Blog — Society

Posted 1/4/12 by Benjamin Miller

Today’s Read: Lenore Skenazy on “Overhyped Panics”

Lenore Skenazy, author of FreeRangeKids.com, wants us to ask ourselves: Are we overreacting to life's rare and improbable threats? And in attempting to protect ourselves and our children against remote risks, do we incur greater societal costs?

In an op-ed in last week's Wall Street Journal, Skenazy argues that the answer to both questions is a definite "yes." She describes an incident in April 2011 in which an Applebee's waiter inadvertently served an alcoholic drink to a toddler. Instead of being resolved with a simple apology and recompense, the incident ballooned into a lawsuit, a national retraining of Applebee's staff, and a media frenzy. What's wrong with that? As Skenazy writes:

This collective decision not to distinguish between rare screw-ups and systemic dangers is turning us into neurotic Nellies who worry about, warn against and, finally, outlaw very safe things.

This reactionary instinct is all too visible in the way we treat our children, eliminating monkey bars and dodgeball because they might cause an accident. But the attitude is pervasive across society. We write laws and regulations to address rare or one-time events, instead of defining our principles and objectives and using common sense to resolve specific issues accordingly.

No matter how many rules we think up, accidents will happen. When they do, let's remember to use common sense, not irrational panic, to fix them.

Posted 12/12/11 by Common Good

Daniel Kahneman on Leadership

Philip Howard recently hosted a conversation with psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, whose most recent work is Thinking, Fast and Slow. According to Kahneman, humans rely on two separate modes of thinking--System 1 and System 2--which have disparate effects on the choices we make. Take a look at the clips below in which Kahneman describes the two systems and their implications on leadership, loss aversion, and risk:

Posted 12/12/11 by Common Good

What do values have to do with it?

Faith and Leadership, the online magazine of the Duke Divinity School, recently interviewed Philip K. Howard, Chair of Common Good, to explore the relationship between law, regulation, values, and personal responsibility. Howard observed:

What I’ve found is that [Americans] at every level of responsibility can’t do what they think is right because the legal system has become either so dense and thick, in the case of bureaucratic structures, or so random, in the case of litigation-related structures, that people more or less tiptoe through the day looking over their shoulders with their noses in rule books rather than striding forward to try to accomplish what they think they should be doing in their lives.

Read the whole transcript here, and watch a video excerpt below:

Posted 11/4/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard Speaks at Duke

Speaking at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard argued that our laws and rules are so specific they prevent people from using their common sense. The Duke Chronicle reports:

The United States needs to reconstruct its entire legal system into one that gives people the freedom to use common sense, Howard said. In this system, the freedom to make decisions would not originate from a lack of regulation but rather from open-framed laws that are easy for everyone to understand, leaving room for people to interpret and apply laws when appropriate.

Posted 10/28/11 by Common Good

George Will Warns Against Warnings

"Whatever happened to the rule, ‘Do not speak unless you can improve the silence’?”

That’s the question the Washington Post’s George Will asks in a recent column about the “merciless river of words” that characterizes today’s airport experience. Warnings and disclaimers are everywhere—like the announcements that moving walkways will indeed end (“Pretty much everything does come to an end, doesn’t it?”). Do they really make us safer? Making arguments akin to Start Over’s on the effects of legal fear and the need to rein in lawsuits, Will writes:

Perhaps some silly warnings are ‘necessary’ to fend off the Fourth Branch of government, a.k.a. trial lawyers. But this merely underscores the fact that all this noise is symptomatic of modern derangements. Solemn warnings about nonexistent risks, and information intended to spare us the slightest responsibility for passing through life with a modicum of attention and intelligence — these express, among other things, an entitlement mentality that the nanny state foments: If something bad or even inconvenient or merely annoying happens to us, even if it results from our foolishness, daydreaming or brooding about the meaning of life, we are entitled to sue someone for restitution.

In January 2009, Will wrote about the work of Philip K. Howard and Common Good, stating: “Law is essential to, but can stifle, freedom…[Today,] what should be routine daily choices and interactions are fraught with legal risk.” Will went on to call Howard’s Life Without Lawyers “2009’s most needed book on public affairs.”

Read the whole column and add a comment here.

Posted 10/27/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard in the Daily News

In today’s New York Daily News, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard comments on a recent lawsuit which is trying to force New York City to make its entire taxicab fleet wheelchair-accessible—which would add $935 million in operating cost every five years.

Wheelchair-bound people, Howard argues, deserve enhanced access to transportation. But at what cost? City transit already spends more than $500 million every year on accessibility. If this lawsuit succeeds, Howard calculates that the cost of each ride for a wheelchair-bound patron would come to at least $2,000—and possibly as much as $63,000! And what about all the other public good that money could fund?

Reducing pollution, funding pre-K education, repaying public debt, providing health care, you name it.

No one is asking the question. In the 1990s, under the same laws and guided by the same logic, advocates for the disabled killed a plan to install public toilets in New York because it was not practical to make the toilets wheelchair accessible. What matters to them is equality, not practicality. Give me my rights!

Society and government have the moral responsibility to use public money for the common good. As Howard writes: “Every public dollar involves a moral choice, a tradeoff with other needs.” Responsible spending means deciding when the tradeoff is justified—and when a $2,000 cab ride is just too much.

Posted 10/26/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard and Phillip Blond discuss government reform

Philip K. Howard, Common Good’s Founder and Chair, and Phillip Blond, the British philosopher known as “guru” to David Cameron’s Big Society, met on October 14 for a provocative discussion of government reform in the United States and the United Kingdom. Phillip Blond is the author of Red Tory, a book that sought to redefine centrist politics in the United Kingdom, and the founder of ResPublica, a think tank whose core principal is the Common Good-like idea that “human relationships should once more be the center and meaning of an associative society.” The discussion was moderated by Sir Harold Evans, editor-at-large of the Reuters news agency and former editor of The Sunday Times of London. Watch the clip:

Posted 10/18/11 by Common Good

Phillip Blond Speaks with Philip K. Howard

Phillip Blond, architect of David Cameron's "Big Society" program, recently appeared in New York to discuss structural problems that plague both the United Kingdom and the United States. He joined Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard on Friday morning to explore common ideas with the Start Over movement. The Christian Century reports that according to Blond:

The breakdown of both social norms and the family unit—and the growth of government to address those ills—as well as the dominance of corporations and the rich in the current economy...[is] a result of an 'oscillation between extreme collectivism and extreme individualism' .... Both are manifestations of the same impulse: a concentration of power first in the state and then in the markets. And both those liberal and conservative 'orthodoxies' have led to the same society-destroying outcome.

Common Good certainly agrees with Blond that political orthodoxy will not lead to a successful American future—and that it's time to Start Over.

Video of the event with Blond and Howard will be posted here when available.

Posted 10/17/11 by Common Good

The Oklahoman Endorses Start Over Solutions

A recent editorial in The Oklahoman supports the Start Over mission to restore authority and accountability to government. After Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard spoke in Oklahoma City, the paper wrote that "sensible rules and regulations, including reasonable fees, should be the norm all the time, not just a temporary response to crises." It continues:

Restoring common sense to society is a bipartisan issue....'Neither party,' Howard's group says, 'will acknowledge the core flaw in our government structure: Americans with responsibility no longer feel free to make sensible choices.'

Read the full editorial here and leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Posted 9/28/11 by Common Good

Common Good Voices: David Rocker

David Rocker, friend of Common Good, recently published an editorial in Barron's, asking the question: Can we rediscover responsible American priorities?

As citizens and voters, Americans have refused to adopt credible plans to return to a more responsible path, choosing instead to vote for candidates who would provide them with short-term benefits, regardless of the long-term costs, a form of intergenerational larceny.

The markets have shown us that we have reached our limits. The Standard & Poor's lowered ratings and the Tea Party are not responsible for the recent market meltdown. Years of irresponsible fiscal policy, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, are the cause. We have brought this on ourselves, and we must fix it ourselves with hard work and sacrifice. Austerity is no longer an option. We must get used to limits and focus to a greater degree on what we need rather than what we want. The establishment of priorities when resources are limited is what budgeting is all about.

...

We have much work to do. But the American people have the resources and the resourcefulness to do it if we recognize the new reality. It is time to focus on what is best for the common good, not special interests.

Read the whole thing here.