Miscellaneous K

Hospitals and the $963 million question

One percent of Medicare funding (almost a billion dollars) will be based upon a quality index. These include benchmarks such as giving aspirin within twenty four hours to heart attack victims as well as patient satisfaction scores. As often is the case, there is question as to whether this is fair to hospitals treating sicker and poorer patients. (The alternatives are to develop statistical adjustments based upon patient population, or to simply allow a participatory sortition judgment to take this into account.)

An experiment where some hospitals were given bonusses showed no difference with hospitals that were not part of the bonus structure. If there is no change in performance, hospitals will get back of the most payment. There is thus too little downside to incentivize change. Bloomberg Business Week page 35 and 36, September 17 to Sept 23 2012.

White House Petition Site

A federal government web site allows one to post and sign petitions. Here are some of them:

subject	number of signatures
The US should go to the metric system	37089
disclose information that the government has been keeping secret about exraterrestrial visits	1947
FDA should not regulate electronic cigarettes	18503
Legalize online poker	9816
recount 2012 president election--alleges 'blatantly obvious' fraud	69610
recognize American sign languages	32,457

Although, obviously, some of these are ridiculous and the subject of derision by the media. Yet Obama responds to many of them including the petition to deport Piers Morgan, a "CNN talk-show host who supports gun control." Obama's team polled the people signing the Piers Morgan petition. Over half says the Obama answer was helpful and one in four say "they learned something new."

Obama organized a conference call between those who petitioned for immigration reform and the people establishing policy.

With 25000 signatures, the White House used to guarantee a response--now it is 100,000 for a guaranteed response..

Sign Here -- Please", page 34, by Michael Scherrer> Time Volume 181 Number Five, 2013

Porto Allegre - participatory democracy

Each neighborhood has a full town democracy, but they send delgates to a city wide assembly. However, there have benn dramatic improvements:

1. sewer access is now 95% , up from 46%
2. tax evasion fell--presumably because people felt the money was spent wisely.
3. The poorest 12 percent are a third of participants in the assembly
4. One in ten citizen have taken part in at least one of the assemblies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/10/participatory-democracy-in-porto-alegre

Participatory budgeting in Venezuela and in United states Cities

Although this paper emphasizes the progress Venezuela has made in human development--and I suspect many people would disagree with this piece--but that is beyond the scope of this blog. It does talk about 20,000 "community councils" of 200 to 400 families. Some councils have joined to work on larger poblems. Also article talks about Port Allegre participatory democracy, which I do above, and references Mike Fox's democracy "Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas"

And one ward has particpatory democracy spend its alderman's capital budget of 1.3 million dollars with three other alderpersons following. Participatory democracies tend to have more smaller projects than the conventional budgets.

New York City now has eight council persons doing the same thing. Also, see an article in Epoch Times that said that 42 council members still are not using it. Participants identify and debate infrastructure projects at neighborhood assemblies. Then "budget delegates" do the mechanics to get precise costed out proposals. These are voted on by the community--to determine which get funded. People in the area, whether as an employee, resident or business owner can become budget delgates but only residents get to vote in the final decision. Note that this process only does a small sliver of the 9.5 billion that the city spends each year on capital improvents--and the city expense budget is not involved at all.

I had a thoughtful Thursday on Participatory budgeting in May 2010.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14649-the-secret-rise-of-21st-century-democracy

Referendum on pay rates

Switzerland referendum just passed-- share holders have binding say on executive pay. Also bans "golden hellos" and "golden good bye" (golden parachutes). There is controversy whether this will discourage companies from coming to Switzerland, or even if it will attract new investment.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ca90f1b4-83ff-11e2-b700-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2MVXNQ1Zm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578338171658493636.html

Miscellaneous

A concern is who drafts the law, whether in a conventional democracy or a particpatory one. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEc), has corporations and state legislators as members. The corporations pay a total of six million dollars a year. They hold three annual conferences wehre companies present 'model bills' to the legilators. ALEC gives "scholarships" to the legislators to attend. The recent Arizona Immigration law was put together by corporations including Correction Corporation of America. NPR questioned whether ALEC should be treated as non-profit or a lobbying organization. Wikipedia, as usual, has a good article on ALEC. However, one should compare organizations such aas the National Conference of Commisions on Uniform State Laws that among other things is responsible for the Uniform Commercial Code, passed in all fifty states.

California Proposition 23 would suspend its greenhouse gas emissions law until the jobless rate falls to 5.5 per cen Valero Oil and owns several refineries in California and has contriubted five million dollars. Tesoro Energy is also contributing. However, in spite of the business money going to support the measure, Polls say that the greenhouse law will remain and the proposition to delay it will not pass. Of course, we know that the solution to the problem is a consumption and sortition based tax. They don't form pollution havens where all businesses relocate to the country with the least environmental restrictions.

In Brazil, voters can vote at age sixteen, a rarity. Fewer than half now choose to vote--when the youth first got the vote early, they were very excited.. On the subject of Brazil, Planet Money had a wonderful piece on how they solved their inflation of eighty per cent. Four College students were called in by the Minister of Finance to help control Inflation. They developed a "Unit of Real Value" It was parallel with the prices in the currency that was inflating. So everyone saw that each day widget was one URV. What changed was that one day a URL was ten cruzeiro's, the next twenty. Eventually, the government just declared that the URV was the real currency. A psychological trick, that worked and enabled the many accomplishemnts of which Brazil can be most proud.

Of course, could one get the same psychological affect by freezing and numbering the money supply.

We talked about Brazil and some other countrie's programs of participatory budgeting where the voters get to choose how some of the money is spent. My home state Illinois has a candidate for Governor on the "Independent" party. He is calling for particpatory democracy for part of the State budget.

My Chinese teacher was giving us the word for finance. (I have just started taking Chinese.) It contains the character for "bug" or "worm." I have blogged extensively about the financial system and whether we need one.

An educational toy and products company is having problems with its rock collection. Some of the minerals contain some lead. He is part of the set of business owners that are turning against the democrats--and an example of the complaints against stupid regulations. One of the ones I heard was about the requirements for having accessible drinking fountains. The plumbing code has rules about this. One might say these are too detailed. And they are ambiguous. And eHow has a somewhat different set. If one should inadvertently install a drinking fountain a little too high or a little too low, should one have to reinstall it? Oh and New York City Council voted to require all water fountains to be set up to fill up a water bottle; this is to give less money to the bottled water industry. I recall somebody complained that he inadvertently made his water fountains one inch too low for the Americans Disabilities Act regulations. He had to pay to have them all raised one inch. I wasn't able to find it by searching for it.
(Wall Street Journal October 12th 2010, CCLVII, NO 87., Elizabeth Williamson, "Business Backlash Grows"

Participatory Budgeting, Thoughtful Thursday Posting

1. "e-participatory Budgeting: e-Democracy from Theory to Success" by Tiago Peixoto, (e-democracy center at the Universitat Zurich)
2. 72 Frequently Asked Questions About Particpatory Democracy, Urban Governance Toolkit Series, UN-Habitat (the "FAQ")
3. Participatory Budgeting in Brazilian Cities: Limits and Possibilities in Building Democratic Institutions, by Celina Souza (I printed this out some time from scholar.google.com. It now appears to have morphed into several articles, one from Environment and Urbanization Volume 13 Number One 159 to 184 Also at www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/21st_Century/resources/papers/documents/souza.pdf

Several cities have a system where people vote on part, or occasionally of the budget. The two most significant are Belo Horizonte and Porto all Alegre in Brazil. Brazil is eighty percent of these. And as Souza points out, decentralization in general is marked in Brazil, participatory budgeting experiments started during the military regime. The Constitution shifted more resources to municipalities and provinces, and local revenue increased as well. The FAQ covers are seven in Brazil, four, elsewhere in latin America, Cordoba in Spain and Saint Denis in but three hundred cities use it to some extent. It can be just voting on several options, but often it includes some direct democracy and chances for ordinary citizens to debate the option. The FAQ has links to several city web sites. And many cities just have a few small project handled by participatory budgeting. Porte Alegre has elected elegates look at the entire capital budget-- about ten percent of the total budget. Mundo Novo has a town hall debate the entire budget--including the mayor's salary! The FAQ cites situations where having the people make the decision on only a minor part of the budget has a beneficial effect on public participation. Also, both Souza and the FAQ denote the tendency of participatory democracy experiments to make decisions to fund specific projects rather than do long term planning although there are exceptions.

Belo Horizonte, a city of 2.5 million, budgets 43 million dollars in a series of forums as well as eleven million in an electronic mechanism. In this process, citizens voted for a public work in each district of the city. Thus a person could vote on one choice for each of nine projects. Ten percent participated in the isprocess. Yet only half the voters only voted for one choice, 15 percent for two, 6.57 for three. 16.25 percent took advantage of all nine choices. (There were four choices per district.) The turn out was 9.97 percent, greater that eh face-to-face approach, that Belo Horizonte has been using for some time. The conventional system involves meetings, and from my readings it is unclear how many and the role of the delegates that simply choose to come, and those that are elected in some process. There is a series of meetings, thematic meetings, and a special housing participatory budget because of concern about homelessness.. ( Since, there was online (and telephone voting), citizens could log in and vote for the public work in district one, log in later, vote in district two, etc. They had a total of fourty two days. As many citizens did not have computer or access to same at work or school, there were 178 places throughout the city where they could vote. As well a bus went to poor areas and highly travelled areas such as the city center to ensure access for everyone.

The city provided an official electronic moderated text-only for people to discuss the projects. Individuals provided pointers to videos,etc on other sites. The moderator kept the comments to the point, but some citizens posted something about one of the proposals and then let loose on their pet topic.

Souza cites statistics that show that Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte enjoy large numbers of people who are involved with civic associations, trust them, and seek information on current events and local politics. Both Belo Horizonte and Porte Alegre appear to have high levels of civic involvement and civil society than other Brazilian Cities and that might have led to the success of Participatory Budgeting. But it appears as well that the the participatory budgeting program improved it futher. 46.3 percent of Porte Alegre residences know about it and in Belo Horizonte 81.5 percent of the delgates approve and 67.3 percent of the general population approve, the highest of all local government policies.

Tiago Peixoto was kind enough to answer questions on his web site. And Paul Johnston raised an issue of concern to this blog, could citizens follow up and help manage the construction and running of the projects on which they voted to choose. Belo Horizonte does do this to some extent, but Dr. Peixoto raised the issue of managing technical projects such as road resurfacing. Demarchy calls for sortition juries to specialize. Thus, road resurfacing projects might be managed by a group that have an interest, expertise, or simply are assigned over a long period of time to this kind of project. And many cities have citizens, special monitoring commissions, and as well as the day-to-day authorities monitor the project--this is a type of demarchy for which I asked what kind of education is needed for such a specialized jury. Could a group of citizens read "RoadWork for Dummies" and participate in a meaningful way with the public works officials such as civil engineers, both to prevent corruption, rent seeking, and just to present a public view (the tension between the job benefits of public works and ensuring that competent committed workers do the work.) And how well does a City Manager, Major or elected Alderman do in keeping an eye on technical projects?

And the issue came up of more more frequent voting than once every two years. Dr. Peixoto proposed a process for prioritizing relatively minor issues, perhaps a "fix my street" site--connected to GIS technology. (This could be a person getting care who was uninsured or deciding on grants for scientific research or giving a bonus to a meritorious public employee.)

To be followed up in Future Thoughtful Thursdays

Many of the writeups of the most prominent country in Participatory Budgeting, Brazil, are naturally in Portugese. I unfortunately have not had an opportunity to learn Portugese. I do have three years of Spanish and will follow up on some of the web sites in the Spanish Speaking countries of South and Central America, listed in the FAQ.

1. Abers, Rebecca, "From Clientelism to Co-operatino: Local Government, Participatory Policy, and Civic Organizing in Porto Alegre Brazil' Politics and Society 26(4) 511 to 523.
2. Navarro, Zander (1197) Affirmative Democracy adn Redistributive Development the Case of Particpatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil 1989 to 1997, unpublished
3. Nylen, William (2000a) The Making of Loyal Opposition: The Workers' party (PT) the Consolidation of Democracy in Brazil in P. Kingstone and T. J. Power (Democratic Brzil:Actors, Institutions and Process (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press) pages 126 to 143
4. Nylen William, "Testing the Empowerment Thesis: The Partici9ipatory Budget in Belo Horizonte and Betem Brazil, Comparative Politics volume 34 Number Two Jan 2002 pages 127 to 145
5. Santos, Boaventura de S. (1998) "Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Towards a Redistributive Democracy" Politics and Society 26(4) 461 to 510
6. Souza, Celina (1997) "Constitutional Engineering in Brazil: The Politics of Federalism and Decentralizztion" London Macmillion New York
7. Wampler, Brian, "Participatory Budgeting in Brazil" Contestation, Cooperation and Accountability, Pennsylvania State University Press
8. William R. Nylen, "Testing the Empowerment Thesis: The Participatory Budget in Belo Horizonte and Betim Brazil Compartive Politics Volume 34 Number Two Jan 2002 pages 127 to 145.

As I was searching for these references from Souza's article, I see a rich gold mine of information on the participatory budgeting experiments .

Belo Horizonte participatory budgeting

from Communications of the ACM April 2010, Vol 53, No 1.

Belo Horizonte did an online vote on whether to spend eleven million dollars on:

1. a new sports complex
2. a library
3. streeet renewal
4. commerfcial center regeneration project

500,000 votes were cast and the sports complex won.

This has been done every year since 2006, and just recently, they introduced phone voting. (I will be preparing a Thoughtful Thursday piece on participatory democracy in Brazil, and I just found Tiago Peixoto's paper on e-Participatory Democracy in Belo Horizonte.)

Environmental Values Clash: Green vs. Green

Environmental and related values compete. Brazil plans to build " huge dam in para. It will provide six per cent of the country's electricity needs. But it will displate 20,000 indigenous. Foreign Policy described the obvious reaction in a country when foreign governments or do-gooders tell them how to handle their environmental needs--they view them as patronizing and people who have screwed up their own area and are now telling other people not to and who have no experience on the ground. (The head of a logging group, 'To speak about the Amazon, an indivdiual must have come down at least once with malaria, be bitten by a snake...only flies first class.. five-star hotels.')

And they wish to develop solar energy in the Majove desert in California-- great for the environment, except for the damage to the fragile ecosystems in the desert. This pits green against green

Would sortition juries sort this out better in approving investments for retirement savings and for wait to be rewarded until we really know" accounts, and in a sortition tax.