The most serious failing of our K-12 system is rarely addressed because it would cost money to fix it and we can’t have that, can we? It’s that we still break for a three-month summer recess. That made sense for me as a farm boy in the ’50s, and I probably learned more on the back of a tractor than you city kids did watching Captain Kangaroo. But we aren’t a rural society any more — and a nine-month school year doesn’t even adequately cover the baby-sitting role of schools. That’s critical because it’s not the ’50s anymore and single-parent and/or two wage-earner families are now the norm. We can’t go on with the nine-month school year. It’s time to go to 11 months. Yes, that means paying teachers more and also finding another way to handle their continuing education, since summer school won’t be so easy for them. But as long as we cling to a 19-th century school year model, we will fail to properly educate kids for the 21st century.
… plan now to attend your neighborhood caucus in 2012. For more see http://www.COCaucus.org
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The challenges and opportunities posed to humanity by our dependence upon, and articulation with, the natural environment are immense, urgent, and of enduring consequence. The set of interrelated issues involving energy, natural resources, environmental contamination and climate change, and their impacts on the biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and even the lithosphere, as well as on human political, economic, demographic, and cultural systems, are complex, intertwined, and systemic.
I’d like to start a far-ranging and detail-laden discussion here concerning these issues and system dynamics, exploring how human actions alter the systems in which we are ensconced, and thus alter the context of our own existence. The rapid deforestation and desertification of the world not only releases carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, which in turn increases the frequency and ferocity of forest fires, increasing the deforestation which increases global warming, in an accelerating feed-back loop; it also eliminates rich repositories of biodiversity, at enormous costs to humanity and to the natural world. Our dependence on fossil fuels, also contributing to global warming, contributes as well to volatile and dysfunctional relations among nations and cultures, forcing petroleum dependent developed and developing nations to pander to the sometimes tyrannical and violence-exporting regimes of oil-rich countries.
Considering just global climate change, both well-known aspects (e.g., rising sea levels as a result of global warming, and the threat that poses to low-lying coastal areas), and less well known aspects (e.g., feedback loops such as those involving the albedo effect through decreasing ice caps reflecting less heat into space, thus causing accelerated global warming; and potentially catastrophic chain-reaction effects, such as those involving disrupted marine food chains due to decreased protophytoplankton production), the breadth and complexity of interacting systemic dynamics demand more from us than the superficial and barely informed popular concern and denial that dominate popular discourse on the topic.
In addition to the immense body of systemic theory, empirical observation, and informed speculation concerning how our actions impact our natural context, and how the resulting changes in our natural context impact our existence in return, there is the entire subset of thought and action regarding our actual and potential responses to this reality. The New Energy Economy, focusing on more extensive use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, and the technical problems of storage and transmission involved, provides a basis for discussion. Within that framework, specific policy issues, such as the efficacy of cap-and-trade carbon markets, or carbon taxes, or taxes and subsidies more generally, come into play. The history of these efforts, including the intense international negotiations culminating in the tentatively promising Kyoto Protocol and disappointing Copenhagen Accord which followed, and current possibilities, such as more decentralized interconnected carbon markets, belong in the conversation.
As always, I invite any and all to participate, hopefully bringing some combination of expertly informed knowledge and insight, on the one hand, and popular perception and curiosity on the other.
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There is plenty of shouting across the national aisle, false certainties on both sides, with Tea Partiers and their fellow travelers insisting that government spending is destroying the country, and some progressives insisting that public spending on social services and entitlement programs can never be a bad thing. Once again, the nation is embroiled in a false dichotomy of extreme views, with the real business of line-drawing lost in the process.
The real economic debate, the one we’re not having, is the one over what, precisely, are the costs and benefits of particular kinds of spending under particular economic conditions. Under what conditions and in what forms does government stimulus spending help or hurt an ailing economy? Does the apparent political inevitability of directing spending toward lower rather than higher short-term multiplier effects (funding too many languishing programs and too few shovel-ready projects) undermine it’s utility as a stimulus strategy? And, a historical favorite, did government stimulus spending end or prolong The Great Depression?
I’ll offer some thoughts on the last question: As this timeline (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm) demonstrates, economic growth was very robust from 1934-1937: In 1933, when FDR took office, the freefall in GDP was brought to an almost complete halt, dipping only 2.1% (after falling 31% over the previous 3 years). In 1934, GNP rose 7.7%, and unemployment dropped about 3%. In 1935, GNP rose another 8.1%, and unemployment went down another 1.6%. In 1936, GNP rose another 14.1% (a record growth rate), and unemployment dropped another 3.2%. In 1937, GNP rose another 5%, and unemployment fell another 2.6%.
According to one argument, the one that 2008 Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman subscribes to, Roosevelt, seduced by these years of phenomenal success in his program of economic recovery, was persuaded to reduce spending and focus on balancing the budget in 1937, driving the nation back into recession. According to the counterargument, it was the spending itself which resulted in the 1937 economic downturn.
But the one piece of evidence that seems to be most consistently disregarded is the one upon which virtually everyone agrees: WWII definitively ended The Great Depression. And just what was it about WWII that accomplished this feat? The fact that it was the most massive public spending project in world history, with enormous deficit spending in the production of heavy industrial equipment that kept getting conveniently blown up and needing to be replaced, a stimulus package far larger than any that could otherwise have been politically accomplished. And one whose success, along with the foundation laid by New Deal policies, set the nation on a path of decades of enormous economic growth.
Those who argue that it wasn’t New Deal spending, but rather WWII, that ended The Great Depression are not demonstrating with their evidence that government stimulus spending is inefficacious, but just the opposite, and that it needs to be truly massive to be truly effective.
Okay, folks! Have at it. I’ve invited professional economists to join this discussion; I hope I have some takers.
To many Americans, a phrase like “social control” makes fingernails on a chalkboard sound like dulcet strains. But, in reality, our national birth amidst cries of “liberty” was a particular response to a particular situation, one which has fed a national mythos lopsided in its orientation, and loath to explicitly address the flip-side of liberty: Governance. The U.S. Constitution, despite the ahistorical myth treasured by most right-wingers, was not drafted in order to guarantee individual liberties and preserve states’ rights, but rather to constrain them both. “Federalism” meant stronger, not weaker, national government, and the constitution was the dramatic response to the toothlessness of the Articles of Confederation, which failed to bind the nation into a single political-economic entity.
The real challenge we must face is not how to preserve liberty, or maintain social control, but rather how to balance and integrate these two simultaneously competing and complementary demands. Following, in the comments, is something I wrote a few days ago on another blog, incidentally addressing this issue. I would love for others to jump in, and engage in this most salient of all political discussions!
Our commitment, as a nation, to protect the civil rights of all people affected by our policies is a sacred one. It defines us as a people. We have often fallen short, and we have just as often redeemed ourselves with impressive reforms. We believe ourselves to be a world leader, a shining example to humanity. It is incumbent upon us to live up to that self image.
The most pressing civil rights issue facing us today, I believe, is the issue of gay rights. It is time for us all to support, without equivocation, complete equality under the law for gays and lesbians, such that all committed couples, regardless of sexual orientation, can enjoy the same benefits and rights, and such that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is treated as the civil rights violation that it is. We Coloradans believe in personal liberty: What more fundamental liberty is there than the liberty simply to be who you are without penalty? Let’s put an end to this enduring bastion of bigotry.
Having said that, we cannot afford to be complacent about the enduring prejudices that have plagued American society throughout its history. Racism still exists, and remains the same odious social disease that it has always been. Not only do we still witness viceral reactions based on racial identity, but, more insidiously, we still bear the burden of the legacy of history, a subtle form of institutional discrimination whereby those whose ancestors had diminished opportunities are themselves born into a context of diminished opportunities. But this latter problem is best addressed by addressing the primary vehicles of those diminished opportunities (poverty, and a lack of commitment to investing in all of our children), rather than the historically determined racial disparity in the distribution of opportunities.
Our challenges do not stop there. We must strive to improve our record of tolerance, and to improve our commitment to the rights of all people. In our criminal justice system, for instance, there is a need for reforms that would both increase the rate of conviction of those guilty of crimes, and descrease the rate of wrongful conviction of those innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been accused. We need to implement strict policies regarding the preservation of DNA evidence, and make an effort to address some of the known factors that contribute to wrongful convictions. And we need to move away from the failed policies of mandatory sentencing and criminalization of non-predatory behaviors.
Finally, we must be vigilant in protecting the civil rights of all Americans, in all contexts. We must steer clear of racial profiling, and the false trade of liberty for security. The key component in all of these aspects of the challenge of preserving civil rights is the error of thinking in terms of “in-groups” and “out-groups.” It’s time to recognize that we are all human beings, first and foremost, far more similar than we are different; no group has a corner on the market of either good or evil, and we should recognize that the crimes of individuals belong to them individually or organizationally, and not to any racial, ethnic, or gender group with which we identify them.
I chose to group these topics together because I believe they are strongly interrelated. The strength of families depends far more on the strength of communities, and crime prevention depends far more on the strength of both, than we have been in the habit of recognizing. Indeed, strengthening our communities is more fundamental even than educational reform, since no reform is more vital to improving educational outcomes.
Though crime rates in the 1990s began to decline and level off rather than continue to escalate, as had been expected (primarily, according to one theory, due to the earlier decrease in unwanted children coming into the world), America still experiences off-the-charts levels of violent crime in comparison to other developed nations. In fact, we suffer a cocktail of problems unequaled in the rest of the developed world: Poor educational performance, a woefully deficient health care system, high infant mortality, excessive violent crime rates, to name just a few. Add to this list of visible failures the equally high rates of less visible tragedies that occur behind closed doors day-after-day, in all socio-economic classes: the tragedies of child abuse and neglect, and domestic violence. The question we need to ask ourselves is, why?
The inevitable answer is: Extreme individualism. We are failing as a society to function as a society. Our overemphasis on the acquisition of wealth, and underemphasis on the health of our communities and families, has come at a very high cost. We are long overdue for redressing this imbalance.
We need local, state, and national grass-roots initiatives to reinvigorate our communties. I propose, and, as a resident rather than as a legislator, will help to organize, a non-partisan community initiative in House District 28, drawing on existing civic organizations and social institutions. The purpose of this initiative is to bring people closer together, on their blocks, in their subdivisions, throughout our district; to reduce the mutual anonymity of our modern society; to increase the ability of neighbors to offer moral support to one another; and to help catch kids who far too often fall through the cracks of our disintegrated society, and offer them the support and guidance they need. Those are the kids who fail to achieve in school, and fail to succeed in life. And they are the kids who, disproportionately, commit heinous acts, now or in the future.
It’s time to stop merely clucking our tongues and expressing our dismay each time horrendous but preventable tragedies of violence occur, and start taking the steps that would actually have prevented them. That’s what communities do.
America is bedeviled by misguided political generals not merely fighting the last war, but endlessly fighting our first war. Every act of government, and every attempt to fund government, whether federal, state, or local, is greeted with a “patriotic” opposition to “tyranny,” even though our own Founding Fathers not only saw a need to create a strong federal government, but also viewed state and local governments as vehicles for, rather than threats to, our individual liberties.
More importantly, we have resoundingly won our first war: Americans are more free today than they have been at any previous moment in American history (except in one ironic sense mentioned below). Not only have we extended the original grant of liberty won in the American Revolution to the vast majority who were excluded from it at the time (African Americans, women, Native Americans, and, to varying degrees, other non-white or non-propertied or non-protestant people), but even propertied, protestant white males are more free today than they have ever been before. There are fewer legal and actual constraints on our freedoms of belief, expression, religion, and action than ever before. There are more, and more vigilant, protections of our civil liberties. And there is more access to a host of liberating educational, informational, recreational, and organizational tools than our ancestors could ever have dreamed of.
To the extent that our liberty is currently threatened, it is threatened most by those on the far right who claim to be defending it. There are two forms of “big government,” that which encroaches upon the constitutional protections of our liberty and that which acts as a vehicle of our collective will without encroaching on our constitutionally protected liberties. Ironically, those who shout “liberty!” the loudest tend to support the former type of big government and attack the latter type, justifying this inversion of priorities (as it is always justified, in all times and places) with the imperative of preserving our domestic tranquility and national security. Equally ironically, it is the latter form of “big government,” when implemented wisely, that is most effective not only at facilitating our collective welfare, but also at maintaining our domestic tranquility and national security in the long run.
But more than our “liberty,” it is our well-being that is currently under attack. We rate abysmally in comparison to other developed nations on measures such as poverty, crime, percentage and absolute number of people incarcerated (by which measure we are literally the most unfree people in the world), infant mortality, educational achievement, and access to health care, to name a few. The primary reason for this comprehensive failure of The United States government effectively to “promote the general welfare” (a principal purpose of our government identified in the preamble of the United States Constitution) is the degree of success of the blind ideological opposition to the use of government to accomplish that task, one completely unmatched in other developed nations.
Rather than continuing to fight the ancient war we have long since won, maybe it is time to start fighting the current battles we are so tragically losing.
To be sure, this opposition to the growth and use of government for our collective welfare has been only marginally successful, though with the devastating effects listed above. Our federal government has grown, by necessity, to deal with the challenges of managing a technologically advanced industrial society in the modern era. But an honest survey of the impact of this growth in size of our federal government is that, not only has it done much to increase the health, welfare, and prosperity of American citizens, but it has also augmented rather than curtailed our individual liberties. Tyranny is not a function of how “big” a government is, but rather of how well or poorly its constitutional and democratic mechanisms function.
This is not to say that there are not real issues involving how best to balance and articulate government, markets, and other social institutional modalities in order to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of necessary and desired services. But those are issues that require the finely honed tools of informed analysis applied to reliably derived data, rather than the sledge-hammer of intransigent false certainties. The tyranny that threatens us is not the tyranny of a large government that imperfectly addresses the needs of a modern society, but rather the tyranny of highly motivated ignorance and irrationality constantly trying to undermine that government as our agent, and augment it as our overlord, imposing horrifying costs and dangers on all of us in the process
Conservatives who argue that more and bigger government isn’t the solution to our problems are absolutely right: Government is just one agent of our will, with strengths and weaknesses that delimit the scope of its efficacy. Whether we address the challenges and opportunities which confront us through government, or churches, or civic organizations, or just individually, nothing supersedes the importance of personal responsibility.
But what is personal responsibility? We generally consider, for instance, not abandoning one’s children to be a personal responsibility. We consider obeying the laws, caring for one’s elderly parents, perhaps even taking adequate care of one’s home and property, all to be personal responsibilities. At the limit, some might use the term to refer to the need that each individual take care of him or herself, so that the rest of us won’t have to. All of these have one thing in common: They involve responsibilities to others. And we understand that those others bear reciprocal responsibilities in turn. Personal responsibility, in other words, is synonymous with mutual responsibility. It is a social obligation we owe to one another.
Something as vital to our collective welfare as mutual responsibility shouldn’t be treated as a casual wish, something we dearly want to see exhibited by others, but feel powerless to affect beyond meekly encouraging it. We should, instead, strive to cultivate it, to instill it in people, something we understandably implore parents to do. But imploring parents to instill it in their children is as weak and insufficient as imploring people to exercise it in the first place. We need, rather, to make the exercise and cultivation of mutual responsibility in people’s individual interest. We need to incentivize it. And, of course, we do.
There are four basic tools for incentivizing socially desirable behaviors: Hierarchies, markets, norms, and ideologies. In hierarchies, codified rules are officially enforced through formal rewards and punishments. Examples of this method of incentivizing behaviors are legal and penal systems, employment contracts, church leadership structures, and formal organizational frameworks in general. The strength of this method is that it facilitates the pursuit of intentionally formulated goals through very direct means. Its weakness involves the rapid accumulation of bargaining, monitoring, and enforcement costs as the goals become increasingly complex, the interests of the parties increasingly varied, and the population involved increasingly large.
Markets operate by facilitating multi-lateral mutually beneficial exchange. The easier it is for me to focus on one thing I do well that others require or desire, and offer it to others in return for the things they do well that I require or desire, the more organically and robustly we are each incentivized to act in one another’s interests. The strength of this method is that, for many purposes, it is the most efficient way to align individual and collective interests, and thus coordinate human efforts in mutually beneficial ways. The weaknesses largely revolve around transaction costs and externalities, creating problems such as the robust production of environmental pollution and depletion along with the robust production of wealth, and the ability of some to off-set certain costs of their enterprises by imposing them on others not involved in, or not profiting from, those enterprises, sometimes quite catastrophically.
Norms are unwritten rules diffusely and informally enforced through the social approval and disapproval of other people. They are particularly effective in small, permanent or long-enduring groups with a high-degree of interaction and interdependence, a low degree of anonymity, and when addressing visible or easily discoverable behaviors. Their weaknesses include that they become decreasingly effective as circumstances diverge from those described in the previous sentence, and that, when most effective, they tend (even more so than hierarchies) toward “overcontrol,” intruding more than necessary on individual autonomy and self-expression.
Ideologies, as I use the term here, refer to all cognitions: beliefs, values, thoughts, anything held to be true by the individual. In a sense, ideologies are norms internalized through socialization, rules that we enforce internally by the self-imposed reward of pride or the self-imposed punishment of shame. Their strength is that we can never hide from ourselves. Their weaknesses are that they generally form a relatively flimsy bulwark against the temptation to act in one’s own crude self-interest, and that, unless one is very careful in how their own ideology develops, they tend toward rigidity rather than forming a robust foundation for continuing cognitive growth.
One weakness shared, in different ways, by hierarchies, norms, and ideologies is that, while they generate in-group cooperation, they often do so in opposition to out-groups similarly organized and motivated, thus reinforcing lines of conflict on a larger scale even as they reinforce bonds of solidarity on a smaller one. Norms often accomplish this very locally, while hierarchies can accomplish it on scales of all sizes, ranging from the very small (such as a small but very formally organized business) to quite large (such as nation-states), though norms almost inevitably are more prevalent for very small scales of social organization. Ideologies, meanwhile, reinforce whatever levels and types of organization the individual most closely identifies with, from the absolute egocentrism of a sociopath to the all-inclusiveness of global humanism and environmentalism, and everything in between.
A particular variation of the in-group/out-group dynamic involves concentrations of power, which can implicate any and all of these institutional modalities in various combinations: Hierarchical control of the means of enforcing formal rules; economic control of vital resources; ideological control of “legitimate authority;” and disproportionate normative control in the hands of those most influential in the community (sometimes due to “charismatic authority,” sometimes to influence imported from other modalities). These can interact in self-reinforcing nuclei of political and social power or, in some circumstances, separate out to some extent into competing camps.
When examining the world through the lens of these social institutional modalities, it is crucial to understand the salience of their interactions. They are, in most situations, tightly intertwined, sometimes almost dissolved into a single solution. Hierarchical organizations, laced with embedded normative and ideological informal infrastructures, are major actors in market economies. Hierarchically organized churches compete in the marketplace of ideas (and sometimes the marketplace of profitable goods and services as well), often with a large moral, or ideological/normative, component to their mission. Families are largely normative, though can have traces of a not-completely-formalized hierarchical framework overlaying that normative structure.
One traditional focus in the debates between the right and the left is the relationship between hierarchies and markets, and what combinations of the two provide for optimal economic efficiency This also happens to be a major focus of Institutional Economics (and of Oliver Williamson, one of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners in Economics). But for a more complete understanding of the implications and potentials of different policy alternatives, one must also include norms and ideologies (and emotional reactions) in the mix, and consider how these too are tangled into the complex dynamics that comprise the field of human endeavors. (The inclusion of normative arrangments was the focus of the other 2009 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom).
Understanding the nature of the human social field, to as great an extent as we are capable, is a necessary prerequisite to devising effective social policies, often by applying a light touch in particularly system-sensitive ways.
In conjunction with my campaign, I have two projects on the drawing board that seek to utilize, for the purposes of improving our collective existence (rather than simply for winning an election), the two somewhat neglected social institutional modalities: 1) the creation of a non-partisan, issue-centered, hostility-free (through moderation) political blog, which will seek out and provide the best analyses, from all perspectives, of the contentious and important social issues of the day; and 2) the creation of a network of non-partisan community organizations, from the block level on up, drawing on and augmenting all of the various kinds of community organizations that already exist, but dedicated to achieving a higher degree of inclusiveness. Anyone interested in either or both of these projects should please contact me.
The world we live in is complex and challenging. But simply agreeing to be reasonable people of good will doing the very best we can, with both humility and determination, would take us a long way forward in our on-going attempt to address that complexity and meet that challenge. As we’ve proven time and again, we’re capable of doing great things together, when we’re inspired to do so. Let’s keep inspiring one another to make this the most robust, sustainable, and fair society we are capable of making it: That’s a project worth getting excited about.
As the child of a small business owner, I understand the challenges that small businesspeople face, the risks they take, the long and hard hours they put in just to keep their head above water. Many work longer hours for less compensation than do some wage or salaried workers in other enterprises. Many large businesses, as well, struggle to survive, sometimes operating for extended periods at a loss. It is essential that we put over-simplistic concepts of class conflict behind us, and consider how best to thrive as a people, all in a shared enterprise.
But the disparity of wealth and poverty in the United States, far more pronounced than that of other developed nations, with far less social mobility (despite the myth to the contrary), is neither most conducive to maximizing our national prosperity, nor the best we can do in our quest to maximize equality of opportunity for all Americans.
Organized labor in America has been an essential force in ensuring that workers are treated as human beings whose interests and dignity matter, rather than just as factors of production who exist to enrich others. A basic sense of fairness dictates that those whose labor produces wealth benefit equitably from the wealth they have produced. In order to accomplish this, on the capital end, there needs to be a competitive return on investments, without which the jobs from which workers benefit simply dry up. The goal, therefore, is to ensure that there is a robust market economy producing competitive returns on investments, in order to create and maintain well-paying jobs and decent working conditions.
W should all strive to ensure that all Coloradans have the opportnity to thrive by their own efforts. This requires a robust economy framed by a legal structure conducive both to the success of businesspeople, and to the ability of workers to earn living wages and live high-quality lives. An economic climate friendly to investment, entrepreneurship, and the ability of businesspeople to succeed is essential to the interests of all Americans, whether wealthy or poor, whether employees or employers. But the purpose of that economic climate is to enrich us all, not just to further enrich the wealthiest among us.
We can do better, augmenting rather than reducing individual liberty in the process, but ensuring that it is the true liberty to thrive rather than the false liberty of denied opportunity. We must strive, as a people, to make sure that we are maintaining a political economy in which people work to live rather than live to work. We must strive to make sure that all working Coloradans can achieve financial security, receive affordable health care, and enjoy a modest pension in the golden years of life, without having to endure unbearable conditions or be strangers to their children in the process. These are reasonable and achievable goals, and we should all be fully committed to them.
