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Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Published September 11, 2014

Migrant farmworkers are subject to social and economic inequalities that put them at greater risk of hardship and injury, according to a book by UC Berkeley’s Seth Holmes.

Fresh fruit comes with a cost. For many residents of California, this cost is paid at the grocery store, where choice is abundant and prices seem fair. For those who work to supply the fruit we enjoy, the cost is different. The cost is felt. Choices are few, and prices aren’t fair. Migrant farmworkers rise before the sun, labor until dusk, and are paid in miniscule amounts for their heavy labor. The average worker makes $8,000 a year. This labor is hard on workers’ bodies, families, and lives.

In his book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (University of California Press, 2013), Seth Holmes, UC Berkeley Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, calls attention to the social and economic structures that produce this inequality, and shows how the suffering of migrant farm-workers is both structural and endemic.

Reflecting on his ethnographic research, which entailed hustling hour after hour across the sun-soaked desert of Northern Mexico in pursuit of the U.S. border, Holmes asks: Is it worth risking your life? Navigating a landscape of inequality, Holmes was held at gunpoint by U.S. Border Patrol agents, arrested, and imprisoned. After spending time in jail with his friends and fellow fieldworkers, he labored in the berry fields of California and Washington State.

As an anthropologist and physician, Holmes represents the promise of cross-disciplinary inquiry that takes seriously the problems of social inequality and risk. His work presents critical perspectives about political and economic structures that separate the United States and Mexico, including how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has recast and exacerbated economic inequality, leaving native farmers of Mexico little choice but to cross the border. Holmes details how these inequalities are felt in the everyday lives of migrants, and how they produce conditions of medical and social concern.

This inequality continues on the fields where berries are picked, where there is frequently discrimination by farm managers, who give assignments based on race, ethnicity, and skin color. The darker skinned laborers of Oaxaca frequently field racial slurs, and are identified as fit for bent-over picking because they are “closer to the ground,” while other groups rank higher in the labor chain, and are afforded work breaks because their bodies are different. For many, these prejudices result in great strain, repetitive motion, and injury.

By bringing attention to the details of everyday life among a group of people who are native to southern Mexico and have been forced to migrate to the United States and work for very little pay, Holmes shows us how risk is felt personally, inflicts injury, perpetuates hardship, and is structurally produced.

Holmes observes how, because of his tall, bald-headed, white, male body, he is treated differently than others. For those with whom he travels, the risks—of not making enough money to survive, becoming injured, or not making it to the United States—are all compounded by the prejudices of having darker skin, a smaller stature, and a different heritage; speaking another language; and being born in another country.

Try as he does to participate in and observe the life of migrant farmworkers, and experience it as they do, Holmes finds himself in the quandary of being white, tall and bald-headed; of having a different body, and so, navigating the world differently.

For Holmes, the question “Is it worth risking your life?” is a matter of choice, but for his fellow travelers, the decisions to cross the border, toil for low wages, and endure lifelong injury are seen as necessities. This life is full of risks—risks that are based on and compounded by social and economic disparity; risks that are distributed differently; risks that are felt and embodied.

Research Highlights

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

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.”

Research Highlights

Seeking New Models for Clinical Medicine

Published August 1, 2014

A new Social Science Matrix seminar is focused on finding radical new approaches to clinical health care.

In Fall 2014, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and Sam Dubal, MD/PhD candidate (Harvard Medical School/UCSF-UC Berkeley), co-organized a Social Science Matrix seminar called “Envisioning Radical Experiments in Social Science and Clinical Medicine.”

This seminar sought to bring together not only scholars from multiple disciplines (including public health, clinical medicine, anthropology, sociology, history, geography, information, economics, comparative literature, public policy, and social work), but also physicians, psychiatrists, patients, and community members, with a goal to create “a collaborative crucible for a new form of medical practice,” Dubal explains. “We ask: how can we envision and design innovative ways of addressing inequities and inequalities in clinical medicine, as informed by critical theory as well as clinical and personal experience?”

Scheper-Hughes explains that her interest stems from longstanding concerns with the criminalization of poverty and madness based on her research on the relationship of ‘schizophrenia’ and historical traumas (e.g. the ‘Great Famine’ in Ireland, and dislocation, camp life, and genocide during and after WWII) and the presence of the severely psychotic in prisons and jails in the U.S. Her work in radical psychiatry was strongly influenced by psychiatrists who were willing to question the norms of biomedicine and come to the aid of the so-called “criminally insane”.

Dubal is completing his dissertation on the reintegration of former militant rebels in northern Uganda; based on his work, he has developed a “deep suspicion of a philosophy of humanism that serves as the lynchpin for humanitarian intervention,” as he explains, and maintains “an enduring concern with the hegemony of liberal humanist philosophy as a paradigm of care in clinical medicine, and the way in which it depoliticizes clinical care.”

“We teach our clinicians to care for the individual suffering of the patient in front of them,” he says, “but we don’t teach them to care for or about a politics which generates social suffering.”

From Radical Psychiatry to Community Health

One of the goals of the seminar, says Scheper-Hughes, is to create a dialogue among “critical psychiatrists, critical anthropologists, ethno-psychiatrists, critically engaged psychiatric social workers, and other providers, together with the psych-survivor community,” who share a “strong sense of dismay at the failures of the dominant psychiatric paradigm that reinforces cognitive and emotional differences by reducing them to ever-changing and refashioned diagnoses and submitting them to powerful and often damaging drug regimes.”

Another theme: the search for autonomous solutions to local crises that stem in part from economic and medical globalization. “Sam and I are both dissatisfied with the global health agendas: the humanitarian aid that is a Band-Aid for diseases caused by poverty, political conflict, violence,” Scheper-Hughes says. “We are looking for solutions beyond “drugs for all” and “Doctors without Borders”, etc.” We hope to identify solutions that acknowledge and respond to the sick-making issues of institutionalized racism, economic inequality, environmental exploitation, gender violence, and other forms of injustice and inequality that manifest themselves in the clinical encounter.”

The two anthropologists witnessed first-hand the clinical care-delivery challenges facing local communities in Spring 2014, when they visited Timbauba (pop. 55,000), in Northeast Brazil, where Scheper-Hughes has conducted multi-decade anthropological research. While participating in a training session for 120 community health agents (local citizens trained by the state to provide basic medical services in the absence of resident doctors), they heard complaints such as, ‘We are frustrated,’ ‘We have the most difficult job with no backup,’ and ‘We don’t know what we will run into when we walk inside a home. Sometimes it is a raving madman or a violent drug dealer, and sometimes it might be a woman in labor without time to get her to a public hospital in Recife [the capital city].”

Scheper-Hughes served as a community health agent in Timbaúba during the 1960s, when she delivered babies, immunized babies, administered injections, treated infectious diseases (TB and schistosomiasis), and bandaged wounds. “Today’s community health agents are not allowed to put salve on a baby’s skin, let alone to ‘catch’ a baby,” Scheper-Hughes says. “The poor people living in hillside slums (favelas) in the area are forced to either travel to the capital for a pre-arranged C-section or to give birth at home just as their grandmothers once did because there are no resident obstetricians in the public health sector.”

Through their Social Science Matrix seminar, Scheper-Hughes and Dubal brought together an array of perspectives to find solutions to such challenges. “We realized that to be able to transcend the limit of existing interventions on healthcare inequalities, we needed a different approach—one based in praxis and organized by horizontal collaboration,” Dubal says. “We could not rely on the experiences of patients and physicians alone, relatively detached from critical theory; nor could we base our interventions on the dizzying theories of critical scholars, relatively detached from lived experience….We are united by a common goal of creating a social medicine proper: a healing of the illnesses of not only individual patients but also society itself. Our approach to this goal, and the central problem of this seminar, is to co-design possible experiments whereby critical theory may come to inform clinical practice.”

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