chez kait

One of my favorite podcasts lately is EconTalk. The host, economist Russ Roberts, is admittedly quite libertarian (for anyone who doesn’t know: I’m not!), but it features some of the most civil, interesting conversations among economists and other commentators I’ve run across.

The latest episode features Arnold Kling talking about his new book, The Three Languages of Politics. I haven’t read it (yet!), but the idea is that much of the reason we tend to talk past each other so much in politics is that we tend to frame things in different terms based in different core arguments… so the libertarian’s coup de grace debate-winner isn’t necessarily anything that matters to the progressive or vice versa. By his classification, conservatives tend to organize good and bad along an axis of civilization vs. barbarism, libertarians along freedom vs. coercion, and progressives as oppressed and oppressors. Echo chamber tendency to listen to those with whom we already agree makes it easier and easier to avoid “multilingualism.”

Anyhow, while I’m sure we could debate all year how well the system actually encompasses political thought, I found it to be an insightful quick shorthand for analyzing arguments and thinking about how my own opinions are constructed — both freedom/coercion and oppressed/oppressor axes are easy for me, which is where my political opinions can get a little equivocal if you press hard enough. On other hand, my capacity for empathizing with those who feel the barbarians are at the gates… might need work. Worth thinking about and prodding the blind spots.

…a lot to go.

Still, some relief from the first survival. It almost feels silly — I’ve been going to school at ODU since January 2010. The PhD level classes were a big jump, though — we spend a lot of time talking about things at the borders of my ability to conceptualize yet — as was adjusting to managing ALL my own time. The research assistantship is plenty of work, but it’s fluid, and I’m still learning when I tell myself the truth about what work I can do now vs. later. It’s hard to judge whether I’m putting in enough effort and when I need to back off to avoid burnout. Learning process.

But. Survived. A little chubbier — time to figure out how to fit more exercise back into the never-ending to-do list — a little frazzled, but now that I’ve done it once it seems more reasonable to expect to be able to do it again.

Sometimes it feels like Knoxville keeps getting everything since I’ve been gone. Gelato shop, dim sum, a local branch of Tupelo Honey (great Asheville brunch place), the Saturday farmers’ market suddenly many times its old size… every time I go back there’s something new and fun. Turns out that Brookings has declared Knoxville one of three cities in economic recovery since the recession. Maybe there was more truth than I knew to the silly ranting about it getting cooler behind my back.

When I saw the preliminary reports claiming voter turnout was lower in ALL 50 STATES than four years ago, I was a tiny bit surprised.

Not because the people surrounding me had been super-duper enthusiastic about either candidate… among my local friends, exasperation over the deluge of swing-state advertising was a far more common theme of conversation in the days leading up to the election. But then it took so long to vote! Two hours in line? One? More? We all compared stories on Tuesday night and Wednesday and told ourselves how great it was to see democracy in action, even if it took up a big chunk of the day. I was one of the lucky ones, with only 20 minutes to wait. A friend who showed up around the same time in a different precinct was there for three hours.

For those with less flexible employment or other time constraints, though, a long line can pose a serious obstacle to voting. The President’s victory speech acknowledged that it’s a problem.

This, however, is the United States. Even running a federal election is an uneven process, governed by national and state rules but largely dependent on the capacities of local governments. Governing reposted a prescient article from 2011 discussing how local budget stress might mean issues in this election.

Locally (because locally is so easy! I have to give it to them, the City of Norfolk posts their data), it looks like there was at least a little of that. Comparing 2008 presidential election numbers with 2012 ones, we had a modestly lower day-of turnout of registered voters: 65% to 63%. Population and voter registration had increased in the four-year interval, though, so that modest drop in turnout still meant 222 more votes cast in person, not counting the provisional ballots. (This year’s provisional ballot count isn’t on the spreadsheet yet; that could explain exacerbation if the new ID laws caused more issues than I’d expect.)

Meanwhile, however, we crammed into six fewer polling stations. State election law specifies the ratio of voting booths to number of registered voters in a precinct, but not the number of volunteers working at check-in or the number of laptops (poll-books) available. I’m not sure if Norfolk follows a similar allocation formula for those; I do know that at my station, there were several empty voting booths while people waited to check in. In this year’s election, the redistricting gave both a higher mean number of votes cast per precinct and a higher level of variability around that average; I’d guess that and restricted budgeting, more than any kind of intentional voter suppression, led to the uneven, sometimes very long lines.

So can we trust resource-limited local governments to ensure fair-enough federal elections? Would having an extended season of no-questions-asked early voting like many other states mitigate the enfranchisement issues without adding too much to the burden of financing an election?

I have several friends who participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, wherein writers make a pact to spit out 50,000 words in November, get-it-done style.

I JUST heard, via an old lindy hopping acquaintance, about AcWriMo. Academics are grabbing the idea for a similar binge-writing support group.

First semester phD student = I’m a bit of a newb for this, maybe. And I’m not sure it’s in the spirit of the thing if you’re mostly writing for assignments with solid due dates anyhow… but I DO need to get a lot of writing done by early December, and it’d be a most interesting and wondrous thing to have assignments done with editing time built in for once. I also need to get a lot of reading done, though, so I think I’ll aim for a modest (but ambitious for me!) 500-words-a-day average, making 15,000 words for the month.

Things I should write this month:

1. Empirical article review, ordered at 2,500ish words for Policy Theory class.
2. An annotated bibliography in progress — it was supposed to be a quick couple-week research assignment, but we got surprised by the volume of work being done in the area. Very much becoming my pet project, the thing I want to work on when burned out at everything else.
3. Filling in the outline for a paper on undergraduate public administration program curricula (also a research assignment).
4. Massive literature review for the Foundations of Public Administration class.

I suspect that’s sufficient to keep me busy, so allons-y?