The MIT Technology Review has the list.

It seems rare that you get to see the doublespeak so up close:

[Interviewer:] At the beginning of your career as a journalist, you were asked, “How do you like being a journalist?” and your answer was “Come on, I was the fucking governor.”
[Spitzer:] Oh, that was meant to be off the record. You know what, though, being a governor is one thing and being a journalist is something different. Different chapters in life that you figure out how to enjoy a lot. But I never denied that I miss being governor.

Read the rest of the interview here.

New York City is randomizing the people who get a certain Housing Aid program called Homebase:

It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.

Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services said the study was necessary to determine whether the $23 million program, called Homebase, helped the people for whom it was intended. Homebase, begun in 2004, offers job training, counseling services and emergency money to help people stay in their homes.

But some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance.

“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

On a listserv I’m on, there has been a lot of ethical handwringing about this program, but these people weren’t randomly assigned to poverty. They were randomly assigned not to receive a program.

If you agree with Stringer that citizens shouldn’t be treated like lab rats, than the conclusion should be that they should receive no treatment. We have no idea whether this program is effective or not. We have no idea whether enrolling people in this program, in the long-term, might increase the time they spend homeless. We have no idea if the program leads to more crime or less. We have no idea if the program does anything. So if you’re not interested in throwing people in to some unproven, untested, possibly ill-designed program at politicians’ whims, the only option is to stop the intervention all-together.

Alternatively, perhaps we can test the program. We can see if the program is effective. We can learn whether the program meets its goals. Not necessarily on a cost-benefit basis, but at all. By any standard. To do that we turn to the randomized experiment.

Now, what is experimentation? In the ideal multiverse we could take the exact same people and give them intervention in one case, and not give them the intervention in the other. Then we could observe the difference and know that it was due to the Homebase program.

Absent that we have only one tool at our disposal that gets at causal inference with almost no exceptions, and that is the well-designed randomized experiment (note all the caveats because basically the randomized experiment is the gold standard, and there are SO many statistical and design tools to turn quasi-experiments and correlation studies into something approaching the ideal that NYC is implementing).

To do this you find two groups as alike as possible and you compare them. You give one of them the intervention, and you don’t give it to the other group. You can’t just give the program to as many people as apply and then pick some other group of people to test as a comparison. Applying is, itself, a factor you want to be equal across the groups. That’s why in random experiments you tend to look for twice as many people as you can enroll, randomly enroll half of them, and then collect data on both them.

A large number of families are denied (1,500) due to lack of funding. Another way to think of the study is that there are 1,700 people rejected, and we found money to serve 200 of them. What is the best way to pick those people? The answer, to me, is the lottery. So 200 of those 1,700 families are assigned the intervention, and we randomly study another 200 of them. These two groups–all people who applied to the program–we can assume are basically similar (have something called “balance”) across all observable and unobservable characteristics (we can measure the first and assume the second).

Now I’m masking a bunch of statistics that show that random assignment leads to balance, on average, but whatever. The point is that we’re creating a counter-factual group of people who applied to the program but didn’t get the intervention and people who did apply to the program who did. The selection was done by lottery–not by some other method such as who you’re best friends with, or whether your name sounds right or whatever. Doesn’t that seem like a just way to assign spots in a program?

Listening to Sandel’s Justice this morning on the way to work, and he pointed out the following RFK quote when talking about the public good. I think he sourced it incorrectly; to a speech at the University of Kansas rather than at the Commonwealth Club, but here is the quote:

Truly we have a great gross national product, almost 800 billion dollars, but can that be the criterion by which we judge this country? Is it enough? For the gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife and television programs, which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. And the gross national product, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither wit nor courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our duty to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud to be Americans.

And the full speech.

Yesterday I got excited about writing about the need for a New York State Constitutional Convention. I had remembered that there was a lot of discussion about it last summer, but I thought that not enough people were 1) still talking about it or 2) had written much about despite the sentiment.

So this is what I wrote, nothing brilliant but a start:

New York State government is dysfunctional. This summer’s state Senate-Lieutenant Governor crisis was a vivid reminder of the disarray; but one that shouldn’t divert attention from the fact that the New York State assembly has passed one budget on time in the last 29 years, that the state has a comptroller elected by the legislature from its own membership, or that neither house will consider, let alone pass, a wide range of necessary and popular conflict of interest and good government measures.

We propose a state constitutional convention in a similar manner to those in 1938 and 1967, with one notable exception, no one who has held state or municipal office in that last five years should be eligible for election as a delegate. There are plenty of civic minded, competent individuals in this state who want to see it’s government function and who are not as whetted to protecting their own power bases.

[Specific problems with the current constitution]

The Constitutional Convention of 1967, where Anthony Travia, sitting Speaker of the Assembly, served as Convention President, saw its constitution rejected in popular referendum. Two primary objections to that constitution was the gradual transfer of the administration and cost of welfare programs to state government and the repeal of prohibition state aid to church-related schools, both of which were seen as adding to the legislatures budget authority and indebtedness.

That convention saw many worthy proposals including a vast simplification of the Constitution, a more thorough and specific Bill of Rights, a independent committee to handle legislative redistricting, authorization of local economic and community development, and sensible improvements to the funding of judiciary.

We would endorse many of these changes in principle, however, a more thorough and comprehensive review of the state government’s structure–including separation of powers and the vast state authority system–is necessary. Such a convention is only possible if the current players in state government are prevented from controlling and shaping the review.

Then I saw this op-ed in the WSJ which basically says almost everything I had intended to say:

New York Needs a Constitutional Convention
It’s obvious Albany can’t clean up its own mess.

By GERALD BENJAMIN and MARIO M. CUOMO

For the past month, the New York State Senate has stopped working entirely. The Senate is not dysfunctional — it is nonfunctional. The problem is that neither the institution nor its members are accountable to “We, the people.” Instead members concern themselves with personal and partisan agendas. More and more New Yorkers are asking: What can we do?

Let’s recall a similar question Thomas Jefferson asked in a 1787 letter to William Smith: “[W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” We in New York can act on Jefferson’s warning. We can demand a constitutional convention.

There are two ways to amend the New York constitution. First, state legislators may identify problems with the political system and propose changes to the people. Second, if politicians benefit from the system’s imperfections (as now) and are unlikely to change it, the constitution provides that every 20 years the people can propose necessary revisions. This is where a convention comes in.

Our next chance to have one will be in 2017. That date is frustratingly far off given the spectacle in Albany. But it is within the legislature’s power to gain back an iota of respect. It should admit its failure and give the voters the chance to protect themselves against further governmental breakdown.

Sooner or later the Senate will find a way to organize itself. When that time comes it can, with the Assembly, give the public the chance to vote “yes” on the convention by placing this question on the ballot: “Shall there be a convention to revise the constitution and amend it?” This is exactly what the legislature should do this year.

A constitutional convention is a peoples’ meeting to design or redesign the peoples’ government. The legislature has traditionally not favored calling such a body to life. It feared that a convention might take steps to diminish the legislature’s institutional power or incumbents’ chances of re-election.

Others with particular interests to protect have also been skeptical. For example, environmentalists worry — needlessly, we think — about a convention altering the present constitution’s commitment to keeping our parks in the Adirondacks and Catskills “forever wild.”

This is short-sighted. Environmentalists might make gains at a convention by convincing us to constitutionalize positive rights to clean air and clean water.

Those eager to avoid a constitutional convention also point to some issues involving the process. For example, the state constitution provides that if a convention is called, three delegates from each state Senate district and 15 at-large delegates must be elected — creating multi-member districts. It also says that each delegate must be compensated by the same amount as a member of the state legislature.

Because Senate districts are presently gerrymandered to benefit Republicans, this provision providing for their use is thought to have a partisan bias. Moreover, the federal Voting Rights Act in general makes the use of multi-member districts suspect for historically racial reasons. Also, legislators or others already in state government could be elected to serve as convention delegates and get paid for their work. The second provision has in the past resulted in unfortunate “double dipping.”

These concerns are exaggerated. Political change has already addressed one of them: Despite gerrymandering, a Democratic majority was elected in current Senate districts.

The other concerns may be addressed as well. The legislature can pass laws to prevent double dipping and assure that multi-member district elections are found acceptable under the Voting Rights Act. For example, in an alternative voting system, each voter would vote for one candidate in the district, not three. In fact, some of these bills are in the hopper right now.

Constitutional change through a convention would require popular votes on three election days. There needs to be a vote to authorize the convention, then to elect delegates, and finally to accept the convention’s work. The process is deliberate and allows for accountability. If the public does not like the result of the convention’s work, it can reject it, as it did in 1967.

It all comes back to the state legislature. Albany can show that it is genuinely interested in considering reform by putting the convention question on the ballot. Alternately, it can ignore calls for change. This, of course, would further reinforce the cynicism of New Yorkers and push them further away from public life — and from democracy. If the legislature wants to avoid this fate, which is of its own doing, then it should take up the calls for reform.

Mr. Benjamin is a professor of political science at State University of New York, New Paltz. Mr. Cuomo is a former governor of New York.

I would, as mentioned above, go a step further than Cuomo and Benjamin and take steps to prevent legislatures from serving as delegates at all. It is clear that if Sheldon Silver chaired the Constitutional Convention than little would change-at least for the better.

I also learned a good bit about the 1967 constitutional convention, which is fascinating. Many people think it failed because the convention put the constitutional to the electorate as an all or nothing proposition, so they had to take the good with the bad, but I’m not sure how else you’d write a new constitution for a state. A good brief on the 1967 convention can be found here (PDF).