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Struggles of a Class Worrier

Published September 5, 2014

Governments have to do more to reduce income inequality, says UC Berkeley's Robert Reich.

If anyone at Berkeley is familiar the nexus of academia, policy, and advocacy, it is Robert Reich, the Chancellor’s Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Formerly the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, Reich is one of the United State’s leading voices on the nation’s growing inequality. Recently, at the Aspen Ideas Festival (a co-production of the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic magazine), he had a chance to speak on the subject to some of the U.S.’s “top one-tenth of the one percent”, as he noted recently on his blog.

“When I suggested that we return to the 70 percent income-tax rate on top incomes that prevailed before 1981,” he wrote, “many looked as if I had punched them in the gut.”

Inequality is one of the world’s greatest and most complicated governance challenges. Social scientists who study the issue often reach dramatically different conclusions about its origins and policy implications. Indeed, many would still argue that inequality is inherent to capitalism; Thomas Pikkety’s re-treatment of Marx’s classic, for instance, has inspired a modern revisiting of the “contradictions of capitalism”.

But that inequality is rising in the U.S. is clear, especially inequality in wages and particularly between wages at the top and everyone else’s. Among developed nations, and some developing nations, the U.S. leads the way. Today’s levels of income inequality have not been seen in this country since 1928.

The Aspen Ideas Festival has been held annually since 2005 and attracts some of the world’s preeminent businessmen, political leaders and policymakers, including both Clintons, Sandra Day O’Connor, and many more. This is an important audience for Reich’s message—both his analysis of inequality in the U.S. and its policy implications. Reich’s larger point is not simply that inequality is growing in the U.S., but that such growth is not actually good for the country’s capitalist economy.

“The question,” he began, “is when does inequality become so wide that it threatens a lot of things that we all hold in common: the economy, equal opportunity, and even the coherence of our society?”

As such, Reich’s approach to inequality is in fact quite measured. Far from being a communist, as Bill O’Reilly called him (O’Reilly claims it was a joke), Reich approaches inequality as an issue to be governed so that capitalism can work to the benefit of all and, ultimately, survive in the long-run.

On all three measures—economy, opportunity, and coherence—the U.S. is not doing well, according to Reich. While the size of the American economy has doubled since 1980, the median wage has remained roughly stagnant when adjusted for inflation.

Up until now, Americans have managed to use some coping mechanisms to keep up: women have joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, both men and women are now working much longer hours, and many Americans, originally fueled by a belief in the ever-rising property value, have used their homes as collateral to borrow money.

When does inequality become so wide that it threatens a lot of things that we all hold in common: the economy, equal opportunity, and even the coherence of our society?

Today, though, these mechanisms are just about exhausted. And this is very dangerous for the broader American economy. While over two-thirds of our economy is based on consumption (of consumer goods, health care, education, infrastructure, etc.), consumption must inevitably decline in a society marked by stagnant wages and ever-growing inequality. Today, 65% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Indeed, Reich believes the last few years of relatively low post-recession growth are evidence of such decline.

Why can’t the poor move up the ladder into the middle and upper classes to generate the purchasing power that the American economy needs to sustain itself? After all, the U.S. is the land of opportunity. Reich believes that the political and economic drivers of inequality in this country also reduce social mobility. The U.S., for example, is one of only three countries recently surveyed by the OECD that spends more per pupil on middle-class and rich students than on poor students. Ultimately, almost half (42%) of children born into poverty will die in poverty—the highest percentage of any developed country. These inequities demand new policy approaches.

But the irony, Reich notes, is that inequality is so pervasive in the U.S. that its detrimental effects can even be seen in the polarization of American politics. As inequality has squeezed the middle class, reduced social mobility, and driven more Americans further into poverty, Reich believes people have grown angrier and even less open to the kinds of measured debates and policy approaches that the effective governance of inequality demands.

Surprisingly, though, Reich’s message is ultimately positive. He believes that inequality in America is actually a positive-sum game where both rich and poor stand to benefit from effective governance. The wealthy are better off, that is, with a small share of a rapidly growing economy than a larger share of a slowly growing or stagnant economy. As such, it is a vitally important issue for the country’s well-being and requires governance approaches that focus on these broader consequences, not only on the lower classes.

Reich likes to say that he’s not a class warrior, but a “class worrier”. And given the detrimental effects of equality on American economics and politics, all Americans—rich and poor—should share his concerns.

Research Highlights

Snapping Back from Disaster

Published September 3, 2014

Was the Hurricane Katrina disaster a failure of engineering or human organizations? UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management seeks new approaches for mitigating the risks of large-scale disasters.

In the face of an earthquake, flood, or other massive emergency, governments are expected to be able to quickly repair damage to power, transportation, waste management, water, and telecommunication systems. Yet these systems are highly complex and interdependent, and managing them requires countless people and dynamic processes.

UC Berkeley’s Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure Networks project (RESIN) was launched in 2008 with a mandate to develop new approaches to improve resilience and sustainability in interdependent, interconnected, interactive critical infrastructure systems (I3CIS). The initiative is directed by Robert Bea, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“We’ve got faculty from business, political science, public health, and a few engineers thrown in to keep it interesting,” says Bea. “The basic goal of the research was to advance and verify methods that could be used to evaluate the risk associated with complex infrastructure systems.”

A key goal of this project is to look beyond resilience as a question of engineering, by integrating complementary ideas from the social, political, and legal sciences. RESIN is also funded by the National Science Foundation, and is part of the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

The project began as a result of an investigation into the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina, Bea says. “After Katrina, it became apparent that engineers were not focusing the critical causal factors: how people interacted, how organizations interacted, and how they accessed, evaluated, and took action on information and data.”

The RESIN team focused its research on the California delta infrastructure as a testing ground for the development of new analytical approaches to understanding risk mitigation within large-scale systems. They focused specifically on understanding the case study of Sherman Island, which sits at the interface between the Upper Delta and San Francisco Bay. “If for some reason we lost the integrity of the levy flood system we have built around that island, whose bottom is ten meters below sea level, you could induce the ‘big gulp,’ when you bring salt water from San Francisco Bay into the fresh water system,” he explains.

Initially this focus was too broad and complex, Bea recalls, but the group had a breakthrough when they determined that they could study the risk related to critical chokepoints. “As uncommon common sense would tell you, these systems are interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent, meaning if one system fails, it tends to cause a cascade of failures in the other systems,” Bea says. “We realized, if we could find particularly vulnerable choke points within this complex system and study those, we could gain an understanding of the risk of catastrophic failures in the entire system.”

This is a major attempt to break through this barrier of traditional risk analysis, which has not explicitly incorporated recognition of human organizational factors, nor interactions in complex systems.

While large-scale infrastructure is commonly regarded as an engineering issue, Bea says that social science is a vital part of the story, as most governments and other infrastructure organizations are not prepare to deal with emergencies in part because they have dysfunctional organizational cultures that are often mired in politics and conflict. “Frequently these cultures develop severe, deep-rooted conflicts that can provide the seeds for failures that then link to risk,” he explains. “As one of our colleagues put it, most engineers want to believe the planet is not inhabited. Engineering technology has found ways to isolate itself from the so-called human and organizational factors. This is a major attempt to break through this barrier of traditional risk analysis, which has not explicitly incorporated recognition of human organizational factors, nor interactions in complex systems.”

RESIN has already resulted in 50 publications and a series of workshops. The participants have also presented their findings directly to fellow researchers and policy-makers, though Bea admits the pace of change has been sluggish. “We have made the circuit and presented to key leaders at the federal level all the way down the local districts, and everyone was appreciative,” he says. “But then they went back to their busy lives, hoping that something bad won’t happen. Through this project, we have learned how to better forecast and evaluate risks, but we met a brick wall when it came time to gain the attention and positive action of people who have the power to ameliorate those risks.”

For more information, visit the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

Image Credit: worldislandinfo.com

Research Highlights

ADHD Explosion

Published August 6, 2014

Two Berkeley professors argue that ADHD must be understood as both a social and biological condition.

Since Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was first introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R) in 1987, ADHD diagnoses have increased steadily in the United States. According to the National Survey of Children’s Health conducted in 2011-2012, the percentage of 4- to 17-year-olds ever receiving an ADHD diagnosis was 11%, up from 9.5% in 2007 and 7.8% in 2003.

The details of this trend are diverse and complicated, as the surge in diagnoses has not been paired with an increase in the number of mental health professionals who are qualified (or a medical system that is equipped) to provide necessary care. Consequently, many individuals living with ADHD come to depend on medication as the main solution and, at times, more complicated mental health conditions go undiagnosed. Paired with the increasing pressure for academic and work performance, this has led to a proliferation of ADHD medications in the population at large, raising questions in the national dialogue about neuroenhancement and the negative consequences of the pharmaceuticalization of mental health.

Taking on this tangled problem, UC Berkeley Professors Stephen P. Hinshaw, from the Department of Psychology, and Richard M. Scheffler, from the School of Public Health and School of Public Policy, argue that the condition of ADHD should be understood as neither purely biological nor purely social. In their book, The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today’s Push for Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), they argue that the condition must be contextualized by both frameworks.

Some critics of ADHD medications argue that these drugs have no long-term benefits, and others argue that by using such drugs, “the parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good.” Hinshaw and Scheffler’s argument rests on the fact that ADHD is biologically real and that we should not discount the serious consequences of ADHD in people’s lives. However, understanding ADHD and its place in our society means situating this biological reality within “family interactions, school factors, neighborhood contexts, and entire cultures, as well as relevant policies and economic realities.”

ADHD can be a soundboard for discussing the long-term effects of the pressures of productivity, educational practices, and economic disparities.

To this end, Hinshaw and Scheffler examine the condition’s historic context, and find its origins in discussions about inattention and hyperactivity at the end of the Enlightenment and exacerbated by the creation and enforcement of compulsory education laws in the U.S. in the mid-1800s. They also demand that more realistic and less sensationalized accounts of ADHD be represented in the media and that scientific evidence be shared internationally and across audiences, so that the general public is better educated about the condition and its effects.

At heart, The ADHD Explosion is a critique of “our medical system’s susceptibility to quick-and-dirty diagnoses,” which allows more complicated conditions to go unnoticed and allows the spread of medications far beyond their designated uses. Paired with this critique is one of over-medication: for psychological conditions like ADHD, there should not be an over-reliance on medication to solve the problem, as other forms of intervention (like behavioral and cognitive-behavioral approaches) should be used in tandem.

Discussions of ADHD are not only located in our need to reform mental medical health care in the U.S. As Hinshaw and Scheffler show us, ADHD can also be a soundboard for discussing the long-term effects of the pressures of productivity and the overlooked factors, such as educational practices and economic disparities, that condition individual Americans’ future possibilities.

Research Highlights

A Critical Take on Cities

Published August 6, 2014

Do urban planners ask enough hard questions? A UC Berkeley working group tackles "critical urbanisms" to challenge the conventional wisdom.

Lewis Mumford became one of the most renowned American intellectuals of the 20th century by popularizing the study of the city through his 20 books and 1000 articles, most written without regard to academic specialization or elitist jargon. To Mumford, the study of the city was fundamentally interdisciplinary. As he wrote in the book Sketches from Life, he was grateful to have been taught to “refuse to recognize the no-trespass signs that smaller minds had erected around their chosen fields of specialization.” Instead he made the city itself “in all its richness and variety…my university.”

In recent years, a group of Berkeley graduate students have acted on this belief and created a forum to examine cities through the lens of different disciplines. The UC Berkeley’s Critical Urbanisms Working Group brings together anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, city planners, architects, and historians, who gather regularly to exchange work, conceive of new projects, and welcome scholars from around the world.

Administrator Matt Wade, a Ph.D. Candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning, explains that the “critical” component of the groups stems from a shared “understanding of how to think critically—not technically—about the practices of colonialism, the trajectories of capitalism, [and] government management of population,” with an emphasis on how these forces have shaped the modern city.

Now centered and run at UC Berkeley, the group emerged when Austin Zeiderman, then a graduate student in Anthropology at Stanford, attended Berkeley’s 2006 Breslauer Symposium on “The Right to the City.” Through this event, he discovered a level of engagement with urban space and the built environment that was lacking at Stanford, and so he partnered with other graduate student attendees from both universities to form the Berkeley-Stanford Citygroup. From there grew a “cross-campus network of people interested in cities and urbanism,” Zeiderman explains.

A flexible structure allowed the group to become one of the most resilient student groups on campus. As its leaders have traveled to conduct fieldwork in Colombia, Mexico, Senegal, or Indonesia, they have continually transferred the reins to a new group of urban studies scholars, who reorganize the group around emerging, pressing questions. In 2009, the group highlighted the problem of globalization and citizenship and hosted eminent sociologist Saskia Sassen. More recently, they invited Fadi Shayya to speak on the politics of space in post-war Beirut. The group is now affiliated with Berkeley’s Global Metropolitan Studies program, which brings together professors and graduate students from disciplines ranging from political science and transportation engineering to African-American studies.

“Urban studies itself is very interdisciplinary,” explains working group Sergio Montero, from UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning. “Advisers don’t try to impose one discipline or theory.”

Founder Zeiderman says the group has been highly influential in shaping his book, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (publication pending), which was “very much written for a kind of urban studies group, like the community created between Stanford and Berkeley.” The anthropology department at Stanford had few resources to support “the spatial dimension” of his book, Zeiderman says, but Berkeley offered an abundance of resources—particularly experts in geography, urban anthropology, and city planning. “It’s hard to say what my research would have been like without it,” he says.

Since its inception, the group has evolved into a multi-disciplinary (and sometimes multi-campus) working group that collaborates on research, writing, and conference presentations. Some members are currently at work on a paper for Latin American Perspectives, and they have organized a number of panels in national conferences in sociology, planning, and area studies. Pressing questions and political concerns cohere the group in lieu of disciplinary boundaries. Recently, students have presented work on the problem of race, equity, and cycling as a solution to urban transportation problems, which is a topic at the forefront of several think tanks and policy debates.

“Berkeley has a strong tradition of people who do critical work,” explains Wade. “[There are] specific theory schools that inspire Berkeley—postcolonial studies, studies of capital, social justice, and how it can be achieved. That’s why I came to Berkeley.”

Research Highlights

Invited Interventions

Published August 6, 2014

New research on why state-building interventions succeed in some nations and not others.

In his 2014 Westpoint commencement address, President Obama called on Congress to support a new Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund “to train, build capacity, and facilitate partner countries on the front lines.” As UC Berkeley Political Scientist Aila Matanock wrote in a recent article in the Washington Post, such “invited interventions” are becoming increasingly common, with recent examples unfolding in places like Libya and Mali.

But despite the popularity of such interventions as state-building tools for weak states that pose a risk to international security, their effectiveness is far from proven, especially in achieving longer-term goals like restoring the rule of law. Matanock’s research attempts to close this gap. In her article, which is based on work recently published in the journal Governance, she lays out an argument for when and why such interventions might succeed or fail.

Matanock, who joined Berkeley in July 2013 after a year at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego, spent time in Melanesia and Central America to try to understand why invited interventions (or “governance delegation agreements,” in the technical jargon) have led to significantly different governance outcomes in different contexts.

In the Solomon Islands, for instance, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) “succeeded in restoring the rule of law and strengthening governance,” according to Matanock, helping to reduce crime and infant and child mortality. In Guatemala, on the other hand, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) has helped increase conviction rates and may have helped reduce crime slightly, but shows no signs of having significantly reformed the country’s failing justice institutions.

In both countries, the interventions consist of foreign experts who are given varying degrees of autonomy to carry out different institutional reforms. They are also supported by the host country, backed up by what political scientists call “input legitimacy”. The key difference in countries like the Solomon Islands and Guatemala, Matanock argues, is in the balance between autonomy and legitimacy, which ultimately depends on the strength of the state at the time of intervention.

Weaker states like the Solomon Islands will grant more autonomy to the intervening coalition, thus allowing them to make deeper, more complex reforms. Relatively stronger states like Guatemala will conversely tend to put more constraints on the autonomy delegated to foreign experts. This increases their domestic legitimacy but also limits them to simpler reforms, even where complex reforms like promoting rule of law are ultimately needed.

In her Governance article, Matanock writes that “host states… have incentive to retain as much authority as possible, so they will only relinquish as much… sovereignty as they are forced to by their loss of domestic sovereignty.”

Knowing the mix of legitimacy and autonomy a state is likely to provide could help diplomats and experts predict the outcomes of interventions.

In the Solomon Islands—the “canonical case of full governance delegation” according to Matanock—the RAMSI police force operates above the authority of the domestic police. Moreover, all RAMSI staff are immune while on the job (and while off the job are prosecuted outside the Solomon Islands).

In Guatemala, on the other hand, the government works with CICIG to select the cases it takes, and only if invited by the government can CICIG lawyers share authority as co-prosecutors. CICIG is thus significantly more constrained in carrying out the job it was designed to carry out for Guatemala.

Matanock’s analysis is not only qualitative. She also supports her argument with a quantitative analysis of the UN’s Chapter VI missions (which unlike Chapter VII missions are enacted with the consent of host countries). Comparing countries that received Chapter VI interventions to similar countries that did not, Matanock finds that 73% of Chapter VI countries (11 out of 15) remained peaceful after civil war versus 40% of matched cases (6 out of 15).

Such quantitative analysis provides broader support to Matanock’s argument, but the real significance of her theory is in its ability to help explain why such missions work—and why they don’t. Knowing the particular mix of legitimacy and autonomy that a state is likely to provide, and thus the kind of “delegation deal” to which is it likely to agree, could help diplomats and experts predict the outcomes of interventions and, theoretically, push for more autonomy where needed.

Image Credit: Sgt. Brad Willeford

Research Highlights

Take No Prisoners

Published August 6, 2014

Through overcrowding, lockdowns, and medical neglect, the conditions in U.S. prisons have become unconstitutional, according to UC Berkeley legal scholar Jonathan Simon.

Tourists headed for a picturesque weekend in California’s wine country often careen across the Richmond Bridge expecting waterfront views, only to encounter an enormous prison. Located less than twenty miles from San Francisco, San Quentin State Prison is the only prison in the state to house and execute death row inmates. But like every other prison in the state, it is grossly overcrowded, typically operating at 200-300% capacity. Courts have ruled that these prisons threaten the safety and health of its occupants, raising a haunting question: do the conditions of American prisons constitute torture?

The question of whether California’s modern prison system is constitutional lies at the heart a new book by Berkeley criminologist Jonathan Simon, Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (New York: New Press, 2014). Simon long ago established himself as an expert on the quantifiable changes in American penology, authoring two prize-winning books. Yet when he moved to California to teach in the School of Law and the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley, he was struck by how numbers failed to represent the inhumanity of the state’s prisons, or as he explained in an e-mail interview, “how miserable the conditions, how extensive the overcrowding, how deep the level of medical neglect and suffering, how severe the unmet need for psychiatric care.”

The 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights further motivated Simon. “Like many U.S.-centered students of law and society, I tended to think about human rights abuses as a problem happening somewhere else,” he explains. “If the U.S. was engaged in something like that, it was in places like Guantanamo.” A year at the University of Edinburgh allowed Simon to explore the investigatory agencies and regulations that ensure humane incarceration practices in Europe, and led him to ask why there were no such institutions in the United States.

In Mass Incarceration, Simon carefully reads several recent U.S. court decisions that affirmed the basic humanity of prisoners and condemned prisons for violating the standards of humane punishment. From these readings, Simon concludes in his book that “mass incarceration is inherently unconstitutional.”

How did the modern justice come to violate the law it is meant to uphold? Simon’s narrative begins with penal reforms put in place in the 1970s that treated prisoners like medical patients, catalogued in a comprehensive data system. New state-of-the-art prison architecture projected an image of order and humanity that appeased experts and ordinary citizens alike.

Prisons have become places of extreme peril, not from violence per se, but because of the chronic overcrowding, regular lockdowns, and medical neglect.

Yet the reform and expansion of the prison system veiled its worst offenses. An ethos of “total incapacitation” transformed the role of the American prison from that of a safeguard against society’s most violent offenders into an instrument to prevent violent crime altogether. An emerging common sense dictated that prisons were, as Simon writes, a “humane way to prevent crime by keeping a largely incorrigible population safely separated from the general public.” New criminal laws called for the imprisonment of petty drug offenders, transforming a once-modest count of violent felons into a ballooning number of mentally ill, non-violent addicts. These convicts aged into a geriatric, chronically ill population that prisons failed to tend.

One recent decision carries particular weight for the future of the mass incarceration regime. In 2009, a special three-judge trial ruled in a landmark case that California must reduce its prison population by 40,000 inmates—more than the entire size of the state prison population in 1970. As Simon explains, “the court went beyond talking about conditions and pointed the finger squarely at laws and policies that drive overcrowding and indifference.” When the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, a 5-to-4 ruling not only upheld the order, but also denounced California’s prison system as a humanitarian crisis. The majority opinion decried the state’s incarceration practices as “incompatible with the concept of human dignity” and fundamentally uncivilized. Through this decision, these cases “had, in effect, put mass incarceration on trial” and illuminated “a way out,” Simon explains, noting that the “way out” requires changing the conventional wisdom about incarceration in the U.S.

“Popular culture imagines prisons as places of austere control,” he says, while “legal elites tend to imagine prisons as places where, as the Supreme Court put it in 1994, ‘dangerous men are held securely in humane circumstances’,” Simon writes. Instead, he says, prisons have “become places of extreme peril, not from violence per se, but because of the chronic overcrowding, regular lockdowns, and medical neglect. These were not places of law, but of emergency governance and gang rule.”

As these abuses come to light, “chastened citizens [will] radically expand their vision of humanity,” Simon predicts. He foresees an impending revolution in common understandings of prisoners’ rights that will transform American penal codes.

“I hope,” he says, “that my book will advance that recognition.”

Research Highlights

Decline of the City-State

Published August 6, 2014

Why did the city-state model give way to the nation-state—and what does Boston have to do it?

The World Health Organization asserts that, for the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. The Atlantic compares the economic power of New York City with that of Australia. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recommends that countries harness the economic might of their capital cities.

Nations, meanwhile, may be losing popularity as a prevailing center of government and identity. Last year, a record number of Americans renounced their citizenship and moved abroad. Statistics such as these crop up in UN reports, media debates, and the halls of academia to pose the question: will the 21^st-century city replace the nation-state?

A historical perspective inverts the question: how did the relatively young nation-state model come to supplant the longstanding tradition of urban governance? After all, ancient Athenian democracy, seats of early modern empires, and New World colonies all assumed urban forms. Only during the 19^th century did nation-states begin to eclipse city-states throughout the world.

Mark Peterson, Professor of History at UC Berkeley, tells the story of the prominence (and ultimate decline) of city-states in his book, The City-State of Boston (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2016). Professor Peterson came to Berkeley in 2007, having written extensively about religion and the economy of colonial Boston and the greater New England region. But his latest project, inspired from reading travel journals and diaries from the colonial era, takes a different perspective, as he dislodges the city of Boston from its iconic place in the history of the U.S.

“The people I am writing about were far less interested in the development of the New England interior than what was going on in Germany, France, and Spain,” he says in an interview. “They were really fascinated by and connected to these other parts of the world.”

Early Bostonians traveled to capital cities and university towns throughout Europe. There they encountered cultures both fascinating and familiar. Vibrant trade networks interwove the interests of merchants from Boston, London, Hamburg, and Saint Dominique. Early modern maps of the Boston position as one of the westernmost points of a maritime world, reserving little space for inland territories. City-dwellers today might recognize their own past in this urban, cosmopolitan Atlantic society.

Bostonians preserved local commitments despite their integral ties to Europe, the West Indies, and other New World ports. From the 17^thto the 19^th centuries, Boston was a largely self-governing city-state within a confederation. Bostonians built a fledging welfare state, and residents took self-governance seriously. They deemed their Senators in the U.S. Congress “ambassadors”. But Boston never attempted to secede from the U.S. Instead, it drew on a long tradition wherein city-states organized themselves into leagues of mutual commerce and defense—or in this case, the United States of America.

When and why did the city-state finally fall? Peterson’s “alternative history” of Boston offers a surprisingly late answer. The city-state survived the Declaration of Independence. It persevered despite the political reorganization of the colonies after the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. Not until the mid-19^th century did the city-state collapse due to pressure from the Southern slave economy and the U.S. Civil War. Boston was never the seed of the United States, as so many textbooks would have it. Rather, the expansion of the United States dismantled the city-state of Boston.

Similar events occurred throughout Europe. Imperial wars and national unification consumed many once-thriving city-states like Venice and Genoa. “Not surprisingly, there was a tremendous amount of sympathy, interconnection, and political support among Bostonians for those European city-states during their struggles,” Peterson says. “There is a real sense that the vestiges of republicanism are in these city-states that are trying to sustain their autonomy in the face of France and other dominant powers.”

Do any traces of the city-state survive today? One city-centered institution persists on a scale that evokes the glory days. “The strongest believers in the model in the United States today are the professional sports franchises,” he says. “That’s how they view the world. You have the San Francisco 49ers, but they’re really the Bay Area 49ers. They organize around metropolitan units, both cities and their hinterlands.”

A city-hinterland unit of governance could very well resurface. To illustrate the value of city-states, Peterson sometimes asks students to name their U.S. or California Congressional representatives and the number of people in their congressional district. Few can answer. “I ask these questions not to embarrass anyone, but to suggest the extreme plausibility of their not knowing the answers. Every member of the California State Senate represents about one million people, which is nuts. This is why it means nothing to students. It’s not representation at all.”

Governing best might mean governing locally, argues Peterson. “I don’t mean in all things, but ensuring that the trash is collected, that your kids go to good schools, that you have parks and sanitation…. Polities could organize themselves using a simple measure: human vision,” he suggests. “I love going up to the hills, and you can see the Bay Area…. [Y]ou can see the realm governed” under a city-state model.

Urban governance does pose serious problems for the contemporary world, he concedes. Colonial Boston banished destitute migrants from its domain, and the society was premised upon religious and social exclusivity. A contemporary world of city-states could unearth some of these darker sides of urbanity on a much larger scale. But contemporaries still could learn much from colonial Bostonians. “They took care of their own,” Peterson emphasizes. “A New Englander might say: ‘If everyone behaved like this, we’d have utopia.'”

Research Highlights

The Happy App

Published August 4, 2014

Need a lift? A new research-based app to boost emotional well-being is in development.

A UC Berkeley PhD candidate is creating a website to boost emotional health.

Tchiki Davis, a fifth year social psychology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, is tapping into the idea that technology can be used to improve emotional health with the concept for a new online tool called LifeNik.

LifeNik, which Davis likens to a start-up more than a research project, is similar to current brain training web tools like Lumosity, a website and application where users play games scientifically vetted to improve memory, attention span, and brain processing skills. Just as Lumosity has created games to improve brain health, LifeNik will create computer games to improve emotional health.

“We don’t see a lot of this in technology,” Davis said. “We see brain training, physical training, but we don’t see well-being training.”

Davis says that LifeNik will feature a variety of games designed to boost mental health and happiness. Relying on lab research from various areas of the psychology field—including cognition, psychotherapy, and positive emotion—the games will catalyze mental processes that elicit positive emotions from users.

“Right now, people can read articles online about emotional health but there is no way to implement them,” Davis said. “We want to take the research that was used in publications and make that accessible to the general population through online games.”

One of the planned LifeNik games is memory matching, where users connect identical cards containing positive information, such as an image of a flower or a positive word. According to Davis, viewing positive pictures can draw out positive emotions; keeping these images and concepts running through the mind can benefit a person emotionally.

LifeNik will be shareable through social media so users can become better connected; some games might include member interaction. “For example, if someone posts a positive picture on the site, another user could thank them for posting it,” said Davis.

Of course, users will have the option of complete anonymity. “Emotional health is still taboo in someway,” Davis says, “We want people to get the positive effects of social interaction, but not the negative effects of somebody potentially judging you.”

While continuing to work on her dissertation, Davis is building the site with her father, Michael Davis, a software engineer who lives in Colorado, as well as other UC Berkeley PhD students who have been providing feedback and support for the project. She hopes to receive grant funding in the coming months. “We are a dad-daughter team,” she says, “so it is unlike the typical start up in the Bay Area.”

Brittany Jahn contributes to Social Science Matrix on behalf of Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces (ICHW).

Research Highlights

Playing with Kids Pays Off Economically

Published August 4, 2014

A groundbreaking long-term study by UC Berkeley researchers shows that playing with children has a profound impact on their future incomes.

In a recent study published in the journal Science, a team led by UC Berkeley economist Paul Gertler found that malnourished Jamaican toddlers who received weekly play sessions with health workers earned 25% higher wages than their peers, 20 years later. The report, Labor Market Returns to an Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention in Jamaica, illustrates that investing in young disadvantaged children can have an enormous payoff—enough to compensate for the initial disadvantages, and perhaps enough to pay for such an intervention economically.

This study is the most recent in a series that began in 1986, when four researchers (including two collaborators on Gertler’s study) began following a group of 129 poor Jamaican toddlers (ages 9-24 months) whose growth had been stunted due to being undernourished. Previous research had suggested that children in this situation could physically recover by taking nutritional supplements, but this did little to offset the toll taken on cognitive development.

The researchers wanted to know whether the toddlers’ mental development could be restored by an early childhood psychosocial intervention. They devised a tightly controlled longitudinal study in which the toddlers were randomly split into four groups. For two years, each group of children was treated differently by health workers.

A quarter of the children were given both a daily nutritional supplement and psychosocial intervention in the form of weekly one-hour play sessions with community health aides. During the play sessions, the aides taught the mothers how to play with their children in a way that promoted development. The lessons included interactions such as playing with educational toys, responding to vocalizations, describing the surrounding environment, reading books, looking at pictures, and playing pretend games.

One quarter of the children received only the weekly play sessions, and another quarter were only given nutritional supplements. The remaining control group received no treatment at all.

When the toddlers were revisited at age 17-18, those who had received the psychosocial intervention had higher IQ’s, were better readers, and had larger vocabularies, irrespective of whether they had received the nutritional supplements. By age 22, those who had received the psychosocial intervention were also less prone to violent behavior and depression.

Gertler’s team was the first to assess the economic impact of the intervention; they asked, did the group that received the psychosocial intervention earn more money in adulthood? The results were stunning: by around age 22, those who had received weekly play sessions as toddlers—requiring just one hour per week of treatment for just two years—earned an average of 25% more than those who had not, enough to catch up to the non-stunted general population.

The study’s results strongly suggest that early childhood intervention for the disadvantaged is not only ethical, but also economically prudent. The findings have important implications for policymakers (and their constituents) pondering whether to fund public early childhood education and mental health programs, especially in low income areas.

Research Highlights

Waging War on Inequality

Published August 1, 2014

Minimum wage increases in cities have significant benefits and fewer costs than expected, according to a team of UC Berkeley economists.

Economic inequality is at the forefront of political debates and conversations among ordinary Americans. Thomas Piketty’s tome on the subject has remained in the New York Times bestseller list since the first week of its release. President Obama has deemed income inequality to be “the defining challenge of our time”. About half of Americans agree that inequality is a “very big problem,” according to Pew Research Surveys. On the other hand, columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the The New York Times have joined federal Congressional representatives from both parties to question the extent of the problem. Policy solutions remain largely stalled at the federal level as powerbrokers debate what to do about income inequality—and whether it is a problem at all.

Cities, meanwhile, have begun to wage their own war against local poverty and inequality through a key instrument: the minimum wage. Ten cities and counties have now approved local minimum wage laws. San Francisco initiated the local minimum wage movement over a decade ago, when voters approved a raise to $8.50; since then, the city has augmented compensation and mandated employee healthcare coverage and paid time off. The movement has now moved to the East Bay: Richmond recently passed a measure to raise the local minimum wage to $13, and Oakland passed an initiative in Nov. 2014 to establish a base pay rate of $12.25.

Detractors argue that cities and workers will pay for these seemingly progressive policies, and claim that employment rates will suffer as companies lay off workers to absorb new costs. Some might well reap the rewards of higher wages, they say, but only at the expense of workers struggling with increased unemployment and the broader public that must support them. Could minimum wages in fact hurt the very workers they seek to help?

The answer is no, according to research by economists Michael Reich, Annette Bernhardt, Ken Jacobs, and Ian Perry, from UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. They extensively analyzed the consequences of a minimum wage in Oakland, and of city-specific wage increases in general, and concluded that local minimum wage laws do exactly what they were intended to: raise the incomes of low-income workers.

“In our assessment,” they write, “the weight of the evidence suggests that moderate minimum wage increases have insignificant to non-existent negative effects on employment and hours, reduce worker turnover, and increase worker retention, and result in small, one-time price increases in heavily affected industries, such as restaurants.”

What do the new minimum wage laws portend for the Bay Area economy? Reich, Bernhardt, Jacobs, and Perry examined the projected effects of the Oakland proposal using employment statistics from a recent local census. They modeled the effects of the proposed wage increase on two groups of workers: minimum wage workers and those who cater to them. Their model generated a range of possible salary effects, from which they chose a midpoint to understand the real-life consequences for the city and its workers.

The results: up to 48,000 Oakland employees will earn $2700 more per year on average. On the scale of the city, the wage increase translates into $120 million more dollars in the pockets of local workers. Wage boosts would particularly benefit adult workers of color, who disproportionately constitute workers earning less than the proposed wage.

But must not this wage increase come at a cost? Not really, the researchers say. Salary costs make up only a portion of a business’s operating costs. For this reason, even a significant change in wages (such as the change from Oakland’s $8 minimum to the $12.25) results in a modest increase in operating costs. As a result, businesses suffer little from new minimum wage regimes and have little need to lay off workers. As Reich put it in an editorial for Politico, “No, a Miminum-Wage Boost Won’t Kill Jobs.”

Companies will easily absorb the costs of the wage increases through several means. First, workers’ productivity increases as they pull themselves out of poverty and into more stable financial situations. Morale balloons while absenteeism and truancy plummet. Second, employee turnover decreases once workers earn enough to secure a sustainable lifestyle. Companies thus avoid the costly process of finding, hiring, and training new workers. In short, workers that are more highly valued produce more valuable and consistent work.

The researchers concede that prices would nominally increase to accommodate higher wages, but their calculations yield an estimated price increase of only 0.2% in retail industries and 2-3% in restaurants. A $10 burger would cost $10.25 under the new regime – a minimal change that seems unlikely to hurt consumers.

Resilient businesses, workers, and cities will thus all benefit from higher minimum wages. Tempering inequality and reducing poverty promises to reduce welfare expenditures and raise morale all around. New minimum wage legislation offers much more fundamental rewards: as Reich and Jacobs wrote in the New York Times, such policies “restore, on a very personal level, some of our notion of fairness.”

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Research Highlights

Lie Detector

Published August 1, 2014

Are our unconscious minds better at sniffing out lies than our conscious minds? Yes, according to recent research co-led by a psychologist at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

A team of researchers led by Leanne ten Brinke, a post-doctoral fellow in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, published findings in Psychological Science that our unconscious minds detect lies more accurately than do our conscious minds. Although we are terrible lie detectors in the first place, this is a fascinating testament to the high level of processing conducted by our brains beneath our awareness.

In her study, ten Brinke asked 138 undergraduates to watch videos of “suspects” either lying or telling the truth about the location of a hundred-dollar bill hidden in a bookcase. The undergraduates had to identify whether each suspect was lying. As expected, they were pretty bad at detecting lies—on average, they performed at chance level.

However, ten Brinke then tested the participants’ unconscious knowledge of whether each suspect had lied. To do so, she asked participants to perform one of two different tasks: one used frequently by psychologists (the IAT, or Implicit Association Test) and another designed by her team. In this latter task, participants were presented with still images of each suspect for only 17 milliseconds, not long enough to trigger conscious recognition. After each face image was flashed, the participants were shown a word. Some words were meant to convey honesty (e.g. “valid,” “genuine,” “honest”) and others are related to deception (e.g. “dishonest,” “invalid,” “deceitful”). Each word stayed on the screen until the participant categorized it as being truth- or deception-related using two response buttons, making their choice as quickly as they could.

The brain might detect lies in a deeper, less accessible corner of the unconscious.

This is where it gets interesting: participants were slower to classify a word as truth-related—and quicker to classify a word as deception-related—if the prior face image (which they never consciously recognized) was that of a suspect who had lied. This effect was far more accurate at detecting lies than participants’ own explicit judgments.

Before you try this at home, take note that even unconscious lie detection wasn’t that accurate: it had the equivalent of about 54% accuracy. This did, however, exceed the accuracy of conscious lie detection—around 50%—by a statistically robust margin. Moreover, it is unclear how effective the task was at probing participants’ unconscious minds. The brain might detect lies in a deeper, less accessible corner of the unconscious.

What makes this finding remarkable is not that we are great unconscious lie detectors (we’re probably not), but the fact that our unconscious minds can detect lies at all, even when we cannot detect lies consciously. Deception is presumably manifested in extremely subtle vocal tones, micro-expressions, gestures, and physiological signs like eye dilation and heavy breathing. The fact that the unconscious mind can pick up on these signals and interpret them without our conscious knowledge adds to a long line of evidence that we are smarter than we might otherwise think.

It is worth noting that some psychologists disputed ten Brinke’s findings. They claimed that the conscious lie detection performance reported in her study was unusually low—that people usually detect lies with 54% accuracy—and that this may explain why unconscious lie detection appeared to be more accurate than conscious lie detection. However, ten Brinke countered (and I would agree) that the suspects in her experiment were probably just good liars. Had they been merely average liars, then both conscious and unconscious lie detection may have been more accurate.

Ten Brinke, who was trained as a forensic psychologist, said she was motivated to join the Haas School of Business after hearing stories of corporate corruption in the news. “I recognized that my expertise in lie detection was not just relevant to criminal investigations, and I sought to apply my knowledge to the field of business,” she said. Perhaps we need regulators who are better at unconsciously detecting lies.

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Research Highlights

If Then What?

Published August 1, 2014

From search engines to medical clinics, algorithms—the code underlying computer-based decision-making—are increasingly finding their way into modern society.

A recent radio ad sponsored by National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S., presents a conversation between a patient seeking medical care and a “digital diagnostician”.

“We have something better than nurses—algorithms!” the digital specialist says.

“Sounds like a disease,” says the patient.

“Algorithms are simple mathematical formulas that nobody understands,” the diagnostician explains. “They tell us what disease you should have based on what other patients have had.”

“OK, that makes no sense, I’m not other patients, I’m me!”

The backlash implied in this ad is just one example of how algorithms—the chains of logic through which computers make calculations—are finding their way into the broader culture, whether through politics, media, science, or everyday life. To explore the implications of algorithms’ creeping presence into modern society, UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix sponsored a seminar entitled “Algorithms as Computation and Culture,” which brought together computer scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars.

“Algorithms and ways of analyzing them form the core of what computer science majors study,” explains Jenna Burrell, Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s School of Information. “However, there is a growing interest coming from other fields in the ‘politics of algorithms,’ recognizing that they are consequential to society as a whole, and raise issues of discrimination and inequality, information access, and the shaping of public discourse. There are algorithms that do automated credit application analysis, decision-support systems for medical diagnosis, and others—like Google Search and Twitter Trends—that manage information search and trend identification, determining what is brought to our attention and what isn’t.”

The Matrix seminar is examining the far-reaching implications of these new technologies by bringing together perspectives from across disciplines. “The purpose is to explore ways of talking and thinking about ‘algorithms’ that are not defined solely by one disciplinary approach, though we also want to study them very concretely, looking at particular examples,” explains Burrell, who is leading the seminar. “The word ‘algorithm’ is starting to bubble up in public debate and in the media as well. We want to explore algorithms from many different angles.”

For the unfamiliar, algorithms are the “if-then” procedures for calculations that computers follow as they process information; they are constantly running behind the scenes in digital technologies. Practical examples include algorithms that run digital alarm clocks (“if ‘time’ is 3:00, then ring”), or digital radio stations that stream music based on your past preferences (“if prior choice was Bach, then play Beethoven, not Rolling Stones”). Algorithms are used in software like Facebook to determine which posts are shown on your news feed, and to determine which ads you are shown based on your past online behavior, as well as your location, age, gender, political preference, and other dimensions.

Algorithms shape opportunities and mitigate dangers. But we don’t yet have a very good handle on their ramifications.

Because algorithms are at the heart of artificial intelligence and automation, they are becoming more widely known (and controversial) as computers are increasingly employed for decision-making, particularly in roles that have previously been restricted to the domain of human beings. Hollywood producers have drawn jeers for adopting algorithms to determine whether a song or movie will be a hit. A Swedish artist raised eyebrows by creating an algorithm to determine what art pieces he should create, based on variables such as available gallery space and the past preferences of curators. And just as industrial workers in the past saw their assembly line jobs replaced by robots, attorneys and even (gasp!) journalists are seeing that much of what they do is largely replaceable by a few lines of code.

Beyond the issues of automation, questions of transparency are arising as the information we receive is shaped by computer code that is invisible to the public. “There are certain consequential, everyday algorithms for which we just don’t have access to the real code,” says Burrell. “We have just a descriptive understanding. For example the algorithm for determining Twitter trends, or the EdgeRank algorithm for prioritizing your Facebook news feed.”

The Matrix seminar—a follow-up to a past seminar on data inquiry—convened faculty and students from Berkeley’s School of Information, as well as from anthropology, history, art practice, neuroscience, law, rhetoric, sociology, and other fields. Sessions were alternatively led by social scientists, humanists, and computer scientists; unlike in traditional seminars that rely on assigned readings, participants engaged directly with algorithms to better understand how they operate.

“Though very much hidden from view, algorithms are part of our everyday lives,” Burrell says. “This is true whether you are directly using a computer and the Internet incessantly or not. For example, if your credit card information is hacked, algorithms will (ideally) dynamically identify this fraud. Algorithms shape opportunities and mitigate dangers. But because they are often quite complex and require specialist knowledge to comprehend, and because many of the most significant algorithms running in the world are kept opaque by commercial interests, we don’t yet have a very good handle on their ramifications. As social scientists and humanities scholars, we are well positioned to think about these ramifications creatively and broadly.”