by Jeremy Loudenback Even in a diverse, polyglot city like Los Angeles, Jan Perry cuts a unique profile that speaks to a multifaceted and sometimes contradictory political career. The former City Councilwoman is a Spanish-speaking, African-American, Jewish Democrat, whose pro-development efforts have sometimes put her into conflict with labor interests. Earlier this Read more…
by Jeremy Loudenback Insurance and pension costs for city employees are a near-constant worry for city governments from New York to Smalltown, U.S.A. As healthcare costs skyrocket, budgeting for employees’ insurance is a tricky proposition. Now, as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) begins the implementation process, city managers are having to Read more…
by Jeremy Loudenback By dispensing with paper-based public services and working smarter with technology, the British government may be able to realize £70 billion in savings by 2020, according to a new report from PolicyExchange (UK). With the U.K.’s widespread use of the Internet, especially on smartphones, many government services could Read more…
by Jeremy Loudenback Tomorrow marks an important date for New Yorkers. As polls open for the mayoral election, the city will be guaranteed a new face in the mayor’s office for the first time since 2001. Michael Bloomberg has held the reins through three mostly prosperous terms, though he has faced Read more…
by Jeremy Loudenback In July, the city of Detroit found itself in trouble again, attracting the headlines that have earned it an ugly reputation for urban and social dysfunction. After he was appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, Kevyn D. Orr, the city’s non elected emergency manager, decided to file for Chapter Read more…
by Jeremy Loudenback On Thursday September 12, University of Washington scholar Laura Evans brings attention to a rarely visited governance issue: the role of indigenous governments interfacing with federal, state, and local government . In the face of meager budgets and strikingly low incomes for many communities, some Native American tribal Read more…
NATE SILVER: Baseball and Politics are Data Driven. The Holt Lecture. Friday, September 20, 2013 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Bovard Auditorium Nate Silver has become today’s leading statistician through his innovative analyses of political polling. He first gained national attention during the 2008 presidential election, when he correctly Read more…
by Raphael Bostic Originally posted on Forbes.com July 3, 2013 @ 5:27PM This clear progress has been driven by the purposeful policies of China’s authoritarian government. But, much of it has proceeded independent of market forces. So while there are beautiful office towers and condominium high rises across Beijing, many sit empty or Read more…
by Raphael Bostic Original posting on Forbes.com – 6/21/2013 @ 4:44PM It’s not super often that Detroit is lifted up as an example of good governance. The city has been wracked with decades of stagnation, has had a series of mayors parade from city hall to jail, and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder recently Read more…
The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Times are collaborating on a public polling initiative that will survey voter attitudes on a range of municipal, state, and national policy issues as well as election campaigns. The project aims to inform the public, stimulate discourse, and Read more…
by Raphael Bostic Orignally posted on Forbes.com 5/17/2013 @ 6:00PM At church the other morning, the pastor’s sermon was about community. She asked us to look at what kind of relationship we had with others in the community. Had we taken time to talk with others and get to know them better? Read more…
by Martin Krieger Ike’s Bluff by Evan Thomas, Threat Vector by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney There has been for some time an historical literature rehabilitating Eisenhower’s reputation as president. Of course, in part he looks better compared to some of his successors. In part, he is now portrayed as a Read more…
by Martin Krieger I am not sure we teach our students what might be called bureaucratic politics. I have been reading the second edition of Graham Allison (and Philip Zelikow), Essence of Decision (1971, 1999). In Allison’s terms, this would be Model III (bureaucratic politics). I know we do his Model Read more…
by Martin Krieger Alan Blinder, When the Music Stopped Richard Haass, Wars of Necessity, Wars of Choice How did we end up in the meltdown of 2008? How did we end up fighting in Iraq in 2003? These are for me the big questions of the first decade of the 21st Read more…
by Martin Krieger Intelligence and US Foreign Policy, Paul Pillar War and Decision, Douglas Feith What was in Donald Rumsfeld’s mind when he demanded that the Iraq war would be launched with a much smaller number of troops than recommended by General Shinsheki? And, a propos of sufficient IED protection, “You Read more…
by Martin Krieger John Rawls. Political Liberalism Columbia University Press, 2005. I recall when Rawls’s Theory of Justice appeared. It was a thick book, and I was not philosophically sophisticated. But its main model, the original position, was appealing if not realistic. It was Kantian but with a modern game-theoretic twist. The Read more…
by Martin Krieger Naomi Standen, ed, Demystifying China: New Understandings of Chinese History, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013 It is a commonplace of historiography that national histories, at each time, are written so as to justify the current regimes. Scholars might well have alternative accounts, but in general these alternatives do Read more…
by Martin Krieger Shui Yan Tang, Ten Principles for a Rule-Ordered Society, Enhancing China’s Governing Capacity 2012 China Economic Publishing House Yan Tang of Price’s faculty has written a basic introduction to how rules lead to a stronger more vibrant and richer society. His audience here is Chinese administrators and government, Read more…
by Martin Krieger The Jewish Annotated New Testament (the NRSV translation), eds. Levine and Brettler, Oxford University Press, 2011. Most Bibles, Hebrew or Catholic or Protestant or…, have annotations and explanations. In general, those scholia or commentary are theological and sectarian, although sometimes they are academic. What we call the New Read more…
by Martin H. Krieger Professor in the Price School His blog is located at http://blogs.usc.edu/sppd/krieger I often find new books by scanning the new books shelves at USC’s various libraries. I surely miss lots of stuff, but I also find books I would never otherwise encounter. As I have mentioned, Read more…
By Benjamin Robinson When Ron Loveridge talks, people listen. The former Mayor and City Councilman of the City of Riverside has been a local, State-wide, and national figure over a 30 plus year career in public service. Over that time, Riverside’s stature has grown in leaps and bounds with a Read more…
by Raphael Bostic Last time, I wrote about the need for “playbooks” to help practitioners in the field advance plans and goals for development and progress. A question came back: what does a playbook look like? Thinking about this, two different potential models come to mind. One model of the playbook Read more…
by Anthony Bertelli Robert Caro‘s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, has become an indispensable book for scholars seeking to understand public administration. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to find colleagues who agree with that assessment. Moses shaped the politics and infrastructure Read more…
by Raphael Bostic How is knowledge passed on from on group to another one? This is a question I continually come upon in my policy work. In nerdy terms, what we are talking about is the preconditions of success. And the strategy is to learn from observed success to distill out Read more…
by Raphael Bostic As we move through the holiday season and approach the end of the semester, it is a good time to take stock of the year that has past. We have had quite an eventful 2012. The year was also a watershed for governance in California. We had our Read more…