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EVERYDAY FREEDOM: A CONVERSATION WITH PHILIP K. HOWARD
GROWING UP AS a minister’s son in eastern Kentucky, Philip K. Howard has been a prominent lawyer and concerned citizen in New York since he arrived via Taft, Yale, and University of Virginia Law School. After working with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, David Rockefeller and Kent Barwick for years on the Municipal Art Society, in 2002 Philip founded Common Good. His current board commitments include The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In the following interview, Howard discusses his views on how best to design the Framework for a Flourishing Society. Jamie MacGuire: How did it happen that a pillar of New York civic life is now 68 QUEST
at the leading edge of public thought on what’s gone wrong with American government? Philip Howard: My civic work led me to witness first-hand what most Americans know: Government isn’t working well. But I didn’t find an epidemic of idiocy among public employees. For example, New York City couldn’t ask for a better mayor than Mike Bloomberg, yet he couldn’t fix many key problems, such as broken schools, because his hands were tied. So I started looking into structural causes of public failure, and seven books later I think I have a pretty good sense of why government works like a badly programmed robot, and how it suffocates
people in their daily choices. JM: Your first book in 1995, The Death of Common Sense, was a huge best-seller. What was its theme? PH: I explained how the aspiration for “clear law” had transformed regulation into a form of central planning—for example, 4,000 worker safety rules made people go through the day with their noses in rulebooks instead of looking out for unsafe situations. This is the government we love to hate—fining people for not having a “material safety data sheet” warning against Joy dishwashing liquid. Whoever wrote all these rules 50 years ago is long gone, so it’s basically democracy by dead people.