Announcing Plume Blue!

There's a reason, probably not a good excuse, why I haven't been posting lately. Late last year I got this crazy idea to start an online dating site. I had vowed never to use online dating again. I felt like an item on a grocery shelf. And then I thought--it doesn't have to be that way!

When I started dating after my divorce, I had this idea in my head that dating would be like it was on Mary Tyler Moore. You know, every once in a while a cute guy calls and asks you to some fun thing. Ha ha ha ha ha. Instead, I find myself interviewed and interviewing over coffee. Mental checklists are sizing up the potential here. Don't hear heavenly choruses singing "Allelujiah?" REJECT.

Ick.

Have you ever met someone who you really dislike at first, and they end up being a close friend-- maybe even your spouse? A friend told me the story of a guy she met on a date. She disliked him so much that she spent practically the whole date in the bathroom. She absolutely did not want to see him again. But her sister was dating his brother, and wanted to double date. So she saw the guy again for her sister. This time they went dancing. She saw in him a completely different person, and they had great fun together. They've now been married for 25 years and have three kinds.

So I started Plume Blue. At Plume Blue you meet people by doing fun things-- you browse dates that members post, not the members themselves. There are a lot of other things we've done differently too. We launched our private beta last Friday to our network of friends. Check it out for yourself: Plume Blue. And if you register through our private invite page, you can join free forever.

Public policy is nice, but Plume Blue is lots more fun. Some day, I promise to get back to my posts, especially the ones on how to change the world. Right now, I'm trying to change dating, and by doing so, bring more fun and joy into people's lives.

Hope to see you there!

Listening to Nature

Two week ago, I sat with a group of American Indian Elders. And listened. What I heard, and didn’t hear, I’ve never heard and not heard before.

I met them along with Laurie Young of the DNR to discuss land, parks and trails, and Legacy funding (see this April post). We’ve had seventeen meetings with Minnesotans throughout the state—wonderful, thoughtful meetings. But the core of these meetings was business stuff—how much to spend it, where to spend it, why to spend it.

The Elders did not talk about these things. To them, land and water are spiritual beings, with as much right to exist in their pure form (unpolluted, unexploited, undisturbed) as humans. There is equilibrium and harmony between humans and nature.

Yeah, well, that’s great you might say. But how the blazes does that help us plan for parks and trails? Here are some of the pertinent questions that arose for me:

-- Can we imagine a system of “public” lands, where public is not defined as owned and operated by the government, but rather, as held jointly in stewardship by all Minnesotans to enjoy and care for, with the only proviso that the land be respected?

-- Is “recreation” too narrow a word? Throughout Minnesota, people spoke of their favorite outdoor recreation—hiking, camping, snowmobiling, horseback riding—all of which are “to do” in nature. Shouldn’t we broaden this to “to be” or “to commune” in nature? The American Indian Elders spoke of the importance of land to their scared ceremonies. In other meetings, Hmong Elders spoke of the importance of land to community gatherings. If we want to instill a deeper sense of connection to nature, are we handcuffing ourselves by limiting our thinking to "recreation?"

--The Elders spoke of memories and traditions gifted to them from their parents and grandparents. Likewise, Minnesotans across the state told of cherished childhood memoires that aroused a love of nature. Over the next 25 years, what traditions do we impart, what gift do we leave that personally touches each and every Minnesota child?

A few words about what I did not hear, for the silence was as loud as the talking. The Elders shared vivid memoires of repression—land takings, language takings, religious takings, cultural takings. Yet they told these stories without rancor. They left no doubt they felt brutally wronged, but also made clear by the absence of vitriol that no brutality can disturb who they are as a people. It was this sense of understanding and purpose in heir lives that shaped the telling of their stories, not spite.

And, I’m afraid I’ll never be in another gathering like this again. When an elder was speaking, everyone else listened. They listened as if every word was filled with wisdom. Indeed every word was filled with wisdom because it came from a place of truth in the speaker’s heart. Imagine if we all listened like that!

Want to Feel Fully Alive? Talk About Your Death

I don’t know how I find myself in these situations, but I am one lucky person. Most recently, I have been working with the Citizens League, Twin Cities Public Television and the Twin Cities Medical Society on a project called Honoring Choices Minnesota. It’s my job to interview people and hold discussions about end-of-life choices.

On Monday I interviewed four gifted people—gifted because when we were talking, I felt as if they were lifting a veil on some deep mystery of life. No man behind the curtain here. This was as real as it gets, almost like stepping out of your pretend life, with its everyday distractions and nuisances and pettiness, into your real life. A real life utterly simple and reachable and always there. They were showing me humanity.

How do you talk about death? Easy, you talk about life. Everyone has a story. It turns out that an essential part of being human is that the story of who we are—whatever it may be—must matter. These days, when “mattering” is equated with fame and money and political power, it’s hard to imagine that our own humble stories might matter. But they do. We make them matter by sharing them with someone who cares about us and can listen with respect and without judgment. Find that person. We also make them matter by ensuring that the choices made at the end of life are consistent with that story. The choices must honor that story.

I heard many unremarkable but remarkable stories on Monday. A twenty-six year old newlywed uses a road trip across America to discuss end-of-life choices with her husband. She reaches her destination feeling “safer and more confident” now that she better understands her own values and desires, and how she would be cared for in her last days.

An elderly gentleman who understands that continued treatment is unlikely to help his illness, but can’t give up because he is waiting for the birth of his grandchild. The Buddhist family that remarks when their parent is dying, “This is what we’ve been waiting for.” The woman who chooses to die in the hospital surrounded by her family instead of being ambulanced back to her hometown where she always wanted to be. She made a choice. The family found peace in their grief because they knew she died as she wanted, with her family at her side.

Thank you to Kim, Mary, Dennis and Paul for sharing their stories and inspirations. Videos from these interviews will be posted soon on TPT’s website.

But also, it’s easy to complete a health care directive. You can find documents and instructions at the Minnesota Board on Aging. It just might be one of the kindest things you’ve ever done for yourself.

Cherchez La Rules!

My brain went on a rampage last night and I couldn’t sleep. I’ve become fixated on “rules.” Sorry for the digression on how to change the world. But this is related, so I appreciate your indulgence.

One of my favorite sayings is “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets.” This is indisputably true, and a testimony to the power of rules. If you have a rule that liability for oil spills is capped at $75 million (which is so ludicrous I had to verify that it is millions, not billions; ha ha, now the senators want to raise it to $10 billion ), no one should be surprised that safety will get short shrift when the daily cost of overruns is $1 million (as reported by the Wall Street Journal/The Week). Rolling Stone goes further to show how this calculation even extended to human lives. If you have a rule that the fine for oil spill is $4,300 a barrel, you can expect oil companies to lie about the amount of spillage, especially when it’s so hard to measure. And oh yeah—quick send in the chemical dispersants to make it even harder to measure!

Rules are important to an orderly functioning of society. If society is in a nice equilibrium and nothing needs to change, then the rules are probably fine too. But if the common good is no longer being served, the rules must be revamped.

Since the rules are deeply ingrained in culture and economic ways of life, they can be hard to recognize and nearly impossible to change. I once heard an advocate for the poor say that delivering aid directly through social service agencies, ridding the system of bureaucracy and red tape, was a bad idea because then social service agencies would have to complete with one another. Perfect example of a rule that is becoming ever so clear: the welfare of existing institutions trumps the needs of their constituents.

The heartache comes, I believe, because (most) people and institutions are well-intentioned and trying hard within the system of rules. If I’m in a boxing ring, I can play by all the rules and fight my heart out. However, the question I should ask myself when I get knocked out is not “Did I do my best?” but “What the hell was I doing in the boxing ring?”

Shortly after Medicare Part D passed, I heard a luncheon speaker relate the uphill battle of quickly enrolling hundreds of thousands of seniors for the new prescription meds benefit. She went on and on about all the challenges, and was rightfully proud of what her organization has accomplished. When she finished, a retiree stood to ask the first question. He said, “If I didn’t have diabetes before your speech, I think I have it now. I should be able to take my Medicare card to any pharmacy and get my prescription filled. Period.” The audience, stunned by the audacity of this truth, didn’t know whether to clap or gasp.

When education no longer keeps up with a global economy, the rules about how to educate, and what education is, no longer suffice. When demographics overwhelm our social insurance systems, like social security and Medicare, the rules have to change or these systems collapse. When the planet is warming at a pace to swallow whole islands, the rules about how to transport people have to change, or, we’ll just keep not adequately responding to one Deepwater Horizon after another. If food rules don’t change, as a society we’ll eat ourselves into impoverishment.

Rules bind us like marionettes. Can we become uber conscious about what strings bind us, who's pulling them and why? When we see that the string is acting more like a ball and chain than a life line, can we take a deep breath and sever it? On second thought, maybe we are borg-like (see last post). We need to disconnect from a collective based on rote action and absence of conscientious choice, and start to create new rules based on individual choice and a collective conscious. Be a rule breaker!

****

After writing this, I thought of a good example of a rule so "hidden" it took research to uncover what was going on. It is well documented that elite soccer players have birthdays in the first half of the soccer year. For example, studies of players in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Belgium found that approximately 70% of elite youth players had birthdays in the first half of the soccer year. After investigating any number of reasons this might be so, researchers found what is called the "relative age effect". At young ages, a 6 month differential can make a big difference in physical and mental maturity. These are the children selected for the more elite team play, and they receive better coaching and socialization. Higher self-confidence builds as well. These kids then get more attention. The whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rule? Age-based team play.

How to Change the World, part one

You may have noticed my inconsistency in posting. At first my plan was to post once a week. But I have found that my motivation is highly linked with having something to say…which I suppose is a good thing for all of us. I’ve been thinking about this one for a while now, and it’ll run in a series.

In an earlier post, I noted that many institutions, experts and professionals talk a good game about innovation and reform, but mostly they want someone else to do the changing, not themselves. It’s like a family thing. You may think your sister is mean, stupid and ugly, but if anybody else says so, you’ll knock their lights out. People in bureaucracies usually know things aren’t working, but they’ll defend the status quo with their lives.

waiting...

The way to change the world is not to wait for someone else. My mom and sister have been waiting for each other to change for fifty years. I suspect there will be little change even if they should both live another fifty. I want to suggest that there are five things each and every one of us has the power to do. Collectively, we’d change the world—a helluva lot faster and far more meaningfully than the government will ever do... And in the process we’ll each live a happier life.

1. Take care of your health.
2. Talk, read or sing to young children.
3. Save.
4. Use less gasoline.
5. Do a small kindness every day.

The common argument is that the actions of one person cannot possibly make a difference. But I want to argue the opposite— it already IS mattering. We don’t need to digress into the sentimentality of It’s a Wonderful Life to see that the choices we make impact not only our own lives, by the lives of those around as was well as those lives of people we may never meet.

It’s not so much the heroic effort but the collective effort that counts. In a me-first society we may reject the idea of collective effort. But then again, we’re not borgs, we’re compatriots on this planet. And I believe that most of us search for our legacy, knowing it will never be riches or fame. It’s nice to know that it is within our humble selves to change the world.

I’ve selected the five based on: 1) the degree to which an individual has control over choices; 2) the magnitude of direct and possible spin off effects; 3) the nature of potential change in our culture. Maybe you have a different suggestion for the top five. I’d love to hear them!

Next up: taking care of your health.

The Creation of Controversy

I mentioned in my blog post "The Green in Me" that I am doing some work for the DNR on how Minnesota should spend the Legacy funds for parks and trails. We had our first public meeting in Saint Cloud last week. Now when you think of public meetings, what words come to mind? I don't attend public meetings if I can help it, because here are my words: boring, frustrating, waste of time, patronizing, special interests, done deal.

About ninety people showed up in St. Cloud, and a remarkable thing happened (hoped for, to be sure...but you never know). These ninety people rolled up their sleeves and got to work. They shared written responses. They discussed issues at their tables with like-minded, and not-so-like-minded people. They voted. They agreed at their tables on how money should be spent. Take a look at these pictures from the event by David Simpkins of Minnesota Trails Magazine, and there's no denying how seriously participants took their roles as contributors to public decision-making.

There was a young girl at the meeting. She came with her dad and he kept saying that they were going to leave early. But every time dad wanted to go, the young girl wouldn't let him. She was learning at an early age the power of processes that help find common ground.

So, you might argue, that's much easier to do when there's no controversy. Having money to spend is a good problem to have. But on tough issues, the public is poorly behaved and close minded--take a look at the health care town halls.

But what if controversy is created in the way we develop public policy? Prior to the actual health care proposals, people were pretty united on the need for health care reform. Does the act of selecting a specific proposal without public discussion fuel controversy? If a proposal is made about something that people really care about and that proposal does not reflect their interests, of course they are going to be hostile and upset. The proposal puts them in a defensive position, with little to do but complain or fight. At this point they are losing something dear to them, and their minds are not in a particularly generous position to be open to other people's priorities.

Imagine if the DNR had chosen instead to develop a proposal behind closed doors and then shop it around the state in a series of town hall meetings (the typical public process). I think you'd see a lot of controversy. There are actually quite a few different viewpoints about how the money should be spent: motorized trails, local parks, natural resource preservation, horse trails, land acquisition, land acquisition, land acquisition. But because people's priorities are being fed into the proposal development and they have the opportunity to discuss trade-offs with people of differing priorities, there was no controversy at the meeting. Will everyone sing kumbaya when the final proposal is released? Unlikely. But there is no denying that people have a much broader sense of a common mission as a result of being asked to contribute in this way. Here's what participants said when asked for insights from the meeting:

• People came wanting to trumpet their personal projects but left feeling they were involved in something quite bigger.
• I realized I am not as radical as I thought.
• To think "we" and not "me."
• It is fun to disagree and vote.
• Many people are concerned and passionate about our world.
• I was amazed at how serious people were in what they were doing and how they took it all in.
• People are a lot more united on some of these choices.

We have defined leadership as "having the answers." Maybe we need a new definition as someone who works with the public to find the common ground needed to advance the radical changes we need to address our most perplexing challenges: education, the public debt, obesity, poverty, long-term care, social security, climate change, name yours.

you can weigh in on the Legacy Funds at www.citizing.org

Tapping Out

Have you ever watched mixed martial arts or cage fighting? Brutal. There are basically no rules, just to beat the crap out of the other person. Katlin Young from my school, the Minnesota Taekwondo Center, was the first woman ever to be broadcast in a mixed martial arts fight on network t.v. (Katie looks and is really tough, but she's also one of the sweetest people you could ever meet.) She got beat up really bad in this fight, but she didn't "tap out." Tapping out allows you to quit the fight when the pain is so excruciating that you can't go on any longer. You simply tap your hand on your body.

When competitors get in the ring, they are well trained-- and crossed trained. Katie started in taekwondo, but if she has no grappling skills in the ring and gets taken down, it's all over. Imagine what would happen if someone with little physical prowess and skill got put into the ring with Katie. They wouldn't last two seconds.

I'm increasingly picturing our economy and society as a cage fight. Earlier this week I moderated a pair of meetings hosted by the Family Housing Fund and the Northwest Area Foundation about a growing phenomenon: unscrupulous investors buying up homes in neighborhoods and then basically acting like slum landlords. This of course is made possible by all the previous predatory and subprime lending and the resulting spate of foreclosures. A report on this topic with a story by Steve Brandt of the Strib carried a startling fact: black and Latino families have lost an estimated $200 billion in equity in the foreclosure crisis.

I always wondered where the money went. I asked a respected economist this once, and he told me, "There was no money. It was all on paper." But wait a minute. If I hold on to my home and there is no transcation, then yes, my losses cancel my gains. But the foreclosure crisis was brought about by hundreds of thousands of transactions. In each case, the seller could have taken cash home and stuck in under their mattress. There were real money gains and losses involved. And sure enough, as I mentioned in my last blog post, lots of money was made on Wall Street.

And here we come to the uneven cage fight. We want "free" markets, but the problem is that "no rules" is a rule. It's a rule that allows the advantaged to take advantage. Wall Street made money hand over fist, in all sorts of ways. They are trained, have connections to money and power; they can shape markets, and with every transaction make a buck that turns out to be pretty risk free. How does the hard working person with only their measly hourly wage compete against this?

Their only recourse is to tap out. The question is, what happens when there's no one left to tap out?

It's No Laff-ing Matter

I was intrigued by the graph I included in my "Poverty is Unaffordable" post that showed the amount of U.S. income going to the top decile earners. Yes, I amuse myself rather easily, but I decided to investigate a bit further. It turns out that the shape of this graph looks exactly like the inverse of the graph of the top marginal tax rates in the U.S.
Remember the Laffer curve? Laffer warned that once tax rates exceed a certain level, total tax revenues will fall because people no longer think it’s worthwhile to work for additional income. Liberals, me included, greeted his theory with a resounding pooh (or substitute your own less polite word), because it also holds that the wealth of the rich will trickle down to all of the rest of us. Even Papa Bush called it “voodoo economics.”
Laffer saw only one side of the equation. Why keep working for that next $100 million if the government is going to take 70% of it? Of course if you’re one of the trickle down beneficiaries making only $35,000 a year, the choice to stop working isn’t exactly the same. But I’m wondering, based on the latest round of financial scandals and malfeasance, from Enron to predatory lending to the lawsuit announced today against Goldmann Sachs, if perhaps Laffer had a point. Maybe we’d be better off if indeed these guys stopped working so hard to make the next $100 million.

There are a couple of interesting things about the graph above of the top federal marginal income tax rate —the rate the wealthiest pay on the portion of their income that puts them in the most wealthy category. The rates were astronomically high during the war—imagine actually raising money to pay for your spending! The economy crashed when these rates were at their lowest—in the 1930’s and again, starting in the 1980’s in a series of bubbles—from the savings and loans scandal; followed by the dotcom bubble, and the housing bubble today.

Laffer seems to have gotten it both tragically wrong and maybe tragically right. The higher the tax rates, the more trickle down seemed to have occurred. Family incomes were increasing and the income distribution was less polarized when tax rates were higher. And GDP capita has increased irrespective of the tax rates after the Great Depression.

Why would family incomes increase when marginal tax rates are higher for the wealthy? Who knows? I imagine that economists have all sorts of explanations. I’m sure there are even some who will say that what appears to be so in the graphs isn’t actually so. I prefer to think that maybe Laffer was right about the incentives for the wealthy. Maybe companies put in place different earnings policies because they know they can’t keep it anyway. Maybe the uber-wealthy do work less at concocting the latest get-mind-blowing-rich schemes that implode in foreclosure, bank failures and stock scandals. Maybe higher tax rates simply create a different expectation for what type of society we want to be.

The Green in Me

I had an epiphany yesterday on account of the green. No, not money or Saint Patty's Day. Nature.

I had the honor of moderating, for the Citizens League and Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, the first of many meetings to discuss how money from the so-called “Legacy Amendment” should be spent on parks and trails. Voters approved a 3/8 cent sales tax in 2008 to be allocated among parks and trails, water quality, arts and culture and wildlife habitat. The tax will be in place for twenty-five years.

I have been candid that I voted gainst the amendment. As a former budget director of both San Francisco and Saint Paul, I have a principle against using constitutional amendments to make, and bind, budgetary decisions. I see now that I voted with my head instead of my heart. Shame on me.

Call me a slow learner, but I finally understand what the Legacy Amendment is about—taught to me by all the wonderful participants at the meeting. The Southeast Asians kept talking about the importance of family, and the group as a whole said that the most important goal was to create a new generation of stewards. My synapses were activated, but were still not connecting until Don Shelby spoke.

I’ve heard Don Shelby speak before, and I’ve interviewed with him on his radio show. He has always impressed me. But today, as my friend Claire likes to say, was transcendent. Shelby described nature as a fundamantal part of our humanness. His exclamation point on this theme was his comparison of the molecule for chlorophyll (which makes plants green) with the molecule for hemoglobin. What separates the life force of plants from the life force of humans is a single atom at the center of a complex molecule. In chlorophyll it is magnesium, in humans iron. Otherwise they are the same.

I looked this up to share it with you, and you can see the molecular diagrams below. Let’s just say that they are close enough (you can indeed see the single magnesium/iron atoms, surrounded by niacin, and then to a complex of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) that there is widespread belief that they are the same but for the single atom. And for our purposes it is so. The similarities are so undeniable that one cannot help but wonder--What is the relationship between humans and nature? Human culture and nature?

chlorophyll molecule

hemoglobin molecule

Forgive me if I’m about to be overly romantic or grandiose, but I am currently reading a provocative book that conveys the sweep of civilization in relation to mythology, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, by William Irwin Thompson. Thompson looks at the great arc of human development from those first days when primates were forced from the forest to the savannah, and the use of tools, possibly early language, and new cultures were born. He argues that large cultural transformations were compelled by climatic changes, and are captured through mythology. For Thompson, mythology is the expression of the intuitive, unconscious knowledge of humans, rooted in nature. Mythology is the stuff that science comes along later to prove (e.g., the myth of our origins in nature and the science of the similarties of the two molecules). But the more advanced our scientific knowledge, the more mythology is pushed to the side.

If you think about it, much of mythology speaks of the relationship of nature to man, just as it provides context for our deepest mysteries. Many cultures share have a story of “The Fall,” for example. Adam and Eve are pushed from the garden; it is the onset of human separation from nature. Today, tens of thousands of years later, we live in an intensely scientific and technological age. Maybe the voters understood that the Legacy is a last chance to reconnect to our natural roots before all is subsumed into digitized bits of information that can be accessed by the nearest electrical outlet. We're hanging on to our humanness.

So maybe we can permit ourselves a bit of hubris by defining Legacy not as our moment in time but as a pivot point in civilization. The question we'll want to answer after twenty-five years is not, “what have we completed" but “what have we begun?”

p.s. if you'd like to know more about how to participate in the Legacy Amendment discussions for parks and trails, go to http://www.citizing.org/ or http://www.patl.intergov.mn.gov/

Aesop Didn't Whine (or doubling down to catch up)

Many years back I visited the San Diego zoo. A young boy was trailing his father, and intoned in a slow whine, "Daaaaddy, can I have some ice creeeeam?" In an even slower more nauseating drone, Daddy replied, "Stop whhiiiining."

Can we please put a little realism back into how we've fared in the stock market? There’s all this hand-wringing about how poor we are because of the dive in the stock market. Foundations, in particular, are cutting back on grants (at a time they should be increasing them) because "they've lost all their capital," while people lament the shrinking of their retirement funds.

There has been a paper loss in value over the last few years and I’m sorry about that, especially for those on the verge of retirement. But take a look at the following graphs, courtesy of the blog Observations. The graph below, the Dow Jones index since about 2000, is illustrative of the perspective we are choosing to take. Indeed, for for the last 10 years, the average rate of return was 1.3% (-1.0% stock appreciation, plus 2.3% dividends). In the last few years we lost all those thrilling returns of the earlier years.

But rule number one of investing is that there are ups and downs. In the short term, the market can be very volatile. Over the longer term, investment returns are relatively stable. If you’re getting richer faster than you think you should be, you’re probably right.


Let's take a longer look. Over the last twenty years, gains were exactly equal to the historical average (1900 through 2009) of 9.4%. A 25-year moving average shows a steady upward gain.


Because we take the short term view, we reach the wrong conclusions about what to do with our investments. Our public officials have convinced themselves that we must somehow make up for these "extraordinary losses". So what are they doing to make up for “lost” investment? Riskier investments!!! Fool me once…

Many states, including Wyoming, Wisconsin, Colorado and California are moving to higher risk investments in their pension funds. Here’s the logic: we owe more than we can pay out because we've assumed higher returns than we've earned (in part due to risky investments), so let's go after even riskier investments so we can assume even higher returns.

“Nobody wants to adjust the rate, because liabilities would explode,” Trent May, chief investment officer of Wyoming’s state pension fund was quoted as saying in this truly frightening story in the New York Times. “In effect, they’re going to Las Vegas,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a Dallas investor and the former chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which oversees public plans in that state. “Double up to catch up.”

Maybe Aesop understood that animals can be smarter than humans. In any case, it’s worth revisiting some of his wonderfully practical advice.

"It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow." --The Ant and the Grasshopper

"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow." --The Dog and the Shadow

"Slow and steady wins the race." --The Hare and the Tortoise

“It is easy to be brave from a distance." (or with someone else's money I might add)--The Wolf and the Kid

The Future Is Us

I recently returned from Florida—I went down to watch some spring training games of the Minnesota Twins. (They’re looking good, but as my brother Kelly points out, the Twins have recently been named the best lineup in all of baseball, so isn’t that a jinx?) If you want to have a sense of what our communities will look like in ten years, visit Florida.

Go Twins!

Everywhere you went there were old(er) people. They took tickets at the Twins’ gate, they served the beer, they were wheelchaired along boardwalks in the Corkscrew swamp. Everything… slowed….down……. And I got impatient (tear the damn ticket already!). But maybe slowing down will be a good thing for our society.

On my way home from Nina’s coffee shop this morning, I heard someone saying, “Where did all these old people come from?” Go to Florida and get used to it.

In case you haven’t looked at demographic charts lately (or ever), I’ve included one here. For the first time in the history of humankind (really!) people over the age of 65 will outnumber school aged children. This will create fiscal problems galore, but dollars aside, none of our “systems” have been set up with this age distribution in mind. None.

My son’s father tells the story of when he was a boy growing up in a small town. Once a year, elderly Mrs. Johnson would take the car out for a spin. Mrs. Johnson couldn’t see very well, and she certainly couldn’t drive very well. So the word quickly spread throughout town—“Get off the roads! Mrs. Johnson is out driving today!”

This may work in Cumberland Wisconsin, but it’s not a very practical overall strategy to help seniors maintain their mobility. Nor have we figured out how to accommodate seniors who need help with their daily activities. In fact, we may not even have accepted it.

Two weeks ago I moderated a community discussion in Woodbury. A 45-unit Alzheimer’s housing has been proposed, including 15 units for those with advanced stages of their disease who aren’t always able to control their behaviors. Many in the local community are opposed. (See the Strib's coverage by Jim Anderson, or the Woodbury Bulletin's by Scotte Wente. One resident simply said, "You're seeing a roomful of people that don't want you there." The neighbors insist that theirs is a family community. Now I ask you, if seniors are not part of our “families” then where do they belong?

Many baby boomers have been living under an illusion that they can “control” and sanitize their lives. I’ll move to a place where I won’t have to look at death or aging, where there’s no poverty or crime. But getting old changes all of this. It is harder to find a job if you need one (I’m guessing all the seniors in Florida were volunteers). Health fails, and sometimes memory. Nest eggs are insufficient for fixing the roof or paying for out-of-pocket medical costs.

My imploration (ok, so it’s not a word, but I like it) to baby boomers is to start thinking about the kind of society you want to live in when you are elderly, and start creating it now. Do you want to be shipped off to the hinterland or would you like to live with or near your family? Do you want to be scraping by and choosing between food or meds or can you start saving a little bit more now? Do you want to be sickly and immobile or can you become healthier now in order to have a more active lifestyle later?

If we don’t start accepting and planning for what is inevitably, indisputably, incontrovertibly an aged society, we’ll find ourselves at the receiving end of our own policies. What would you like those to be?

Poverty is Unaffordable. Really.

Warning! This will be a recurring theme…all of the things we can no longer afford. But we’ll start with poverty, because it has the happiest outcome. No more poverty!

Some people tolerate poverty because the Bible said so. I’ve always wondered whether Jesus’ comment was actually a comment on humankind. There will always be poverty because human beings are too self-centered to end it. Those with money, that is. Why give up a good thing?

Then there’s the belief (deeply held but hardly conscious and certainly not spoken) that poor people are poor because they deserve it. They are stupid or lazy or incompetent or something like that. Correspondingly, rich people earn the money they make. Every last cent.

I have two aunts who will tell you so. Both were (very) small town girls with minds and futures to match. They married men from slightly larger towns, and these men happened to have slightly larger minds. They became millionaires. Unfortunately, the women’s hearts did not increase with their pocketbooks. They believe the homeless deserve to sleep under bridges and every last immigrant should be shipped back (except the ones that clean their pools in Arizona of course). In their defense, their attitudes are not so different from those on Wall Street, who are convinced that their paychecks match their skills.

Research has clearly shown that income is related to all sorts of outcomes—health status, educational achievement, crime and incarceration. It is easy to see how my aunts could fall into the trap of thinking that the poor only have themselves to blame. But research has also shown that a tiny bit of money (gumball money for my aunts)—on the order of $50 a month-- can make a huge difference in the lives of the poor. For example, their children learn better in school, and the incidence of domestic violence decline.

Why might that be? Simplistic as is sounds…stress. One study showed that stress in school children (which can be measured physiologically) diminishes their short term memory skills. These skills are essential for learning. And here researchers talk about another factor of stress: demands on one’s attention. Researchers tracked air traffic controllers and found a direct relationship to the hecticness of their work day and the way they treated their children and spouse and home.

It is stressful to be poor in our society! And I would argue that we can no longer afford to keep people stressful. I don’t know about you, but I no longer want to pay for the costs in lost educational achievement, incarceration, welfare, and poor health.

Here’s an idea. Instead of paying people not to work (welfare or unemployment) how about paying them to work by giving them a wage supplement? They’re better off, our businesses will be more competitive, and the costs to society will drop. Besides, it costs $800 million in Minnesota to process income supports in Minnesota. Last I looked, we had a huge budget problem. And counting. Any chance it's related to this graph?

thanks to Trout Lowen for sending along the video clip

Who's Your Daddy?

Earlier this week, I met with employees from two of Ecumen’s senior housing locales, Centennial House in Apple Valley and Lakeview Commons in Maplewood. We were talking about the challenges of paying for long-term care when we age. A casual comment at Centennial House turned into a really important learning moment for all of us.

Linda, Barb, Peggy, Peggy, Mary, Lisa at Centennial House

Jessica, Audrey, Mary, Glenn and Joyce at Lakeview Commons

Nursing home care is expensive—as much as $80,000 a year, so it’s not surprising that people might need public assistance to pay for this care, which is uninsured. Most of the women (the group was all women) at Centennial House knew of someone who had turned to public assistance to pay for their care. I asked them—“How does this make you feel? Happy that your friends are cared for? Resentful? After all, public assistance is your money. It has to come from somewhere, and it comes from our taxes.”

You could feel the energy in the room shift as the women took this in. I heard comments like “Wow, I never thought about it this way,” “Hmm…I’ll have to think about that,” and “I always looked at it as beating the system, not as my money.” I asked them if they thought it was important for everybody to understand that the “system” is nothing more than our money. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

And so they helped me realize how disconnected we have become from understanding our collective responsibility to one another, even though the evidence is all around us. It’s easy to point fingers at the family who turns to Medicaid for their long-term care or the family who runs up credit card bills, but this starts at the tippy-top, with dear old Uncle Sam.

The national debt now stands at $12.6 trillion and ticking (see the debt clock I've added on the side bar). That’s equal to $40,700 for every man women and child in the U.S. Do you have an extra $41,000 laying around for our dotty relative? Just where do we imagine repayment will come from? Baby boomers are about to retire, and for the most part haven’t even saved enough for themselves. If the demographics weren’t about to go upside down for the first time in the history of mankind (i.e., more elderly than children-- in 1950 there were six social security beneficiaries for every worker; it 2030, there will be 46) we could cross our fingers and hope our kids will pay for our excesses. Maybe the Chinese will take pity on us. Or maybe we can keep printing money and the Fed can experiment with negative interest rates. That would create a painless way of erasing our debt —people would pay the Treasury for the privilege of lending it money.

All of this doesn’t even count the looming Social Security and Medicare crashes ahead—both will become insolvent. Social Security’s cash flow could turn negative any year now. So what does our government do? It recommends giving Social Security recipients a bonus check of $250, for a total of $14 billion. I have no doubt that many retired people have trouble making ends meet. But the pocketbook is empty.

A recent study estimated the uninsured health care costs faced by a couple at 65 years of age for the rest for of their lives. I don’t want to bum you out if you didn’t know this already, but it averages $197,000-- $260,000 if you include nursing home costs.

I once was moderating a conversation about leadership with a group of nonprofit and government executives. Everyone agreed that things need to change, but no one seemed willing to be the one to do it. “What’s the barrier?” I asked. “Why not change?” One person replied, “It’s politically risky. I guess we would all need to hold hands and jump off the cliff together.”

Ahh, the power of those invisible cultural tentacles that bind us all to the status quo. Maybe, I’m wondering, the same is true of saving. Why be the only stupe to save? After all, according to the marketing whizzes, we deserve not to save! One of the women at Centennial House suggested that there ought to be a payroll deduction for savings for health care expenses in our retirement years. Most of the group at Lakeview Commons really liked this idea— as if they want to be forced to save. Maybe a group jump over the cliff is precisely the answer.

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A big thank you to thank the folks at Centennial house-- Barb, Peggy L., Peggy B., Mary, Lisa, Linda and for a great conversation, and Janis for setting it up. Ditto for everyone at Lakeview Commons- Joyce, Jessica, Mary, Glenn and Audrey, and Andrea for making the arrangements.

Sci Fi Accountability

I was talking with an educator a few weeks ago. The topic was standardized testing and “accountability” and she said, “Let's face it. We don't do this for the kids. It's all for the adults-so we can tell ourselves we're doing the right things.”

Blow me away. In twenty years in public policy, I don't think I've ever heard such a spring rain statement. I hoped her admission might clear the air for some effective work, but unfortunately, she was resigned to the situation. Her logic went something like this. It doesn't help the kids. It's probably not right. There's nothing I can do about it. So be it.

Accountability is the big buzzword in government and among television commentators. President Obama must be held accountable. Toyota must be accountable and Tiger Woods must be accountable. But how does accountability work when no one is in control of the outcomes?

Few people I've met, including the leaders of reputable nonprofits and government agencies actually think they can change “the system.” They expect the governor or the legislature to do it for them. I once asked a large group of nonprofit leaders what their plan was for getting their agenda accomplished. They said, “The election of a new governor.” I replied, “I hope you have Plan B.”

What does accountability mean in a world where the problems are BIG but no one thinks the underlying system can be changed? What if the system is the problem? Was the CIA held accountable for 9/11? Was the SEC accountable for failing to investigate Bernie Madoff despite ongoing tips about his wrongdoing? We've become creatures of a new world order ruled by “systems.” Our systems have become the man-made artificial intelligence machines of science fiction that take over the world and cannot be defeated. We created them, but cannot change them. Health care reform be damned. (Even if it passes, everyone knows it's not real reform; the system lives!)

Our current version of accountability is part of the problem, not the solution. Yes, government should show positive outcomes with all of the taxpayers' money. The premise of the way we practice accountability, however, is incorrect. You cannot hold a system accountable because it's not a living thing-it has no capacity to act on its own, to make decisions. I'd like to hold the chair accountable when I ran into and bruised my shin, but really, the chair doesn't care. Neither does the system, which may be one reason people feel so powerless.

Face-to-face with the goliath system, we have cowered and substituted real accountability with three things: blame, paperwork and measurement. When something goes wrong, we look for someone to blame. Anderson Cooper is fond of asking, “And why has no one been fired over this?” Would firing someone have prevented 9/11? I doubt it. Being accountable should mean fixing the problem. But in systems where rules, procedures, and organizational and professional cultures suck you in like quicksand- there's no escaping- firing someone is a veneer of accountability that distracts attention from the real issue.

We have also equated paperwork with being accountable. Government agencies are fond of posting large incomprehensible spreadsheets on their websites, and then proclaiming, “It's all there!” Chances are, not even they can tell you what was accomplished from spending the funds just so. They may not even be able to explain the spreadsheet. When I was the director of public works for Saint Paul, I was appointed just in time to find out that the sewer fund had blown through $16 million of cash in a few years and the department was faced with borrowing to meet its cash reserve covenants. When I asked the accounting staff how this happened, they replied, “It's too complicated to explain.”

I had lunch once with a journalist. He quit his job as a county social worker because it was just paper-pushing. As he described it, he reviewed 18 page applications (reduced from 36!) that went like this:

Page one: are you poor?
Page two: are you sure you’re poor?
Page three: are you really sure you’re poor?
Page four: are you sure you’re really poor?
Page five: are you really sure you’re really poor?
And so on….

In the meantime, research has shown that it is very common for recipients in this system to be worse off the more they work. The paperwork may be in order, but as they start working, their loss in benefits exceeds their wages, so they actually have less money to take care of their family. What does it mean to be accountable in such a system? And accountable to whom? Is it not odd (and totally unacceptable) that being accountable to my family and being accountable to taxpayers work at cross-purposes?

And finally, measurement. It’s all the rage! Cities have become fond of indicator projects, which report key statistics to mark progress. Somehow, key has come to mean about 150 indicators (which suggests we don’t really have any priorities) and note, that nothing happens if progress is good, nonexistent, backwards, sideways, mirror image, whatever.

Of course you should fire bad employees (I did at Public Works), take measurements (I do this for clients) and keep your paperwork (I do my taxes religiously and honestly). But who am I keeping accountable? In every instance, myself. It is my job to do these things.

So if we want real accountability, we have to recognize two things. First and foremost, people are accountable to themselves. People will take care of themselves and their family first, because that is what we are indoctrinated (and required) to do under capitalism. Second, the only person I can really control is myself.

Can you build public policy under such a notion of accountability? Absolutely. Have we done it? A teenie weenie bit. The boogie man (aka the system) lurks.

Testing Our Patience

The great thing about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is that it has finally brought attention to the vast numbers of children --our children, our nation's future-- for whom our education system is failing. But that may be the only good thing about it.

No Child Left Behind has accomplished the same thing as many of our public policies do: it is creating a massive industry with benefits for many, except those the policy was intended to help. American students took 45 million tests in 2006, a number that certainly has risen as NCLB requirements have kicked in. The Government Accounting Office estimated that, between 2002 and 2008, states would spend between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion to implement tests mandated under No Child Left Behind. These are just the direct costs; if the time spent on prepping students and coordinating and administering the tests are included, the costs could be 10 to 15 times higher.




If this type of expenditure were producing real progress among students, I'd say, "Hallelujah!" Instead it's producing some really perverse incentives:

• A recent report in the New York Times stated, "As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma. "
• It gets worse: in a second story, we find that, "Cheating on tests used to be thought of as primarily the domain of students, but as standardized test results have taken on an increasing importance as a way to measure schools, the culprits have increasingly turned out to be educators." The schools are changing the students' test scores so the schools look better. Never mind how the students are faring.
• If you do not have a teenager in a Minnesota high school, you might not be aware that in 2009, 43% of 11th graders failed to pass a math test needed to graduate. The legislature, horrified at denying diplomas to so many children, came up with an Einsteinian idea: let's tell them that if they take the test three times and still don't pass, we'll give them a diploma anyway.
• Because tests are costly, states are turning to multiple choice "bubble" tests because they are cheaper to administer, yet they are notoriously inadequate as a measure of students' knowledge as skills. How would you feel if your annual performance review consisted solely of a standardized multiple choice test, and it alone determined whether you'd keep your job? Other economically advanced nations use performance-based assessment where students are evaluated on the basis of real work such as essays, projects and activities. And by the way, they do just fine (or better!) on standardized multiple choice tests.
• Remedies must be taken at schools that fail to show annual yearly progress (another odd measure), one of which is "turnaround." Those teachers in Rhode Island? They've been turned-around. Here in Minnesota, where we're "nice", turnaround is a fancy word for reshuffling the deck chairs. One teacher described to me that when a school is reconstituted, the poor performing teachers are let go-- to another school.

In fairness, NCLB is creating pressure to help students who struggle the most. I recently completed a number of interviews with teachers and principals, and was struck by the variety and intensity of efforts they were making to help students pass standardized tests. People will argue whether this is a good thing or not. But the biggest takeaway was this-- how does standardized testing help the student, teacher or school when a student enters 9th or 10th grade with a 5th grade math level and must pass an Algebra II (i.e. quadratic equations and trigonometry) test by the end of 11th grade? As one teacher put it, "“How do I help? I’ve hit every tool in the toolbox. I don’t know what to do. They (the students) don’t know what to do. It’s very sad. They work so hard.”

more to come on this subject...

Our Little Genious Cheats and other Saturday tidbits

On Saturday mornings I read the New York Times, and I'm always struck by the arcane, the absurd and the avoidable. Here are a few from this morning.

Our Little Genius cheats... Remember seeing the ads for this game show in which super smart kids are quizzed? Fox has scrapped the show over allegations that they coached the kids on answers. Far less scandalous than real life--see the story in which schools actually changed students' standardized test score answers so the school would fare better under No Child Left Behind.

Tim Pawlenty, speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference last week was quoted in two different articles, in the first saying: "God's in charge" and in the second "We should take a page out of her (Tiger Wood's wife) playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country." How someone could hold (or not) both of these beliefs is truly remarkable, and says everything we need to know about him as presidential material.

Sarah Palin started a row with an actress with Down syndrome who did a voice over on Family Guy. Palin's disingenuous blather was ignited over an episode in which Chris begins to date a girl with Down syndrome, and asks about her family. The girl replies "My dad's an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska." Palin claims it was a swipe at her son Trig. The actress, Andrea Fay Friedman, replied, "My mother did not carry me around like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes."

The latest threat in Haiti is the accumulation of human excrement. Haiti had no sewage treatment plants even before the earthquake; the lowliest workers cleaned latrines and the waste was transported to disposal sites. Now it just piles up. And worse, starving families rummage in it looking for food. Public health officials fear outbreaks of cholera, malaria and dengue. Cases of typhoid and shigellosis are already on the rise. "Haiti's pigs live better lives than we do," says a displaced mother of four.

Headline: "Fewer People Late Paying Mortgage." Details: The improvement was in the group that has only missed one payment. The percentage of homeowners missing two payments increased, from 6.25% in the 3rd quarter of 2009 to 6.89% in the fourth quarter , as did the percentage of those missing at least three payments, from 8.85% to 9.67%. And the number of loans in foreclosure rose from 4.47% to 4.58% --from 3.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

My weekend gift to you: No item on Tiger Woods.

The rine in spine sties minely in the pline, or, language is power

Yikes! It's funny how fast you can fall behind when you're traveling and swamped with work. While I'm sure no one put their life on hold while waiting for my post, I promise to be more consistent in the future.

I was in Albuquerque having great fun with my brother Kelly and his wife Debra. See pics below. We went to the zoo, and while I'm not normally a zoo fan, the cats were prowling, the gorillas fighting and the the birds were beautiful. Did you know a black leopard has spots? We waiting for him to walk into the sun so we could see his spots. Stunning!

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I met with my friend Mahmoud a few weeks ago. He is Iranian born, and is now a U.S. citizen, having been here since he was sixteen. He’s a linguist, and has fascinating ideas about language.

As a learner of English, he was determined to match his language to that of native speakers. He studied every type of English language pattern possible, from children’s nursery rhymes to Olde English to southern dialects to Boston dialects. And he still couldn’t figure out what made his speech different. So he went to the head of ESL at the University of Minnesota and asked her, “What is it that makes my English different from native speakers?” She told him, “When you find out, please let us know.”

Many years later, Mahmoud has yet to discover those intricacies of language that identify a person as a non-native speaker. But he has discovered how powerful those differences are. As a younger man he took a job in the restaurant industry. He was promoted five times in six years, moving from wait staff to the head of a multi-million dollar business. He says he did it by adjusting his language with each promotion, tailoring it always to the people around him.

Mahmoud believes two things. First, language has always been used, and still is, to separate people by status. Think "My Fair Lady" (see Eliza and henry below). Think the movie "Fargo". Second, language, thoughts and behavior are a package deal.

We judge people by their language. After the movie “Fargo” was released, there was a strong backlash from Minnesotans over the way their speech was portrayed. Check out this hilarious clip and you’ll see what I mean. An editorial in the Brainerd Dispatch ("Fargo was filmed in Brainerd) read, “ But the film's depiction of a typical Brainerd resident is particularly illuminating - a vapid moron presumably the product of inbreeding by a 100 percent Scandinavian population.” Much of the depiction was a product of language, which the Brainerd Dispatch shows great sensitivity to in a side bar reading, “Dey didn't show ya dis here really big watertower dat we're so attached ta in dat der movie, did dey?”

For Mahmoud, it’s not about sacrificing your native language. Instead it’s about gaining power through learning new dialects. Just as I am more effective if I know Chinese in China, I’ll be more effective in landing a job if I speak the dialect of a potential employer simply because I am communicating better.

Some of the work I do is in the field of education. The twist in thinking from, “this is the right and only way to communicate” (which rejects the students’ heritage, and hence their personal identities) to “people use many forms of language and the more you know the more powerful you’ll be” has profound implications. It’s interesting that young ESL students are often grouped with special education students. We treat them as needing remedial work. But in fact, they’re doing double the learning as native speakers, because they have to learn both the material and English at the same time. Instead of celebrating their dual language abilities, we punish them with inferior test and classroom grades. In fact, research is beginning to show that dual language speakers develop superior intellectual capacities as they mature.

I’ve noticed in my work with alternative school students that their writing is pretty dreadful by traditional standards—specifically, their grammar and spelling sucks. But their stories will tear your heart apart.

why is every little girls dream to become princess? No matter what color no matter rich or poor that seems to be every little girls dream. I used to always imagine I was the princess of the Ida B. Wells (that’s the name of the projects in Chicago that I grew up in) I use to stand between the orange poles (that’s where my throne was at) and imagine my prince charming was coming to take me away from my hell hole of a house. See my father was a well known drug dealer when I was born and by the time I was 5 we had lost everything dew to his full blow crack addiction...my mama spent her nights looking 4 him in the crack houses he use to own right on the rock block. When he wasn’t on the rock block he was stealing our TVs , vcr’s and ect. To provide for his problems.

If language is about communicating, surely this student has mastered a form of language, whether or not we approve of it. We often dump students with poor writing skills into the discard pile. They are made to feel “stupid” (their words, not mine). We fail with our own communication in helping them understand that language and writing are about power— it’s about developing the skills to thrive in a world of multiple dialects. Ultimately, they fail to master the language skills they need to prosper after high school.

Thanks Mahmoud! Hope I didn’t bastardize your elegant thinking too much.

Walkin' the Line

I’ve been stewing about the Central Corridor light rail line in Saint Paul. When officials came to their senses (somewhat—no full credit from me until we see the actual results) and announced on Tuesday the possibility of three more stations, I felt reprieved from writing a post on this subject. Alas, I can’t stop myself from weighing in.

It was determined, based on a federally-required cost-benefit calculation, that the spacing for certain stations along University Avenue would be one mile apart. These particular stations happen to be located in the lowest income, most transit-dependent neighborhoods. This means up to a half mile walk, if you live on University or another street intersecting the station. For some, the walk can be even longer. Planners like to draw circles with stations in the center, showing the ½ mile service area. But that’s as the bird flies. If people had wings they wouldn’t need the rail line.

The logic behind the mile-apart decision was that the rail line must meet federal standards for cost-effectiveness. Not a bad idea, although it creates some strange incentives, as highlighted by Net Density. But why was the decision made to space these stations more widely in order for the line to qualify as “cost-effective?” I hunted around quite a bit, and could not find the answer to that question.



So I went straight to the source and looked at the how the calculation of cost-effectiveness is made. I reached this conclusion: the cost-effectiveness modeling is done in a black box that few people know or understand. Quantitative models, by virtue of being number-oriented, masquerade as technical and objective in nature. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves; they are in fact laden with values (and other non-data-driven assumptions), values that are never made explicit because they’re buried in complicated numerical formulas.

The evaluation criteria for the stations included nine considerations, and as the transportation planners like to point out, “transportation service equity was not a criteria” (sic). It’s not just that equity was not a criterion; the criteria themselves were weighted against an equitable outcome. The criteria included considerations such as proximity to major employment centers and development potential. Lower income neighborhoods are often lower income precisely because they lack these attributes.

The cost-effectiveness calculation itself gives preference to some transit users over others (namely, the majority by virtue of being the majority) under the guise of a supposedly objective measure. Cost-effectiveness is a function of total user-benefits, measured as mobility improvements for all transit and highway users. A 2005 survey by the Met Council showed that half of LRT users would have made their trip by driving alone if LRT had not been available. A little more than 20% said they’d take the bus, and just under 10% said they couldn’t make the trip. Using aggregate benefits tilts the index towards the needs of people who would otherwise drive because they are the biggest share of the aggregate. Moreover, the benefits for drivers derive from different factors than the benefits for non-drivers. The benefits for drivers, who walk little or not at all, don’t wait, and don’t transfer, come from faster train times. For those reliant on transit, however, the opposite is true. Their total travel time is very long—they walk, they wait, they transfer.

So the calculation works like this (illustrative example). Suppose there are 100 drivers, and their travel time is five minutes faster because of fewer stations. This totals 500 minutes in benefits. Twenty people who could not make the trip without transit walk 20 minutes more with fewer stations (400 minutes in benefits.) Five hundred is more than four hundred. The drivers win.

I understand that getting people out of their cars is important, and that there are many different views on this subject. But let’s not pretend that the design and calculations are an impartial, objective, “best” way to do transit, stripped of value judgments. Kudos to folks like the District Councils Collaborative, the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, and the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative for their efforts in getting decision-makers to acknowledge that.

Notes: thanks to the many readers who emailed me with comments on my first post. You made great points! Don't be shy--share them!