Public Problems

Season 3 Episode #11: On Overpopulation In US Prisons by Justin Bullock

“Welcome to the, Decision Making in Public Service course. My name is Justin Bullock and I will be the professor for this course

I have been very much looking forward to this course and preparing these lectures. Decision making is a topic that I have been fascinated with since grad school and up through my latest research in artificial intelligence. How and why decisions are made and how this process impacts public service and public servants

While I will give you a broad introduction lecture at the beginning of this course, much of the content of the lectures will be wrestling with and discussing the material from the four books that have been selected for this course.

These four books are also used to broadly structure the course. The first book that we will cover is Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. I would also recommend Ray Kurzweil’s How to create a mind: the secret of human thought revealed. Your brain structures your mind and who you identify yourself and how you make decisions, so we begin with developing a better understanding of what neuroscience and philosophy have to tell us about us, the individual decision maker.

We move from here to an extended treatment of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It is here where the worlds of economics, psychology, and decision-making crash into one another. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel prize winning economist and does a wonderful job conveying much of his life’s work in this wonderful book. You will be introduced to system I and system II thinking, how systematically irrational and biased we are, how this has consequences for decision making, and much much more

From here we incorporate machines into the decision-making conversation, as machine intelligence or artificial intelligence has continued to develop and substitute for human intelligence. For this treatment, we will read Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, which is a serious treatise on the decision-making space and how artificial intelligence performs in comparison to human intelligence and what that looks like. I will also pull from some of my own work with co-authors on this topic and how it influences public service decision making

Finally, we turn to the concept of administrative evil, and here we turn from individual behavior or market behavior to more specifically some of the factors or organizations that lead them to engage in behavior that needlessly harms people, or as Danny Balfour and Guy Adams put it in their book, administrative evil. This concept looks at how some of the factors that influence individual decision making can be broadly influence by professional norms, tribal identities, and dehumanization. It is at this level, that the role of decision making becomes unmistakably important in the delivery of public services

I intend to publish a lecture just before each class. For those of you taking the course, the expectation is that you listen to the lecture before class and come prepared to discuss the content along with the assigned readings for class that week. For those of you following along who are not taking the course. I hope you enjoy the content as well!

I will be publishing the first lecture on decision making which will be called Decision Making: Basic Concepts later this week. For the in-person students, you will need to listen to this as well before our first class. My general plan moving forward is to release the lecture on Sundays.

I hope you enjoy the lectures on decision making! Thanks for your time. “

Season 3 Episode #10: On Inequality of Funding in Public K-12 Education.

Thank you to Jaycee Jones, Blane Counsil, Morgan Seekatz, Michael Migaud,and Austin Reed for your work on this one.

I love it when we get to argue for better education. I've never found a compelling argument against improving education. The important question is how?

And for that question, this episode is worth a listen.

Enjoy!

In the latest episode of The Bush School of Government & Public Service's podcast, Bush School Uncorked, Justin Bullock and Gregory Gause, along with panelist Ann Bowman, host Will Brown and Kenny Taylor from the Center for Nonprofits & Philanthropy at the Bush School for a discussion on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.

A wonderful conversation is had about the role of nonprofits in modern society, questions of democratic accountability and gaps in service delivery, and the work the Center for Nonprofits & Philanthropy at the Bush School is doing locally, throughout the state, and globally.

Enjoy!

In this episode of Bush School Uncorked, Professors Gregory Gause and Justin Bullock provide some reflections on the 2018 US Midterms. The conversation was recorded mid-afternoon on Wednesday, November 7th, 2018.

Enjoy!

You can find a transcript for this episode and all our Bush School Uncorked episodes at: http://bush.tamu.edu/podcast.

In this episode of Bush School Uncorked, Professors Gregory Gause and Justin Bullock discuss democracy and democratic erosion with Professor Jessica Gottlieb. Professor Gottlieb is an expert in developing democracies, much of her work focuses on understanding how young democracies, throughout Africa, engage in governance activities. She is also currently engaged in a cross-university teaching collaboration at http://democratic-erosion.com/ which examines the prevalence of democratic erosion throughout the world.

The conversation touches on many facets of democracy that you may find interesting.

Many thanks to Professor Jessica Gottlieb for her time and the conversation!

Enjoy!

In this episode, Bush School Professors, Justin Bullock and Greg Gause host Professors Lori Taylor and Ann Bowman to discuss education, education policy in Texas, issue concerning state governance, and the upcoming elections.

Enjoy!

You can find a transcript for this episode and all our Bush School Uncorked episodes at: http://bush.tamu.edu/podcast.

On October 16th, Gregory Gause and Justin Bullock, with guest Raymond Robertson recorded the first episode of a new podcast sponsored by The Bush School of Government & Public Service, called “Bush School Uncorked.”

Professor Robertson schooled the hosts in the recently negotiated trade agreement, USMCA. We then explored the important world of trade and its impact on markets, countries, and individual humans.

Following Professor Robertson’s lessons in trade and empirical evidence, the conversation broadened to trade with other countries and other current conflicts on the global stage.

Given recent events, and our resident Saudi Arabia expert at the table, Professor Gregory Gause, the conversation inevitably turned to the killing of Washington Post reporter, Jamal Khashoggi.

The panel also discussed foreign policy tactics, the use of bullying techniques on friends and allies, and the cozying up to autocratic leaders.

The conversation was wonderful.

More episodes to come.

You can find a transcript for this episode and all our Bush School Uncorked episodes at: http://bush.tamu.edu/podcast.

In this teaser, Professors Justin Bullock and Gregory Gause introduce a new podcast, sponsored by The Bush School of Government & Public Service, called "Bush School Uncorked."

Thanks again for following along in 2018! Happy New Year! Check out this episode for a brief reflection on 2018 and several updates for 2019

Here are the links to events mentioned in this episode:

Bush School Uncorked Live Recording: https://www.facebook.com/events/302964363672881/

Book Club Event Page:

https://www.facebook.com/events/331158434346206/