DCHawk1 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 09, 2020 10:24 pm
seahawk wrote: ↑Thu Apr 09, 2020 10:09 pm
DCHawk1 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 09, 2020 3:05 pm
OK.
Theodore J. Lowi,
The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States
Alfred Kahn,
The Economics of Regulation: Principles and Institutions
And especially:
James Q. Wilson,
Bureaucracy
It's all pretty standard bureaucratic theory: Technology makes the world complicated. Regulating a complicated world requires specialized knowledge. Specialized knowledge is almost exclusively held by industry practitioners. Therefore, if government wants to regulate, it has to choose primarily from industry practitioners -- most of whom then go back to industry but are even better at their previous jobs because they now have regulatory experience AND contacts.
James Q. Wilson, the cheerleader for mass over incarceration and author of the stupid "Broken Windows" nonsense? You're recommending that fraud?
You people and your anti-intellectualism...
Between Wilson and Lowi, you have probably the two best-known, most-respected, most
mainstream American political scientists in history -- in addition to two past presidents of the American Political Science Association.
The only people who consider Wilson a "fraud" are crackpots and cranks.
Which, I guess, makes sense.
We've lived in different worlds, DC. I took my MPA and worked in the public sector where when people like my husband made a mistake and a kid he took the daily gamble on went out and killed someone, he went before the public on TV and explained that and was accountable at the next election time. Wilson's Big Theories about crime were totally wrong and led to huge over expenditures by states and the Federales in incarcerating people for extremely long times and in spending needless money on prisons. He was wrong and offered fraudulent bullshit about the rise in crime in the 1970s, which was about demographics--as the crime levels magically went down when the Baby Boomers had passed through the peak ages where young men commit crimes, basically late teens through age 25.
But, we as a nation were left with huge prison populations that both conservatives and liberals see the problem with, but with laws on the books that make it difficult to reduce them, even though crime is back to the level before Wilson started in cheerleading for incarceration. He was also totally and completely wrong about his based-on-nothing Broken Windows bullshit, which has been proven invalid and a huge mistake. Had he been a publicly elected official instead of an academic, he would have been elected out of office long ago and left with a shredded reputation.
And yes, I lack your adulation of bullshit academics. I lived with someone as intelligent as Wilson, who dedicated his life to making things better for the population that James Q. condemned to prisons in huge numbers. Who had a concealed carry permit, because those who actually deal with actual criminals get their lives threatened, even 15-20 years later. I worked for Michael Francke, who didn't get the accolades from a bunch of silly academics who write about a politics that they know nothing about, because he was murdered at age 42, gutted from chest to groin outside his office, for trying to clean up a corrupt prison system in Oregon.
I remember meeting Kelling, back in the early 80s, when people I worked with were questioning his theoretical nonsense. Because they, like my husband and Francke, were intelligent folks that went a different way from the Keyboard Warriors like yourself and silly academics like Wilson. However, times change and my guess is that Wilson's reputation among the made up discipline of political scientists will be repudiated as the nation tries to figure out how unravel the ridiculous prison building and lock 'em up strategies put in place by the Wilsonian disciples.
Don't inject Lysol.