Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  I knew of a council member once who got a call from an elderly constituent asking him to help deal with a dead raccoon. But the animal was in the person’s yard, not quite in the street, where the city would be obligated to take care of it. The rule here was clear: too bad for the homeowner. But that didn’t seem like the right answer for someone who couldn’t handle it on her own. So the council member went to the home, discreetly dragged the carcass into the street, and then called it in so it would be taken care of.

  Obviously this can’t be endorsed as a way of dealing with these problems. But without exceptions to rules, the world would be a colder and probably worse place to live.

  ULTIMATELY, THE RISE OF MORE DATA and technology presents tremendous opportunity for cities to be smarter and more efficient in their operations—and therefore become healthier, safer, better places to live. But after taking office, just as quickly as I learned the power of data, I also learned to be mindful of its limitations, and aware of the problems it will not solve. And I learned to maintain some level of respect for the role of intuition.

  Good intuition, backed by years of experience, can make it possible to sense things—like whether a trash customer is telling the truth when he calls to say you missed a pickup at his house or whether he just forgot to take the trash out—often with remarkable accuracy and sometimes without even being able to explain how it is sensed. There is great power in human pattern recognition, which actually resembles big data analytics in its most important characteristic: the ability to know things without knowing exactly how we know them.

  Often, discussions of performance management gloss over this crucial difference between data analysis in general, and “big data” used with artificial intelligence. Using data in general is nothing new; it is simply the application of factual knowledge to make decisions. As an approach to government, it came as naturally to Alexander of Macedonia as it did to Robert McNamara. For the purposes of using data, the only thing to change with the introduction of computers is that we can gather and apply it more quickly and precisely.

  “Big data” is different. It has the potential to change government, along with the rest of our society and economy, in categorically different ways than the use of data in general. Not everyone may share my definition, but to me the difference is this: Using data means gathering information, understanding it, and applying it. Using big data means analyzing information to find and apply patterns so complex that we may never grasp them.4

  COMPUTERS CAN NOW CRUNCH sets of numbers so vast that the patterns that emerge from them are beyond the reach of the human mind—and yet the patterns can be used. Utilities like our waterworks are beginning to tap into computing capabilities that can accurately predict points of failure in water systems without our truly understanding how the prediction was made—only that it works.

  Ironically, what makes this kind of predictive technology most interesting is that it so closely resembles human intuition. More often than we realize, humans rely heavily on knowing things that we can sense, but not explain. One of the reasons it was impossible, till recently, to program a car to drive itself is that many of the mental processes we use to drive a vehicle cannot easily be defined or described (and therefore cannot be programmed). Like the parks maintenance supervisor or road foreman going through countless decisions in the back of his head, anyone driving a vehicle relies constantly on subconscious pattern recognition. I can’t explain to you how I know the moment when a snowy road has become too slick for normal braking, or whether I am a safe distance from the centerline, or whether I can beat that yellow light. I just know. If I wanted a machine to gain this capacity, I would have to do one of two things: master the precise basis of this knowledge so it could be programmed, or construct a machine capable of learning it the same way I did.

  The latter is becoming possible, and this is the true fascination of artificial intelligence. For government, there are extraordinary implications to a program that could anticipate road failures five years in advance, or predict asthma attacks using linked data sets on hospitalizations, weather, and car emissions to sense patterns so exquisitely complex that we will never understand them.

  Now even explicitly social functions, like gauging how much anger a certain policy proposal will cause, can increasingly be achieved through social media analysis that might eventually outmatch even the finest-tuned human political antennae. The ultimate lie detector won’t be designed, like current ones, by programming known patterns in heart rate and perspiration. It will be designed by machine learning, scanning millions of recordings of people saying true or false things, and using this to make predictions based on combinations of indicators beyond our comprehension.

  The algorithms advance every year. This is why Netflix has a good sense of what films you would like, perhaps even doing a better job of predicting your preferences than you do, if all you have to go by is a trailer and a description. But these capabilities are also still in their infancy. My Internet TV device still sometimes shows me commercials clearly intended for a middle-aged homemaker or a teenage video-game enthusiast.

  And no matter how sophisticated the programs, they will never fully learn our sense of mercy—the rule not to be applied, the efficiency not to be captured. Capable of something resembling intuition but nothing quite like morality, the computers and their programs can only imperfectly replicate the human function we call judgment. Knowing when one valid claim must give way to another, or when a rule must be relaxed in order to do the right thing, is not programmable, if only because it is not completely rational. That’s why, even as reason has partly replaced divine intervention for explaining our world, it will not replace human leadership when it comes to managing it. A person aided by data can make smarter and fairer decisions, but only a person can sense when an unexplainable factor ought to come into play—when, for lack of a better expression, “something is up.” And that, as John Voorde might remind me, has been the job of elected officials all along.

  4 I am aware of taking a liberty with the term “big data,” which is usually defined simply to mean data that cannot be processed without the aid of powerful computers. Here, I am talking about something more distinctive—the subset of big data analytics that involves the discovery and use of patterns beyond our comprehension.

  12

  Brushfire on the Silicon Prairie

  Neither mayors nor governors were in fashion when I was an undergraduate hanging around the Institute of Politics at Harvard. Discussions of nonfederal government were comparatively rare. Among the politically attuned, most eyes were on Washington, keeping tabs on national policy, or on the still-more-alluring arena of foreign affairs. When you did hear about the state or local level, it was usually in a program or study group that fused the two together in the compound phrase “state and local,” pronounced almost as if it were one word, stateandlocal. These dynamics were set in opposition to national politics, and states usually got attention for the tension between them and the federal government, as if state-federal power struggles were all that mattered in federalism. Yet some of the most important policy dynamics of our time have to do with the relationships, and the tension, between state and local government.

  I knew as soon as I took office that it would be important to form a positive relationship with our Republican governor, Mitch Daniels. Daniels was first elected in 2004, when he defeated South Bend’s own Joe Kernan, making him a villain to Democratic partisans around here. A compact man known for a powerful intellect and a temper that could flare up on occasion, he had been a protégé of Senator Dick Lugar and served alternately as a top pharmaceutical executive in Indiana and a Republican White House official.

  By the end of his tenure, Daniels was popular across the state and often mentioned as a presidential prospect for the technocratic center-right. But his first term was marked by intense political battles, in which his greatest nemesis and foil was a Democrat from South Bend, Indiana House Speaker Pat Bauer. Daniel
s’s first major and controversial policy was to lease the Indiana Toll Road, which ran through our northern part of the state, to a private entity and use the money to finance road projects across Indiana. The privatization was unpopular here, and fiercely opposed by the Democrats, led by the old-school Speaker Bauer. When the seventy-five-year lease to a private operator went through, the flow of funds to other parts of the state felt to many here like a poke in the eye. Viewing Daniels about the same way most people in the area did, I had briefly worked for his 2008 opponent, taking a few weeks off from McKinsey to help with policy research, press, and debate preparation—a fact that I hoped would not come to light while I was in the process of reaching out to him.

  But in working on his opponent’s campaign, I also began to realize what had made Daniels a formidable opponent—and such a highly effective governor that some national conservatives saw him as their best hope of challenging President Obama. He was a business-minded technocrat, with very little interest in the social issues that were used to rile up electoral bases in campaign years but left communities divided long after their political usefulness expired. Instead, he was extremely focused on economic issues and interested in making government work well, even achieving the improbable feat of reforming the Bureau of Motor Vehicles into an efficient and user-friendly customer service organization. (Since the BMV is the one state office that virtually every citizen uses, it was also a politically clever thing to do.)

  When I had been campaigning for mayor, a frequent gripe was that the state’s economic development agency had done virtually no deals in the South Bend area since Daniels had become governor. Blame went in all directions. Many believed that we were being punished, that because our northern region was far from Indianapolis and generally voted Democratic, the state government ignored us or even went out of its way to withhold opportunities from us. Others insisted that our woes were of our own making—that South Bend was so unfriendly to business and beholden to labor groups that it was impossible for even the best-intentioned Republican administration in Indianapolis to work with us.

  I didn’t care whose fault it was; I just wanted it to change. And I sensed that the governor might feel the same way. I had no use for the Bush administration of which he had been a part, and he would probably never agree with my full-throated support for public education and organized labor rights. But despite our differences in ideology, it seemed that he and I shared a desire to use data and good management practices to drive better government. And politically, it made sense for him to score economic wins anywhere in the state he could, including our area.

  Eager to work across party lines, I gathered some community and business leaders and invited him to lunch in South Bend. The meeting was genial, and afterward he made some flattering comments to the Tribune for a story that ran with the headline “Governor Likes South Bend’s New Attitude.” We agreed that he and I should be working together to find opportunities, and sure enough, a few weeks later Daniels was back in South Bend, celebrating the expansion of a local steel-box manufacturer with help from state incentives—and an end to the dry spell of state economic development wins in our region.

  It was my first major experience in this kind of bipartisan cooperation. The most important thing I learned was that it has little to do with stretching or changing your beliefs. The governor and I did not persuade one another to become more centrist on any particular issue; rather, we found the areas where we had common goals and stuck to them. Plus, by collaborating on a specific, measured effort, we gained ground in trust and familiarity that would be helpful in the future. But Governor Daniels was in his final year, and I would have to start over again when the 2012 election yielded his successor.

  I had known of Congressman Mike Pence for years, since he was a highly visible figure among the conservative warriors in Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. So when I actually first met him at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2011, I was surprised by how affable, even gentle, he seemed. I was with a group of candidates and elected officials attending the Indy 500, and it was a warm day at the speedway. (Then-reality-television-personality Donald Trump had been set to drive the pace car that day, but had backed out for some unexplained reason.) As we milled around near our seats, someone spotted Pence walking along the concourse to his box and introduced us. Dressed in the politician’s off-duty uniform of a blue oxford shirt and khakis, he very much looked the part: a congressman going to a sporting event. We exchanged some pleasantries, and I didn’t think much of it or expect to see him anytime soon. But a year and a half later, I was sitting in a folding chair in the January sun facing the west front of the Indiana capitol at his invitation, looking through a cloud of my own breath as he took the oath of office and became Indiana’s governor. Afterwards, at a reception for attendees, I caught up to him and mentioned my eagerness to work together to benefit the city. He gave a sincere nod and heartily agreed, and a long and complicated relationship began.

  There is a photo from that spring of 2013 showing me with Mike and Karen Pence in the M.R. Falcons club on the West Side of South Bend. The M.R.’s (not to be confused with the Z.B. Falcons on the Far West Side), is one of those old-fashioned social halls and civic associations that long revolved around working-class civic commitment, neighborhood ties, and Polish identity—hence a major stop for the Dyngus Day experience. Though Dyngus Day, as I described earlier, has traditionally been a Democratic-focused affair, more Republicans have realized its value for mixing it up with regular voters. Responding to my invitation to come to town anytime, the new governor and first lady had decided to experience the sausage, cabbage, and camaraderie firsthand.

  Unfortunately, his office was less responsive to my advice on exactly when to come during the day’s festivities. Local politicians know from experience that it is best to conduct their Dyngus Day activities as early as possible, since the beer, music, and sausage are already going strong at daybreak, and things only get more, well, festive over the course of the day. The Pences turned up in midafternoon, pretty much the peak of the day’s eating—and drinking.

  In the photo, I have my arm around the governor as if he were an old friend. I certainly sought to be a friendly host, but the main reason my hand was at his back was that I was trying urgently to get him out of that room. Not only were the revelers into their revelry, but worse, his detail had dropped him off at the entrance that led to the bar full of some of our younger citizens taking advantage of beer specials, as opposed to the larger room containing the more elderly and sedate visitors enjoying their kielbasa and noodles.

  Retail politics is never fun among the intoxicated. If a voter who doesn’t like you has had a lot to drink, you get an earful. It’s even worse if a voter who does like you has been drinking. The handshakes last way too long, they begin repeating themselves, and it takes a well-practiced art to get away from them and move on to talk to someone else—which is futile anyway, since the same person will find you later and try to have the same conversation. So my immediate concern was to get the governor and first lady out of the bar and into the dining room before they regretted coming altogether; my arm was around him in order to push him, as quickly as a mayor politely could, into the other room.

  I don’t know if it was because of that visit or in spite of it, but the governor seemed to remain determined to be a friend to South Bend. His office was always open to me, and he often appeared in our area for factory tours, ribbon cuttings, and other events, always with something good to say about our city. He even appointed Jim Schellinger, a well-known Democrat and architect originally from South Bend, to chair the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Most helpfully, Pence championed a visionary economic development effort called the Regional Cities Initiative, which helped change how we position our cities for growth.

  The basic idea behind Regional Cities was that economic development is no longer just a game of luring factories—what some call “smokestack chasing”—from other locations, us
ing tax incentives essentially to buy jobs. Instead, at a time when many people first choose where they want to live and then start looking for a job, it makes sense to recruit people, not just employers. The best way to do that is to enhance the appeal of the community, often called “quality of place,” and the initiative’s focus was on supporting projects that would do just that.

  The other main idea of the Regional Cities program was that communities in the same area should work together. For years, cities and towns would view their immediate neighbors as economic rivals, trying to lure jobs across a city limit or county line. But since many workers commute across these boundaries anyway, it does no good to add jobs at the expense of the next town over. If South Bend focused on picking off employers from nearby Elkhart, it wouldn’t matter much to the regional economy. Using tax incentives to achieve this would simply give away revenue while rearranging economic value within the same area.

  Sensibly, some metro areas have entered into economic nonaggression pacts, in which each city promises not to use incentives to lure employers away from its neighbors. But true regional collaboration—proactively working with other cities by sharing resources to grow the economy—was still rare in Indiana. To incentivize better behavior, the state offered a major grant for local economic development work, not to a city but to a region. In order to compete with the funding, all the counties and cities in an area would have to band together, show they could collaborate, and submit a joint application showing how they would share the funds.