Article Type: Recap

Authors Meet Critics

The Future of Nuclear Waste

Published November 13, 2020

A Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" panel asked, how can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future?

Recorded on Nov. 5, 2020, this online “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured Rosemary Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, discussing her book, The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material. Professor Joyce was joined in conversation by Cathryn Carson, Professor of History, and Kate O’Neill, Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.

At the heart of Joyce’s book is the question, how can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would satisfy demands from the Environmental Protection Agency for a marker system that would be effective long into the future. Expert consultants proposed two very different designs: one based on archaeological sites recognized as cultural heritage monuments; the other proposing that certain forms invoke universal feelings.

The Department of Energy opted for a design based on archaeological ruins, cited as proof human-made markers could last and communicate warnings for thousands of years. This book explores the common sense assumptions the experts made about their archaeological models, and shows how they are contradicted by what archaeologists understand about these places and things. The book alternates between discussions of archaeological marker designs and reflections on the alternative proposal based on archetypes intended to arouse universal responses. Recognizing these archetype designs as similar in scale and form to Land Art projects, it compares the way government experts proposed their designs would work with views of modern artists and critics. Drawing on views of indigenous people who disproportionately are asked to accommodate such projects, the book explores concessions within the project that only oral transmission is likely to ensure such sites remain identifiable long into the future.

“It may seem surprising to have an archaeologist writing a book about the handling of nuclear waste,” Joyce said. “The scope of work has led me to ask questions about long-term temporalities, about how ongoing understandings of futures by people in the past could be conceived by those of us who are in their future, and for whom, what happened, is now a past.”

Joyce explained that her interest in the project began in 1999, when she saw an article in Time magazine describing how the government was working with artists to propose plans to mark nuclear waste sites so that they would not be violated for 10,000 years. “That was precisely the kind of long-term thinking I was interested in,” Joyce said. “As Time characterized it, the artists were drawing on universal features that would repel people, such as the use of sharp pointed metal, of red and of jaggedness. And immediately, as an anthropologist, I was attracted to the idea…because that goes against one of our central understandings, which is that there’s very little that can be assumed to be universal.”

Joyce’s book explores how different materials and symbols were considered to be markers, and how other methods — such as oral history — could be used to convey where the poisonous materials were buried. “Ultimately I’ve come to understand that what’s at stake here is something larger,” she said. “All of my attempts to explain the book tended to have recourse to poetry, to art, to fiction. And this is part of what I think is a broader challenge for those of us in the social sciences, whose work sometimes does not have the impact it should have in the world…. We need to remind ourselves of the ability of a poetic language to convey the impact, the meaning, and the implications of things.”

Watch the full panel discussion — including the responses by Kate O’Neil and Cathryn Carson — above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

2020 Citrin Center Award: Robert Putnam

Published October 25, 2020

Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, on his book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

Recorded on October 20, 2020, this video features a lecture by Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University.

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion, named after Jack Citrin, the Citrin Award annual event recognizes the career of an individual who has made significant contributions to the study and understanding of public opinion. The 2020 Award celebrates the achievements of Robert Putnam, one of the most distinguished political scientists in the country, whose work has been an indispensable guide to understanding the underpinnings of democracy and community in America and elsewhere.

Raised in a small town in Ohio, he was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities, for “deepening our understanding of community in America.”

Putnam has written fifteen books, translated into twenty languages, including Making Democracy Work: Civic Transitions in Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, both among the most cited social science works in the last half-century.

In this lecture, Professor Putnam presents his latest book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

Authors Meet Critics

Let Them Eat Tweets

Published October 16, 2020

An "Authors Meet Critics" panel on "Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality," by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker

Recorded on October 13, 2020, this online panel focused on the book, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, co-authored by Paul Pierson, the John Gross Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Jacob Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. This book explores how the modern Republican Party has come to be defined by “plutocratic pluralism,” which combines an elite-benefiting economic agenda with populist appeals.

Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and Christopher Parker, Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, responded as “critics” of the book. Both Skocpol and Parker have authored books on topics directly relevant to today’s GOP — including the Tea Party. “I think these are the authors of the two best books on the Tea Party, which I think is critical for understanding how we got to where we are,” Pierson said.

Moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, the lively dialogue began with an introductory overview by the two authors. Pierson explained that the book was a response to the fact that the “dramatic shift in the distribution of economic resources in the United States was not being sufficiently considered in in the discussion of where Donald Trump comes from and how he came to occupy the position in American politics that he did.” Pierson pointed out that wealth inequality is far greater in the United States than in Europe. “There is a tendency to lump what’s happening in the United States together with the explosion of right-wing populism that you see in various countries in Western Europe — and of course, there are important similarities — but this suggests that there are also very dramatic differences.”

Let Them Eat Tweets illustrates how the rise in inequality in the U.S. poses challenges for democratic politics. “As inequality grows, there’s likely to be more of a divergence of preferences and interest between the wealthy and everyone else — so the things that are going to benefit ordinary citizens in the economic sphere are not going to be beneficial to those economic elites,” Pierson explained. “Economic elites are likely to become more suspicious of democracy, and they’re going to work harder to make sure that voters are not going to use their numbers to overcome and possibly redistribute the economic resources that are increasingly concentrated at the top.”

In his comments, Hacker stressed the vital role that organizations have played in shaping the modern Republican Party, as groups like the NRA and various Christian Right organizations have become entwined with the party’s platform. “This is another respect in which the American landscape is distinctive,” Hacker said. “We have this ecosystem of right wing media that is willing and capable of deploying highly racialized, anti-government themes in a way that turns out to be mobilizing for a core group of voters.”

In her response, Skocpol largely praised the authors for showing how the GOP has evolved since the 1980s by “using all the levers available in the U.S. constitutional and federal system to further narrow majoritarian governing agendas.” However, she noted that the book would have benefited from a more clearly articulated causal argument. “I’d like to have seen a lot more precision about the various organizational networks that are in play in and around the Republican Party,” she said, adding that she would have also liked to see an analysis of the Democratic Party’s own role in allowing the rise of the modern GOP.

In his comments, Christopher Parker posed a series of questions to the authors, including what they think is different about the role of race today compared to earlier eras. “In the early part of the 20th century, during the Gilded Era, we saw massive amounts of inequality,” Parker said. “But we didn’t see any sort of racial conflict at the behest of other plutocrats…. If your theory is correct, we should have seen plutocrats try to stoke racial division, but we didn’t.”

The ninety-minute panel covered a wide range of topics, including similarities and differences between the U.S. and Europe, as well as the dynamic relationships between political economy and demographics. In his closing remarks, Hacker encouraged the audience to read the book and assess it for themselves. “I want to encourage people to read the book and decide whether I’m right that this book helps us understand 2016 to 2020,” Hacker said. “I think the argument is correct that, unless we address the extreme inequality that we have, some of the same particular strains that we’re talking about are going to keep recurring and threaten our democracy.”

Watch the full video of the event above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

Published October 16, 2020

Recorded on October 7, 2020, this video features Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley, discussing her book Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, with Nikki Jones, Professor of African American Studies.

On October 7, 2020, Social Science Matrix hosted an online discussion focused on Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, a book authored by Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley. In her book, Summers documents Washington, D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting the economic and racial developments of H Street, one of the city’s main commercial corridors. Thompson’s book offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital.

Dr. Summers discussed Black in Place with Nikki Jones, Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, as part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series, which features critically engaged discussions about recently published books by social scientists at UC Berkeley.

Jones noted at the outset, however, that “Authors Meet Critics” was an inappropriate title for the conversation. “[Authors meet critics] is standard fare in the academy, we know that,” Jones said. “But it represents a particular way of producing and consuming knowledge, and it doesn’t always align with the Black feminist politics that I like to bring into the space or even Black feminist modes of critique…. I show up in this space not as a critic of what has been thoughtfully and carefully produced, but as a co-constructor of knowledge, as a person who has engaged with your work and your ideas, and is poised to engage with you around those ideas, and others who are able to join us today, to also learn from that conversation.”

Summers began the discussion by providing an overview of her book’s central focus. “I’m really describing this changing historical role of Blackness and its interaction with processes of gentrification,” she explained.  “I’m using this small space — H Street, this commercial corridor — to tell a much wider story about cultural change, about racial conflict, and also about capital flows and governance…. I wanted to take this hyperlocal focus because I think you’re better able to see the the nuances and the patterns that hold narratives together. And you can better see the inner workings of power when you look at a small geography, and unpack various elements that contribute to the production and the management of space.”

“It perfectly illustrates this problem that emerges when Black areas are essentially primed for revitalization,” she added. “I’m using Blackness as this central analytic to really understand how racism shapes Black life and, and how these liberal proclamations of ‘race neutrality’ or these calls for diversity only serve to marginalize and ultimately displace Black people.”

Summers explained that she coined the term “Black aesthetic emplacement” (BAE) as a way to think about how Blackness is “deployed to fortify public order and organize landscapes literally, as well as foster capital. This happens through this hegemonic capitalist structuring and a signifying of ideas about Blackness to really increase the desirability of coming to a particular neighborhood, or coming to the city. I don’t mean Black aesthetics as in Black cultural production. I’m thinking about Black aesthetics separately, where Blackness operates as an aesthetic that’s essential to gentrification as an urbanizing process, and can really be seen clearly in institutions that provide daily life or daily service.”

“The urban landscape is being produced in ways that necessitate the visibility of Blackness, but also operate alongside the displacement of Black people and those enterprises that cater to poor and working-class Black residents,” Summers said. “In the book, I’m trying to document these these everyday expressions of the symbolic takeover of Blackness…. The transformation of H street really exemplifies this dismantling of the Black city. It’s this disappearing mode of social and cultural life that’s been revised and and remade by this aesthetic infrastructure.”

The book shows us how a city becomes cool through Blackness, even as the population of Black people in the city declines.

In her comments, Jones praised how Summers uses the transformation of the H Street corridor to expose the story of race and gentrification, and noted that, as a sociologist, she likely would have taken a different approach. “I appreciate the way that space is the main character, the key respondent in this book,” Jones said. “I focus on on interpersonal interaction, so I simply would not would not have done the thing you do here quite masterfully, which is to make spatial relationships — the relationship between space and capital, and in turn the relationship between space, Blackness, and capital — a main point of entry into the story of H Street.”

“Sociologists can take space for granted,” Jones said. “In not taking space for granted,  you create a way of seeing relationships — structural, economic, and social — that exist but aren’t accessible solely through the tools or training of social science generally. And in doing so, you provide a model not for the one way to see Blackness in the city, but a multiplicity of ways to see Blackness, and to see Black people in spaces where they are necessary, yet unseen.”

“Blackness is made to be seen in the city in ways that are increasingly untethered from the visual presence of actual Black people, untethered from Black life as it is lived, as you argue, in a place where blackness operates on the level of aesthetics.

Jones pointed to one of the examples described in Summers’ book — Chocolate City Beer, a (now defunct) craft brewery owned by two White men that used the Black power fist in its logo — to highlight “how ‘Blackness shows up in the city — Blackness as taste, Blackness as struggle, Blackness as nostalgia. Blackness acts as an engine of profit. Blackness is ‘the illusion of inclusion within the culture of modern capital’…. The book is a history of how post-racial discourse in neoliberal urban development converts Blackness into a prized aesthetic. The book shows us how a city becomes cool through Blackness, even as the population of Black people in the city declines.”

Watch the video of the discussion above or on YouTube.

 

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: The Struggle for Hong Kong

Published October 13, 2020

Hong Kong Protest

“Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times.” These words, appearing in English and Chinese on the signs of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, appeal for action, recognition, and solidarity. Such utterances are now prohibited, after the Beijing government passed a new national security law on June 30th. Chinese authorities maintain that this recent legislation is intended to prevent foreign intervention and separatist sedition, but critics in and beyond Hong Kong have argued that the new law grants Beijing unprecedented powers and that it will lead to the curtailment of civil liberties and free speech. Western commentators have sometimes described Hong Kong as a canary in a coal mine, a bellwether for democracy in Asia. Yet for China, it is the concept of “one country, two systems” that best captures the enduring and complex bond that links Hong Kong to the mainland.

On October 1, 2021, Social Science Matrix hosted a “Matrix on Point,” co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, that considered both the history and future of Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Panelists included Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Alex Chow, a doctoral student in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography; and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. Thomas Gold, Professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel.

The panel was presented as part of the Matrix Solidarity Series, which features talks and panels that explore—and critique—the ethical foundations, concrete implementations, and prospective designs that foster connectedness, inclusiveness, tolerance, and equality. These conversations are meant to serve as an argument on behalf of the premises and practices of solidarity, and an exposition on the potential of the social sciences to contribute to it.

Panelists

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on global and comparative issues, globalization, political sociology, and other areas, with a regional focus in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa. She has published three award-winning monographs on China, and has co-edited the volume: Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Alex Chow is a social activist from Hong Kong and current doctoral student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a former secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and a former Vice-President (External) of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union. Chow was an organiser of the 2014 Occupy Central with Love and Peace campaign, a non-violent civil disobedience campaign aimed at promoting democracy in Hong Kong. He served time in jail for storming the government’s headquarters before the 2014 Occupy protests began. Chow earned his master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds courtesy positions in Law and in Literary Journalism. A cultural historian with a strong interest in connecting China’s past to its present and placing both into global perspective, his publications include Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2018). He received his PhD from Berkeley (History, 1989).

Thomas B. Gold (moderator) is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught in the Sociology Department from 1981 to 2018. From 2000-2016 he served as Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP), a consortium of North American universities that administers an advanced Chinese language program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has also served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies, founding Director of the Berkeley China Initiative and Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies. Professor Gold’s research focuses on many aspects of the societies of East Asia, primarily China and Taiwan. His co-edited (with Sebastian Veg) volume, Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong, will be published later this year by the Institute of East Asian Studies Press.

Matrix Lecture

The Code of Capital

Published September 29, 2020

A Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Katharina Pistor provided an overview of her book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.

On September 21, Social Science Matrix was honored to co-sponsor a virtual Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University and Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation.

In her lecture, Pistor discussed her book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, which argues that the law selectively “codes” certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. The book was lauded as one of the Financial Times‘ Best Books of 2019 in the field of economics and one of the Financial Times‘ Readers’ Best Books of 2019.

The event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Network for a New Political Economy and introduced by Steven K. Vogel, Chair of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

“One of the core questions that the book addresses is the question of, what is capital?” Pistor explained. “What I’m basically arguing in the book is that capital is a wealth-generating asset. And what we have to understand is the legal DNA, if you want to call it that, or the ‘code of capital.’ We have to understand what kinds of features create assets that are really wealth-generating.”

As an example, Pistor noted how a piece of land is only considered to be “capital” when it is classified as such by the law. “If you take land, it’s just a piece of dirt,” she said. “If you want to monetize land, you have to graft certain legal protections for the holder of land rights onto that land. That’s not natural. It’s a social decision. One of the critical questions is, who makes this decision on behalf of whom, and who has access to or control over the decision-makers? Let me just take away the punch line: lawyers are really important here, including private transactional lawyers who work mostly in private offices behind closed doors.”

Pistor explained that different legal frameworks work together to “code” capital, including property law, trust and corporate law, bankruptcy law, and contract law. She said that all capital has certain shared characteristics, including priority, with the law determining who has rights to assets, with some rights stronger than others; and durability, the ability “to extend rights that we bestow on asset holders over time and to protect these rights from too many other competing claimants.”

Another defining attribute of capital, Pistor said, is universality, which ensures that the priority and durability rights are protected not only between two people who entered into transaction with one another, but are “actually enforced against the world,” Pistor said. “The state comes in here because it will enforce these titles, not only against parties to the transaction, but against anybody” Another defining trait is convertibility, the ability to convert assets into other assets, such as cash. “Three out of those four, and then you have something that I would call capital,” Pistor said.

Pistor emphasized that the subtitle of her book, “How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality,” relates to how the law is “a representation of the centralized means of coercion… As lay people, we may think of law as a relationship between the citizen and the state by which the state governs its citizens. And we might also think about civil and political rights, or human rights more generally, and realize that actually, citizens can also use the law, which is a creature of the state, against the state itself, in order to protect their own individual, civil, and political rights. And then there’s this third dimension, which is really what my book is all about, which is that citizens can harness the centralized means of coercion of the state for their own means when they want to organize their relationship with other citizens. It is this horizontal relationship between citizens — or actors that don’t have to be citizens — who want to harness the law to avail themselves of the coercive powers of the state to organize their private rights.”

The beauty of digital code is that it is highly scalable. We don’t even have to rely on a centralized state power at the territorial nation-state level, but we can create digital relations across national boundaries.

Pistor drew upon legal history to explain how, starting with land, the same “core modules” have been used “time and again” to code capital. “We can see a lot of capital creation and a lot of also skill development for how to code capital,” she said. “Once lawyers and their clients understood the mechanism, they realized that the same legal coding techniques could be applied to different types of assets.”

“One of the questions I asked myself in the towards the end of the book is whether the legal code might be replaced at some point or is already being replaced by the digital code,” Pistor said. “The beauty of digital code is that it is highly scalable. We don’t even have to rely on a centralized state power at the territorial nation-state level, but we can create digital relations across national boundaries. In the book, I come out with the question, is this a new kind of code, and will it replace the legal code? Or is it more complementary, where the legal code will encode the digital code, rather than the other way around? I think that question is still open.”

Pistor argued that the processes through which capital is “coded” through legal mechanisms need to be reformed to reduce wealth inequality. “We have to get at the system,” Pistor said. “It’s not enough to chop off a head of a ruler, what you really have to do is get at the system. The system, of course, is resistant. So you have to use an approach I call “strategic incrementalism….” It’s basically taking a page out of the script that lawyers and capital holders have used over centuries to say, okay, how did you do this, and what did you need to accomplish this? And how much do we have to take back to so that we can make sure that we can cherish our democratic values and get the upper hand in governance again?”

Watch the lecture and Q&A above or on YouTube.

 

Matrix On Point

Homelessness and the Bay Area Housing Crisis

Published September 28, 2020

On September 21, 2020, a panel of researchers, advocates, and medical practitioners joined a "Matrix on Point" discussion focused on homelessness and the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing crisis.

What are the institutional barriers contributing to homelessness in California, and what can be done to alleviate them? What are the consequences of the criminalization of the homeless, and what are these residents’ rights and civil liberties? These questions were at the heart of a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion recorded on September 21, 2020, which brought together researchers, advocates, and medical practitioners panel to explore the Bay Area’s housing crisis and homelessness.

Panelists for the 90-minute presentation included Chris Herring, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University; Margot Kushel, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations; and Tomiquia Moss, Founder and CEO of All Home, a new organization dedicated to finding regional solutions to the homelessness and housing crisis in the Bay Area.

“The three people here have probably done more than anybody to help us understand the causes of homelessness in the Bay Area,” said the panel’s moderator, Carolina Reid, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning and the Faculty Research Advisor for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

During the panel, each speaker gave a roughly ten-minute presentation; these were followed by a Q&A, with questions asked by Reid and submitted by members of the audience. The speakers reinforced that homelessness is not an unsolvable problem, but that its root causes are often ignored. In her comments, for example, Kushel noted that the primary driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing for “extremely low-income” (ELI) residents. “Homelessness is not caused by mental health and substance use problems,” Kushel emphasized. “The more we blame this problem on highly stigmatized medical conditions, the more it lets us off the hook for solving the fundamental problems that have brought us to this point. We have an extraordinary shortage of…housing that is available and affordable to people who make less than 30% of the area median income.”

Kushel also stressed the major contributing impact of structural racism, noting that a disproportionately large percentage of homeless people in the Bay Area are people of color. “There’s no way we can have an honest conversation about homelessness without talking about the ongoing effects of structural racism,” Kushel said. “We are still very much living with the downstream effects of redlining and other forms of discrimination.”

In her comments, Tomiquia Moss agreed that structural racism is a root cause that must be addressed, but she also noted that an improved regional approach is necessary to help cities find a common solution. “The Bay Area counties are doing incredible work on the ground, trying to support people experiencing homelessness every day, but they’re doing it all in in silos,” Moss said. “Our cities are scrambling, trying to figure out what to do…. We have this very fractious system by which we are trying to solve one of the most fundamental social problems of our time…. When we think about regional approaches to homelessness, the first thing we have to think about is the region actually has to operate as one place.”

Moss said that much of the work of her organization, All Home, is to “try to figure out, how do we bring stakeholders together to look at best practice and borrow lessons-learned and to strategize around resource-sharing, and to assess what assets need to be brought to the table in order for us to do a much better job across geographies in order to address the homelessness and housing crisis…. People talk regionally, but they act very locally. Land-use decisions and zoning changes are held at the local level, and we don’t really have a lot of regional, state, or federal governance that forces us to work as a region.”

Addressing income inequality should be another priority, Moss said. “People are simply unable to afford the rents that we demand in the Bay Area,” Moss said. “And then we blame them for being poor…. We haven’t actually solved the fundamental math problems of wealth inequality.”

In his remarks, Chris Herring presented research he had conducted while earning his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley; his enthnography-based dissertation focused on the impacts of anti-homeless laws, such as laws banning panhandling, camping, or lying on sidewalks. “These are laws that prohibit life-sustaining activities that homeless people have no choice but to undertake in public,” Herring said. “These laws have been spreading nationwide and have been growing at the fastest rate in their history over the last 10 years.”

Herring said that the increased criminalization of homelessness was driven in part by “urban development in areas where used to folks used to be able to camp without receiving complaints.” Gentrification, he said, has led to a “different type demographic of folk moving to the city, who are more likely to call the police.” Accompanying this has been the proliferation of “business Improvement districts” through which groups of property owners, merchants, and  esidents hire private security firms who call the police when homeless residents refuse to move.

The criminalization of homelessness is a major issue, Herring said, because it perpetuates the cycle of poverty. “One of the things that folks feared most was the destruction of their property,” Herring said. “In fact, they feared the destruction of their property more than arrest. And what I saw happening was that arrests were actually used as a means to dispossess people of their property.” Herring said he is continuing to work on reforms, such as reforming the dispatch so that police officers are not first responders to homeless-related ordinances.

Ultimately the panelists agreed that, while homelessness is a complex issue, there are solutions available that must be adopted from all levels of government. “We are at a precipice in our time where we don’t have the luxury of not figuring out what the foundational challenges are to actually ending homelessness in the Bay Area,” Moss said. “Homelessness is solvable. It’s not just about finding someone housing. It is about figuring out how we bring our most vulnerable residents inside and helping them not just subsist in our communities, but to thrive.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

 

 

Affiliated Centers

Race and Public Opinion: Today in Historical Context

Published September 21, 2020

An online panel discussion — presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix — focused on the history of race and public opinion. 

Recorded on September 10, 2020, this online panel discussion – presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix – focused on the history of race and public opinion.

The panelists included: Desmond Ang, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government;

Hannah Walker, Assistant Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin;

Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor of Politics, Princeton; and

Angela X. Ocampo, Assistant Professor of Political Science, LSA Collegiate Fellow, University of Michigan. The event was moderated by Amy Lerman, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley; and David Brookman, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

For more about Social Science Matrix, visit https://matrix.berkeley.edu. For more about the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, see https://citrincenter.berkeley.edu/.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

 

 

Workshop/Symposium

2020 Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics

Published March 21, 2020

For the second straight year, Matrix hosted a two-day workshop focused on the economics of climate change.

 

On January 31-February 1, Social Science Matrix was honored to host the Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics, which was co-sponsored with support from Sara Miller McCune. This two-day conference brought together leading scholars from universities around the world — including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford — for a series of presentations and discussions focused on applying the tools of micro- and macroeconomics to understand and tackle the challenge of climate change.

Over the course of the two days, the scholars discussed and debated such topics as whether the government should rebate carbon tax revenue; dynamic responses to carbon pricing in the electricity sector; the climate and ocean in the social cost of carbon; whether environmental markets cause environmental justice; and commodity price volatility under anticipated climate change.

The goal of the workshop was to explore recent advances in climate economics, with an emphasis on the linkage between empirical and numerical modeling methods. A major stated goal of the workshop was to bring junior and senior researchers together. The program consisted of presentations from an outstanding group of invited leading senior researchers, as well as a select group of junior researchers (PhD students and post-doctoral students).

“There’s been this realization that climate really is a problem that we need to solve — and we need to solve it now,” said James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. “Berkeley is actually the leading place right now for climate economics research. It’s playing a central role, it has great people, and it’s terrific to come here.”

The workshop was hosted by the Berkeley Climate Economics Group, which is led by David Anthoff, from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, Max Auffhammer, from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics & International Area Studies, and Solomon Hsiang, from the Goldman School of Public Policy. Social Science Matrix has supported the work of these researchers since 2015; they have convened a series of Matrix Research Teams focused on using economics to understand the potential impacts of climate change in the U.S. and around the world.

“Social Science Matrix really has been an invaluable support for us to get this from an idea that a couple of faculty had to get this to a regular, established place where climate economics can happen,” said Anthoff. “We’re really the only place that organizes a regular meeting that is focused on specifically targeting climate change economic questions.”

Watch a video about the workshop above or on YouTube.

 

 

Matrix Lecture

Alexandra Gillies, “Crude Intentions”

Published March 20, 2020

A video featuring a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, author of Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World.

Recorded on March 4, 2020, this video features a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, an expert on oil-sector corruption and author of the book “Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World.” This event was co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

About the Book

Billions of dollars stolen from citizens are circling the globe, enriching powerful individuals, altering political outcomes, and disadvantaging everyday people. News headlines provide glimpses of how this corruption works and why it matters: President Trump’s businesses struck deals with oligarchs and sold property to secretive shell companies; the Panama Papers leak triggered investigations in 79 countries; and corruption scandals toppled heads of state in Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea. But how do these pieces fit together? And if the corruption is so vast and so tied up with powerful interests, how do we begin to fight back?

To find answers, Crude Intentions examines the corruption crisis that erupted during the recent oil boom. From 2008 to 2014, oil prices shot through the roof. Motivated by more than nine trillion dollars in new oil money, corruption followed apace. Examining the oil boom is like placing a drop of dye in the circulatory system of global corruption, and watching as it reveals the system’s channels and pathways. Company bosses signed off on risky schemes to snap up choice oil blocks. Politicians in Brazil and Nigeria stole billions to build up their election war chests. Kleptocrats in Angola, Azerbaijan, and Russia seized upon the oil wealth to cement their hold on power. And an army of bankers, accountants, and lawyers lined up to help these corrupt actors stash their loot in the global system of shell companies and tax havens that serve today’s super-rich. The money then bought yachts, mansions, and even a few foreign politicians.

Drawing on information exposed by intrepid journalists, prosecutors, and whistle blowers, Crude Intentions tells jaw-dropping stories of corruption and asks what we can learn from them. The cases reveal common tactics, but also vulnerabilities in this web of fraud. These are the starting points for building a smarter fight against corruption, in the oil sector and well beyond.

About the Author

Alexandra Gillies is an expert on oil-sector corruption. Her other recent work has focused on the Nigerian oil sector, national oil companies, commodity trading, and promoting transparency standards including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). She has authored academic articles on related topics and co-edited the volume “Smart Aid for African Development” (Lynne Reiner, 2009). She is an advisor to the Natural Resource Governance Institute. Alexandra holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Cambridge, where she researched the political economy of the Nigerian oil sector. She spent 2008 in Nigeria as a Fulbright Fellow. Prior to joining NRGI, she consulted for the World Bank, DFID, USAID and several political risk firms. She served as assistant director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Alexandra also holds degrees from the University of Ghana and Emory University.

Other Events

Immigration and the American Ethos

Published March 16, 2020

A panel on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy and Matthew Wright.

Recorded on March 6, 2020, this panel discussion focused on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California, and Matthew Wright, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

Joining the authors as discussant was Nicholas Valentino, Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan. The panel chair was Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at UC Berkeley.

This event was co-sponsored by the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix.

Matrix On Point

Election Manipulation

Published March 10, 2020

Recorded on March 3, 2020, this Matrix On Point panel consider a wide range of issues related to the security and fairness of our elections. The panel featured Sarah Anzia, Michelle J. Schwartz Associate Professor of Public Policy & Associate Professor of Political Science; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor's Professor of Law; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair of Political Science. The event was co-sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

With the 2020 general elections fast approaching and the nominee of the Democratic Party still undecided, this election year is bound to be contentious and fraught with anxieties. Foreign interference, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the census, the purging of voter registration logs, fake ballots, the malfunction and hacking of voting machines — each of these issues poses a distinct threat to the fairness and security of our elections. Although the right to vote is not constitutionally conferred, it is one of the central ideals of representative democracy. Given the reality of low voter turn-out and the peculiarities of the electoral college, the coordination and galvanization of blocks of like-minded voters can prove decisive in shifting elections. As such, many worry that voting rights are threatened by by both foreign and domestic forces who seek to sway elections in their favor.

Recorded on March 3, 2020 — the day of the “Super Tuesday” primary — this panel discussion consider a wide range of issues related to the security and fairness of our elections. The panel was presented by UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix as part of the “Matrix On Point” discussion series, and was co-sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

The panel included Sarah Anzia, Michelle J. Schwartz Associate Professor of Public Policy & Associate Professor of Political Science; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor’s Professor of Law; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair of Political Science.

Watch the video of this event above or on YouTube.