quality control levers in blogging

Let me get away from my usual aggressive rhetoric for a bit to talk about the lack of accountability in contemporary political punditry.

If I didn't believe in the value and importance of political blogging I wouldn't spend any of my time on it, or on critiquing it. And if I felt that the people I write about most weren't worth critiquing I wouldn't bother. I think that political blogging, and many political bloggers, are worth investing in. But I am saddened and angered by the lack of accountability and quality control levers within the profession. Let me show you what I mean.

 Here's Yglesias at his best, on education, a topic on which he and I have great disagreements:

My father dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade. As it happens, my father went on to have a successful career as a novelist and screenwriter and is by no means poor. Still the fact of the matter is that my mother could help me with my high school math homework and my dad couldn’t, since he has very little formal math education. A person who grows up in a household headed by a single mother who didn’t complete high school is going to be at a significant educational disadvantage vis-a-vis a person who grows up in a household with two college educated parents for reasons that are not going to be solved by a transfer of financial resources to the single mother. Similarly, a person whose parents were both raised in Latin America and don’t speak English is going to be at a substantial disadvantage. Literate English-speaking parents do a lot to teach their kids to read and write, parents who don’t speak English and may have limited literacy in their native language aren’t able to do this.

This is smart, and the kind of smart that reminds you why it's worth sticking with Yglesias through his less well-developed ideas, and why his prominent role in the political blogosphere is on balance a good thing. I'm not particularly pleased with the reference to common sense on what is an empirical question, but that's no big deal. I think he's making trenchant observations about how conventional wisdom can be distorted or distorting. This kind of thinking is the beginning of inquiry-- you've got to follow up with your empiricism-- but perfectly legitimate and necessary, and an example of the best kind of policy generalism, which is necessary for a functional democracy. You'll note, incidentally, that here Yglesias is moving in the direction of complexity.

Here's Yglesias at his worst, on education:

my experience is that a lot of people on the left, rather than arguing the merits of the issue, seem to take it as self-evidently un-progressive to try to improve the performance of a public agency in part by doing things that the people who work at the agency don’t like. When it comes to big city police departments, I think a much healthier attitude exists. Not one that says cops shouldn’t have rights in the workplace or that “cops are bad,” but one that recognizes a substantial tension between the liberal desire to have police departments work well and the police officers’ desire for high levels of job security and low levels of accountability.

I should hardly have to tell you that this is a specious and childish comparison, one that distorts more than it clarifies. There are a vast amount of difference between education and policing. As happens so often, his commenters just absolutely school him here, so you can look to them for a comprehensive set of critiques of this post. To stake out my usual position, I would just add that Yglesias continues to ignore (despite having heard this critique many times) that there are persistent and non-trivial epistemelogical difficulties in measuring teaching quality fairly, accurately, and to our practical good, and that accordingly we have far more reliable information about best practices in policing than we do in education. Also, criticisms of policing don't actually take the form of calls for widespread privatization, nor the destruction of police unions, which are the goals of the education reform movement and are transparently conservative/libertarian. You'll note, incidentally, that here Yglesias is moving in the direction of simplicity.

What I want is to get more of the former and less of the latter. I'm just one person, so my opinion individually should  naturally be of little consequence. But there should be some mechanism of accountability through which the mass can influence professional bloggers. And you'd certainly like that system of accountability to privilege factual accuracy, reference to empiricism, and an appropriate acknowledgment of complexity.

The problem is that there's simply no reliable mechanism of accountability in political blogging to deal with the dross. People say that the oppositional ideologies within the blogosphere ensures pushback, but as I've been trying to document, that doesn't really happen. Social capture happens. Professional incentives distort. The think tank and media distortions in professional punditry, such as the massive over-representation of libertarianism in comparison to the number of American libertarians, upset the balance. Yglesias's commenters are often a good check on his laziness, but they are very easy to ignore, and he does. The Center for American Progress certainly doesn't seem to be imposing any accountability for him; they don't appear to ask him for accuracy or quality control. (They did, however, hijack his blog when he criticized Third Way, which should tell you something about CAP.) There are those few critics such as me, but I'm also ignorable, and there are standard measures to delegitimize people like me, such as the ubiquitous insistence on personal vendetta.

I just don't see any particular set of incentives or penalties for your average political blogger. This is exacerbated by the manic pace of blogging, which means that most posts are quickly forgotten, so there's little opportunity for public accountability. It frustrates me when professional bloggers don't evolve or improve, but I can't really blame them, as there's no concrete reasons for them to change.

I will be the first to tell you that knowledge making in the university system is imperfect. Many people can recount all the ways in which the publication/peer review/tenure process is politicized, detrimental to teaching, distorting, and inimical to certain kinds of inquiry or topics. But there is at least a clear process here. If I want to make an article and have it resonate professionally, I have to publish in a reputable journal. The editors of the journal will give my proposal an initial vetting. They reject many or most. If I get through that original vetting, my paper goes through the peer review process. The peer reviewers make comments and set standards. I have to change my article in order for it to be published. Once it's published, it's accessible to a field of experts who will evaluate it for quality and accuracy. If I'm wrong, others will publish criticizing me. Publication is rare enough that every piece really counts. If my work is consistently poor or inaccurate, it will deeply impact my ability to get hired, to gain tenure, and earn promotion and professional laurels. It's an imperfect system, but it's a system with a clear set of quality control levers that are directly tied to professional advancement. There simply is no equivalent system in political punditry. See the careers of, for example, Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Goldberg for evidence.

Oh, by the way: Yglesias's comparison is more apt than he knows in one particular way. As so often happens with policing, the inevitable result of the ed "reform" movement will be juking the stats. These educational problems are irresolvable given the realities of our system of resource distribution, inequities in quality of parenting, and the unspeakable but real fact that people are substantially unequal in intellectual aptitude. But since our society is incapable of recognizing that we don't have the tools to solve all of our problems, we instead cover those problems with pleasant lies. There is absolutely no question in my mind that the educational reform wars will cool through a consensus decision to pretend the problems away.

The question is, will we do so in a way that destroys unions, harms teachers, and hands yet more public over to private enterprise-- dare I say it, a self-evidently unprogressive outcome.