A Five-Dollar Solution to Government

The technologist’s fear of appearing ignorant about Congress didn’t stop him.

James D’Angelo 2019

On November 3rd, 2014, the same day as he received a first-prize award at MIT for a blockchain-based solution to climate change, James D’Angelo released a video about Congress – something he knew little-to-nothing about.

In the piece, he claimed that nearly all of our modern problems with government had their origins in an overlooked congressional reorganization act which came into effect in 1971. More absurdly, he explained they could all be fixed with a five-dollar cardboard box.

“I should not be the one doing this. I am completely unqualified,” he said when I interviewed him in a shopping mall in Uganda in September of 2018. “I was even more unqualified back then, when I launched that video. I mean, come on, when I started looking at Congress and their sad response to inequality and climate change, I barely knew the difference between the Senate and the House. And here I was claiming I had figured it all out.”

I should not be the one doing this. I am completely unqualified.

Outside of some youthful anger directed at the U.S. war in Iraq etc, James’ history with civics education or Congress was near zero. He managed to avoid government classes in high school. And in university he studied electrical engineering and biology.

Receiving his his Masters in EE in 1990 he launched immediately into a NASA project focused on collecting better data on the sun. There he worked with an old cadre of MIT professors who had cut their teeth on the Voyager projects. In 1995, his NASA project launched carrying with it James’ newly designed Analog-to-Digital converter for space applications.

Since then, he has worked on dozens of research projects in the tech world with the occasional forays into biology. And his 2013 work on a decentralized, software-based identity system for refugees got considerable attention by folks at the UN.

”Refugees suffer from having no reliable form of identity. This hurts them when they show up at camps, seek medical attention or look to emigrate elsewhere. Often, because of the lack of a good id system, the victims of violence are indistinguishable from the perpetrators.”

But when James’ son, Enrico, was born in 2011, everything changed.

James ponders that moment. At 53-years-old, he still sports thick black hair and an athletic build, but any confusion on his age is betrayed by the thick shocks of gray in his beard. He pulls a sip off his large iced coffee. Legs crossed, hands gesticulating, he is dressed in army shorts, a black T-shirt and a Fenway-park baseball cap.

“When Enrico was born, suddenly everything had much more urgency. Climate change was more urgent. Partisan anger was urgent. Income inequality was terrifying.”

This terror drove him to begin a pattern of going on long walks – his iPod loaded with audio books. “I felt like an idiot, but I had to attack these issues with government. I listened to books by the right and the left. I read Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria, Niall Furgusen, Elizabeth Warren, Norm Ornstein, anything. But wow, because I knew so little about government and economics, a lot of that stuff made no sense to me. It made me ADD about the whole thing. I’d start one book, get lost, and then get terrified and then start another.”

But to him, one peculiar pattern began to emerge. “In the first chapter of all of these books I started to hear a familiar refrain: ‘Something happened in the seventies...’”

Harvard Talk with David King 2016 - Pitfalls of Transparency

“For months, I kept hearing it. Elizabeth Warren talked about how male wages stagnated in the 1970s. Reich talked about inequality. Stiglitz talked about government ineffectiveness. Hacker and Pierson talked about amnesia. Drutman talked about the rise in lobbying, etcetera.”

And then one day as I was walking around the reservoir in Brookline, it all hit me like flash. I literally got goosebumps. I had read years before that Congress had switched from closed voting to open voting in the early 1970s. And I remember back then being blown away that I had never heard that before. As ignorant as I was about government, I found the notion of voting publicly scary.”

James’ eyes light up as he recalls the moment it all dawned on him.

“My first reaction was that if I was a member of Congress and I was voting in front of the TV cameras, I would be afraid to vote against the wishes of my friends or my family.”

“But then I thought about the pressures of interest groups, kings, president’s, lobbyists, etcetera. I stopped in the middle of my walk. I pulled of my headphones and I thought: ‘What if that single change did all of this? What if all of these problems from the 1970s are caused by transparency?”

Legislative accountability benefits the powerful.

“I downloaded everything I could find on the sunshine reforms. But there was so little. When I started, I was sure that someone had written this all up into a clear paper. I was sure that I’d find something that said something like ‘Transparency causes Inequality’ or ‘The Sunshine Reforms are Driving Climate Change.’ But there was nothing like that anywhere.”

“But the more I looked, the more evidence I found. The correlations are striking. The reports are dead on. Its really remarkable.”

A couple months later, the technologist put all of his research and claims into a video, but he was afraid to launch it.

“I had shown the piece to friends for a couple weeks and they all liked it. But none of them were experts on Congress. In my mind I was certain I had missed something – I had to be wrong.”

His fears certainly stemmed from the innate controversy of his claims. The solution that James saw was to push back on a sacred institution of democratic government – transparency. To him, the way to curb the undo influence of special interests was, to make Congress darker not brighter. He was advocating for smoke filled rooms and closed doors.

On the day of the launch, I sat there with my finger on my mouse, ready to delete the video. I was sure my feed would be flooded with comments about how stupid I was.”

“But it was mind-blowing. The video quickly became the most popular video on my channel and the comments were overwhelmingly supportive.”

The video, titled “The Cardboard Box Reform” is now just 500 views short of a hundred thousand. And it has generated almost two-thousand likes and just thirty down-votes.

“Clearly the success of the video encouraged me. It inspired me to dig deeper, research more and find out if I was really right or wrong. It also led me to seek out congressional scholars, and the only living scholar I could find who had written about the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act was just down the street for me. David King was alive and working at Harvard.”

James recounts his first meeting with the Harvard scholar. “I think we became partners in five minutes. He slapped his head and said ‘oh man, I thought this public voting might cause a problem.‘”

“With David on board, things really cooked. But it wasn’t for another year that all the pieces started to fall into place. We could started to understand the weaponization, the gamesmanship, and perhaps most importantly, the single notion that legislative accountability benefits the powerful.