Just read a jarring piece by Malcom Gladwell’s in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the emerging connection between playing football and developing serious brain injury later in life. One study Gladwell cites finds a significantly higher proportion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.) in the brain, a malady caused by trauma, than in the rest of the population. The problem Gladwell discovers, is in the accumulation of micro-traumas to the brain, rather than the accumulation of concussions as was previously believed.

It’s particularly disturbing to read this article as a football fan. At its best, the sport is a celebration of strength, courage, teamwork, and intelligence. Further, it is deeply woven into the American psyche. Television ratings for American football far exceed that of all other sports. FOX, CBS, NBC and ABC/ESPN have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to secure television deals. Personally, my earliest memories are of watching the Miami Dolphins with my dad. As a 12 year old, I sobbed uncontrollably when the Dolphins gave up a 10 points halftime lead to the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XVII (damn that John Riggins!!!!) Even academics wax poetic about the muscular ballet of football…check out these two Stanford Humanities professors going on about the aesthetic beauty of the sport.

While it appears that research on brain trauma is in its early stages, it seems the toll the sport takes on its participants is far greater than even they realize. From a policy perspective, it opens up the question of paternalism. When should the state step in to save individuals from themselves? The lure of current riches – both monetary and psychic – draws individuals to enter into contractual arrangements that, in many cases, leaves them worse off than if they had not played. Because they have imperfect information about future outcomes, then exchange future health for current fame and fortune. Should we allow them to?

A more vexing question is whether we as Americans have begun to construe access to football spectating as a social right? Social rights are typically those goods that government provides to help secure our well being. Examples are education, health care, etc. Typically, once Americans consider something a social right, government has a difficult time withdrawing it….see Medicare. Having gone to college in the South as I did, I’d be hard pressed to envision what the vast majority of people would do on a Fall Saturday afternoon if there were no college football to watch. I can’t imagine a politician that would even touch the question of banning football. I’m afraid we have developed such a deep, inviolable attachment to the sport that getting rid of it would be akin to getting rid of universal public education? I say this as someone who still watches the Miami Dolphins and marvels at the brilliance of the wildcat offense. But now when I watch, I’ll do it with both admiration and apprehension.

I heard a great podcast interview with Martha Nussbaum done through the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. The interview is based on her new book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law .

What strikes me as most interesting in her work is the distinction she draws between disgust and indignation, the former being based on a visceral impulse to distance oneself from an object and the latter based on the violation of abstract principles like human dignity. Nussbaum notes that every culture seems to label an “other” as worthy of disgust.

This distinction is important for understanding contemporary politics. A few weeks back, Jimmy Carter made news for suggesting that much of the “tea party” opposition to President Obama was based on racist beliefs towards him, not on ideology. If true, this would seem to be political action motivated by disgust rather than indignation. Indignation would be if opponents truly viewed him as a socialist and weren’t simply masking their visceral disgust for him with a more socially acceptable ideological argument.

The problem is that it is immensely difficult to tease out the difference. How do we know if opposition is truly rooted in racism? Perhaps a combination of disgust and indignation drives opposition to Obama. How much was opposition to Bush driven by digust? How much by indignation?

It’s an important question because disgust can’t be reasoned with. Logical arguments do not make spoiled milk smell better. True racism can be “un-learned,” but how much of that un-learning takes place through reasoning? I’m not sure.

No Invitation to APSA for You Buddy!!!!

I’m often critical of my own discipline, but that’s ok because it’s cosa nostra! Fellow Political Science bloggers at The Monkey Cage are rightly peeved (and here) over an amendment offered by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn to prohibit NSF funding for Political Science research. Here’s Coburn gettin’ all Thomas Kuhn on us:

NSF spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political “science.” This amount could have been directed towards the study of biology, chemistry, geology, and physics. These are real fields of science in which new discoveries can yield real improvements in the lives of everyone.

Ouch! If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Coburn was a levying a reasoned critique against a behavioralist approach to the study of social and political phenomena that perhaps tries to mirror the natural sciences too closely. It’s like he read David Easton’s 1969 address at the American Political Science Association where he calls on political scientists to ask more relevant questions and create a “new behavioral revolution” in political science. Maybe Coburn is a devotee of Bent Flyvbjerg and his book Making Social Science Matter where the Dutch Planner calls for a more phronetic rather than epistemological approach to social research. Maybe he’s read the vast literature on action research.… ok, back to reality.  Here’s his big case.:

(political scientists) may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

Wow! Say what you want about behavioralists, but Gary King is not John King standing in front of an interactive map. There is a place for advancing general knowledge about why people act the way they do with regard to politics. This last paragraph shows a disdain for voters. “Americans who have an interest in electoral politics”? Am I pollyanna or shouldn’t that be everyone?

Man, we Poly Sci types gotta’ get the word out! I’m glad I don’t teach at Oklahoma State!!!!

Check out this effort called Parking day NYC by artists and activists to create bite-sized, modular patches of public space. I wonder how these types of efforts might work in suburban communities?

New Yorkers to Create PreFab Parks for Park(ing) Day. via WorldChanging.com

Here are some startling figures on the world’s water supply:

When it comes to global water issues, the numbers are not pretty: 2.5 billion people (that’s nearly half the world’s population) live without safe sanitation. About 1 billion still defecate in the open, and that same number do not have access to safe drinking water.

Don’t Love That Dirty Water.via Good Magazine.

This is a few months old, but interesting.  Paul Smalera at Slate asks if Obama is the Getting Things Done (GTD) president.  Anyone who works in IT or knows someone who works in IT is familiar with the cult (I mean that in a nice way) of productivity guru David Allen and his GTD system for managing work flow.

Smalera asks whether Obama is being too much of a checklist president , focused on moving legislation off his to-do list instead of focusing on fewer bills that would forward a progressive agenda.

To be fair to David Allen, he does talk about conducting a weekly review where you, in personal development speak, adopt a 50,000 foot view of your goals.

My take is that presidents need to be GTD focused in their first six months.  I envision a 2011 State of the Union address where President Obama  can spend 60 minutes ticking off accomplishments from his first term….taking a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook.  Think about Bush 43’s legislative agenda in his first term which included the Medicare Prescription Drug legislation and No Child Left Behind.

The big question is why we prefer our presidents to be able to rattle off a laundry list of accomplishments.  I think is goes to our core American ethos.  GTD is so popular because it provides people with a manual for fitting into American norms….kind of like The Protestant Work Ethic for white collar workers.

Why is belief that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus ineligible to be chief executive stronger in the South than in other areas of the Country? I know the racism thing is an attractive explanatory reach, but could it be better explained by levels of political polarization, education or political culture? It would be interesting to compare this data with regional breakdowns of the belief that the Clinton’s killed Vince Foster and were running a drug cartel out of Arkansas.

HT: Washington Monthly

Update

Via Tech President...the top ten states in Google searches for “Obama birth certificate”

A look at Google Trends is certainly illuminating. The top ten states where people are searching on the phrase “Obama birth certificate” are:
1. Louisiana
2. Mississippi
3. Colorado
4. Oklahoma
5. Alabama
6. Tennessee
7. Arkansas
8. Missouri
9. South Carolina
10. North Carolina

Political Science super blog The Monkey Cage introduced me to a book by Josiah Ober, a Political Scientist at Stanford entitled Democracy and Knowledge that provides a defense of Athenian Democracy on the grounds that it’s participatory rule-making processes (for example, the Athenian Council of 500 were chosen by random lot rather than election) provided a greater breadth of perspectives on social issues than our current representative democracy.  The argument is that citizens can provide the local knowledge needed to make effective decisions and that social networking technologies might help organize citizen input in effective ways.

Here’s a sample chapter of the book.

Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review suggests that to Get What You Want, Don’t Go With Your Gut.  Rather than let your emotions produce a reaction to an event that affects the outcome, you should pause and let your assessment of the preferred outcome guide the reaction.  Solid, Jedi Master stuff.  However, the more I read about moral psychology, the more I question this premise.  Joanthan Haidt at Virgina has done some interesting experiments asking students their moral evaluations of these scenarios in which no harm comes to subjects:

a son who promises his mother, while she was on her deathbed, that he would visit her grave every week, and then reneged on his commitment because he was busy.

a man buys a dead chicken at the supermarket and then has “relations” with it before cooking and eating it.

Most of the students responded with an strong “ewww” factor guiding their evaluations, but had difficulty coming up with rational explanations for why the behavior was morally wrong. The logic for its moral appropriateness, or inappropriateness, resided in “the gut” or the emotional brain. I wonder if better advice to those in the business world and, from my perspective, the political world would be to become skillful and knowing when to listen to your gut and when to listen to the rational brain that sets goals. It would seem that there are times when your gut is telling you that your outcomes need to change. Personally, I’d be ecstatic if more politicians listened to their gut when voting on legislation.

So people pick cockiness, or to use contemporary urban parlance, swagga’ over actual competence.  So says a researcher:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are.

The piece goes on to describe other ways in which people are more drawn to those who present themselves as self-assured.  Isn’t this something Jay Z, or Erving Goffman, already knows.  What does this fact of human behavior say about our politics?  It sure explains the appeal of a Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh.  Maybe that’s the problem with the progressive left, it lacks swagga’… I mean Amy Goodman?  Al Franken?  Lovely people, I’m sure, but c’mon.  Even Chuck D couldn’t make Air America cool!

An interesting thought experiment would consider how you could operationalize cockiness?

HT: orgtheory.net