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.

HT: Nancy Scola at TechPresident

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).

KPFA in Berkely has a wonderful radio show called Against the Grain.   Tuesday’s show had an interview by the host C.S. Soong with William Irvine, a philosophy professor at Wayne State University.  The talk fouced on Irvine’s new book “A Giude to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.”  The book focuses on the anicent Greek/Roman philosophy of Stoicism.  In the interview, Irvine notes that the goal of the Stoics was “tranquility” or the moderation of passions and desires which often lead us towards emotional higs and lows.  He claims the stoics did this through reasoning.  If you want a brand new car that you don’t need, the Stoics prescribe that you think about your current car being stolen and how that loss would make you feel.  That in turn would make you appreciate your existing car more.

My policy class is looking at metaphors and symbols in politics and how they are used to frame debate about issues.  A growing consensus in emerging on our biological predispositions to become vulnerable to frames.  Matt Bai has a good New York Times Magazine article that describes the Democratic party’s love affair with George Lakoff and his theories of framing.  But listeinging to Irvine’s description of the stoics makes me think about how much we’ve allowed ourselves to succumb to emotion and desire in political discourse.  The Greek conception of man (people) was that they were half animal and half god.  The animal was the impulsive, irrational side and the god was the reasoned, logical side. I contend that our politics have drifted towards appealing to our “animal side.”  See Frontline’s great documentary The Persuaders for an example of emotional appeals.

Of course politicians have always appealed to lower instincts in making claims to power.  But do we have a responsibility to create a “push back” from the “god side.”

What are the consequences of policies that are sold to us using strong emotional appeals?  Should we as a society demand that our citizens work to cultivate virtues like tranquility and reason?  Or has the train left the station… message makers have become much too sophisticated at pushing our emotional buttons that reason’s not making a comeback, and it hasn’t been here for years  (apologies to L.L. Cool J).

I’m giving a talk tomorrow to our Pyschology Department’s brown bag series entitled “You Call This Service? The Effect of Project Type on Deficiency Paradigms in a Service Learning Project.”  The main theme of this talk is that unreflective service learning programs that emphasize altruistic service learning where the pedagogical emphasis is on “service” has deleterious effects for both the subject and object of service learning.  From my article (currently under review The Journal of Political Science Education):

the programmatic emphasis with altruism focused service programs is on the community being served as “in need” rather than as a community with a pre-existing stock of assets (Kretzman and McKnight 1993). This deficiency paradigm (McKnight 1996) leads to a focus on what Eby (1998) calls McService or Service in a Box – a perspective on service that ignores the specific context in which the service takes place and thereby reinforces a paradigm of advantage and dependence.

Service learning is a very powerful and effective pedagogy. A number of studies find that the approach enhances students’ understanding of links between theory and practice, their problem-solving and critical thinking and their empathy towards social problems. But how do we keep our students and our institutions from developing a “do gooder” syndrome where they view their role as “saving” communities?

In the study I discuss tomorrow, I present very preliminary research that suggests that students gain a more complex relationship of low-income communities when service learning programs are designed to promote collaborative work rather than traditional forms of voluntarism. Altruism and giving of one’s time are important elements of a strong civic culture. However, my fear is that we train a generation of students who want to work for rather than with people in low income communities.

Theda Skocpol has a great critique of the change in civic participation from locally-based associations to national “professional advocacy” organizations that limit the range of voices in public discourse. I’m curious to hear about other’s experieince with service learning. Do students work collaboratively with communities or work for communities? Do the projects they engage in emphasize the community as deficient or as asset filled?

Although I’m not a sociologist, I was lucky enough get a Ph.D. from one of the few public policy programs (University of Colorado – Boulder) in the U.S. that wasn’t simply economics by another name and actually took sociology seriously. One of the key “lightbulb” moments in my life was being assigned C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination.

As an intrepid young graduate student, I had no idea that I was reading a sociologist or that Mills’ was out of favor when I came across his text. He shook me by forcing me to realize that the times in which I lived were mediated through a structure, that structures have changed throughout human history, and that people life chances are heavily influenced by that structure. More importantly, he challenged me as a would be social scientist to make this truth explicit to others.

I think of Mills’ as I teach my courses at California Lutheran University in the midst of what might be a broad, expansive paradigm shift in how we organize ourselves politically and economically. I am struck by how difficult it is for people to recognize that the structure they find themselves is not how it has always been. I’m curious as to how others are talking about the global financial crisis. Are they addressing it as a temporary blip in an otherwise sound structural system? Or are they addressing the possibility of a shift and speculating as to what that shift might look like?