Pete Guither has had some fairly harsh things to say about academic drug policy work in general and about me in particular. But - somewhat to his surprise - he’s pretty pleased with Marijuana Legalization. It’s good to know that our effort to produce a fair-minded (not an artificially “balanced”) view of the evidence has been appreciated.
Pete Guither has had some fairly harsh things to say about academic drug policy work in general and about me in particular. Â But - somewhat to his surprise - he’s pretty pleased with Marijuana Legalization. It’s good to know that our effort to produce a fair-minded (not an artificially “balanced”) view of the evidence has been appreciated.
On the other hand, Guither picks out two passages - one about the value of liberty, the other about the limits of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” - and tells his readers that:
It seems clear that those two passages were written by different authors.
The book is a completely collaborative product: each author read and edited every chapter, more than once. But, as it happens, both of the passages in question originated on my keyboard.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
I’m now past collaborative work, but I’m curious how you managed the editing workflow. Multiple drafts of a big document circulating electronically and edited by different hands is a recipe for chaos. Did you rely on clever workgroup software or old-fashioned benevolent despotism?
Is this taught in graduate schools? Perhaps it should be. Outside the classroom, most real work is teamwork.
Good question. No fancy software needed. First step was to write out about 150 questions, divided into 15 chapters. Each chapter was a Word document, exchanged as email attachments. We divided up the initial drafting by chapters: Jon put together a spreadsheet and sent it around for people to volunteer to take individual chapters and assign themselves due-dates, and also to volunteer to act as first or second reviewers on chapters they weren’t signing up to draft. In a few cases a chapter writer asked someone else to handle one or two of the questions. The first circulated draft would have a filename of the form CH1MK05-14: chapter number, author’s initials, and date. Then “version control” passed to the first reviewer, who would mark up the document in “track changes,” assign it a new filename (CH1JConMK6-01), and send it back to the drafter for review. Points of disagreement were flagged for email discussion by the whole group, with the final resolution up to the drafter. (It helped that everyone was very accommodating.) The result went out, with a new filename, to the second reviewer, and the process was repeated. Then the chapters were assembled into a full manuscript, and each of us in turn read the whole thing again.
The key to keeping this is the idea of “version control.” SOMEONE always has charge of each document, and no one else messes with it until version control passes on, and each version’s filename tells you who did it and when.
Implementing version control like this takes a tremendous amount of discipline. Well done. In software development we have rich VC toolsets allowing many users to operate independently on any part of any file and pretty astounding algorithms that merge these often with no intervention. We can generate a “blame” view that shows precisely who changed what last and when.
Distributed benevolent despotism!
Your secret seems in part to have been that systematic review was done in pairs, with only selected “points of disagreement” referred to the whole group.
You can get software to help. The bloated size of a Word document compared to a text file is largely due to its elaborate tracking of changes, which is invisible unless you dig hard.
When I was in Strasbourg, the ECHR - which managed to establish its independence from the unresponsive main Council of Europe IT unit - set up an elaborate version control system based on the Word document format for its key products, decisions on admissibility and judgements. SFIK the case file manager is the Secretariat official, so drafts and edits by members of the Court have to go through him or her. I imagine SCOTUS must use something similar, especially as the situation gets complicated with joint opinions and judgements. The technology does shift power slightly in the direction of the bureaucracy of clerks and officials who control and understand it.