2. In what ways has your scholarship reshaped your field(s)?

a) Voting rights reforms. In 1970, in "Prometheus, Proteus, Pandora, and Procrustes Unbound: The Political Consequences of Reapportionment," 37 Chicago L. Rev. 474 (1970), I challenged the view strongly held among political scientists and study groups that reapportionment would reduce gerrymandering, empower big-city minorities and others stifled by rural overrepresentation, and activate and revitalize state governments and the House of Representatives. In practice, reapportionment has weakened cities relative to suburbs; it has increased gerrymandering, by forcing more frequent and drastic (but no less self-serving) redistricting than legislators would have chosen for themselves. It has produced bizarrely shaped districts and has continued to give a 40-50% bonus in seats per vote to the party that draws the districts.

It has drastically reduced legislative turnover - to 2-5% in California in recent years - strengthening incumbents and weakening challengers. It has radicalized and polarized both parties (because safe seats, unlike competitive ones, are most contestable from the far right or left, in primary elections). It has soured relationships among legislators, stalled legislative action, and forced anyone who wants political action to bypass the legislature altogether and resort to the clumsy, inflexible, initiative process. It helps explain why the much-redistricted House, with 80% safe seats, was so much more harsh, partisan, and divided over impeachment in 1998 than the unreapportioned Senate. It has also drastically reduced the influence of minority voters in racially-segregated "affirmative-action" gerrymandered districts. There are many more of these now than there were in 1970, but they are now politically segregated, as well as demographically, with narrow, strident, uncompromising representatives, "Malcolms" hypersensitive to race issues, oblivious to other issues. Like liberal or conservative legislators from any safe seat, the Malcolms have strong incentives to take narrow and extreme, doctrinaire positions, but weak incentives to compromise and form broad coalitions with other groups.

I was the first political scientist to warn of such outcomes, a perspective which many considered beyond the pale in the 1970’s but has since become a strain of conventional wisdom, perhaps even the prevailing one today. In 1975, in The Rise of Guardian Democracy, Ch. VI, I amplified the public-policy case against wholesale reapportionment and added to it some skeptical, and then-heretical commentary about other proposed electoral reforms, such as the McGovern Reforms of the Democratic Presidential nomination process, and abolishing the Electoral College. Both of these reforms likewise offered to weaken the center-seeking and strengthen the fringe-seeking elements of the parties affected. The critique of electoral-college reform originated with CMC professors Harry Jaffa, Martin Diamond, and Mike Uhlmann, not me, and it did prevail in Congress, thanks to them, not me. But my critique of the McGovern reforms, written during the 1972 campaign but published three years later, was the first to point out the threat they posed to the cohesion and popularity of the then-dominant party (Guardian Democracy, 176-188).

This is surprising, since the most viable candidates of the day, and most of the political scientists, were centrist New Deal Democrats far more directly threatened by the reforms than I was, a centrist Republican. But they were so deeply fixated by the reformist rhetoric of the McGovern wing of the party that no one but a couple of old-line Democratic Congressmen and Austin Ranney (an old-school centrist Democrat political scientist who published Curing the Mischiefs of Party Faction in 1975) realized the danger, or, realizing it, dared mention it. Neither Ranney nor I were heeded, and the Republicans held the White House almost by default for 16 of the next 20 years against a string of weak, left-driven Democratic nominees. In 1982-83 two eminent political scientists, one a centrist Republican, the other a centrist Democrat, made much the same points Ranney and I had made in 1975. These were James Ceaser, in Reforming the Reforms (1982), and Nelson Polsby, in The Consequences of Party Reform (1983). Polsby, in particular, was finally heeded, first by Bill Clinton and other centrist founders of the Democratic Leadership Conference, later by other political scientists, after Clinton squeezed himself through McGovern’s needle’s eye and then ousted Republicans from the White House for eight years. Skepticism of the McGovern Reforms is probably now the prevailing view among political scientists. If it is not, it should be. In any case, Ranney and I were John the Baptists of sorts for Polsby and Clinton.

b) Population policy. "Federal Law and Population Control," Ch. 22 in Environmental Law Institute, Federal Environmental Law, West Publishing Co., 1974, was written by request of ELI head Fred Anderson, almost as an afterthought to the other chapters in the compendium. I wrote up an 80-page chapter trying to pull together various perspectives on population, thought I did a good job of it, as did ELI and some enthusiastic users of the compendium, and set out in 1975 to expand it into a 160-page book. Like the Shakespeare Clinic (below) it turned out to be a much bigger, slower, project than I anticipated, and it got bumped by the Shakespeare projects in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Now, 25 years and 2 billion more people later, I have 14½ chapters and 600+ pages of text finished. I am a chapter and a half and much updating of the early chapters away from completion. I still consider it my most challenging and important project, I do not think the need for it has gone away, and I intend to complete it before I go away.

Between them, the ELI chapter and the book manuscript offer many insights not found elsewhere on population policy alternatives, optimal populations, limits to growth arguments, effects of past population-control interventions, direct and indirect, ways to balance and reconcile the perspectives of different disciplines, and ways to understand and deal with threatening trends which you cannot predict with precision. They argue that family-centered morality limits population growth more than it enhances it. They further argue that, though Malthusians (not Malthus himself) have often tended to predict too much doom too soon, market buffers and technology breakthroughs have not repealed the laws of physics or biology, only softened and postponed their worst effects. Though the U.S., and other first-world countries achieved replacement-level fertility in the 1970’s, and third-world fertility is noticeably lower than it was a generation ago, immigration and high immigrant fertility continue to increase our population at alarming rates, especially in Southern California. At present rates of expansion the U.S. shall have half of China’s present population by 2075, all of it by 2150, only two human lifetimes hence. Many biologists doubt that such populations could even be fed at today’s U.S. standards without a miraculous extension and expansion of fossil-fuel agricultural inputs. Pimentel and Pimentel, 1994, say that modern agriculture amounts to a conversion of fossil fuel into food. We now have to put 3 calories of fossil fuel into agricultural production for every one we take out. Absent the fossil-fuel subsidy, they say, the U.S. would have a carrying capacity of 200 million at our present standard, not the 260+ million we now have, far less the billion we are headed for in less than two lifetimes. Third-world nations don’t pour oil and coal into their fields as lavishly as we do, but they have more mouths to feed, are growing faster, and hence face the same or greater risks of population overload.

Some cornucopian analysts, such as the late Julian Simon, are much more optimistic than the Pimentels, and the cornucopians, as often in the past, may turn out to be at least partially right. But the difference between most cornucopian optimists and most Malthusian pessimists in their estimates of ultimate world carrying capacity is only about three doublings, which would only give us another 150 years of expansion, at present rates, if the cornucopians are right. Again, that is less than two lifetimes. It’s not much.

Missing from my insights on population, unfortunately, is the kind of grand, penetrating, night-and-day breakthroughs that I claim for my other writings: for example, that reapportionment and McGovern reforms backfired; that rehabilitation and rapid rail haven’t worked; that smog and congestion charges would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than command-and-control regulations are; that none of the testable Shakespeare claimants could have been Shakespeare; and that A Funeral Elegy was written by someone else. I wish that after 25 years of thinking about it I had come up with a comparably dispositive insight as to how to stop the population explosion. But I haven’t. On the other hand, no one else has either, and I am not finished yet. If anyone does figure it out, I hope I can give him or her a boost.

c) Rehabilitating criminals. In 1972, in "Crime, Punishment, and Professional Paradigms," I was the first political scientist to challenge the then-prevailing view, roundly endorsed by Ramsey Clark and several national crime commissions, that high-science "therapeutic" rehabilitational techniques worked better than low-science "punitive" ones. Claremont psychologists greeted the paper with disbelief. They conceded that I was right about the 20 or so leading studies I looked at, but they were also certain there were many more better studies out there showing the superiority of the therapy approach. They assigned a graduate student to refute my paper in his master’s thesis. He couldn’t. The next year psychologist Paul Martinson published his famous study, "What Works?" in The Public Interest, examining 300 rehabilitation studies and coming to the same conclusions that I had, that the therapy-supporting evidence was either inconclusive or fudged. This time it took, and conventional wisdom dramatically reversed itself from what "everyone knew" up to 1972. Martinson’s paper was the one which finally made this massive conversion, not mine nor those of two other psychologist Pauls, Lerman and Takagi, whose skeptical works also antedated Martinson’s. But the first two Pauls and I were pathfinders on what turned out to be an entire profession’s road to Damascus, something between prophets in the wilderness and John the Baptists for Martinson.

d) Rapid Rail. Prior to 1975 it seemed that every opinion leader in Southern California -- Mayor Bradley, the Los Angeles Times, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the Regional Transportation District, most environmental groups, both political parties, and even the Auto Club -- saw Rapid Rail as the ideal solution to Los Angeles’s growing transportation problems. I did a study of SCAG’s figures in the light of the record of BART and several other new rapid rail projects, and came to the opposite conclusion. My evidence said that RTD’s figures were badly fudged and that the project was a costly boondoggle which would reduce traffic in the corridor it served by less than one year's growth, could cost more per passenger than a chauffeured Cadillac, and would entail violently regressive transfers of wealth from poor taxpayers to rich construction companies and landowners along the route served. I published the results in "The Los Angeles Affliction: Suggestions for a Cure," The Public Interest, Winter 1975, reprinted, Los Angeles Times, 2 March 1975.

This is probably the most influential of all my writings. It got lots of national and local attention. It didn’t stop the first part of the L.A. Red Line (already committed in 1974), but probably did weaken its support and helped slow it down enough for SCAG and RTD eventually to shelve plans for their behemoth, $183-billion follow-on system. Within a year, BART co-founder Melvin Webber confirmed my conclusions for BART in almost every particular. "The BART Experience: What Have We Learned?" The Public Interest, Fall, 1976. By 1996, L.A.’s Red Line likewise confirmed my conclusions. By 1996 it provided 4 million passenger trips a year for $160 million in annualized costs, amounting to $40 per one-way trip. In the meantime, my once-heretical views had become conventional wisdom among transportation economists, even at the Federal Urban Mass Transit Administration. Federal rapid rail subsidies, and SCAG and RTD plans for the behemoth heavy rail system were drastically curtailed. SCAG’s latest Draft 1998 Regional Transportation Plan barely mentions heavy rail beyond the short segments already under construction (98DRTP, p. I-17).

e) Congestion Charges.In its place are three new economic-incentive items, toll roads, mileage charges, and High-occupancy/Toll HOT lanes (I-20-I-22). One of these, HOT lanes, is my invention. HOT lanes are reserved not just for high-occupancy vehicles (HOV’s) but for low-occupancy vehicles who pay a toll set high enough not to overload the reserved lane. Such tolls are higher during peak hours, and HOT lanes are a first step toward full-scale peak-hour congestion charges. Most models say that these would control a hundred times more congestion than heavy rail at a hundred times lower cost. I am neither the discoverer nor the first advocate of congestion charges. Columbia economist William Vickrey was among the first to advocate them in the 1960’s and got the Nobel Prize for it in the 1990’s. But I was the first person to publish a congestion charge proposal for the Los Angeles Basin (also in "The Los Angeles Affliction") and the first to conceive of, and advocate HOT lanes as a pilot test vehicle for congestion pricing in an area where they would otherwise be politically unthinkable. "Road Use Charges and Jitneys: Some Thoughts on How to Introduce Them to Los Angeles," Rose Institute, CMC, July 1976.

HOT lanes weren’t very thinkable then either. They were dismissed on the spot as impractical by then California Transportation Secretary Adriana Gianturco. But I later managed to get them endorsed by a consortium of environmental groups in 1982, by the South Coast Air Quality Management District Advisory Council in 1983, by the California Legislature in 1986, by Congress in 1990-91, and by the Southern California REACH Task Force and SCAG in 1997. The first HOT lanes in the world opened on California SR 91 in 1995, the second on I-15 in 1996. Both have been a hit with users, greatly reducing the resistance to HOT lanes in REACH and SCAG planning documents. SCAG’s 1998 DRTP now calls for two more HOT lane projects (p. I-21).

f) Smog charges. I did not discover these, either, but I have advocated them since setting foot in California 30 years ago and have done more than most to get them adapted and deployed as a smog-control weapon in the Los Angeles Basin. "Full-Cost Emissions Charges for the South Coast Basin," 7 The Environmental Professional 49 (1985) was the most influential of several papers on the subject. The SCAQMD’s Advisory Council recommended them unanimously in the mid-1980’s, got a $10,000 study and several big UCLA conferences devoted to them, and eventually put them forward as a preferred alternative to a well-considered tradable-emissions permits strategy designed by Stanford’s Roger Noll. Either his or my market strategy would have been a great improvement over the command-and-control strategies they replaced. Neither would have happened if my Coalition for Clean Air (of which I was president at the time) had not gotten California State Senator Robert Presley to authorize both alternatives in a bill overhauling California’s clean air regulatory structure. Neither would have happened if we had not gotten U.S. Congressman Henry Waxman to authorize both alternatives in the Federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. In the end, the District chose Roger’s strategy, of having the regulator set the permissible tonnage of pollution rights and the market the price, over mine, which had the regulator set the price and the market the tonnage. The District’s RECLAIM program controls as much Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx) as the old command-and-control program it replaced, but cut estimated control costs of by two-thirds overnight. We have yet to see what will happen when the allowable levels get ratcheted down far enough to drive the prices up again, but we should find this out in a few more years.

) The Shakespeare Claimants. My work with Valenza and the Shakespeare Clinic has gotten more international media coverage than any of my other work. We got feature coverage from ABC, NBC, Japan and Korean Broadcasting Companies, NHK, the Japan Educational TV Network, the Voice of America, Radio Canada, Radio New Zealand; Science Magazine; the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, 160 other American newpapers; the Times of London; La Repubblica Mercurio, Rome; and the Johannesburg Citizen. We reached more than 75 million readers or viewers and got about $1.3 million worth of free publicity for CMC in 1990-91. This year NHK claims (probably falsely by an order of magnitude) that they will reach 100 million viewers. But it is still an open question whether we changed any minds. We can hardly claim to have changed the thinking of lit-department Shakespeare authorities on the question of whether the Earl of Oxford, Bacon, or 35 other testable "claimants" actually wrote Shakespeare’s poems and plays. No lit department professional that I know of believes that any of the claimants could possibly have done such a thing. Nor have we changed many minds among anti-Stratfordians. Most of them are still convinced it was one of their claimants, not William Shakspere of Stratford, who wrote the Canon. Thousands of books and articles have been written on this subject outside of lit departments, and they are still pouring out, most of them with no mention of our work. Moreover, Valenza and I have many times said that our work was too novel, too wholesale, and too heavily reliant on computers to be the last word on these and other perennial authorship questions. We still expect some attrition from people who examine the same texts at retail, using conventional, as well as computer evidence.

Nevertheless, I think the case we have made against the tested claimants is even stronger than the cases I once made against criminal rehabilitation and rapid rail. Much of our work has been out now for nine years. It has been reviewed as "one of the three best [of 500 authorship studies] in the field." It has also been vigorously, but unsuccessfully, attacked by some leading authorship black belts. In some ways the attacks have told us more than the encomia about the solidity and validity of our findings. When the dust settled, total attrition of our "final" 1996/97 results turned out to be astonishingly low, about a tenth of a percent, and we had so much "overkill" in our play test results that a third of them could be completely nullified and still not change the remaining tests’ 100% acceptance of core Shakespeare and 100% rejection of non-Shakespeare. Two-thirds could be nullified, and we would still have 100% Shakespeare acceptance and 95% non-Shakespeare rejection. To someone with my training in the adversary process this is encouraging news. The more strenuous, probing, black-belt scrutiny we survive, the more likely it seems that we have gotten most of it right. Only time will tell whether, as with the political reforms and the smog/transportation insights discussed above, our conclusions become widely held, and, if so, whether it is our evidence or someone else’s that carries the day. But the evidence is at least in place, and to me it still seems very strong. None of the 37 claimants we tested could be the True Shakespeare.

h) Funeral Elegy by W.S. and the Shakespeare Apocrypha/Dubitanda. Our findings on poems and plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha and Dubitanda should be of greater interest to lit departments regulars than our findings on the claimants because the regulars do differ among themselves over these. For the Dubitanda (plays in the Canon which might not be by Shakespeare), the most interesting cases are A Lover’s Complaint (LC), Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI, Part III. Our tests suggest that the two plays are co-authored by Shakespeare and someone else, and that LC is probably written by someone else, though the case against it is not as strong as the case against the Funeral Elegy. For the Apocrypha (plays outside the Canon which might be by Shakespeare), the most interesting texts are Funeral Elegy by W.S. and Edward III. Both of these have been welcomed into the Shakespeare Canon by all three American editors as possibly Shakespeare’s.

Some British editors accept Edward III as possibly Shakespeare’s; some do not. No British scholar accepts the Elegy. Our tests say that Edward III, even its most Shakespeare-like scenes, is by someone other than Shakespeare, and that the Elegy is 3,000 times more likely to have been written by Jacobean playwright John Ford than by Shakespeare. Our thoughts on the Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint appeared in the top Shakespeare journal and were described as "interesting and useful" by the Number One American Shakespeare editor, G. Blakemore Evans, and "lucid and unusually persuasive" by Number Two, David Bevington. It remains to be seen how they affect the profession as a whole. The Ford paper is still under preparation. It looks persuasive to me and has been highly praised in draft form by Brian Vickers, a top British Shakespeare pro. But we are probably at least three years away from knowing whether and how it changes the perceptions of Shakespeare regulars at large.

From the Shakespeare and population studies, very little. From the others, quite a bit. The Rose Institute exists primarily as a counter to hoggish redistricting moves by Phil Burton, Richard Alatorre, Willie Brown, and other top Democratic mapmakers in California. These succeeded in preserving 98% of incumbents in the California Legislature throughout the 1980’s, in giving the Democrats half again as many seats per vote as the Republicans, and in giving Democrats control of the California delegation to Congress in three elections where the Republicans won more than half of the popular vote. As discussed above, they also polarized the parties, soured the legislature and stalled its productivity, and drove people to using initiatives to get anything done. Alan Heslop has fought these trends for 25 years and won some impressive victories. Willie Brown and many other once-protected incumbents are out of the legislature; gerrymandering is far less blatant and intrusive than it was not long ago; and the districting process is now much more even-handed than it was before. Heslop deserves the credit for this, not I, but I was the one who first systematically explored reapportionment’s bad side effects.

California and every other state have abandoned rehabilitation as the central goal of their prison systems and now settle for punishment and incapacitation. Grandiose rapid rail boondoggles for L.A. have been drastically scaled back. Two HOT lanes, once unthinkable, are now up and running, the first of their kind in the world, and the powerful REACH Task Force has asked for two more in the short run, plus congestion charges in the long run. The Los Angeles area now relies primarily on economic incentives to control some stationary-source pollution, another first. First-stage smog alerts in the L.A. Basin are now down from 150+ when I first arrived, to one and seven, respectively, in 1997 and 1998, even though the population in the Basin has been growing faster than India’s. These reductions have more to do with long-ago command-and-control regulations, such as cleaner new cars and reformulated gasoline, than with new economic incentives, but, as president or vice-president of the Coalition for Clean Air from 1971 to 1986, I had a hand in many of these, too.

I suppose I had at least a prophetic role for most of these developments, and maybe a bit more than a prophetic role for RECLAIM, smog control, and HOT lanes.

4. What discoveries have you made?

I claim my share of these, both conceptual and empirical. A short list of conceptual discoveries would include my distinction between organic and mechanistic social perceptions, the Guardian Ethic, and Elliott’s laws. Organic perspectives are tribalistic, familial, communitarian, complex, and concrete; mechanistic ones are individualistic, universalistic, simple, and abstract. Burke and Aristotle were organicists; Hobbes and Bentham mechanists. We learn organic perspectives at our mother’s knee, mechanistic ones in school and at markets. You need both to make sense of most social questions. I make more use of the distinction than most other social scientists do today (Guardian Democracy, 196-209). The Guardian Ethic is a set of preferences, more mechanistic than organicist, which I believe better explains the Supreme Court’s intervention in voting rights cases in the 1960’s and 1970’s than other constitutional doctrines (Guardian Democracy, Ch. 1). It also anticipated the notion of PC by more than a decade (Guardian Democracy, p. 11) and helps explain why social scientists of the time were highly attentive to some things and oblivious to others. It presumed that modern was better than traditional, action better than inaction, standard better than special, and expert better than amateur.

Many of Elliott’s laws are tongue-in-cheek, but some of them could count as discoveries, for example: "If assumptions were horses, economists would ride;" or "You’re only middle-aged once." I suppose HOT lanes and many of the 54 tests we used on Shakespeare could be described as conceptual discoveries.

Among my empirical discoveries I count the following:

a) That reapportionment did not do what most political scientists said it would do.

b) That high-tech, therapeutic "Swedish" methods don’t deter recidivism any better than low-tech, punitive "Arkansas" methods.

c) That most new U.S. rapid rail projects have been costly boondoggles.

d) That congestion charges would control much more smog and congestion, at far less expense, than rapid rail and most command-and-control smog strategies. Same for smog charges.

e) That HOT lanes are the most promising way to get to congestion charges.

f) That none of the testable Shakespeare claimants, and none of the poems or plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha match Shakespeare’s known works.

g) I was also among the first, in January 1991, to raise (privately with some AIDS experts) the awkward question whether treating HIV without fully curing the patient (as was hoped of AZT then and actually seems to be happening now with protease inhibitors) would save more years of life by prolonging the life of the patient than it would cost by prolonging the life of HIV patient-vectors to continue spreading the virus. In the following months I asked this question of six leading epidemiologists and got the same response: "That’s a very interesting question, but no one would dare try to answer it." The answer is still not clear, but I soon learned that three top epidemiologists had, in fact, attempted to calculate an answer. Anderson, Gupta, and May published a letter in Nature in March 1991 concluding that, if HIV infectivity were constant (we now know that it is not), the answer to my question would probably be no. Under their simplified assumptions, prolonging the patient-vector’s life would subtract more years from the lives of the vector’s contacts than it would add to the life of the patient.

h) I was also, in "The Peacock Syndrome: Barriers to Economic Development in Egypt," (1968), among the first to challenge the notion, which seemed universal among my Harvard mentors, that massive foreign aid to third-world countries would do for them what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe.

5. Summary.

Disparate as these impacts and discoveries may be, they do have something in common. Almost all are in much-studied topical areas. Many are outside the field of political science, narrowly defined. Most were contrarian and highly controversial when first published. They at least started outside the pale of prevailing scholarly convention. Many have since been embraced by changing scholarly convention, seldom because I was persuasive, often because someone else was persuasive or because subsequent events have proven persuasive. I was put on earth to discover, not to persuade. Nevertheless, in 30 years of hindsight, most of the discoveries have turned out to be true, and a lot of persuasion got done somehow, usually (though not always) by someone else. On balance, I do think we have gotten quite a bit closer to the truth of some major questions than we were when I started.

5. What can you tell us about the scholarship of CMC students and alumni?

Many CMC students have written books. Of my own, Gregg Vanourek; Bill Walter; Tom Neff; Hugh Hallman, John Zvesper, Dion Scott-Kakures, Jeffrey Macy, and David Waterhouse come to mind. Others would include Terry O’Rourke, Ken Masugi, Tibor Machan, Patrick Riley, Orley Ashenfelter, Yuen Foong Khong, Sombat Chantornvong, George Otte, Mark Runco, Craig Evans, Aaron Fuller, Edward Marshall, William Woods, Kurt Ritter, Steven Boyd. There are many more in the Rose Institute’s alumni poll, but the poll was anonymous, so none of them can be easily identified. It hasn’t produced a book, yet, but I consider the Shakespeare Clinic "link" a major student-driven scholarly project which has made large and lasting changes in the field of Shakespeare authorship studies.