Change?

The word of the day is “change” — the political conventions are blaring it out, and apparently the voting public is ready for it.

It’s worth thinking about what “change” amounts to. Things change in many ways — by accident, by the inevitable workings of natural processes, or as a result of the actions of people and groups. The eruption of Mt. Krakatoa in 1883 changed many things in the world, for better or worse. But this isn’t what “change” means in this context.

When people talk about “change” in a political or social context, they are referring to outcomes that can be influenced by human agency and choice. We want to change the pace of global warming — that is, we want to take deliberate steps that will result in a slowing of the buildup of greenhouse gases globally. We want to change the “pay to play” mentality that many city governments have permitted to develop between contractors and politicians — that is, we want to create a new set of regulations and laws that do a better job of controlling corrupt practices in city government. We want to change the level of threat of terrorist attack that the United States faces — that is, we want our leaders to design a set of strategies for diplomatic, military, and intelligence agency actions that will reduce the motivation of potential attackers or interfere with the execution of their plans. We want to change the degree of disparities of income and quality of life that is found among Americans in this century — that is, we want a set of government and economic policies that have the effect of increasing income and quality of life for the least-well-off.

So the relevant meaning of “change” has to do with actions, goals, and strategies. Calls for change in this sense generally mean one of three things: we need to change direction — the things we’re aiming at aren’t quite the right mix. We need to change strategies — our plans for intervening in the world on the basis of which we are pursuing our goals aren’t working well enough. Or we need to change the way we operate — to embody greater transparency, greater allegiance to human rights, greater honesty. Change is about agency in the world — the things we aim at, the means we use, and the principles we adopt.

Government — its policies, its strategies, its priorities — is at the center of what people are concerned about when they call for change. This is true primarily because governments have the greatest ability to influence the outcomes that we care about the most; but it is also true because governments have badly disappointed us at various junctures in our history, by pursuing the wrong goals or bungling their efforts to achieve the right goals. So it’s not a bit surprising that a debate about the need for change would crop up around the moment of this critical election in the United States.

People are calling for change today because they are dissatisfied with the outcomes, trends, strategies, and manner that current public actors are achieving. They see outcomes that are the result of deliberate policies — but that are highly undesirable. They see policies that are intelligently related to the achievement of certain goals — but the goals are the wrong ones. They see policies and initiatives that are ill-conceived and bungled. And, often enough, they see public actions that are morally defective in a variety of ways — dishonest, devious, illegal, anti-democratic, self-interested, or hateful.

So when people call for change, it would appear that they’re asking for one of several possible kinds of change: a change of goals, a change of strategies, a change in the manner in which a government or corporation behaves, and perhaps a change in the personnel carrying out these actions. They want to see public action to be aimed at goals that the majority in society can support when honestly conveyed. They want to see policies and strategies that are well suited to achieving these goals, and supported by facts and analysis. They want to see coordinated efforts by their governments that will lead to better outcomes and will put the trends onto a more acceptable course. And they want to see a manner of action that respects the law and the requirements of a civil democracy.

Let’s hope that the next several months of political debate can really focus on these core questions: what problems do we most urgently need to solve in the next ten years in this society and this world? What strategies and initiatives do the candidates propose to address these problems? What evidence can we marshall to assess the likelihood that they will follow through with their stated intentions? These are exactly the right debates; and once we think clearly about the goals and priorities we have as a nation, perhaps the choice we make among candidates will be less about personality and more about confidence in the program and the team that will implement it.

Cooperatives within markets

In a recent post I considered the question whether households in a rural community might be able to achieve energy self-sufficiency based on the cultivation of crops such as cattails and community production of ethanol. One question raised there is whether it is possible to estimate the land and labor that would be required for household self-sufficiency, and the other is whether we might describe an economically feasible distillery cooperative system that would permit a hundred families to distill their product. Based on assumptions that are drawn from a number of sources out of a very complicated domain of knowledge about the economics of ethanol, I put together several scenarios to see what the lifestyle consequences would be for “fuel farmers”. A scenario based on moderate assumptions yielded these results: in order to produce a household stock of fuel of 2,400 gallons of ethanol, a household would need to cultivate 10 acres of cattails and would need to expend 4 hours per day year round on cultivation, harvesting, and distillery coop duties.

What I’d like to focus on in this posting is the feasibility and characteristics of cooperatives as a way for small- and medium-sized communities to handle some of the key material activities they need to accomplish. In a modern society we are so accustomed to market mechanisms and individual decision-making that it is somewhat difficult to imagine how coops might work in modern circumstances. So, for the example under consideration here, the market scenario is straightforward: farmers grow cattails to serve as a raw material for a privately owned distillery; the price of the cattails is eventually determined as a function of the quantity and value of the final products of distillation (ethanol and feed); and cattail farming is simply another crop within the private farmer’s portfolio. And if the business case for a privately developed distillery is favorable — that is, the raw materials will be available in sufficient quantity and low price and the value of the product will be sufficient to provide a profit — then entrepreneurs will emerge to fill this economic niche. Everyone’s interests are satisfied: farmers earn more income, private owners earn a profit, and society is presented with a growing volume of renewable fuels.

But consider the downside of this market-based story from the fuel farmers’ point of view. They have no control over the price that their cattail crop will bring; they are subject to the vagaries of commodity prices and the semi-monopoly position held by the local distillery; and they are likely to believe that the “middle man” is taking too much of their crop and labor in the form of profits. And, after all, the farmers’ interest is in achieving a sustainable energy supply — not simply a level of income consistent with the budget necessities of everyday life. They’re growing the cattails because they are a source of energy that can be produced and consumed separately from the market. So passing through the market twice — selling the raw materials and purchasing ethanol — seems like an unnecessary and risky detour; why not simply turn the crop into ethanol directly without passing through the marketplace?

So the fuel farmer has an interest in directly capturing the energy content of the crop, not simply growing another kind of cash crop. This could be done by establishing a farm still and processing the crop directly; but there are significant economies of scale in distillation, so this is not an ideal solution. An inefficient distillation process simply means that the farmer must farm a larger area and expend more labor in order to arrive at the net quantity of fuel required. A better solution would result from sharing the distillation process among an extended group of households and maintaining a small to medium-sized distillery for the use of the community. So we might imagine leaders coming forward who propose the establishment of a cooperative distillery. Coop members would share costs, labor time, and ethanol based on the volume of feedstock that they provide to the process. If all households were farming roughly the same amount of land at the same level of intensity, then all households would contribute cash and labor equally and would “earn” the same quantity of ethanol from the process.

So now let’s do a little bit of scenario building. Suppose there is a turnkey distillery operation that can be purchased for $2 million, with a well-documented set of technical efficiency characteristics. (That way prospective coop members know what they’re getting into.) The distillery processes 60,000 pounds of biomass a day and produces about 2,000 gallons of ethanol. The distillation process requires 30 hours of labor per day. And this scale of production is about right for the needs of a cooperative involving 100 households. Members are required to accept joint financial responsibility for debt and operations of the coop, and they are required to provide their full share of coop labor at the distillery based on a schedule of work times. And, given the technical characteristics of farming and distilling, they can be confident that their fuel farming labor will result in a quantity of biomass that will entitle them to 2,400 gallons of ethanol annually. On a plausible set of assumptions, this means that each household will have coop dues of $2,200 and a monthly labor obligation of 6 hours.

So far, so good; this sounds like a good deal for each of the households. Each household satisfies its annual energy needs with an investment of $2,200 in cash and about 1,000 hours of labor expended on cultivation, harvesting, transporting, and distilling; whereas the cost of purchasing this volume of ethanol would be about $10,000. So what obstacles might arise in implementing this cooperative solution to the problem of energy self-sufficiency?

There are several predictable challenges that this scenario is likely to raise, including especially in the areas of governance, technical management, work management, accounting, trust, taxation, and sustainability over time.

Governance. The cooperative needs to make decisions about management, maintenance, and improvement of the facility. How should this be done? Are all decisions to be taken on the basis of a vote by the membership? Should there be an executive committee with some powers of decision-making? Is there an executive manager? How will conflicts among coop members be managed and resolved?
Technical management. The distillery is technically complex. Maintenance requires skilled technicians or millwrights. Can the coop count on these kinds of expertise among its membership? Will it need to hire outside experts and engineers to maintain the facility? Who will take responsibility for maintaining safety processes and standards within the facility?
Work management. Who will supervise the work of coop members while they are performing their tasks during coop labor? Is there a likelihood of “easy riding” — coop members who bring their blackberries to work and keep checking their email rather than cleaning the boiler? What kinds of discipline processes are feasible within a coop — for example, fines imposed on “no-show” workers? Will the coop need to reward internal experts with a somewhat larger share of the product?
Accounting. There is a very substantial amount of accounting of inputs and outputs that needs to be accomplished. As coop members pull up with a load of biofuel the quantity and quality needs to be measured and recorded. Clear formulas governing the pay-out of ethanol need to be codified. There is a time lag between depositing the feedstock and withdrawing the ethanol; rules need to be established that govern the household’s entitlement to a given quantity of ethanol on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly?).
Trust. Members need to have a substantial level of trust in each other and in the non-professional managers of the process. Theft of assets is always a possibility by managers. Fraud on the part of coop members is also possible — for example, mixing non-feedstock materials into a load of feedstock and taking credit for 6,000 pounds rather than 5,500 pounds of stock. More careful inspection procedures have a cost — more labor time from the membership. Members need to be confident that other members will continue to pay their dues — otherwise the debt obligations of the coop fall on a smaller and smaller circle of dues-payers.
Taxation. The cooperative is likely to face expanding demand for improvements of the facility, the technology, or the use of labor. This means raising the obligations imposed on coop members, in the form of coop dues, a percentage of their ethanol share, or an increase in labor time required by coop members. How will these increases in assessment be decided?
Sustainability over time. The economics of the cooperative distillery depend on a certain size of membership — say 100 households. Like any human organization, there will be exits from the cooperative — retirements, relocation, discouragement. Will the cooperative be able to continually recruit new members in sufficient numbers to keep the process in the black? Is there the risk of the “dying seminar” that Thomas Schelling writes about — decline leading to rising costs for the remaining members, leading to further decline in membership (Micromotives and Macrobehavior)?

So — there are significant challenges of governance, management, and trust that stand in the way of a successful cooperative. This doesn’t mean that cooperatives are impossible to create or sustain, or that they don’t have significant economic advantages for their members. But perhaps it does explain why this is not a common solution so far in modern social settings as a way of securing coordination and shared economic benefits among a mid-sized group of persons or households. At the same time, it seems very worthwhile to expend effort on trying to resolve these issues in ways that make cooperative arrangements more feasible and sustainable than they currently are in modern society.

Sustainability and biofuel farming

James Gustave Speth has written a really important book on sustainability within a modern society. The book is called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, and it’s an important contribution. One of the most fundamental conclusions that Speth arrives at is the idea that sustainability will require a truly profound transformation of how we think about a “good life,” and a rethinking of the kinds of material circumstances we might aspire to in order to create a world system that is genuinely sustainable.

One way we might try to pursue this line of thought is to consider whether gardens and local biofuel production might provide a basis for more sustainable human activity. Could we use more of our own time and labor to create some of the material necessities of our lives, and do so in a way that imposes a smaller footprint on the world’s energy and resource system?

David Blume was a guest on NPR’s Science Friday on August 15. Blume is the author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century. Blume is an advocate for the idea that alcohol can be a large and ecologically positive component of our modern energy economy (website). And he believes that it is possible to imagine a more decentralized energy economy for the United States in which local producers and distillers satisfy a large percentage of the energy needs of a region.

Blume made an observation that I found intriguing: that the common wetland plant, the cattail, can be a fuel source for producing ethanol. (Here’s a news story on Blume’s comments about cattails on an earlier occasion.) Corn produces about 250-300 gallons of ethanol per acre, and it is estimated that cattails would produce something less than this. (Blume himself estimates that the yield of cattail ethanol production would be “many, many times” that of corn, and says that 7,000 gallons per acre is feasible. This seems unsupportable, given the potential yield of other biofuel crops.) But cattails also have ecological advantages: they soak up excess nutrients (e.g. agricultural fertilizer runoff or sewage waste plant effluent), and they require little cultivation. Here are a few news stories (story, story) with some interesting background.

So here’s the question: what would be involved in creating a community that is energy self-sufficient based on ethanol production? Could households grow their own fuels? What would the economics of a cooperative community-based distillery look like? How much land, labor, and money would be required for the household?

It should be noted that there is serious disagreement about the most basic features of the commercial ethanol economy: does ethanol production lead to a net gain in energy, or do the inputs into the cultivation and distilling processes exceed the energy content of the resulting volume of alcohol? Here’s a discussion at FuturePundit and a summary of the findings of a national expert, David Pimental from Cornell University. Here are the central conclusions of a recent study by Pimentel and Tad Patzek at UC-Berkeley:

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”

(Other studies reach a very different conclusion. See a summary of studies on the energy balance of current ethanol production on this Oregon website.)

But still, let’s think it through a bit. The scenario I’m imagining is labor-intensive and local, so the costs of energy associated with mechanization and transportation are reduced or eliminated. Could we imagine a local energy economy based on crops and distillation that could be fitted into an otherwise acceptable lifestyle? (The analysis will begin to sound like Piero Sraffa’s exercise, Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory.)

A family’s energy budget might look something like this, estimated in gallons of ethanol:

transportation 800 gallons (10,000 miles)
cooking 300 gallons (365 days)
heating 1000 gallons (180 heating days)
illumination 100 gallons (365 days)
refrigeration 200 gallons

This adds up to 2,400 gallons of ethanol required for a year’s energy use. But we aren’t finished yet, because cultivation and distillation also have an energy cost, and this cost is a function of the volume of alcohol required. Let’s take a more optimistic estimate than that provided by Pimental above, and assume that the energy cost of distillation is 30%. (We’re working with a coop, after all!) To produce a gallon of ethanol we have to expend .3 gallons in the distillation process. And let’s assume that cultivation is done by hand without mechanization, but that the crop needs to be transported to the distillation facility at a 10% cost. (That is, I assume that the net transportation cost of transporting the thousands of pounds of feed crop to the processor is 10% of the net alcohol product of the crop.) These estimates imply that the household requires 4,000 gallons of alcohol.

Now assume that the alcohol yield of an acre of cattails is 250 gallons; this implies a fuel farm size of 16 acres. (It would be nice to extend the exercise to include a food garden as well; this is left for the reader! Here’s an interesting United Nations article from the 1980s on the economics of family gardening that can help get the analysis started.)

Now how many hours of labor time need to be devoted to cultivating and harvesting this crop? Evidently cattails don’t require much by way of fertilizers, irrigation, and pest control. But I’m sure there is some level of maintenance needed, and 16 acres is a large area. In fact, it represents a rectangular plot that is 200 feet by 3,500 feet — more than half a mile long. So let’s assume that basic maintenance of the cattail crop requires 2 hours a day of adult labor. The large investment of labor, however, occurs at the harvest. About 14,000 pounds of cattails will be harvested per acre, or 224,000 pounds for the farm over the course of the harvest. If we assume that an adult can harvest 200 pounds per hour, this represents 1,120 hours of harvest work. Let’s assume that harvesting can be spread out over a couple of four-week periods or 56 days; this implies 20 hours of adult labor per day during the harvest season. So it would take 10 hours a day, 7 days a week during the eight weeks of harvest season for two adults to harvest this volume of cattails. Two months of very hard work devoted to harvesting will eventually produce enough ethanol to support the household’s chief energy needs.

Now what about the economics of the cooperative’s distillery? If we assume a cooperative involving 100 households of the scale just discussed, the distillery needs to process 22,400,000 pounds of material in order to produce 400,000 gallons of ethanol. The households will be farming an area of 1,600 acres of cattails — about three square miles. And the system will be supporting the energy needs of about 500 people. If we keep our assumption of a 30% ratio of input-to-output, this process will consume 120,000 gallons of ethanol. The coop members will need to fund the purchase and maintenance of the still and the labor costs associated with operation of the still. Perhaps it’s a labor coop too? In this case, each household will need to devote several hours a week to work in the distillery. And we might imagine that the coop would require a “tax” of some small percentage of the alcohol produced to cover maintenance and operating expenses. Here’s a research article from AGRIS that examines the costs of a small distillery of roughly this size. The conclusion is somewhat discouraging: “The analysis indicates that the distillery would not be profitable at current prices for corn and ethanol.” In other words, the cost of inputs and operation of the distillery exceed the value of the alcohol produced, according to this analysis. But this conclusion isn’t quite relevant to our scenario, because the raw materials are not purchased through the market and the product is not sold on the market. Nonetheless, the finding implies that there’s a shortfall somewhere; and it may well be that it is the unpaid labor of the fuel farmers that is where the shortfall occurs.

So here’s the upshot of this back-of-the-envelope calculation: it would be a major commitment of land and labor for a household or a village community to achieve energy self-sufficiency through cooperative-based ethanol distillation. And I’ve made an assumption I can’t justify: that the energy input to the distillation process is 30% of the energy content of the resulting quantity of ethanol. If that ratio is 60% instead of 30%, then the land and labor requirements for each household are greatly increased; and if the ratio approaches or exceeds 100%, then the whole idea falls apart. But even on these assumptions, the life style associated with this model sounds a lot closer to that of a peasant village in medieval France or traditional China than to that of a modern US citizen. It involves hard physical labor during several months of the year and a moderate level of labor effort during the remainder of the year. And if we imagine that the scenario is extended by incorporating a substantial amount of food gardening for family consumption, then the balance of necessary labor to free labor tips even further in the direction of the peasant economy.

Rising income inequality in China

Allan Wheatley writes an important article in Reuters this week about the situation of rising income inequalities in China as part and parcel of the booming economic growth the country has witness for the past two decades. Several key facts emerge from the piece: While spectacular affluence is emerging at the top end of China’s economic hierarchy, 204 million people lived on less than $1.25 per day in 2005. China’s Gini coefficient of income inequality rose from 40.7 in 1993 to 47.4 in 2004, according to an Asian Development Bank report — a remarkably steep and rapid rise. (This compares to a Gini coefficient of income inequality in India of only 36.2.) And inequalities of income between urban and rural people continue to rise. Wheatley indicates that some experts believe that this phenomenon is the result of both rapid economic growth and a set of policies by the Chinese government that favor efficiency over equity. And some experts believe that these rising inequalities are a significant source of risk for social stability in future decades.

Wheatley bases most of his article on the recent work of the World Bank’s chief economist, Justin Yifu Lin, formerly a leading professor at Peking University. Lin and colleagues have published a collection of papers titled China’s Dilemma, which attempts to identify the economic policies that have resulted in this sustained rise in income inequality. (The volume was co-published by Australian National University and Asian Pacific Press and the table of contents is available online.) As Wheatley summarizes the findings, the Chinese government’s policies concerning economic growth have favored “efficiency” and corporations over “equity” and workers. And Lin argues that state policies actually protect and subsidize corporations, resulting in a massive transfer of wealth and income to the most affluent.

All of this suggests to me the importance of returning to some of the important discussions of poverty and growth that were so dynamic in the 1970s. Development theorists such as Hollis Chenery (Redistribution with Growth) and Irma Adelman (Economic growth and social equity in developing countries) gave careful analysis to the institutional context of economic growth, and put forward a strong argument for the idea that poverty alleviation needs to be built into the growth strategy from the beginning. Both focused their attention on the institutions through which income is generated — largely property holdings in land for peasants — and argued that redistribution of property entitlements needed to be a structural feature of equitable economic growth.

It was neglect, not factual or policy weakness, that led to the eclipsing of this line of thought in development circles and World Bank thinking. The Washington Consensus essentially put aside the idea that there are alternative pathways of economic growth, some of which are more favorable to equity than others.

China’s current theory of economic development seems closer to neo-liberal orthodoxy than it does to a progressive “poor-first” policy mix that would have the most sustained impact on China’s poor.

(There is more discussion of the poverty-first approach to development thinking in an unpublished paper on my research site, Putting the Poor First.)

Public versus hidden faces of organizations

Think of a range of complex organizations and institutions — police departments, zoning boards, corporations, security agencies, and so on indefinitely. These organizations all have missions, personnel, constituencies, and policies and practices. They all do various things — they affect individuals in society and they bring about significant social effects. And, in each case there are at least three aspects of their realities — the ways they publicly present themselves, the ways their behaviors and effects are perceived by the public, and the usually unobservable reality of how they actually behave. Usually the public persona of the institution is benign, fair, and public- spirited. But how close is this public persona to the truth? In many of our basic institutions, the answer seems to be, not very. We are daily confronted with cases of official corruption, corporations that abuse their power, legislators who take advantage of insider status, and the like. So how can we conceptualize the task of getting a reasonably accurate perception of the hidden workings of our major institutions and organizations?

First, let’s consider whether it is possible to specify a minimum charter of good organizational behavior in a democratic society. This would be a partial answer to a part of our question: what defines the conditions of a socially acceptable and publicly defensible organization? Consider these aspirations —

The organization should have goals that are compatible with enhancing the public good.
The organization should have appropriate policies about behavior towards employees and the public.
The organization should genuinely incorporate a commitment of compliance to law and regulation.
The corporation should embody a faithful commitment to exerting its efforts on behalf of its stated mission and stakeholders.
The organization should be committed to transparency and accountability.

Bad business practices and corruption can often be traced to a violation of one or more of these principles. The most offensive practices by powerful organizations — predatory behavior, asset stripping, the use of coercion and threat to achieve organizational goals, fraud, deception, illegal behavior, toxic waste dumping, evasion of regulations, and bribery — all fall within the categories identified here.

So how are we to determine whether our existing organizations and institutions satisfy these minimal conditions? We might imagine a routine “scan” of major institutions and organizations that asks a small set of questions along these lines:

What are the real operational goals and priorities of the organization?
What are the operational policies that govern corporate action?
How do agents of the organization actually treat members of the public in carrying out their tasks?
To what extent are there discrepancies between policy and practice?
To what extent do powerful leaders and managers use their positions to favor their own private interests? (conflict of interest)
To what extent do business crimes occur — accounting fraud, investor deception, evasion of regulations for health and safety?
And, most generally, to what extent is there a discrepancy between the official story about the organization and its actual practices?

It is very easy to think of examples of bad organizational behavior illustrating each of these questions — waste management companies fronting for organized crime groups, pharmaceutical companies producing defective generic drugs, police officers accepting bribes from speeding drivers, mining companies hiring “security workers” to evict “squatters.” And it would be a very interesting exercise to try to provide brief but accurate answers to each of these questions for a number of organizations. Based on the answers to questions like these that we are able to establish, we could then make an effort to answer the question of how great a discrepancy there is between the benign public persona of major institutions and their actual workings.

In theory we might say that answering these questions is no more difficult than putting a man on the moon — costly but straightforward. However, as was said twenty years ago in the context of anti-ballistic missile technology, the difference is that the moon doesn’t fight back. Organizations — particularly large governmental and corporate organizations — are very adept at covering their tracks, concealing bad behavior, and re-telling the story in their own interests. So the investigative challenge is a huge one — we might speculate that corruption multiplies geometrically, while investigative capacity multiplies arithmetically (a sort of Malthusian theory of misbehavior). Any given abuse can be uncovered in the New Yorker or on the 6 o’clock news — but bad behavior outstrips investigative resources.

So the task of understanding this aspect of modern society amounts to finding effective ways of shining a light on the real practices and priorities of important organizations and institutions. And the practical interest we have in controlling bad organizations — controlling corruption, ensuring good environmental and labor practices, eliminating coercion and violence — comes down to the challenge of enhancing the ability of democracies to investigate, regulate, and publicize the standards and outcomes of behavior that are required.

(Earlier posts have addressed aspects of this issue, including comments on corruption and publicity.)

Education choices and personal futures

Why do people pursue education — whether through secondary school or through post-secondary school?

It seems like a very simple question with an obvious answer: education adds to one’s skills and productivity; these enhanced skills make one more attractive in the employment market; and therefore, pursuing education is a rational investment in future lifetime earnings. (The economic impact of post-secondary education has been estimated to be at least one million dollars in additional earnings for the baccalaureate graduate over the high school graduate in the United States.) In other words, the simple answer appears to be that people make rational decisions about their investments in training and education, and they see the financial advantage that can be expected by having completed a degree program. More education is a valuable investment in future income, security, and status.

Caption: % of high school graduates aged 25-29 who have received bachelor’s degree

Source: National Center for Educational Statistics (link)

However, this answer stimulates quite a few difficult questions. Most fundamentally — how are we to make sense of the behavior of the people who do not make this choice? The chart posted above indicates that in the United States, less than 30% of 25-29 year-olds have completed a four-year college or university degree — and this percentage has only risen from 21% to 28% from 1971 to 1995. Moreover, this statistic does not include high school dropouts. So if more education is so plainly a rational investment, why is there such a low participation rate in the United States? Why do so many teenagers drop out of high school? (A recent study estimates that the drop-out rate in the Detroit public schools exceeds 50%, with some estimates going as high as 78%.) Why do many high school graduates choose not to apply to colleges or universities? (Only 36% of adults between 18-24 in the United States are enrolled in college or graduate school; Institute for Higher Education Policy report.) And why do under-educated but qualified young adults choose not to return to colleges or universities to complete their degrees? (In southeast Michigan, for example, there are more than 150,000 young adults between 25-34 who have completed some college courses but have not earned a degree.) So what are we to make of this evidence of dropping out, non-attending, and non-continuing?

Here are a few answers that have been proposed: some people lack the ability (or believe so) to complete their educations; some people lack the discipline to work hard today for a benefit that will only materialize in the distant future; some people lack the confidence that the normal opportunities that await university graduates will be available for them (because of racial discrimination or recession, for example); some people simply don’t think clearly about their current choices — they don’t plan well for the future; and, perhaps, some people are not strongly motivated by material incentives (income, career advancement).

Most of these explanations make sense of the behavior by re-describing the terms of the choice — thereby making the observed behavior “rational in the circumstances”; or they explain the behavior by referring to “failures of rationality” — weakness of the will, miscalculation, indifference to future benefits. (Jon Elster’s work has often focused on these sorts of failures; Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality.) But these explanations don’t seem sufficient; they appear to dissolve the problem rather than explain it.

A second type of explanation of these social behaviors is one based on analysis of structural barriers to educational completion: poor schooling at earlier levels, racial or ethnic discrimination in the provision of educational opportunities, or economic obstacles to continuing education (tuition and the need to work fulltime), for example. To these structural barriers some social psychologists have added the factor of discouragement created in young people by ethnic, racial, or gendered stereotypes about performance. An important example here is found in Claude Steele’s important work on “stereotype threat” and the major effects on performance that can be documented as deriving from stereotyped expectations. (Steele describes some of his hypotheses and findings in this Frontline interview.)

To these rational and structural factors, though, it seems relevant to ask whether there are also cultural expectations and community values that underlie the choices made by young people in various communities concerning education. There is the idea, for example, that midwestern manufacturing regions had developed a culture of complacency about education created by the availability of well-paid manufacturing jobs in the 1950s-70s. The easy availability of manufacturing work that required only a high school education led families to believe that their children didn’t need good educations in order to succeed in the world of work they would be entering. This set of expectations, it is argued, led to a familial attitude that guided young people towards choices that gave little importance to advanced education — and, for that matter, little attention to the importance of strong performance in K-12 schooling — a kind of “Beach Boys” mentality (cars, parties, fun). It would be interesting to know what attitudes towards higher education are found in Appalachian mining communities — is a college education valued by most families as a key ingredient of a good future, or is college education regarded as something foreign and unnecessary? And it seems that there is an opportunity for some good anthropological research on the Latino communities of the United States to help explain why high school completion rates and college attendance are lower than in other struggling communities in the United States.

So the question here is an important one: are there cultural values that work against placing a high value on educational attainment? What steps can be taken to mitigate these forces? And how do cultural, structural, and familial factors interact to give rise to low educational aspirations for a sizable percentage of the American youth cohort?

(I would like to see comparable statistics for Germany, France, and Australia. Any good sources out there?)

Trust and corruption

The recent collapse of a major skyscraper crane in New York City last month led to a surprising result: the arrest of the city’s chief crane inspector on charges of bribery. (See the New York Times story here.) (The story indicates that the facts surrounding the charges are unrelated to this particular crane collapse.) Several weeks earlier, a Congressional committee heard testimony from three F.A.A. inspectors to the effect that the agency had permitted Southwest Airlines to fly uninspected planes (story), and some attributed this lapse to too cozy a relationship between the F.A.A. and the airline industry:

The F.A.A.’s watchdog role, to many Democrats in Congress who now oversee airline regulators, grew toothless. “We had drifted a little bit too much toward the over-closeness and coziness between regulator and regulated,” said H. Clayton Foushee Jr., a former F.A.A. official who led a recent inquiry by Mr. Oberstar’s committee. (story)

The basic systems of a complex society depend upon the good-faith commitment of providers to give top priority to safety, health, and quality, but they also depend upon regulation, inspection, and certification. Caveat emptor doesn’t work when it comes to airline travel or working in a skyscraper; we simply have to trust that the airliner or the building is built and maintained to a high level of safety standards. The food we eat, the restaurants we patronize, the airlines and railroads we travel on, and the buildings we live and work in (and send our children to) provide complex products for our use that we can’t independently evaluate. Instead, we are obliged to trust the providers — the builders, the airline companies and their pilots and mechanics, the restaurant operators — and the regulatory and inspection regimes that are intended to provide an assurance of quality, safety, and health.

And yet there are two imperatives that work against public health and safety in most modern societies: the private incentive that the provider has to cut corners, and the perennial temptation of corruption that is inherent within a regulatory process. On the providers’ side, there is a constant business incentive to lower costs by substituting inferior ingredients or materials, to tolerate less-than-sanitary conditions in the back-of-restaurant areas, or to skimp on necessary maintenance of inherently dangerous systems. And on the regulatory side, there is the omnipresent possibility of collusion between inspectors and providers. Inspectors have it in their power to impose costs or savings on providers; so the provider has an economic interest in making payments to inspectors to save themselves these costs. (See Robert Klitgaard’s fascinating book, Controlling Corruption, for a political scientist’s analysis of this problem.)

In a purely laissez-faire environment we would expect there to be recurring instances of health and safety disasters in food production, building construction, transportation, and the healthcare system; this seems to be the logical result of a purely cost- and profit-driven system of production. (This seems to be what lies at the heart of the Chinese pet food and toy product scandals of several months ago, and it was at the heart of the food industries chronicled by Upton Sinclair a century ago in this country.)

But an inadequate system of regulation and enforcement seems equally likely to lead to health and safety crises for society, if inspection regimes are inadequate or if inspectors are corrupt. The two stories about inspection mentioned above point to different ways in which a regulatory system can go wrong: individual inspectors can be corrupted, or honest inspectors can be improperly managed by their regulatory organization. And, of course, there is a third possibility as well: the regulatory system may be fully honest and well-managed but wholly insufficient to the task presented to it in terms of the resources and personnel devoted to the regulatory task.

These two tendencies appear to be resulting in major social problems in China today. There is little confidence in the Chinese public in building standards in even the major civil engineering projects that the country has undertaken in the past ten years (CNN story, BBC story), there is widespread concern about corruption in many aspects of ordinary life, and there is growing concern among consumers about the safety of the system of food production, public water sources, and pharmaceuticals (story). (The anger and anguish expressed by parents whose children were lost in collapsed schools in Sichuan appear to derive from these kinds of mistrust.) So one of China’s major challenges for the coming years is to create credible, effective, and trusted regulatory regimes for the areas of public life that most directly affect health and safety.

But the stories mentioned above don’t have to do with China, or India, or Brazil; they have to do with the United States. We have lived through a period of determined deregulation since 1980, and have been subjected to a political ideology that minimized and demeaned the role of government in protecting the health and safety of the public — in banking no less than air safety. It seems very pressing for us now to ask ourselves: how effective are the systems of regulation and inspection that we have in our key industries — food, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, transportation, and construction? How much confidence can we have in the basis health and safety features of these fundamental social goods? And what sorts of institutional reforms do we need to undertake?

Is publicity an important source of power?

Powerful agencies in global society pursue their interests using the many forms of power available to them. Corporations, states, and powerful individuals exercise various kinds of power over ordinary people and groups. Coercion, deception, concealment, and intimidation rest in the portfolio of the powerful. What forms of self-defense are available to ordinary people against the misuse of power through coercion, intimidation, or the corruption of other wielders of power?

Amartya Sen’s answer to a part of this question is a famous one. He poses the question, why did major famine occur in post-Revolution China but not in post-Independence India? And his answer is, the existence of electoral institutions and a free press in India but not in China. The publicity of an emerging famine gave the Congress Party in India a major incentive to take steps that would prevent full-blown famine conditions. By contrast, the opacity of China and the non-accountable power of the Communist Party permitted the famine of the Great Leap Forward to continue through two harvest seasons and to accumulate to 20 to 30 million excess deaths. Publicity and public accountability of government played a decisive role in the different experiences, according to Sen and his co-author, Jean Drèze (Hunger and Public Action).

So, in suitable political circumstances, a free press involving independent investigative journalists can be a check on power, both in the hands of the state and for non-state actors. (Several earlier posts comment on the limits of this mechanism in authoritarian states; see entries under the label repression.)

What about the web and the blogosphere? Can these decentralized and non-official forms of publicity serve as an effective check on the abuse of power by the powerful?

There are several reasons for thinking they can, but there are also several countervailing factors. On the positive side, the web provides a broad and diffuse platform through which people with concerns or grievances can express their ideas and observations. Web pages and blogs provide everyone with a platform from which to make a case and present evidence. We can all be investigative journalists; we can all speak truth to power. And thanks to the power of search engines, these voices aren’t doomed to the oblivion of cacaphony. People concerned about a particular issue can find each other and pool information. And they can coordinate their actions into organized collective action. Whistle-blowers can publish their knowledge on the web — often behind a screen of anonymity that protects them from retaliation.

But we have to ask this question: to what extent does public knowledge of an abuse lead to effective actions or processes that remedy the abuse? What social mechanisms transform public knowledge into power? Sen’s argument about famine identifies one such mechanism: voters care about famine, and parties or candidates who are known to be ineffective in response to famine will be unsuccessful at the polls. So public opinion, energized by knowledge of disturbing facts, can lead to action by elected officials. But this mechanism isn’t available in all social settings or for all forms of bad behavior by powerful agencies, for several reasons. First, some forms of bad behavior by the powerful are largely outside the control of democratic processes — for example, business practices. Second, there are recognized strategies of “spin control” that allow bad actors to obscure their actions from public view. Finally, it is all too often that it is difficult to capture enough public attention to an abuse to gather a significant political force. (Think about how relatively ineffective public knowledge and revulsion about the violence in Darfur has been; and think about how little effect public knowledge of ineptitude and racial bias in governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina had on the actual policies and remedies that have been offered. The public knows quite a bit about both situations; but this knowledge hasn’t actually changed very much.)

Consider a hypothetical example. Suppose the XYZ mining company is developing a major gold mine in an underdeveloped part of the Amazon. And suppose that its practices of land acquisition, environmental effects, and labor relations are in fact highly abusive, coercive, and destructive. (Here’s a summary of a report documenting just this sort of behavior in Guyana.) For example, suppose the company has hired a private security company to evict local farmers, and evictions have taken place through the use of a significant amount of coercion; and suppose that the operations of the mine are creating significant and permanent environmental destruction. Now suppose, finally, that travelers and reporters have unearthed some of the details of these bad behaviors. How can that information be used to compel the company to improve its practices, or to lead to some form of punishment for the company that might deter similar practices in the future?

It would appear that there are only a few avenues of influence that exist. First, reporting the behavior to the national government that has jurisdiction might result in enforcement of national regulations about labor and environmental practices. Second, widespread global exposure of the practices might prove to be sufficiently embarrassing for the XYZ company that it has an incentive to reform its practices. And third, widespread exposure of the practices to potential customers of the XYZ company might lead these customers to purchase their gold from a competitor.

It is apparent that all of these remedies are very weak. National governments often lack either the will or the capacity to enforce regulations — even when they exist. Multinational corporations have thick skins, and public embarrassment may be a relatively small price to pay for profitable practices. And they have deep pockets when it comes to communicating their side to the story. And influencing consumers using this kind of information is possible but limited. The effort to discourage consumers from buying “conflict diamonds” falls in this category, and in the case of diamonds it may be moderately effective. But it is not likely to affect the purchasing behavior of anonymous companies buying raw materials whose business interests are defined by price, reliability, and quality.

So it seems that two things are true: first, that the internet has created a channel for the gathering and sharing of information that greatly increases the likelihood that bad behavior by powerful actors will be noted in some detail; and second, that this degree of publicity is only weakly to moderately effective in discouraging or punishing bad behavior by powerful actors. So publicity is a resource for the powerless; but it is a resource with fairly limited effects.

Causes of the world food crisis

Today’s New York Times has a good story on some of the background of the current food crisis (story). The basic point is fundamental: donor nations and international development institutions have substantially disinvested in the great agricultural research institutes that were founded in the sixties and seventies to provide a scientific basis for increasing food security. The story highlights the significant decline of institutions like the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines — with disastrous consequences for the continual challenge of increasing agricultural productivity and — usually — rural incomes. (Click on the graphic to see a great set of graphs documenting investment, productivity, and rice stockpiles.)

There is a direct relationship between investment, scientific activity, and improvement in agricultural techniques, seed varieties, and new forms of pest control. If the world makes those investments, we have a good reason for confidence in the ability of the planet to keep food supply ahead of food demand. But if funding agencies and international institutions falter in their attention to the continuing struggle for agricultural progress — as they most certainly seem to have done — then food security will indeed be a center-stage issue for the coming decades.

Many commentators have also emphasized another crucial point: that hunger and poverty are directly connected. We’ve seen the impact that rising rice prices have on poor people in dozens of countries in the developing world — essentially pushing poor people into ultra-poor crisis. But there is also a virtuous circle that economic development policy makers need to be striving for: increasing the incomes of the poor, leading to greater purchasing power, leading to rising demand for locally and nationally produced food, leading to increased incomes for rural poor people. Seen from this perspective, agricultural development has to be a top priority within economic development policy thinking.

The struggle for racial justice

The struggle for racial justice in America was in its sharpest form in the 1960s, from the Freedom Marches in the South in the early sixties to the militant and determined struggles in the North in the later sixties. Organizers, militants, activists, leaders, and volunteers gave their best energies, brains, and courage to this extended effort to change American society. And when you think about it, this decentralized movement was remarkably successful in terms of its reach, the ability of various civil rights and activist organizations to motivate followers, and some of the concrete structural changes that were achieved. (It goes without saying that we have a very long way to go in pursuit of racial justice today, in 2008.)

One way of getting a better understanding of the Civil Rights movement is to read some of the very good historical and sociological scholarship that has been done on the period — for example, Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 (America in the King Years) or Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer. But another way is to talk with people who lived through the struggle — people who went “went South”, people who worked as organizers and activists in Chicago or Detroit, people who got involved in some of the militant organizations such as the Black Panthers. And often what you gain from conversations like this is somewhat different from what comes across in the organized historical scholarship. It’s more intense, for one thing — just as it must have been in the 1960s to talk with veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade about their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. But it also gives you the participant’s perspective on things rather than the historian’s view. And it focuses often on the process of mobilization and consciousness-raising, rather than the eventual outcome.

I’ve done two recent interviews with scholars whose own experiences of the Civil Rights movement are genuinely absorbing. One is Ahmad Rahman, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the author of The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora. Rahman is an accomplished historian and a rising authority in African and African-American history. He was also an activist and member of the Black Panther Party in Detroit in the 1960s. The second interview is with Dr. Gloria House, a professor of humanities and African and African-African American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. House is a well-respected poet and author, and has played an important role in the continuing prominence of Broadside Press. (She recently edited a great volume celebrating the press; A Different Image: The Legacy of Broadside Press: An Anthology.) Her own experience of the Civil Rights movement began at UC-Berkeley, followed by time in Alabama and Detroit. Her experiences with SNCC and the struggles in the South are very intense, and she finds the voice to express what she experienced powerfully. She has spent decades as a scholar-activist in Detroit.

Both interviews are absorbing and eye-opening. One point that comes out of both Rahman’s and House’s recollections is the importance of the struggles for African national liberation in the development of consciousness within the African-American movements — and the “echo” of American developments in African liberation thinking. There is a very clear demonstration of the political-intellectual work that went into framing an understanding of American society and liberation that was suited to the African-American experience. But there are dozens of other important insights — the ways in which the struggle for Black Consciousness developed, the importance of youth engagement in the struggle, and the power of poetry during those decades. Rahman brings some of the issues forward to the present day, by comparing the struggles of French immigrant people against police brutality with the struggles of the African-American community in the earlier decades. And House shares some of her thinking about where the quest for racial justice may be going today — emphasizing community-based activism. She also shares several of her poems about the early days of the struggle at the end of the interview.

It is a constant struggle for all of us to go beyond clichés and cartoons in our understanding of our society and our history. And a very powerful way of doing that is to listen to the voices of people whose experiences are so directly connected to the major fault lines and turning points in our history.

The video interviews with Rahman and House are posted on YouTube, and audio versions are posted as well; Rahman, House part 1, House part 2. The audio interviews are also included in the UnderstandingSociety podcast, available through iTunes.

Visit also this relevant posting on Jim Johnson’s blog, with information about the recent publication of Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.