Abstract:

Professor Schuck's new book first identifies the endemic  ineffectiveness of much federal domestic policy as a major cause of public disaffection with Washington.  This disaffection has grown along with the size and ambition of federal programs and  now threatens the very legitimacy of our polity.  Synthesizing a vast amount of social science evidence and analysis,  he argues that this widespread policy failure has little to do with which party dominates Congress and the White house but instead reflects the systemic, structural, institutional obstacles to effective policy.  These deep obstacles to coherent policymaking include our political culture, political actors' perverse incentives, voters' collective irrationality, policymakers' poor information, the government's inherent inflexibility and lack of credibility, the effect of dynamic markets on policy coherence, the inherent limits of law as a policy instrument, a deviant implementation process, and a deteriorating bureaucracy.  Those policies that have succeeded help to explain why most policies fail. Professor Schuck proposes a variety of remedies to reduce government's failure rate.

Speaker Bio:

Peter H. Schuck is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.  He has held the Baldwin professorship since 1984, and also served as Deputy Dean of the Law School. Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 1979, he was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1977-79), Director of the Washington Office of Consumers Union (1972-77), and consultant to the Center for Study of Responsive Law (1971-72).  He also practiced law in New York City (1965-68) and holds degrees from Cornell (B.A. 1962), Harvard Law School (J.D. 1965), N.Y.U. Law School (Ll.M. in International Law 1966), and Harvard University (M.A. in Government 1969). 

His major fields of teaching and research are tort law; immigration, citizenship, and refugee law; groups, diversity, and law; and administrative law. He has published hundreds of articles on these and a broad range of other public policy topics in a wide variety of scholarly and popular journals.  His newest book is Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (April 2014).  Earlier books include Understanding America: The Anatomy of An Exceptional Nation (2008) (co-editor with James Q. Wilson; Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples (2006)(with Richard J. Zeckhauser); Meditations of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics (2006); Immigration Stories (co-editor with David A. Martin, 2005); Foundations of Administrative Law (editor, 2d ed., 2004)  Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Harvard/Belknap, 2003); The Limits of Law: Essays on Democratic Governance (2000); Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (1998); and Paths to Inclusion: The Integration of Migrants in the United States and Germany (co-editor with Rainer Munz, 1998); Tort Law and the Public Interest: Competition, Innovation, and Consumer Welfare (editor, 1991); Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts (1987); Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Policy (with Rogers M. Smith, 1985); Suing Government: Citizen Remedies for Official Wrongs (1983); and The Judiciary Committees (1974). He is a contributing editor of The American Lawyer.

Abstract:

Around the world, public health interventions have dramatically changed the life chances of millions. Life expectancy has increased, and fewer children die prematurely at an early age. However, health performance is characterized by large inequalities. Patients are often treated with little dignity, particularly when they are poor. And health systems tend to be relatively unaccountable to citizens. The project “The Governance of Public Health in Mexico” seeks to offer citizens, researchers and policy makers a set of tools that may enable them to evaluate, visualize and interpret the performance of the Mexican health system from a bottom up accountability perspective. The presentation will center around the development of a municipal dashboard that allows for the measurement of the relative performance of local governments in health, and the use of visualization tools to understand the epidemiological profiles of municipalities, based on the methodology of the Global Burden of Disease.

Speaker Bio:

Alberto Diaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. from 1997-1999. His work has primarily focused on federalism and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His forthcoming book is entitled Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism and Poverty Relief in Mexico (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni).

Drawing on data collected through comparative ethnographic fieldwork on Chinese investments in Zambia in the past five years, this talk seeks to answer the questions: What is the peculiarity of Chinese capital? What are the impacts of Chinese investments on African development? Rejecting both the Western rhetoric of “Chinese colonialism” and the Chinese self-justification of “south-south collaboration”, Lee examines the mechanisms, interests and limits of Chinese power through a double comparison: between Chinese and non-Chinese companies, and between copper and construction.

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford. Her research interests include labor, development, political sociology, global ethnography and China. She is author of Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt and Gender and the South China Miracle. She is working on two book projects, one on Chinese investment and labor practices in Zambia, and the other on forty years of state and society relations in China. 

Date:             April 2, 2014 (Wednesday)

Time:             16:00 – 17:30

Language:      English

Venue:           Stanford Center at Peking University, Langrun Yuan, Peking University

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of In Europe’s Name, History of the Present, Facts are Subversive, and other books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in the Guardian.

Li Qiang is Professor of Political Science at the School of Government at Peking University, Director for Development Planning Department, and Director of Center for European Studies at Peking University.