The Crux of the Problem….

Yesterday’s discussion of trade agreements generated a number of thoughtful comments. As regular readers know, I rarely “weigh in” to the back-and-forth (for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I have a day job), but I do want to focus in on an observation posted by Pete, because it describes an under-appreciated challenge of modernity that has increasingly been troubling me.

Pete said:

Trade agreements are very complex to even read and comprehend much less determine their impact over time on the greater good. I’m not sure why anyone would believe that they totally understand any of them based on advertising or even real news if you can find it.

That’s why I rely on other professionals like Drs and lawyers for their specialties and why I hope they rely on folks like me to keep wings from falling off airplanes.

It’s the most pernicious of modern myths that we are capable of understanding the intricacies of many many things including international trade.

It isn’t only complex trade agreements. It’s the increasing fragmentation and specialization that characterizes contemporary societies and modernity in general.

The problem, as Pete notes, is that none of us is a polymath capable of independently assessing the credibility of information about our modern environments: whether the airplane has been properly designed, the trade pact adequately protects our interests, the new medication is free of side effects, the scientists are accurately measuring climate change…We have no choice but to depend upon the informed, professional opinions of those who are expert in these various fields.

And right now, most of us don’t trust anyone. Worse, we don’t know how to determine who is expert and trustworthy.

There are a lot of reasons for our pervasive skepticism. Our current “wild west” information landscape is a major one: at the same time that media has made us aware of the myriad ways in which our public institutions have failed us (Enron, the “banksters,” the Catholic Church molestation scandals, major league sports dopers and “deflaters,” government officials…), that same media has itself morphed and fragmented, causing us to lose much of what used to be called the “journalism of verification.”

At the same time that we are positively marinating in “information”–much of it trivial and/or bogus– determining the credibility of that information and the identity and credentials of its source has become challenging if not impossible. We have “news” without context. Even reputable studies and surveys are cherry-picked and distorted. As a result, in areas where we do not possess the historical, scientific or technical knowledge to critically evaluate what we read or hear–which for most of us, is most areas–we simply choose to believe sources that confirm our pre-existing biases.

Even when Pete’s plane flies and the wings don’t fall off, a sizable percentage of us will choose to believe reports that it crashed.

In our internet age, with both information and misinformation ubiquitous, the challenge is to combat propaganda and spin without doing damage to the First Amendment–and to build and monitor trustworthy social institutions and a credible and trusted media. That will require–at the very least–a vastly improved public education system that equips citizens to evaluate the credibility of information sources, and the emergence of a rigorous and ethical journalism.

We don’t seem very committed to either task.

Comments

Beyond the Bumper Stickers

“It’s more complicated than that” is a sentence I probably mutter in my sleep. (My students  think I repeat it on a daily basis, sort of like a mantra.)

In a New York Times op-ed a couple of weeks ago, Miriam Sapiro, who was a deputy U.S. trade representative from 2009 to 2014, addressed one of the many subjects that is more complicated than either free-trade purists or knee-jerk opponents of markets understand, in “What Trump and Sanders Get Wrong About Free Trade.”

After noting that the United States enjoys a 200 billion dollar trade surplus, she points out that unless we continue working to pry open foreign markets for American goods and services, we will have a hard time creating more jobs: Nearly all of the world’s population lives outside our borders.

The Department of Commerce estimates that every increase of $1 billion in exports sustains nearly 6,000 jobs, and that export-related jobs pay on average 18 percent more than jobs focused on the domestic market.

We Americans have an unfortunate tendency toward “either/or” arguments. Trade is good or bad. We are for it or against it. But this is one of those areas in which the question is not–or should not be–yes or no, but how. What distinguishes a good trade agreement from a bad one? How do we ensure an equal playing field? If domestic manufacturers have to abide by rules protecting the environment and ensuring fair labor practices, for example, other parties to these agreements should be bound by similar constraints. All trade agreements are not equal.

And we need to recognize that there are multiple causes of our economic problems.

Rather than blaming international trade for economic woes, we need to have an honest conversation about what the United States must do to strengthen its economy. More than 20 percent of American children today live in poverty. Our educational system, once the envy of the world, now ranks in the bottom half of much of the developed world. The tax system rewards companies that exploit loopholes, infrastructure is crumbling and training programs lack the kind of apprenticeship and credentialing opportunities that Germany and other major economies offer…
Of course it is easier to score points by denouncing trade than to tackle the tough issues, but such demagogy ignores the roots of economic insecurity and inequality.

It’s handy to have a villain to identify, but the emotional satisfaction of identifying someone or some thing as the “bad guy” rarely translates into a solution to the problem at hand.

It is also a mistake to think that positions on trade policy break down along neat party lines. As we learn from Political Animal, 

U.S. Conference of Mayors (which is overwhelmingly Democratic), endorsed TPP. The reason, as Ron Brownstein pointed out, is clear.

New data released May 13 by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program helps explain the mayors’ tilt toward trade…Brookings found that fully 86 percent of U.S. exports now originate from urban areas. Moreover, exports drove more than one-quarter of all metro area economic growth from 2009-2014.

I think it was H.L. Mencken who said “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Comments

Squirrel!

Is it just me, or does the recent rash of anti-LGBT measures remind other people of Finding Nemo?

If memory serves (and at my age, it may not) the “Dory” character would be pursuing a goal when suddenly she would be distracted by something unrelated and unimportant. Her head would swivel, and shouting “squirrel,” she’d forget what she’d been doing and follow the distraction instead.

Sort of like Mississippi, one of the most recent states to enact homophobic legislation.

According to a story in USA Today, Mississippi’s “well-being” scores are abysmal:

Mississippi
> Well-being index score: 63.7
> Life expectancy: 75.0 years (the lowest)
> Percent obese: 35.4% (the highest)
> Median household income: $37,095 (the lowest)
> Percent with high school diploma: 82.3% (3rd lowest)

Nowhere else in the U.S. did people feel as negative about their work environment as in Mississippi. But this was just one of the problems facing state residents. Respondents were among the most likely in the nation to lack access to basic necessities. More than a quarter of people surveyed in the state indicated they did not have money for food at some point in the previous 12 months, while nearly as many lacked money for health care. By a number of measures, the state was one of the absolute poorest in the nation. The median income in Mississippi was just $37,095 in 2012, lowest in the U.S. Also, 24.2% of people lived below the poverty line, more than in any other state. With limited access to basic needs and poor healthy behaviors, the state was among the worst in the nation in physical health assessments. Last year, no state had a higher obesity rate than Mississippi. In 2010, no state had a higher rate of death from heart disease or a lower life expectancy at birth than Mississippi.

So–rather than keeping their eye on the task at hand–which should be ameliorating these appalling negatives–Mississippi’s lawmakers chose to yell “squirrel!” and point to the (nonexistent) menace posed by that state’s gay and transgender citizens.

This actually seems to be a favored tactic in several states, including Mike Pence’s Indiana. (Not very good at governing? Quick–pick a distraction!)

As someone recently noted, the current bathroom hysteria is particularly misdirected, since there is no record of any transgender misbehavior in a public restroom–something you certainly can’t say about Republican lawmakers’ public restroom activities.

In fact, the more we learn about the private conduct of our most homophobic “family values” office-holders, the more interesting it gets: Dennis Hastert (recently convicted of abusing young boys when he was a coach) led the fight against same-sex marriage–not to mention the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for his sexual improprieties. In Alabama, Robert Bentley, another “pious” GOP Governor of a backward state who supports “religious liberty” legislation, is embroiled in a tawdry sex scandal. And so it goes.

What do you do when you’re caught with your pants down–either literally or figuratively?

Squirrel!!

Comments

Surely You Jest….

Evidently, the Indiana GOP has announced that Governor Mike Pence will be running for re-election on his record. Jeff Cardwell, Indiana’s Republican Party Chair, is quoted as saying (presumably with a straight face) “He has a very strong record.”

Well, it certainly smells strong…

The Democrats’ response has been pretty predictable. A media release pointed to several documented aspects of the Governor’s “strong” record: Indiana’s per capita income is 38th in the U.S., thanks in part to repeal of the Common Construction Wage; the damage done by RFRA; Indiana’s rank of 46th in quality of life; Pence’s decisions to decline an 80 million dollar grant for pre-kindergarten, to cut funding for public schools and to wage unremitting war on the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction; his responsibility for Indiana’s infrastructure woes, including poor supervision of contractors that facilitated acceptance of substandard asphalt; his understaffing of DCS that nearly crippled that department while putting vulnerable children at risk; the damage he has done and continues to do to the state’s reputation by rejecting Syrian refugees and signing an insane and punitive anti-abortion bill…

And of course, the Democrats couldn’t resist another mention of JustIN, Pence’s tone-deaf proposal to establish a “news bureau.”

But if you are really interested in seeing the “record” that Mike Pence plans to run on, in all of its fulsome “glory,” you should revisit a recent post from this very blog. I began by listing all the reasons Hoosiers should not re-elect our Pastor-in-Chief, and then I challenged readers to fill in the blanks, to tell me what I had missed.

Forty-two of them did.

Together with the list in my post, the comments provide a pretty comprehensive picture of what Mike Pence has done to Indiana.  (Much more comprehensive than the Democrats’ press release but to be fair, no one would read it if it had been that long.)

This post would also be too long if I included everything listed in the prior post and its comments, but here are just a few that the Democrat’s media advisory left out…

  • He’s made war on Planned Parenthood, denying poor women life-saving health services and facilitating the HIV outbreak in Scott County. Meanwhile, he diverted money from medically-appropriate clinics to “pro life” organizations.
  • He has enthusiastically supported privatized prisons. (Couldn’t have anything to do with campaign contributions, could it?)
  • He refused to expand Medicaid even though the feds were paying for it.
  • He refused to apply for the SNAP time limit waiver, for which Indiana qualified, resulting in benefit cuts to an estimated 65,000 individuals.
  • Vastly increased logging in state forests, among other assaults on the environment….

There’s a lot more in the original, but you get the idea.

Yessiree–a strong record to run on!

Surely, they jest.

Comments

Fascinating!

On the original Star Trek series, when Mr. Spock was confronted with a new and unexpected bit of information, he would raise one Vulcan eyebrow and intone “fascinating.”

I don’t have a Vulcan eyebrow, but “fascinating” was my reaction to a 2013 academic paper written by Johannas Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, with the not-very-sexy title “Household Response to Income Changes: Evidence from an Unconditional Cash Transfer Program in Kenya.”

Stop yawning, because this is important. And fascinating.

In the U.S., lawmakers (and not just right-wing ones) have long taken a punitive approach to the poor. Even self-labeled “compassionate conservatives” like former President George W. Bush have proposed programs that would “help welfare recipients develop middle-class values.” (Because clearly, if you are poor, you must be morally defective.)  American attitudes toward the needy have their roots in 15th Century English Poor Laws that prohibited “giving alms to the sturdy beggar.”

American social welfare programs built on that model have numerous, demeaning—and costly—restrictions on eligibility. After all, if “we” don’t watch “them,” they’ll cheat us hardworking taxpayers.

Most recently, a number of state legislators have piled on; convinced that any assistance allowing recipient discretion would “obviously’ lead to imprudent choices, they have even passed rules about what welfare recipients can buy at the grocery store with their food stamps.

Imagine what would happen if we simply sent poor people some cash! (Um…perhaps like Social Security…?)

Well, it turns out we don’t have to imagine it; an NGO called “GiveDirectly” has been doing just that in Kenya. GiveDirectly chooses beneficiaries at random; the only criteria is income below poverty level. The organization is rigorously evidence-based, and the paper I came across is one of several independent research projects examining the results.

So what happened?

Recipients spent more on health and education. Alcohol and tobacco expenditures did not increase. The researchers found

no evidence for an increase in tension within households, no significant spillover effects on non-recipient households, and no general equilibrium effects at the village level, with the single exception that we observe an increase in female empowerment at the village level. Together, these findings suggest that simple cash transfers may not have the perverse effects that some policymakers feel they would have, which has led for a clear policy preference for conditional cash transfers or in-kind transfers.

I came across this article because I have recently become aware of psychological studies connecting poverty with a host of deleterious psychological consequences, and I was exploring the literature reporting on those consequences for a book I’m writing. (I had previously understood the link between insecurities of various kinds and social unrest, but I was unaware of this particular line of research.)

As an article in New America Weekly reported, the human brain has specific reactions to any form of scarcity; it seems that cognitive capacity can only be stretched so far. This has been dubbed the “bandwidth tax,” shorthand for the proposition that scarcity inhibits the brain’s ability to focus on multiple tasks. This isn’t a big surprise to anyone who has agonized over whether to use her limited funds to buy baby formula or see the pediatrician.

Interestingly, the levels of stress associated with poverty can be assessed physically; people produce a “stress hormone” called cortisol, levels of which can be measured.

Haushofer and Shapiro measured them.

Transfer recipients experience large increases in psychological well-being, and several types of transfers lead to reductions in levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Apparently, cash transfers to desperately poor people are followed by increased access to education and medical care, and lowered levels of a stress hormone that interferes with good decision-making.

Fascinating.

Comments