Ideological politics is a bad, bad thing / Obama seems a-ok
2008-03-06 / 22:51 / dave
What bothers me the most about the Bush administration is its reliance on ideology over facts. The best analysis I’ve read is Franklin Foer’s 2004 article Closing of the Presidential Mind. It’s a long article, so for those with short attention span you might prefer browsing these instead. Just kidding! Really, for those of you with short attention spans here is the 5 line summary:
- Bush’s administration ignores facts it doesn’t like
- This comes from a long history of conservatives rejecting the supposed left-skewed bias of the experts
- The administration is politicizing bureaucracies such as the CBO, EFA and NSF
- This has lead to policy disasters but
- Bush doesn’t care because, dammit, he’s guided by ideology
With this in mind, I was tickled by Noam Scheiber’s article The Audacity of Data. According to Scheiber–and there is some debate, at least according to his followup–Obama not only consults with experts, but his experts reject sweeping changes and ideology. Instead they prefer pragmatic reforms driven by observations.
Adjusting your hypothesis to match reality? That sounds positively empirical. Combined with Obama’s other characteristics–sincerity, diplomacy, charisma, etc.–that sounds pretty good.
Intrestingly, Scheiber’s article wasn’t comparing Obama to Bush but to Bill Clinton. He only mentions Bush in his followup and only to identify a way in which Bush and Obama would be similar, namely their advisers would have pull. At first I thought Scheiber’s assertion that Bush relied on economic advisers contrasted with Foer’s assertion that Bush was a head-strong ninny, but I don’t think that’s true. Instead it demonstrates that once you start with an ideology it’s easy to fall into confirmation bias: if you already want to give tax cuts to the rich, it’s easy to surround yourself with advisers who think that’s a good idea.
Confirmation bias is difficult to avoid, all you can do is try to keep an open mind. Therefore good decisions require two levels of pragmatism: 1) don’t be ideological in your search for experts and 2) make sure they’re not ideological in their search for answers. Scheiber’s article seems to indicate that Obama has done both.
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Not that I disagree with your premise, but if history has taught us anything, it is that no one can approach anything without some sort of ideological filter. That’s not to say that everyone is tweaking data to fit their conclusions, but often their very approach to problem space will be seen through some shade of glasses.
I don’t think Obama or his policy advisors are without any sort of ideology, I’d just hope that they would listen to the data. In essence, I’d hope they would think scientifically. Scientists have their own bone-headed bias, but in general data is king.
[...] I’m not saying you should go get make yourself a nice shiny pen, just that it worked for me. This is agile, or at least the small ‘a’ kind. I still think big ‘A’ Agile is the best methodology going, but only if you avoid getting ideological. [...]