Philip Howard
Appearances
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Yes. And indeed, the budget in New York City, I think, would be dramatically improved if only public workers had to pay the same percentage of health benefits as private industry does. In many jurisdictions, health benefits when working are free. There's no deduction for them. And then after they retire, they're also free.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The difference in state and municipal budgets is apparently just radically altered by the fact that there's no contribution as required in the most private sector context.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The politicians get campaign contributions. So the politicians in exchange for this, what is in effect a new spoil system? You know, the old spoil system, politicians would get campaign funds and then they would give people public jobs. no matter how bad a job they did. And we supposedly got rid of that with the merit system.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The union collective bargaining creates a new spoil system, except it's different because it's permanent. It doesn't change with the change of party control. And in this system, the unions consolidate the mass of big government
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
with the mass of public employees, put all their contributions in a place, and then go to the political leader with a boxcar filled with cash, effectively, and not just cash, but also working labor banks and call banks and knocking on doors. They literally recruit and they'll pay members to do this, to be campaign workers.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
So in New Jersey, in the last election, the campaign of the winning governor was staffed by union members. The campaign director was a union officer. So you end up having this system where the unions basically provide the campaign resources and personnel. And in exchange, what they get is the continuation of this system in which government is unmanageable
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And in which the pensions and benefits are far beyond the market and have rendered, again, certain big industrial states effectively bankrupt.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
They're the leading opponents of it. First of all, most of the union benefits and controls and actions are designed to preserve the benefits to the union leaders themselves. In many states, unions never even come up for recertification. They're certified once and that's it. And then they just stay in place. So union leaders make a lot of money.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Anything that gets in the way of the union prerogatives, such as reducing taxes or that sort of thing, they will consolidate national resources. Again, we're talking about over $5 billion a year in annual dues to go and kill an initiative in Maine or some jurisdiction that's aimed at good government.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And that's one of the reasons why political leaders won't take on the unions, because if you're a union opponent, it's not just that you're fighting them in your jurisdiction. All this money is going to fly in from around the country to get you unelected.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Union influence is unique compared to all interest groups, and it's not merely one of scale. The union elephants say versus all the hyenas. Public employee unions are not just getting some public favors. They're controlling the public policies on how government operates. Former California State Senate President Gloria Romero, a Democrat, put it this way.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
There's no aspect of state government operations or public policy that is untouched by the power of public sector unions and their allies in Sacramento. From enacting legislation to writing a state budget to confirming state board and commission appointees, labor's presence is omnipresent.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Bad schools, unaccountable police, and other endemic failures of modern American government share one defining trait. They are impervious to reform. No matter who is elected, no matter the voter demand for change, government almost never changes how it works. The effects are predictable.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
No. No, they don't. At every level of government, government has become unmanageable and unaffordable and unreformable because of the union controls. It's almost impossible politically to fix it. Let's go to the courts and have the unions declared unconstitutional because democracy is completely ineffective when the people who owe a duty of loyalty to the public
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Because the union collective bargaining agreement in Minneapolis, as in most places, severely restricts public managers from reassigning personnel or disciplining personnel or changing their responsibilities. And in Minneapolis, I think there had been, well, he had a history of complaints.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
have bought off the political system and are running government for their own benefit instead of the benefit of the public.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The first is no organization works unless it's manageable. And that requires adaptive choices at every level of responsibility. Government is unmanageable. The second takeaway is we can't give public unions a veto on how government is run. Democracy exists to put executives in office who have the authority to try to run government for the benefit of the public.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And that can never work if the public unions have the veto. And my third takeaway is this is a problem of constitutional dimension. And we should understand that when democracy has, in effect, become a spoil system with billions of dollars for one purpose put into it, that the best solution probably lies in the courts. And it's based on the inability of democracy to do its job.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
But in Minneapolis, more broadly, there had been, I think, in the prior decade, something like 2,600 complaints of police misconduct, of which a grand total of 12 led to discipline. And the most severe discipline was a 40-hour suspension. So you basically have a government system that's completely unaccountable.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Yeah, pretty much. It varies a little bit by state. But for example, there was an 18-year study in Illinois of teacher accountability that found that an average of two teachers out of 95,000 were terminated for performance each year. That's basically zero. That's actually twice the rate as in California. So there's no accountability.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And the harm of no accountability is much worse than having bad people on the job, which is bad enough. The harm is that when everyone knows performance doesn't matter, it's almost impossible to have a healthy culture within an institution because there's no mutual trust that everybody's doing their share because everybody knows performance doesn't matter.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Government was never efficient, right? It's a government. So it lacks those sort of market pressures of business organization. But until the late 1960s, the rule was that public employees could not collectively bargain. FDR was a firm opponent of collective bargaining. In part, because it was a breach of duty of loyalty.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And in part, it was because the dynamics of public bargaining are very different than trade bargaining. In a business context, if the union demands too much, everybody loses their job. because the business goes out of business or moves to another town or sends the jobs offshore, as happened to Detroit with demanding too much back when. So government doesn't work that way.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
You can demand all you want, and government can't go out of business. Nor can it move out of town. So what's happened is that almost without anybody really paying attention, the public unions levered the rights revolution in the 1960s into a kind of a plea of fairness. Why can't we have collective bargaining too? 38 states gave it to them.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And almost immediately, they started getting controls that effectively prevent any manager from dismissing anyone.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Growing citizen frustration and anger, broad distrust of police and other governing institutions, students ill-equipped to compete and even to be self-sufficient, and stupendous public inefficiency and waste.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Sure. So what's happened since collective bargaining was authorized in the 1960s is there's been a steady accretion of controls. One benefit is to have wages go up. And I'm not, you know, I think that's the least of the sense here.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The second thing that happened is that unions and political leaders figured out they could make promises with pensions in the future without having it come out of the current budget. So then they made promises for future pension and healthcare benefits that didn't affect the current sitting political leader.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
But then you have these 200 to 300 page agreements, which have gotten more and more detailed over the years, where the controls almost look like it's control for its own sake. So the disciplinary proceedings require objective proof. all kinds of warnings in advance. In police contracts in many jurisdictions, you can't interview the police officer for several weeks.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The police officer and his representative get a chance to view all the other witness statements first so they can conform their story to what other people are saying. The discipline is resolved by arbitrators who are approved by the unions. And if they don't go along with what the union wants, then they won't be approved next time. So it's their job. So they've been paid off as well.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And then there are these management controls by the federal government. Anytime there's a new word processing program, the union gets to negotiate how the training works. Whenever there's any reallocation of resources or asking somebody to do something out of their job description, the answer is no. You only can work within your job description.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
So let's say a work crew is fixing the Long Island Railroad, for example. And there's an overhanging branch on the tree. The work crew fixing the rail track isn't allowed to pull down that branch. You have to call in a worker whose job it is to clean up the branch. I mean, there are controls that are designed for inefficiency.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
The police is interesting. Police is less rigid than, say, highway work crews or teachers or bureaucrats because the police job is generally on the sidewalk, right? So they have to respond to what they see. So the biggest problems with the police contract are the ones having to do with general management, allocation of people from this job assignment to another job assignment, and indiscipline.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
I mean, like with Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, people said they had never seen a police officer who had been terminated for misconduct. Thinking about what are management tools? Well, the main tool is accountability. The next best tool is resource allocation. You can't do that. You can't allocate resources differently. You can't manage it differently. You can't even make suggestions.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Yes. I think there are two sources of school failure in this country. The first is that no one has authority to close bad schools by and large in the Union States or authority to manage them differently. So in Chicago, there are 45 schools where not one student is proficient in reading or math. And no one in Chicago has the authority to do anything about those schools.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
So a combination of kind of excessive red tape and union controls have made it so that the really important and honorable but profoundly human institution of teaching is human. You can't have a good school unless the educators are free to be themselves. And what's happened is that teachers have been disempowered and principals have been disempowered by the union controls that make it unmanageable.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
When by red tape that makes you fill what special ed teachers spend half the day filling out forms. So you've got to put humans back in control of schools. And we've created this horrible kind of rigid bureaucratic institution that's designed to fail.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Right. So you have unions bargaining over how to collect the garbage. And the result of that is that garbage, municipal garbage collection in the big cities costs basically twice as what private garbage collection in those same cities cost because of the union rules on what the routes are and what the hours are and everything else. There's just no flexibility in the system.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And so presetting work schedules in advance denies the basic microeconomic truth that nothing works unless you make it work on the ground, on the spot. You constantly have to adjust and adapt. And public unions instead rigidify everything in advance and it fails. There's a great phrase from Thomas Edison, nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Well, first of all, the correctional officers have gotten involved in the making of policy. So they were one of the biggest proponents of the three strikes and you're out rule in California, because that meant more people went to jail, which meant more demand for correctional officers. Well, you know, it was a terribly unfair rule.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
You know, somebody who steals a banana goes to jail for life because he had earlier stolen a golf club. And then they have all these recent work rules. So in New York, New York City or the state, one of the rules is you can have unlimited sick time. So last year there were sick kids. Nobody came to work. Prisons were literally out of control.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
And the people who were the supervisors had in their contract that they never had any obligation to go into the cell blocks. So you had people in the central office refusing to fill in after the officers all declared that they were sick, even if they weren't. It was just chaos. You know, people get killed in situations like that.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
There have been very few studies that have attempted to calculate the costs. At one point, David Osborne, who wrote Reinventing Government, and he and a colleague estimated that costs went up by 35% to 95%, depending on the area of government. But I think that understates it.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
When COVID hit, there was a thought early on that maybe it could be transmitted by hand contact on the subways, for example. So the MTA in New York decided to have regular cleanings of the subway cars. They'd go clean all the bars that were sanitizing. And they didn't have enough cleaning workers, so they hired outside contractors to come in and clean.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Well, the outside contractors apparently did three times the work for the dollar. And that's an example of the ineffectiveness.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Yeah, that's right. And that was because of work rules, rules that required feather bedding.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
So the contracts have been negotiated in a way that's designed to avoid public awareness. Benefits in the future don't show up in the bottom line this year. So early retirement, pensions that aren't put on the balance sheet this year, that sort of thing. Most public employees can retire, again, varies widely by the contract.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
Public safety officers often after 20 years, they're talking about retirement, somebody in their early 40s. and you get a pension, studies show that the pensions are materially richer than private pensions by some significant percentage. And then if someone retires early, in many jurisdictions, then they go back to work.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
So they get their pension, which in many cases is almost the same as their salary. And then they go back to work and start all over again. So they're collecting their pension and they're collecting their salary. And it's called double dipping.
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
What is that? Spiking is when the contract provides that your pension will be determined by your average compensation in the last year or two years of work. And the practice, which has been ended in some jurisdictions but not in all jurisdictions, is to give the person who is nearing retirement as much overtime as possible
3 Takeaways
Why Bad Cops Stay and Schools Fail (#240)
so that their $100,000 job becomes a $250,000 per year in the last year or two, so that their pension is determined against a base of $250,000.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
No, absolutely not. The chances are zero that you could get approval to build a canal like the Erie Canal or to build a railroad over a mountain range. Zero. You have all these environmentalists who demand lots of review and compliance with countless different mandates created over the decades.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And they do so from the comfort of their homes and the economy that exists only because of things that they would never permit.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
You wouldn't think that expanding broadband service would raise significant environmental issues, but the way environmental law is interpreted, it does. And so you have to get environmental approvals.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And then there are all these collateral goals that are built into the laws, such as you have to give a certain amount of business to women or minority-owned businesses, you know, and things like that.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And this accretion of requirements means that actually pushing the button to say go and having a contract, it's like a bureaucratic labyrinth of migraine proportions that takes years, years to navigate. And it's been, what, four years now? And they haven't succeeded in navigating. How typical is that? For infrastructure, certain kinds of infrastructure, it's extremely typical.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
I mean, building transmission lines from renewable sources in the Midwest to the cities, for example, is so onerous that people don't even propose them because there are so many different levels of approval, depending on the state, because every infrastructure project has harmful environmental consequences. I mean,
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
A transmission line might go through a pristine forest or in someone's backyard, and someone will object to it. In California, one of the ways to reduce the risk of fires, of these wildfires, is to do controlled burns. But controlled burns require environmental review, and the neighbors don't want a controlled burn, or some don't. They'll have to smell smoke.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
So you have mitigation measures absolutely essential to the health and safety of people who live in California that aren't done because the approval process is to earners.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Well, often they don't get made. When there's really a public imperative that there has to be a decision, often the process will go on for years, sometimes a decade or longer. And at some point, people kind of drop of exhaustion and they finally agree to dredge the Savannah River, this one that took 16 years. And sometimes they just give up on the projects. It just costs too much.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
No one. The law has made it so that no one has authority.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
In the 1960s, which was a very tumultuous decade, Americans woke up to all kinds of abuses of authority, racism, pollution, gender discrimination, abuse of disabled children, lies about the Vietnam War, you know. So we woke up to all these abuses and we needed to change our values. And we did. We created a civil rights law and environmental laws. Great. That's fine.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Changing values is a good thing to do. But the geniuses at the time said, well, we don't want any more abuses of authority. Let's change the way decisions are made in the public sector. So they got this idea that law should not only set goals or principles of non-discrimination, for example, but should also tell people exactly how to meet the goals.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Before that, you didn't have such a thing as a 1,000-page rulebook. The Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages long in 1956. 10 years later, 21,000 miles of road had been built. This new way of governing is that everybody would simply comply with detailed rules.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
You know, when you go through the day with these checklists in the workplace to make sure that there is a material safety data sheet for dishwashing liquid in case somebody drank too much of it. Literally, that's the actual story. All this kind of, you know, make sure there's oxygen in the air.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And then things that are so self-evident that could be subsumed within a principle, you know, facilities, tools, and equipment shall be reasonably suited for the use intended. That's a perfectly good principle that people can, instead we have a thousand page rule book on it.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And then where there couldn't be rules, we got the idea that there should be neutral processes where people could prove the validity of their choices. So that's where we got this idea that you couldn't terminate any public employee unless you proved in a hearing that the employee was no good or so much worse than everybody else. How do you prove that... A teacher bores students or whatever.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
I mean, how do you prove it? How do you prove who's a bad writer? How do you prove who doesn't try hard? How do you prove who doesn't get along with co-workers? How do you prove any of this stuff? You know, they're matters of judgment. That's the job of the supervisor.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And then the third leg of this stool of paralysis was the idea of giving people the individual right to complain about anything they didn't like. And so we created a system that's basically paralytic. And the rule books have gotten thicker and the procedures have gotten more lengthy and the rights have become rights for everyone. So we created a government where nobody can make decisions.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Yes. It consists of thousands of specific requirements that are debated in scores of public hearings and meetings that are then challenged in court in litigation proceedings that themselves take three or four years and where no one on behalf of the public has the authority to make the trade-off judgments about whether it's a good project or not and should be approved.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And the arguments turn on legal compliance and legal terms instead of what's good for the public, which should be political choice. So I don't think you can fix this system. I think you have to replace it. You have to replace it with one that acknowledges what we tried to abandon in the 1960s, which is the need for human choice.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
is have a clear hierarchy of authority to make decisions, where law is the framing, but whether a permit is given cannot be validated by law. Law is a framing for official authority, which is politically accountable. And today, we look at it as a matter of legal compliance. It's not a matter of legal compliance.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Courts should have almost nothing to do with it unless someone strays over the boundaries and makes decisions they're not authorized to make. What's difficult about this is that there's so much law in the books now that trade-off judgments are themselves unlawful.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Sometimes you have to decide which is more important, the endangered species or the power. No one has authority to make that choice. And courts get involved and say, oh, no, you've got to honor the desert tortoise or whatever it is. You can't put in this wind farm or solar field or whatever. There's no lowest common denominator system that works. It's always trade-offs.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
And all these laws, in effect, prohibit trade-offs. So how can you run a society when you can't make trade-off decisions?
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Yes. And if we don't trust the person, then have an authority mechanism. So one of the things I recommend is that we replace years of what lawyers call ex ante process hearings and proceedings that go on for years and stuff. that we have some of that, because public transparency is a good thing to have. And the environmental review is, in general, a good thing within reason.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
But it should be dozens of pages, not thousands of pages, because that just obscures. It just gives no pebble left unturned. You end up getting lost in the detail. So you replace most of the process before a decision with transparency, a decision, and then review by some authority group.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
In the case of infrastructure, I recommended creating a national infrastructure board that would comment on big infrastructure projects and could approve them. That takes weeks. That doesn't take years. It's not a legal decision. It's a judgment call by some other group.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
So if we're afraid that officials are going to be would-be Robert Moseses and put highways through good neighborhoods or whatever... then we can have a review mechanism with authority to veto them. So one of the things I found in a paper I wrote is that all of this process, depending on the area, increases the cost from two times to four times.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
One, law can't govern. Humans govern. Law is a framework for governing. That requires a change. So the next thing, what is the change? We need to have a decade, not unlike the 1960s, but in this case, it's a decade of recodification and simplification so that people take back control of government. People, school teachers and principals can actually have authority to run the schools.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Transportation officials actually have the authority to give permits. And the third takeaway is, you know, right now we're in a period of vilification of government because it's bloated and it doesn't work and it's ineffective and it does need to get disrupted and replaced. But government is not the enemy.
3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
In a crowded, interdependent society with a global economy, government is more important, not less important. And so what we need to do is to remake it on a vision that allows government to work, that allows government to be responsive. And that requires simplifying it and rehumanizing it and moving forward in a way that gives us all a sense that we're invested in our own future.