Show Me the (Research) Money

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Alarmed by growing scientific research on the health risks created by the widespread prevalence of guns, the NRA and its Congressional allies stripped all funding for the Center for Disease Control’s gun research budget. They also inserted a provision into the CDC appropriation bills that said “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” deterring the CDC from providing significant funds to gun research ever since. As a result, the New York Times reports, “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result.” This has meant in practice that “there is no scientific consensus on the best approach to limiting gun violence, and the N.R.A. is blocking work that might well lead to such a consensus.”

“Biden: The White House Will Fight NRA’s War On Science” Zack Beauchamp

We know from other areas– evolution and climate change would have to top the list– that the American right is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-science. They don’t want public funding of science (unless it supports corporate profit) and when science tells them something they don’t want to hear, they start disinformation campaigns. They force religious dogma– creationism– into the school textbooks and they pretend to debunk climate science.

The damage this has done to our intellectual life is probably best measured by the damage to our coastlines, amplified by the public’s unwillingness to support measures that might slow down the global rise in temperature. We are more ignorant, as a culture, than we ought to be and we will be paying the price for decades. I suppose that I knew this but it turns out the right has long used the same tactics in the science of gun violence.

Here, the enforced ignorance, sponsored by the right, has cost us in the sorts of scientific knowledge we might have used to prevent the recent gun massacres. It also makes effective gun control measures now much less effective, which I suppose is the point. I think that restoring this research has to be high on the agenda if we have any hope of real change. It ought to be obvious that We can’t prevent gun violence unless we understand it.

Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous, Writing

Market Myths

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The US health care system is 2.5 times more expensive than the nearest competitor for inferior overall outcomes. A UK Treasury study of “private financing initiatives” showed they typically added 40% to the cost of public services. Academic publisher Elsevier’s 37% profit margins are a big reason why its articles cost 8 times more apiece than do their open source equivalents. And of course the Cameron government’s massive cut to British universities resulted in an immediate, nearly-universal tripling of fees and a likely increase of 100 billion pounds to public debt.

“MOOCs and Parking Lots: Privatization on Auto-Pilot,” Chris Newfield

As a kid, I loved the Greek Myths. I am not completely sure why– I wasn’t a natural scholar or anything, and there was nothing systematic or intellectual about my interests. I think I just liked the idea of a world that included these supernatural beings. I have the same feeling now when I watch Dr. Who. I don’t have to believe in the good Doctor– literally, as my students would say– in order to take pleasure in the idea that he exists.

I think the market has a similar role in the lives of a lot of people. If you think about it, or do some reading, you quickly find out that the market is no panacea for anything. It does some things well, but even the things it does well have very high costs, many conveniently hidden. Apple brought us the I-phone, but behind the technology lies an entire world of exploited labor and environmental damage, among other things.

At some point– reading Yeats, I think– I discovered that the Greek Myths also included the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a Swan. It’s a freaky and disturbing story. We need a similar sort of story for the people who believe in markets. The market is comforting because we want to live in a world that sorts itself out automatically, that settle into fairness in the way a dog settles down to sleep. The market story is pleasant and utterly impossible.

Posted in: Economics, Uncategorized, Writing

The Emperor Looks Increasingly Naked

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Unfortunately, Mr. Vaidhyanathan says, the discussion of college reinvention represents a watering down of higher education’s social contract—a process that has been in the works for decades. “What it is going to take to reinvigorate higher education in this country,” he says, “is a strong political movement to champion research, to champion low tuition costs as a policy goal, to stand up against the banks that have made so much money lending for student loans, and to reconnect public institutions to their sense of public mission.”

“That is going to be a long process,” he says. “It has taken 20 years to press universities down into this cowering pose, and it is going to take 20 assertive years to get back to the point where Americans view American higher education the way the rest of the world does.”

“For Whom Is College Being Reinvented?” Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk

When I lived in the Philippines as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1980’s, the first measure of wealth wasn’t what people owned, as it was in the U.S., it was the condition of the roads. I live in Conception, Tarlac, a few hours north of Manila, the hometown of President Aquino, and the roads were constantly under construction. Filipino’s used to joke that each region should get its own president, in turn, so that every region could be developed.

Roads are a part of the social wage, the often unspoken benefits we get simply because we are citizens. We have great roads in the U.S., at least in most places, but no national health care or pension system. It’s no coincidence that most of the stimulus money went to building roads. Other parts of the infrastructure– airports, fiber optics, sewage, garbage collection– are just as important, of course, but roads have a special place in the American heart.

In the 1950’s and 60’s the social wage grew to include a cheap college education. The Reagan Revolution changed all that; we had less and less money for roads and infrastructure and college grew increasingly expensive. The social wage stagnated, shrank; we can’t get national health care, our pension systems are in trouble. We tend to think of roads– and cheap education and good infrastructure– as our birthright but they are not.

The social wage existed and grew because we fought for it, through unions. A lot of people thought that technology was going to make this social process– grabbing our share of profits in the form of the social wage– obsolete. Let them raise tuition; we’d use the internet to make education so ubiquitous it would be nearly free. (“Virtually” free, I should say.) Perhaps 2012 is the year that we began to realize that there’s no detour around the class struggle.

Posted in: Writing

Violence

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It’s difficult to write about violence after yet another school shooting; I’d hate to contribute to the sense of mindless obsession that surrounds these things, especially on television. The news channels haven’t been able to talk about anything else, even when there’s little to say; they design graphics and even theme songs around every incident, fighting over ratings and advertisers. It’s all predictable and mostly empty and sad.

At some point in the ritual, sooner rather than later this time, perhaps because very young children are involved, the journalists turn their attention to the debate over gun control. We do need some sensible regulations over guns, of course, especially cheap handguns and automatic (and semi-automatic) rifles, even if we also know that anyone set on mass violence will probably find a way to find a gun and ammunition. We make it too easy.

The culture of guns runs from the posturing of the NRA to the families who keep small armories at home, certain that they are safer against some poorly defined threat. It doesn’t stop there. The same “moneyed interests” who have made sensible gun regulation impossible (and try to destroy unions and privatize schools and…) stand in the way of a comprehensive national health care system with full parity for mental health. We need to connect the dots.

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Writing