Biotechnology and the Modern Liberal Project

Biotechnological enhancement of human capabilities reveals a characteristically modern stance toward nature: Human nature, as given, is an impediment to be overcome on the way to full human freedom. As a form of metaphysical partisanship, the biotech enterprise seems to further the political intention of Thomas Hobbes to nullify human diversity. Commerce in biotech enhancements, and the individual liberty such commerce instantiates, is likely to have the ironic effect of psychic homogenization.

Regulators and Redskins

We examine the correlation between federal government activity and performance of the capital’s National Football League team, the Washington Redskins. We find a positive, non-spurious, and robust correlation between the Redskins’ winning percentage and bureaucratic output, measured by pages published in the Federal Register. Because the Redskins’ performance is prototypically exogenous, we give this result a causal interpretation and provide a plausible, causal mechanism: bureaucrats must make “logrolling” deals to expand their regulatory power, and a winning football team offers a shared source of optimism to lubricate such negotiations. We do not find the same correlation when examining congressional activity.     

Deliberation in large juries with diverse preferences

This paper considers a game in which imperfectly informed jurors who differ in their thresholds of reasonable doubt must decide whether to convict or acquit a defendant. Jurors deliberate prior to voting on the fate of the defendant, and the defendant is convicted only if all jurors vote to convict. Although it has been established that full information revelation is impossible when jurors have sufficiently heterogeneous preferences, this paper demonstrates that if each juror shares preferences with a small fraction of the other jurors, it is possible to obtain enough information revelation so that the correct decision is made with probability arbitrarily close to one in large juries.     

Policy and Organizational Change in the Federal Aviation Administration: The Ontogenesis of a High‐Reliability Organization

Although the high‐reliability organization (HRO) literature identifies several attributes that differentiate HROs from other types of organizations, these studies do not explain how an HRO comes into being, nor do they provide a means to gauge or measure the extent to which an organization exhibits the specified features. This article reports the results of a 97‐year longitudinal case study tracking the emergence and continuation of HRO characteristics in the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control operations to answer the following questions: how do HRO functions emerge in public organizations, and do policy changes lead administrative changes, or is there little relation between policy and organizational change? The analysis shows that (1) HRO characteristics emerged incrementally over an extremely long period of time, and (2) policy changes preceded organizational changes early in the process of HRO development, but the relationship of policy change to organizational change decreased in later stages.     

Proportional Representation and the Framers

Techniques for conducting elections developed since 1800 have raised a question about the soundness of the American framers’ majoritarianism. John Stuart Mill notably argued that the framers’ desire to reward merit, as opposed to party loyalty, would be better served by a system of proportional representation that gave deserving minorities a voice. This article considers the likelihood that a system such as Mill proposed would have the results he hoped for; it concludes that such a system is more likely to worsen problems with the existing system of representation than to solve them.