You can pass public policy in your state, your county, and your city. This is very important to do because of the issue of civic capacity. We need to increase the civic capacity, and I need to talk about the Curley Effect.
This is not about The Three Stooges with Larry, Curly, and Moe. This is about Mayor Curley of Boston, and I have to give full credit here to two professors from Harvard who came up with the formula here, which is like seven pages of higher math calculus.
What Mayor Curley did was he created an environment that was hospitable only to the people who would vote for him. And he purposefully drove out of Boston all who would oppose him. And in doing so he created that environment. Now keep this in mind: that as you’re dealing with elected officials, subconsciously this is going through their heads.
Here’s another data point that you always want to remember. They did this analysis a few years ago, and they looked at 614 elected officials in Great Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They looked at their careers. Of the 614, four of them left office on their own terms in their own manner.
The rest of them were defeated, driven from office, scandalized, died in office, one of those other things. Why anybody would ever want to run for a political office, I have no idea, but the American Association of Recovering Politicians meets on alternate Tuesday nights in the basement of any Methodist Church. Please stop by.
But seriously, there are a lot of ways you can effect policy, and I think the most effective way to do it is with breakfast.
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