent weeks can have an impact on our economy because we import so much oil. Some have gone so far as to say that this is a “national security issue.”

2. Using less gasoline would lead to lower levels of pollution.

3. Having more expensive gasoline may reign in sprawl, or at least make living in denser areas (cities or denser suburbs) more attractive. (See an example of this argument here.) In the long run, higher gas prices could be viewed by some as a threat (or by some as a welcome deterrent) to the sprawling suburban lifestyle that many Americans have adopted  since the end of World War II. Higher fuel prices would likely impact driving trips, fast-food restaurants, and trucking costs, all key pieces to the typical suburban lifestyle. One could argue that the American lifestyle of the last 65 years has been made possible by relatively cheap gasoline – and life would change if it was consistently at European price levels.

There could be other impacts as well including more walking and bicycling (cheaper, less pollution, better for health) and less time wasted due to traffic and congestion.

It bears watching how this rhetoric over gas prices continues. Is it simply a matter of a short-term (lower prices to help the economy) vs. a long-term perspective (higher prices help limit some negative consequences of driving) or could this turn into a debate about how driving (and cheap gasoline) is closely linked to the essence of American life?

Telling graphs about American infrastructure spending

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A number of commentators in recent years have pointed out the relatively small amount of spending on infrastructure by the American government. Here is another take on this, complete with some handy graphs. Additionally, here is some interpretation about government spending on education and technology:

Productivity-enhancing spending, according to Meeker, comes from three main sources: infrastructure, education and research and development investment. We’ve seen infrastructure spending collapse as a share of the budget since the 1960s. What about education and R&D?

In 1970, the U.S. (at the federal, state and local level) spent twice as much on education as health care. Twenty years later, health care closed the gap, and today, total government spending on health care is about 33 percent higher than education spending, which is more or less even with its 1970s levels.

Second, look at technology. R&D spending exploded in the late 1950s and 1960s on the back of government investments in aeronautics and science. Fifty years later, federal R&D has fallen below 1950s levels as a share of GDP, while the private sector has picked up the slack.

So after looking at figures like this, I want to ask what kind of strategies could be utilized to tackle the issue of infrastructure spending, particularly with budget issues looming all over the country?

Mayors united

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It’s not just suburban Chicago mayors excited to work with Rahm Emanuel.  The Hill is reporting that basically every mayor in the U.S. is looking to Chicago right now:

The Chicago mayoral election results Tuesday weren’t just a triumph for Rahm Emanuel; they were also a victory for mayors across the country.

Many mayors have been critical of cuts in President Obama’s proposed budget, and some of them are hoping his former chief of staff will lobby the White House on the needs of local communities.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which consists of mayors of cities with populations of 30,000 or more, is eager to work with Emanuel as soon as he is sworn in as Chicago mayor on May 16. With budget battles looming, the group hopes that Emanuel’s influence on the White House and Capitol Hill will significantly advance its agenda.

I’m not sure what to make of this.  On the one hand, I’m all for empowering state and city governments.  On the other, I’m not sure that the best way to do that is to further expand federal control over local governments via an increase in restrictive federal funding grants.

Discussing the mortgage interest deduction and how pricy (and large) a McMansion is

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One common use of the term McMansion is simply a large home. In this blog post about the mortgage interest deduction, the writer contrasts the price of McMansions to more normal-sized homes:

That means average homeowners with modest Capes and fixer-uppers are helping subsidize others stretching to keep up with the Jones and their million-dollar McMansions.

The measuring stick of a McMansion in this post is how large the mortgage is:

A close look at the interest rate deduction reveals much of its benefits go to homeowners with mortgages far larger than most in the middle of the housing pack. Check out this Forbes piece, which nicely lays out the argument for taking away this perk from the homeowners with outsized mortgages – incredibly the limit is currently $1 million…

The president’s deficit commission recommended capping the deduction’s use at $500,000 in mortgage debt, down from $1 million now, while nixing its use for vacation homes and converting what’s left to a 12.5 percent tax credit.

OK, I vote for keeping it simple and just lowering the mortgage cap to $500,000 or $600,000, while making second homes ineligible as well.

So a McMansion here would start with homes that cost $500,000 to $600,000. In most suburban communities, this buys a large home. In denser areas, not necessarily. What about older homes that cost this much – are these McMansions? It wouldn’t take too much searching online of real estate listings to translate these prices into square footage in particular areas.

Overall, this use of the term McMansion seems to refer to any large house beyond “modest Capes and fixer-uppers.” This use of the term seems quite vague: a McMansion is any (presumably larger) house above a certain price point.

Chicago population loss among challenges for new Chicago mayor

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As Chicago votes today, the Chicago Tribune pointed out the issues the new mayor faces, including a declining population and financial issues:

The U.S. Census Bureau gave Chicago a reality check last week. New data showed the city lost 200,000 residents in the last decade, a 6.9 percent decline. Chicago’s lost more than the entire population of Illinois’ second largest city, Aurora.

A Mexican immigration wave that fueled growth in the 1990s has subsided. Researchers expected those immigrants to bring more growth as they had children. Instead, immigrants are moving from Chicago to the suburbs or bypassing the city entirely. That 1990s influx looks like the exception to a long and steady rule. Chicago has lost population in five of the last six decades. It has fewer people now than it did in 1920.

The city government faces a yawning debt and unfunded pension obligations. It is spending beyond its means. A city that has fewer citizens has fewer potential wage-earners available to support it.

This is a big set of issues to face. But the Tribune seems to be fairly optimistic:

The good news: Chicago is far better positioned for the future than it was during its wrenching Rust Belt days of 1980. The city’s economy is more diverse, and its urban environment richer in the amenities that attract a talented work force, from parks to culture. As corporate headquarters scaled down across the country, Chicago became a global center for back-office operations and business services such as corporate law firms. Its central location and status as a transportation hub give it a crucial advantage going forward. That’s why we need to get the expansion of O’Hare International Airport back on track, pronto.

The city will need some new ideas as well as dealing with existing projects. This airport expansion idea has been in the works for years now and is a move that could bring in new business and opportunities.

And I wonder with an election like this, where there is no incumbent and we seem to have a cleaner break with the past, whether the new mayor really has to introduce massive projects or ideas at the start. Perhaps the first goal could be to improve how Chicagoans and those in the region feel about and view their city. For example, take a look at the crime rate: it has dropped and yet there is perception problem. A dose of optimism, trumpeting what is good about the city rather than what is going wrong, could be a good starting point. And then, something has to be done with the larger issues that the Tribune enumerates.

Modeling “wordquakes”

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Several researchers suggest that certain words on the Internet are used in patterns similar to those of earthquakes:

News tends to move quickly through the public consciousness, noted physicist Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna and colleagues in a paper posted on arXiv.org. Readers usually absorb a story, discuss it with their friends, and then forget it. But some events send lasting reverberations through society, changing opinions and even governments.

“It is tempting to see such media events as a human, social excitable medium,” wrote Klimek’s team. “One may view them as a social analog to earthquakes.”…

Events that came from outside the blogosphere also seemed to exhibit aftershocks that line up with Omori’s law for the frequency of earthquake aftershocks.

“We show that the public reception of news reports follow a similar statistic as earthquakes do,” the researchers conclude. “One might also think of a ‘Richter scale’ for media events.”

“I always think it’s interesting when people exploit the scale of online media to try to understand human behavior,” said Duncan Watts, a researcher at Yahoo! Research who describes himself as a “reformed physicist who has become a sociologist.”

But he notes that drawing mathematical analogies between unrelated phenomena doesn’t mean there’s any deeper connection. A lot of systems, including views on YouTube, activity on Facebook, number of tweets on Twitter, avalanches, forest fires, power outages and hurricanes all show frequency graphs similar to earthquakes.

“But they’re all generated by different processes,” Watts said. “To suggest that the same mechanism is at work here is kind of absurd. It sort of can’t be true.”

A couple of things are of note:

1. One of the advantages of the Internet as a medium is that people can fairly easily track these sorts of social phenomenon. The data is often in front of our eyes and once collected and put into a spreadsheet or data program is like any other dataset.

2. An interesting quote from the story: the “reformed physicist who has become a sociologist.” This pattern that looks similar to an earthquake is interesting. But sociologists would also want to know why this is the case and what factors affect the initial “wordquake” and subsequent aftershocks. (But it is interesting that the paper was developed by physicists: how many sociologists would look at this word frequency data and think of an earthquake pattern?)

2a. Just thinking about these word frequencies, how does this earthquake model differ from other options for looking at this sort of data? For example, researchers have used diffusion models to examine the spread of riots. Is a diffusion model better than an earthquake model for this phenomena?

3. Does this model offer any predictive power? That is, does it give us any insights into what words may set off “wordquakes” in the future?

Sarkozy joins growing chorus of Western European leaders who have said multiculturalism has failed

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In a recent interview, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said multiculturalism has failed in his country:

“My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure,” he said in a television interview when asked about the policy which advocates that host societies welcome and foster distinct cultural and religious immigrant groups.

“Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want… a society where communities coexist side by side.

“If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France,” the right-wing president said.

“The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women… freedom for little girls to go to school,” he said.

“We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him,” Sarkozy said in the TFI channel show.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia’s ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also recently said multicultural policies have not successfully integrated immigrants.

Based on what Sarkozy said in this interview, it sounds like he either has a different definition of multiculturalism or a different end goal. A contrast to multiculturalism would be assimilation where newcomers to a country (or any group) should quickly or eventually adopt the customs and values of the country they have entered. Sarkozy is suggesting that because some immigrants have not done this, multiculturalism has failed. But Sarkozy seems to be explaining how assimilation has failed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines multiculturalism thusly: “the policy or process whereby the distinctive identities of the cultural groups within such a society are maintained or supported.” In this sense, a long-running policy of multiculturalism ends up changing the larger culture to some degree. It sounds like Sarkozy (and some of these other leaders) are not as interested in this. Can French or English or German culture change and incorporate elements of cultures from immigrants living within their borders?

These comments from various leaders seem to have been motivated in part by growing Muslim populations in these nations.

It is also interesting to note that there is not a whole lot of public discussion about this in the United States. Some of this may be more below the surface, particularly when issues like immigration arise (though this has been overwhelmed by economic concerns). Can you imagine an American political leader of any party making a statement like these Western European leaders have?