Anybody else unsettled by 13 year olds promoting books on politics and giving rousing political speeches? He’s actually not bad, but what ever happened to video games and pick-up basketball?
At the very least, you can show this to your undergrads when you need to light a fire under them!
Peter Singer offers up a provocative article in the Chronicle of Higher Education imploring us to spend more of our time in academe addressing global poverty across the board, not simply in Sociology or International Relations courses:
We should not limit so important a topic to specialized courses on international development (valuable as they are). The issue should be prominent in anthropology, cultural studies, economics, ethics and sociology. In political-science courses, we should ask why we pay so little attention to people living in poverty outside our borders.
His concern for the neglect of the global poverty issues is so profound that he thinks we should prioritize areas of study that emphasize pressing social issues (Yay for Social Scientists! Peter Singer for Provost of the World!)
we should give a lower priority to areas of study that have no obvious connection with world poverty or with, say, climate change or avoiding war or, indeed, with any similarly large and pressing problem. That will no doubt incense some of my colleagues who think that we should study art, languages, history, mathematics, or philosophy for its own sake. I agree that, in an ideal world, studying epistemology, classical music, and Italian Renaissance art would be part of every cultivated person’s education. But we live in a world in which 27,000 children die every day from preventable causes.
While I wouldn’t go there, I’d submit that a move towards more engagement with the world through the study of its social dynamics is preferable to a move away from it. There are examples of institutions that are eliminating social science programs altogether. Contrast Singer’s view with Wisconsin Lutheran University’s decision to drop their political science major because they determined it wasn’t central to the liberal arts mission of the institution to offer (HT: The Monkey Cage).
I would caution however, as we thrust headlong into saving the world that we use Harold Bloom’s controversial reading/misreading of Plato in which he suggests the point of the Republic is to point out that “political idealism is the most destructive of human passions.” We should enter conversations with students in about how best to alleviate global poverty with profound humility regarding the complexity and contextuality of global problems and be wary of magic bullet solutions to hard, vexing problems. At the same time, I agree with Singer that we must act as if what we did mattered, whether it’s ultimate outcome actually produces desires results. I’m struck by a parallel he uses in his courses:
I draw a parallel with a situation in which you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. We all think it would be seriously wrong to walk on past the pond — in fact, most people think it would be monstrous. Yet most people don’t think it wrong to buy expensive shoes that they don’t need rather than give the money to an organization that would put it toward interventions that could save a child’s life.
This intriguing thought exercise illustrates my point. One one hand, it seems monstrous to ignore mass suffering just because we don’t observe it directly. On the other, we have no way of know if contributing money to a charity would necessarily produce the desired effect. In fact a case could be made that charity has deleterious effects on economies in the developing world. Donated clothes, for instance, creates a secondary market in resold goods that undermines the development of a local textile industry in African countries. Of course doing nothing wouldn’t necessarily mean an indigenous textile industry would thrive and would ensure that many millions continued to go hungry.
Again, this example doesn’t mean we should act or engage our students in discussions of global poverty. It means we should be intentional about having broad-based discussion about how to address them. But they should take place.
One of my students sent me this interesting graphic that suggests we’re getting there.
This graph suggests that our stock market losses are equivalent to the losses during the great depression for the same time period. Granted, this represents only one data point. Here’s another:
Nearly one in five own more than homes are worth – Time Magazine.
There is plenty of counter-data to suggest that we’re in a slowdown. Unemployment is “only” 9.1 percent, a far cry from the 25% unemployment during the peak of the great depression. I’m more interested in the question of how and when we construct a depression. Rahm Emmanuel has achieved conservative blog infamy for saying “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Indeed, the Obama administration has initiated an agressive policy agenda (education, health care, environment, budget, bank bailout, housing, etc.) The policy might fit the times, but Emannuel’s sentiment reflects the investment an activist government has in constructing a depression. An increasing amount of data suggests that “if the construction fits, wear it.”
Brian Knowlton at the New York Times Caucus Blog posted on a conference call with the White House’s new Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra. Of special interest to social scientists is his plans to create a data.gov repository. I’m getting a bit wary of these new free standing “.gov” sites and wondering if they represent an “openness meme” rather than actual openness. But the rhetoric sounds promising. From Saul Hansen’s Bits blog at the New York Times:
Another initiative will be to create a new site, Data.gov, that will become a repository for all the information the government collects. He pointed to the benefits that have already come from publishing the data from the Human Genome Project by the National Institutes of Health, as well as the information from military satellites that is now used in GPS navigation devices.
“There is a lot of data the federal government has and we need to make sure that all the data that is not private, or restricted for national security reasons, can be made public,” he said.
While more data availability is all good, we in the social sciences should keep an eye on the type of data that gets released. The federal government puts out a fair amount of quantitative data already. What I’m interested in is how that data is going to be made available. Will the layman with an interest in an issue be able to quickly mashup data and application to create information they can use. Can a local activist get water quality data from the EPA and be easily able to create a Google Map that shows areas of concern? it’s one thing to do a “data dump,” it’s another to be intentional in empowering people to use the data. Then again, that might be best left to “the crowd” of politically active geeks whose numbers I hope grow exponentially in the next few years.
Saskia Sassen has a good essay in the latest issue of Dissent regarding globalization and the expansion of executive power in liberal democracies.
She makes the case that the globalization literature tends to focus on whether the state as a whole is made stronger or weaker by globalization. She calls for parsing units of power within the state and evaluating their relative strength vis-a-vis globalization. She reports on new work she’s doing that suggests the rise of trade and finance related agencies, the rise of cross border collaboration, the rise of the IMF and WTO and the increasing deregulatory climate for trade around the world has led to increased executive power.
These findings are in step with what what Post-Fordist theorists have been saying since the 1990’s. The central claim of many of these theorists is that the state would not fall away but that it would have to become a more flexible state to adapt to quickly changing conditions (i.e. global financial crises) Logically, executives are more flexible and adaptable than legislatures because they are not deliberative bodies and are not consensus based.
She’s right to assert that this expansion of the executive erodes citizen power. There are few mechanisms to make executives accountable. My hope is that the generative capacities of the internet make it easier for the electorate to be engaged by more conveniently providing access to political information. There are some rumblings about the Obama administration’s delay in making information about it’s inner workings accessible to the public. But..it’s hard to generate mass public outrage over the lack of citizen briefing books.
Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum
I’ve been spending part of my day chewing over this quote by Mark Pesce in an essay entitled Hyperpolitics published in edge.org (one of my favorites).
Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.
His argument is that the “hardware” of new technology makes us hyperconnected. This accelerated capacity to share with one another allows us to more quickly reproduce behaviors, what he calls hypermimesis…an accelerated capacity for “the crowd” to learn from one another. This capacity will lead to a hyperempowered crowd that will produce unprecedented soceital changes that liberal democratic systems will be incapable of handling.
I’m usually very skeptical of proclamations about the great unrecognizable future. I remember a student introducing me to Ray Kurtzweil’s idea of the singularity and thinking “this guy’s Kurtzweil guy is a nut”! But I’m slowly giving more purchase to the idea that our “hardware” is allowing us to make rapid, unreflective, undemocratic changes to our social, political and economic systems.
Pesce makes a simple yet provocative argument: changes in a society’s ability to share causes massive shifts in social organization. Does this ability to share/copy/mimic explain the financial crisis we now find ourselves in. The desire of other financial institutions to get into the mortgage market, the easy availability of credity and coupled with the accelerated ability to slice and dice mortgages led us to where we are today (as I write the Dow Jones average is at 6726).
I remain a skeptic of deterministic/functionalist views of human evolution. I still think we have the resilience and capacity to stake out new forms of social organization. But we have little idea as to what those new forms will look like.
Those of you who can’t get enough of political scientists blogging should go over to the entertaining and informative The Monkey Cage blog for a compendium of what my humble discipline has to offer the blogosphere.
There’s lots of good stuff out there, but no good mechanism for aggregating it. Has anyone put together a list like this for sociology blogs? Other discipline’s blogs? How do you determine which blogs are worth your while and which aren’t? What becomes “Google Reader worthy?”
For those of you who think about how to make your findings relevant in public policy discussions, check out Hans Roslings’ TED Talks. Through his Gapminder application that aminates time series data, Rosling has managed to take abstract numbers and humanize them. A good example is the Dollar Street interactive graphics he talks about halfway into his discussion.
I’m not certain that Rosling has had any impact in changing policy discussions, but they are amazing classroom tools. I wish the Obama administration used this type of animated data when it is trying to tell a story about the need for universal health care or addressing climate change. Imagine a one hour prime time special where the administration used these tools for presenting data (minus the swordswallowing at the end of Rosling’s talk).
