Statecraft February Roundup
Statecraft February Roundup
Transmission, DARPA, Drugs, Sabbaticals
We published three tremendous interviews this month:
How did you win over the Secretary of Labor?
“I have this artifact somewhere: I took a piece of paper, and I have good handwriting, and I wrote on the piece of paper — I very deliberately didn’t do a Word document or PowerPoint slide — the three things that I thought should be happening at our agency, the Employment and Training Administration. I wrote the current state of those three things, in terms of what was happening both internally and externally with our customers, and three recommendations for things we should be doing differently, and I handed it to him when we were sitting in a car. That was pivotal, because he saw me as someone who was thinking much bigger than my job… and that I had some ideas about how to actually do it.”
“Some of the other agencies, when they operated on our behalf, used cooperative agreements rather than other transactions, because that's what they thought their legal authority was. Actually a lot of these agencies had OT authority, if they’d actually read their enabling statutes. They didn't know what the language meant.
You're talking about DOE: DOE had other transactions authority in its enabling statute in 1977, and yet Congress had to force it down DOE’s throat in 2005. Even then, they implemented it in the most backward way.”
“In drug development, making a thing that is plausibly good is much, much easier than making something that is actually, reliably, very good. Deploying drugs to scale requires that reliability.
It’s a very hard socio-technical problem. All the different kinds of regulatory requirements, quality management, quality control, etc., that could be naively identified as red tape or boring paperwork that slow down the innovators are actually there to achieve that reliability.”
What We’re Reading
Asterisk Mag published an interview on why it costs so much to build public transit in America. It’s the sort of clear, direct, concrete resource we like to aim for at Statecraft.
At IFP, my colleaguewrote a major report on “How to Save America’s Transmission System.”
“The overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build things.”
You’re an academic and you want to make your research more effective? Consider taking a tour of duty in policy, says Jordan Dworkin in an essay for Nature.
“To be sure, spending a sabbatical working in government instead of writing a book or completing a research fellowship will not appeal to everyone. But many of the concerns about this option are overblown. Fears that six months or a year are not enough time to make a difference don’t account for the long-term value of the relationships that such placements establish.”
A cool paper, flagged by Ryan Briggs:
“When elite civil servants in Pakistan were randomized into a training course on econometrics, they were twice as likely to support policies with RCT evidence a year later and were more likely to pay for such research.”