There’s lots of debate about whether the economic crisis is over. One reason the debate doesn’t get resolved is that we don’t have a clear conception of an economy doing well (though we sort of know bad, at least when we see it in extreme forms).

Somewhat disturbingly, what passes for economic news often focuses not on the state of the economy but on the state of stock markets. This isn’t irrelevant to the performance of the economy but it’s not a direct indicator either. It’s a reflection of how the future looks to investors and traders. And the future they consider isn’t so much the overall performance of the economy as the potential profits their investments can earn.

What’s most often taken as an index of overall economic performance is growth. It’s generally held to be bad when an economy gets smaller, good when it expands. We have various indicators that try to measure growth. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most familiar. Most economists define a recession in terms of shrinking GDP. There’s no consensus on how much the GDP has to shrink and for how long. And there are lots of competing measures. The International Monetary Fund even says that there doesn’t have to be actual shrinkage, global growth of less than 3% per year makes a recession. Then there’s the even vaguer question of what makes the difference between a recession and a depression. The short answer: depression is worse. Or in joke form: it’s recession if it affects someone else, it’s depression if it affects you.

It’s odd to have this vagueness in public discourse about economic issues when the research discipline itself is devoted to mathematical precision. But the problem doesn’t really lie in problems with this pursuit of precision. It lies in failure to ask other questions – and here it is not just economists who are culpable but all of us.

We have grown accustomed to thinking the main question about the economy is simply “up or down?”  But even if we knew for sure what to measure, growth could at best be only an aspect of economic success. It doesn’t tell us whether an economy is creating jobs, distributing wealth equitably, or providing public goods as well as private ones. It doesn’t tell us whether economic activity in a country is primarily benefitting people there, investors elsewhere, or middlemen between the two. It doesn’t tell us about risk or stability. And this is even without considering the possibility that growth – at least in many forms – is actively bad, destroying possibilities for an ecologically sustainable future or simply piling up too much “illth” alongside wealth.

We need a public conversation about what we want and can reasonably expect from the economy. If there is to be a new regulatory regime, it should be guided by goals that have been critically and publicly discussed and that go beyond averting disaster and supporting growth. Economists recognize other benchmarks: employment, inflation, productivity, balance of trade, fiscal deficit, the Gini index of inequality. We could set much more explicit performance targets for the economy.

If we think growth is good because it ought to lead to more jobs, then that should guide policy and we should recognize that growth in stock market indices – or even GDP – doesn’t measure it. Some kinds of growth bring jobs, some kinds don’t (even though they may bring profits). From the jobs perspective (among others), industrial production is better than financial speculation. So is providing high quality care for the sick or elderly. We can ask similar questions about, say, housing – whether our goal is simply quality housing or home ownership (perhaps with a low foreclosure rate). Is the economy providing good living spaces or not? Is it better at providing second or third houses for some or good homes for all? The same goes for food – whether we wish to stress the quality of nutrition, the quantity of production, the safety of products, or the environmental impact of different forms of agriculture. We could even ask questions at a higher level of complexity. If we say we value a free enterprise economy because it supports democracy, for example, then shouldn’t we try to measure how well it does so? Is extreme inequality better for democracy than making sure all citizens share in the fruits of economic production?

I’d like to live (and work and invest) in an economy that reduces poverty and provides health care, education, good housing, and good food for most citizens. I’d like an economy that recognizes the dignity and value of work – paying good wages commensurate with both effort and investment in acquiring skills. I’d like an economy in which prudent risk taking is generally rewarded – yes, some capitalists are better than others – and sheer speculation isn’t. I’d like continued technological innovation but also greater care for the environment. But the point isn’t what I’d like. It’s that citizens in general ought to ask what kinds of economic performance they want and ask the government to target investments and regulation towards that, not just toward growth.

It’s odd that in the United States today we taxpayers are making massive payments to support the economy and not having a real discussion about what we want for our money. And much the same is true around the world. Taxpayers who are contributing thousands of dollar a year to Wall Street bailouts and economic stimulus packages are spending lots of time looking for green beans that cost 10 cents less a can and checking out which cable services offer more value for money without really making clear what they want for their much bigger investment in the economy.

Economists and other social scientists have tools for measuring many different kinds of economic performance besides growth. If there is demand for other indicators they can produce them. If there isn’t, the economists will probably keep producing knowledge for corporate clients. Likewise a key regulatory reform would be simply transparency: hedge funds and other investment firms should have to make clear just what they do. The public ought to demand the knowledge to make good decisions about what kinds of economic performance it wants

The short answer is that after 9/11 the Bush administration flailed about trying to find a response to a terrorist threat that would recognize its genuine connection to Islam without becoming anti-Islamic. Clearly they failed, but on the way they tried not just pre-emptive wars but actions against everyone who had given to Islamic charities that according to the US government allowed funds to find their way to “terrorist organizations”. Ramadan gave money to Islamic charities that provided care for Palestinians. The charities gave some funding to Hamas, which is condemned as a terrorist organization for the violent form of its resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestine, but which is also the elected government in Gaza and has long been a provider of medical and other services. Ramadan may or may not have known aid went to Hamas.

There is a knotty local question about how to “constructively engage” Hamas in the pursuit of both peace in the Middle East and humanitarian care for suffering Palestinians. There is a broader question about whether it is helpful to condemn as “terrorist” whole organizations with multiple purposes and projects– Hezbollah is another – rather than condemning specifically terrorist actions as such and working to make sure avenues are open for peaceful social change. But neither of these questions makes sense of actions like blocking visas for the very wide range of peaceful Muslims who make charitable donations – some $940 in Ramadan’s case – to organizations that try to help Palestinians. This sort of action needlessly makes the US appear to be anti-Islamic. It will be a very good thing if the Obama administration puts a stop to the entire policy – now that a court has made clear that due process still applies in Ramadan’s case.

And what of Ramadan himself? He was invited to the US to take up a distinguished professorship at Notre Dame (as well as to attend conferences and other meetings – including by the SSRC). Though he will probably not take up that specific position, we should hope he visits often and joins in both broad ecumenical discussions and dialog with fellow Muslims. Ramadan is commonly described as a reformer and in a strained analogy as the “Muslim Martin Luther”. This makes some want to call him a “moderate Muslim” but although this is meant as a term of praise and acceptance in the West it is ambiguous since it can be read as signaling not just moderation in action, but moderation in faith (as though Islam, or religion in general, is something to be appreciated only in moderate amounts).

My sense of Ramadan is that his faith is strong, but that it is accompanied by recognition of legitimate variation. He stresses that Muslims in Europe (and indeed around the world) reflect formation in different contexts. They accordingly bring different perspectives to the interpretation of common religious texts and traditions. Instead of condemning this as deviation from a revealed truth he regards this as an opportunity to deepen the search for meaning in Muslim scholarship because that demands continual renewal of interpretations of the Qu’ran and other fundamental texts and continued examination of the moral demands of new circumstances. Moreover, there is the opportunity to bring Muslim voices and values into the development of European culture – which is itself not something fixed by any particular past but rather open to renewal or reinvention (even if some Europeans like some Americans prefer rigidity and closure in their relations to cultural heritage). Religion and culture are not identical, Ramadan suggests, but they may be mutually informing. And the same goes for politics, which may be informed by religious sources of moral judgment but should not be organized on the basis of religious criteria for citizenship or dogmatic religious resolutions to political questions.

The US was founded with recognition of internal diversity as well as unity. This was informed by the strong but varied religious roots of the new country as well as from more secular appropriations of Enlightenment thought by some of the Founders. Protestant Christianity came in many forms, as does Islam today. Though some politicians and social movements have recurrently sought more dogmatic closure, American society has long gained strength from its ability to incorporate new and different ideas as it incorporates immigrants and welcomes visitors. I hope the lifting of the ban on Tariq Ramadan suggests a government working now in favor of the balance of unity and diversity rather than in favor of closure rooted in fear. For we are weakened as a people and made dangerous as a world power when we try to think in broad oversimplifications – whether about religions or about global politics.

Related Links:
Closing our borders–closing our minds?

We are disturbed that in the aftermath of the widely disputed election, media that should allow open communication and discussion have been closed down. We are alarmed by reports that students have been attacked, not only when taking part in public protests but even in their dormitories. We know that many professors have risked censure by speaking out and others have stepped down from their positions in protest. We express our solidarity with them.

As an organization committed to scholarly excellence and scientific advancement since 1923, we are well aware of the ways in which political repression can impinge on academic freedom and on the ability of scholars to contribute all they can to the public good. This is an issue in many countries around the world. It is particularly sad in Iran with its rich tradition of intellectual achievement. We hope that all responsible authorities in Iran will work to make sure that scholarship is respected and that scholars have the freedom to communicate openly and without retaliation both among themselves and publicly.

Flourishing humanities fields (including scholarship in fields like cultural anthropology, historical sociology, and human geography) are important in themselves, but also as part of the mix of intellectual perspectives that helps us understand and make sense of science, technology, economic change and social structure. They have a distinctive role not just in academia but also in public knowledge—advanced by museums and films as well as writing and teaching.

In his public comments, Leach has emphasized moving beyond some of the “culture wars” that have dogged the NEH in the past. He is right, for example, to stress both the internal self-understanding of the United States and the understanding of different contexts and connections around the world. Not only is this not an either/or choice, the two necessarily inform each other. And despite publicized clashes, many branches of the humanities have gotten better lately at integrating the national and the international.

Alas, the humanities have declined as a proportion of contemporary universities (and trends in the current fiscal crisis may exacerbate this). The growth has been in professional schools, quasi-professional fields, and parts of scientific and technological research. These are important too, but the humanities play a special role (along with social sciences) in undergraduate teaching, in integrating different branches of intellectual life, and in public communication. Foundation support has dwindled, and not just in art history—partly because many foundations have focused on seeking immediate solutions to practical problems and not broader or deeper understanding. The Mellon Foundation is one of the few that has consistently supported high quality scholarship and creativity in the humanities. Political shifts have made the NEH less consistent, but it is needed now—not just as a general source of financial support, but as an institution that can demonstrate how openness and good judgment can go together, making recognition of quality something distinct from imposition of politically informed taste.

The appointment of Jim Leach suggests that the Obama administration recognizes this. I’m sorry to lose him from the Board of the SSRC (since the President’s conflict of interest rules require him to step down), but he can play a very significant role in this new position.

• Go to lecture write-up.
• Go to YouTube video.
• Download transcript (pdf: 91 pages, 256kb).

Since Obama is a masterful rhetorician, we can expect a story to be woven around the stimulus plan. It isn’t a bad thing that it is seen as relentlessly pragmatic and as containing nods to many different issues and constituencies. Both pragmatism and inclusivity are part of the message to which Obama has committed his presidency. But I want to suggest an important substantive message that is implicit in the stimulus package and explicit in some of Obama’s other statements. He needs to speak clearly about restoring the ideas of the public, and the public good, to centrality in the consideration and implementation of public policy.

Every politician speaks of the public good, of course, and the phrase ‘public policy’ is routine. But in fact, the very idea of the public good has deteriorated as a category in American policy-making. What has replaced it is the notion of larger or smaller aggregations of private goods. But the public good is not simply private goods for the majority of Americans (though there is nothing wrong with more private goods). To be a really meaningful concept, the public good has to refer to benefits we share and which, through being shared, help to constitute us as a public or, as an older term has it, a commonwealth.

The notion of commonwealth once flourished, especially in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to call attention to the possibility that society was made by its members for their common benefit—a benefit they could not enjoy simply as private individuals. Its meaning overlapped the ideal of public good, including the Roman notion of res publica: the idea of public matters or things that gave us the word “republic” and from the Renaissance on, a whole republican tradition of civic responsibility and participation. This tradition did not deny the significance of private property or limits on the intrusion of the state into personal life, but it did emphasize that public life offered an extremely important potential of its own, which private life could not match.

Indeed, private life was often understood in this tradition to be a retreat from public life. It is no accident that our term private derives in part from deprivation, or that it is the lowest rank in armies, by contrast to general. In both ancient Rome and the republican tradition that idealized Rome, private life was seen as incomplete. A statesman might retire to private life when he was old, or when he had lost power, but the idea of being a statesman—and indeed a citizen—centered on public life.

In the remainder of this post, I will address:

• What was so important about public life?
• Why should we care about revitalizing the idea of the public good now?
• What does it have to do with the Obama stimulus plan?

What was so important about public life?

The ideal of the public good needs to be understood with a strong emphasis on what makes a public. And what makes a public is creating goods collectively, sharing them, doing so on the basis of people’s equal citizenship not their personal connections, and being open in our communications. We don’t always live up to this ideal, but it is an important one embedded in our understanding of democracy and indeed of America.

Historically, the first sense of “public” had to do with sharing: the shared activity of citizens in creating institutions and making a collective life, and then sharing in that life. Public participation was a creative act. Through speech and deliberation, through collective choice, citizens made their city or their country. This emphasis on public was not at all anti-individualistic. On the contrary, it was precisely individuals who thought they should have something to say about how public affairs were organized and who entered into public discussion.

It is helpful to see what this idea of public, or the republic, was opposed to. It was opposed to tyranny, first of all, in which decision-making was not shared among citizens. It was opposed to the idea that the state, or political leadership in the state, was simply an exercise of power for selfish ends rather than in pursuit of collective benefits. Later, this notion of governance as a creative process, as making the country, was also important in revolutionary societies like America. The founders of the United States did not believe they should simply inherit social institutions from the past; they thought they should make them. Similarly, many argued that the nation they shared was a result of this common labor, not simply inherited as a matter of common ethnicity. This is one reason why the word commonwealth lives on as the formal name of several American states.

So the first sense of public was that citizens created something that they held in common (and lost if they didn’t collectively maintain it). This could be mundane, like a public park. It could be a marketplace kept clean and safe by public action. It could be roads built for both the convenience of private citizens and the prosperity of a whole city or country. It could also be the institutions of government and collective defense, of education and health care, the honoring of heroes and other ceremonial events, the preservation and advance of a common culture.

The second sense of public is more familiar to us from modern economics, though it wasn’t altogether foreign to older republican thinking. This is the idea that some goods are inherently public because we can only enjoy them if we share them. Or put another way, some goods cost a great deal and are not diminished when they are shared, so it is more rational to share both their cost and their use. Clean air and clean water are good examples, but so are many of the goods government tries to deliver, including national defense and emergency services to respond to catastrophes. Of course you can try to get clean water by buying bottled water rather than using public water systems. But this is monstrously inefficient—both for you as an individual and for society in general. It is no accident that the societies considered more developed and advanced and generally better off are those in which more goods are provided publicly. That you can turn on the tap and get clean water almost anywhere in America or Europe is a basic difference from much of Africa, large parts of Asia, and the rest of the world. It is a public achievement.

There is much debate about which goods are public in this second sense, and also about when it makes sense to provide them privately by individual purchase. Most roads in the United States are public; some of them do charge user fees, but the money goes back into roads not to profit. Toll roads have sometimes been private businesses, however, and some still are. Airports may or may not be fully public. Internet services seldom are. Debates over health care turn largely on this issue. It is possible to pay privately for better health care than others have. But a system based mainly on private provision results not only in inequality but also in higher costs—now perhaps a staggering one-sixth of GDP in the US. Indeed, the costs are so high that even most very well-off citizens can only enjoy high levels of medical care by means of sharing—albeit through insurance rather than more completely public mechanisms.

The third sense of public refers to the fact that politics joins strangers to each other. That is, the bonds created in public life are different from those in families or tight-knit communities. This is more true of large countries than the small cities of the Renaissance. But the point is not just that people have never met but that they are not part of the same smaller groups. The public life of the country involves citizens of different ethnic groups, different religions, different regions, different lifestyles.  Likewise, the public services the government provides are made available to all, impartially, not just to those in charge or those with connections to them, and not just to those who seem familiar but also to those who seem strange to members of the power elite.

We often speak of our whole society as a family or a community. But in fact it isn’t. It is a collection of many families and many communities. These differ from each other. Some seem strange to each other. Yet all are part of the public created by our common government, our shared social institutions, and our relations with each other. The public good is enjoyed in common by these different people. And, importantly, the government relates to each of these people impartially; government officials aren’t supposed to say “I know this person” or “I like that ethnic group”; they are supposed to provide the same services to all, as strangers.

The fourth sense of public is closely related to this. The public good does not exist separate from the discussions citizens have about what they hold to be good. Experts may inform these debates, but what makes the public good public is that citizens can debate it; they can consider not only what is good but which possible goods should have priority. For this reason, it is important for public communication to be open and for the workings of government to be transparent. When public funds are being spent—as in the stimulus package—the ways in which they are spent should be made clear to citizens.

Why should we care about revitalizing the idea of public good now?

The short answer is that there has been a long and concerted campaign on behalf of private property and private interests. We should think first of individual freedom, many have suggested, rather than collective benefits. And then with embarrassing haste they have translated the freedom of persons into the freedom of property, and the freedom of property into arguments against any sort of regulation (even requirements simply to report honestly and accurately what one is doing, say as an investment banker or hedge fund manager).

The argument has been made very effectively that too much emphasis on the public may stifle legitimate private interests. This is indeed something to watch out for, but not a reason to reject all pursuit of public interests (and, really, no one wants to; even strong libertarians see some need for police; the question is where to draw the line). The argument has also been made that each individual should be understood as self-sufficient. This is clearly a mistake. And the argument has been made that our personal interests lie mainly in our private property. This argument needs to be counterbalanced by recognition of all the ways we benefit from effective and fair provision of public goods.

Notice that I snuck the words “effective” and “fair” into the last sentence. The two strongest arguments against focusing on public goods are: 1) that they won’t be provided as effectively as private goods, or that they will be distributed unfairly; 2) so if you want to make sure you get yours, you should rely on private means.

These arguments deserve to be taken seriously. They need to guide anyone seeking to provide public goods. Provision needs to be effective and fair, or citizens will lose faith in what they build in common and try to rely on what they can get for themselves.

But recall that there are some things it is really hard for everyone to acquire individually, or even just through their families’ resources. Take education. For most Americans it is provided at relatively low cost by public—government—institutions. Some people opt out and choose to pay privately. But they almost never pay the full cost of their education. It is a big burden for a family to send a child to a private university, for example, but think how much the burden would grow if that university were not tax exempt? And why is it tax exempt? Because it is understood to provide a public good. What is that public good? It is partly a wider distribution of the private good students gain—notably improved job market chances. And because there is public provision (even in so-called private universities) we insist that universities not be just for insider groups, that they be fair and admit strangers. But the public good of higher education is not just a provision of private benefits. There is a public benefit to having educated, well-trained professionals whose services we will share—nurses, teachers, and doctors, for example. There is a public benefit if education helps to increase prosperity and thereby also reduce crime and otherwise improve the quality of life in our communities. And there is a public benefit to the education of all citizens so that they can join in the collective process of maintaining our society and making it ever better.

It is crucial to see that public goods are not provided only by the government. Charities, religious organizations, nonprofit schools, philanthropic foundations, and social movements may all work to provide public goods. But as important as these are, the government is basic. It is through the government that we create the institutions that most affect all of us. These express something basic about who we are as citizens and what we value.

What does it have to do with the Obama stimulus plan?

And here is both the challenge for President Obama and the opportunity to give greater coherence and richer meaning to the stimulus package—and indeed government programs well beyond the initial stimulus package. We need government to work well and fairly at providing public goods for the American people. There is no solution to the problems we face—including the most basic economic problems—that does not depend on more effective government. Therefore, if we are to have a lasting recovery, and especially if we are to have an economy that provides better for all of its participants, then we need more effective and fairer government.

The stimulus package is, therefore, or at least should be not only an infusion of cash into markets but a beginning to the effort to renew government institutions. This is partly a matter of organizational reform. It is partly a matter of adequate budgets. It is also a matter of articulating the ideal of public service—of creating public goods, helping people to share in them, and making sure they are distributed fairly. It is important to attract young Americans to government and public service, and to inspire both them and those already working for the government with these ideals. Implementation of the stimulus package, and rhetorical descriptions of the stimulus package, should speak directly to these goals.

Moreover, we need the President, along with other leaders, to help make clear what public values guide the government—in the choice of programs and in their administration. This should not be seen as “mere rhetoric” or salesmanship. Public speech is important. Leaders contribute to democracy by articulating values, helping to clarify issues and focusing our attention on choices. Then we the people can better join in deciding what we stand for, what public good defines us.

That’s probably true. But I think that there is another deeper and more valuable silver lining in this cloud of economic disaster. The need for economic stimulus provides an opportunity to demonstrate the value of good government and public service.

America’s need for a major economic stimulus package is widely felt. American markets urgently need an infusion of capital. Growing ranks of unemployed workers urgently need jobs. Both families facing foreclosures and families simply wanting to buy a new home need credit. And yes, banks and Wall Street investors and small American businesses all need that capital, that credit and those workers. So why is the economic stimulus package controversial? Why did every Republican in the House of Representatives vote against it?

Of course simple partisan politics is the first and probably the most important reason. Republicans are desperate to show they still matter, that they don’t have to go along quietly just because the President is popular, the Democrats have a big majority, and the stimulus package has wide popular support.

But many Republicans also voted, I believe, out of real conviction. They voted against the stimulus because they thought it would expand government. The Cato Institute is not running for re-election and it ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times challenging the notion that a stimulus package was really needed. A couple hundred economists signed on.

There are two reasons for this kind of negative response. One is basically an opposition to a stimulus package as such, because it represents a government intervention into the economy. It is impressive that the Cato Institute could find 200 economists who still believe markets are automatically self-correcting—and indeed self-correcting not just in the long-run (when, as Keynes said, we will all be dead) but on a time-scale fast enough that years of massive suffering can be averted. But this is an honest belief, and social scientists can debate whether it is grounded more in empirical evidence or ideology.

Others are not against a stimulus but against this particular package. Some would rather rely more on tax cuts or target the tax cuts more to those who are likely to invest their savings (i.e., the well off). Some would focus more on bailing out specific businesses, whether banks or auto companies. The common ingredients are a desire to get money into markets quickly, and a willingness to rely entirely on the same economic actors and market mechanisms that have been working in a minimally regulated fashion for the last several years.

Instead, the Obama team has chosen a very broad approach to economic stimulus. They are not just printing money, not just opening credit, not just infusing cash to the biggest corporations in America. They are building schools and repairing roads, making health care available to the uninsured, creating jobs, investing in cleaner and more renewable energy, giving tax credits to working families. This is partly a matter of equity—distributing money and opportunity fairly—and it is partly a matter of trying to reach people in personal need as quickly as possible. But it is also a matter of economic policy. Obama and his advisors are trying to promote economic growth by getting cash and capital into the economy by dozens of different routes, not just a few. They are betting that recovery will be more sustainable if it has broad roots than if it is based only on the rescue of troubled corporations and wealthy investors.

But the Obama approach is also based on a belief in public service and effective management of public affairs. It will work only if a wide variety of different government agencies do their work well. It calls for the staff of the Department of Education to do a good job using early childhood education funds to make Head Start work better. It calls for staff of the Department of Energy to do a good job using stimulus funds to promote innovation in new energy sources and in new technologies. It calls for the staff of a range of departments to use stimulus funds to make specific improvements—in housing, in roads, in health care. There is an act of faith in this.

For decades every presidential candidate has run against government. Not only conservative economists but also a range of others have told us there is almost nothing the government can do better than corporations and markets. They have pressed for private schools over public, private prisons, privatization of social security, an approach to private health care that leaves more and more Americans uninsured and doctors working as the agents of insurance companies. This didn’t happen just because markets were effective, it happened because advocates for market fundamentalism were effective in spreading an ideology that said private property should be the basis of all policy, that public values and interests were always derivative or secondary.

That many government programs have been run poorly and that too many government officials have been corrupt has given credence to the accusation. Of course, the corruption may have reached its peak under the Bush administration—which of course spoke the language of small government but actually caused the federal government to grow larger than ever before. And hasn’t there been quite a bit of corruption on Wall Street? Bernard Madoff, of course, but also every investment bank that sold instruments its executives didn’t understand, every commercial bank that hid the toxic loans on its balance sheets, every financial manager who knew the game they were playing could not be sustained but thought he would be smart enough to get out before it collapsed and had no obligation to make his gambling clear to investors?

Here’s an example of a government program being run badly: former Treasury Secretary Paulsen organized the Bush administration’s bailouts of banks so that there would be almost no restrictions on how the money was used. And many banks used the money to pay bonuses to their own high-level staff, more than $18 billion dollars worth.

The Obama administration may yet give more money to those same banks, because bank failures are a bad thing for the public interest. But if the administration is serious about the public interest, it will put conditions on the money, it will put regulations in place, and/or it will demand an ownership stake in the banks.

And this is the issue in every area where money from the stimulus package can be spent: the Obama administration needs to distribute the money in appropriate ways with appropriate conditions. It needs to establish regulations that protect the public interest. And in some cases, it needs to rely on public institutions—like public schools and hospitals.

For these public institutions to work well, they need support. In some cases they need reform. In all cases they need new recruits and new motivation for longtime staff members who have suffered in the years when no one wanted to say anything good about government.

President Obama may help to inspire improvements by calling for change. With his cabinet members he can help to insure improvements by changing the organizational structures and operating practices of government agencies. But it is not just structures and procedures that matter. It is also the ideal of public service itself, and the idea that government should be judged by how well it promotes the public interest. Candidate Obama promised a renewal of public service. In effect, routing stimulus funds through a range of government agencies is making good on this campaign promise as well as his promise to fix economic problems.

President Obama has chosen to put faith in effective government action and invited the American people to do so as well. In the long run this may be just as important as the record-setting size of the stimulus package.

The transition to the Obama administration is a chance to help create a better government — and perhaps a better world. A crucial first step in this is strengthening the knowledge base from which the new government will work. All sorts of knowledge matter, but none more than knowledge of the different cultures, governments, economic institutions, religions, social movements and ideological commitments that shape the actions of both our allies and others, at scales from the local to the national to the global.

To benefit from such knowledge the Obama administration needs to look to researchers, and people with good research-based educations, not only to people with family or business connections to different parts of the world. Amateur knowledge and arbitrary personal experience won’t be sufficient.

One reason amateur knowledge and family connections aren’t enough is that every family comes with different biases. Vacation travel is a superficial source of insight into international affairs and the internal affairs of other nations. No matter how talented and productive a businessperson may be, having concluded a deal with a company in another country doesn’t guarantee a broader or especially a critical grasp of what else is going on in that country. Academic researchers don’t always have more insights than others, but they do have the training to look deeply and systematically at what is going on. Even more importantly, a research community cultivates critical assessments of different claims to truth. It is this invitation to argument based on evidence that most distinguishes a serious research field from the anecdotal knowledge which proliferates in many other settings.

Specialists doing research on the Middle East, for example, knew that trying to base Iraq policy on what a few exiled dissident leaders said was woefully inadequate. But many in the administration found it easier to be charmed by the seeming “authenticity” of Ahmed Chalabi’s personal testimony. That made for bad policy — with dreadful consequences that haven’t ceased.

Despite a recent fashion for abstractions and ambitious but empirically thin models, many researchers learn the languages of the places they study and pay close attention to both their histories and the movements for change that flourish today. This kind of knowledge is crucial. And we have to hope the Obama administration will not neglect it.

There is every reason to think that the Obama administration will be committed to basing its decisions on the best knowledge available. The Obama transition team has consistently emphasized competence in its appointees — including strong education and relevant experience. But recently there has been a furor over one worrying appointment. Many of the best researchers on South Asia have been shocked that the Obama transition team added an Indian-American business leader widely viewed as closely linked to Hindu nationalists. It’s worth reading the letter written by these distinguished researchers — many of them also Indian-American but speaking on the basis of scholarship not simply personal connections or commitments.

I don’t know Sonal Shah and can’t speak to how deeply she shares the Hindu nationalism of many of those with whom she has shared positions of organizational leadership. But I do know that Hindu nationalism is an issue to which the Obama administration needs to pay attention. Islam is not the only religion which produces extremists. There are Jewish and Christian examples as well. And in South Asia Hindu nationalism is every bit as violent as Islamism and every bit as much a threat to peace.

South Asia is just one of the regional contexts in which the Obama administration will face threats to peace. India is just one country but a very large and important one. Hindu nationalism may get less attention because it seems to be “just in India” and thus not a global issue, but that is misleading. Not only are there Hindus elsewhere, but as both terrorism and the financial crisis have been driving home, events in distant places are increasingly linked to each other.

The Obama administration needs experts on India and other specific places. It also needs people who look at issues like nationalism and political violence comparatively, based on both place-specific knowledge and knowledge of global connections. But fortunately, the government doesn’t need to hire all the specialists; America has a wonderful system of universities in which they will continue to work (though the administration would be wise to make sure that context-specific training and research remain active). The most important thing is for those the new administration charges with developing policy to have the attitude that they want the best possible knowledge and the willingness to listen to critical perspectives.

While the situation is complex, the main issue seems to be that print journalism is no longer profitable. The crisis, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience but vanishing advertising, particularly classified. Newspapers are responding by building online platforms that can provide information on demand and adding new (often Web 2.0) services.

Some see great possibilities in more widely dispersed Internet news media. They argue that it offers the potential of new audiences, new ways of storytelling, more immediacy and more citizen involvement. (On the last point, it’s worth noting that during the recent attacks in Mumbai, high-tech citizen journalists provided glimpses of what was taking place that transcended the news cycle.)

Others, however, see a crisis for the public sphere if we no longer have widely shared and authoritative news media. They fear that the move to the Web may lead to a general decline in the scope and quality of journalism, not because the online medium isn’t suited for news, but because it isn’t suited to the kind of profits that underwrite newsgathering.

Either way, the profession and public role of journalism seems to be in transformation. What are the implications for democratic politics, for social cohesion, for checking up on government, and for opportunities for different racial, ethnic, social movements or other constituencies to participate or be better served?