Article Type: Recap

Matrix On Point

The Long History and Present Surge of Anti-Asian Violence

Published April 15, 2021

 

From Donald Trump’s calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” to the recent wave of violent attacks in the Bay Area, the past year has seen a sharp increase in racist attacks on Asians and Asian Americans.

The causes and consequences of this racism were at the center of a Berkeley Conversations panel discussion, “The Long History and Present Surge of Anti-Asian Violence,” presented on April 1, as part of the Matrix on Point series.

“This panel is not just about the recent, horrific attacks on Asians, but it seeks to situate this violence in both the history and the present of this nation’s life,” said Raka Ray, dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences, who moderated the event. “It also points to the need for a more integrated and interconnected history of race in America.”

Ray explained that the event was organized in response “to the Asian and Asian-American students who asked us to do something that showed that they and their histories of being in this country mattered.”

Michael Lu, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, introduced the panel and spoke to the importance of creating a forum for open discussion about anti-Asian violence.

“Many of us in the (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community have been feeling invisible for much of our lives,” Lu said. “Invisible, because our history isn’t taught in the schools. Our stories aren’t told in the media. Our contributions often go unrecognized. Our struggles, our pains often go unnoticed. I’m really glad we’re having this discussion tonight, right here at the Berkeley campus, where the Asian-American movement started more than 50 years ago, to lift that veil of invisibility, to tell our stories, to make our voices heard.”

Russell Jeung, professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, presented data gathered through Stop AAPI Hate, a website he helped launch in March 2020 following a rise in anti-Asian sentiment at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I knew that unless we documented the racism that we were experiencing, policymakers and the media wouldn’t pay attention,” he explained.

Leung said that nearly 3800 hate incidents were reported through the site between March 2020 and February 2021, including verbal harassment, civil rights violations, coughing and spitting attacks, physical assaults and other forms of violence.

“We asked those who had experienced racism, what is their number one stressor? They said racism,” Jeung said. “Asian Americans are now under such a state of siege, and have experienced racism that has been so damaging, that they’re more concerned about other Americans and their hate than they are about a pandemic that’s killed half a million (Americans). That’s how widespread and how dangerous this racism is.”

Kimberly Hoang, associate professor of Sociology and director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago, called attention to how the media portrayed last month’s mass shootings in Atlanta, when eight people were killed, including six Asian women.

“We must move away from the media’s approach to narrating the story, and the ways that opportunists have seized this moment,” Hoang said. “(We should) remember that at the heart of these shootings is an intelligent public starved for depth in understanding a group of women who were immigrant entrepreneurs, low-wage workers employed past their retirement age, single mothers and real people whose lives and families are forever broken as a result of these devastating events.”

Catherine Ceniza Choy, professor of Ethnic Studies and an associate dean in the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science’s Division of Undergraduate Studies, discussed the 150-year history of anti-Asian racism in the United States.

“It is part of the history of racial violence in the United States. Yet it is not well known. It is marginalized, if not erased and overshadowed by popular mythical images of Asian Americans as a monolithic model minority,” Choy said.

“We have to confront this long history of anti-Asian violence in order to understand how tenacious it has been and how tenacious it continues to be, and to figure out what each and every one of us can do to prevent and mitigate hate and harm,” Choy said. “I take heart that we, as Asian Americans, have many allies across racial and ethnic lines, because our fates are interlinked. At stake is the health and well-being of our nation and world. We have no choice but to work together to stop Asian hate.”

The event was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Social Sciences Division initiative “Toward a Racially Just Social Science,” and by Social Science Matrix, APASD, AAPISC, the Sociology Department, the School of Public Health, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for South Asian Studies, and Stop AAPI Hate.

Solidarity and Strife

Beyond Competition: Alternative Discovery Procedures & The Postcapitalist Public Sphere

Published April 13, 2021

 

On March 19, 2021, Social Science Matrix presented a lecture by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Morozov is also the founder and the publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative. He holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. This lecture was presented as part of the SSRC-sponsored research initiative, “Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic,” co-organized by the UC Berkeley D-Lab and Social Science Matrix. This event was also co-sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group.

The title of the lecture, “Beyond Competition: Alternative Discovery Procedures & The Postcapitalist Public Sphere,” refers to an essay by Friedrich Hayek, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” (1968). In an abstract for the lecture, Morozov wrote that “Hayek’s insistence that competition is the surest and most reliable technique of eliciting innovation is well reflected in today’s digital landscape, dominated as it is by digital platforms, with their stated goal of facilitating market exchange. Yet, beyond Hayek’s favorite bugbear of central planning, there surely must be other ways of ‘discovery’ — even if they do not currently ‘scale’ as well as the techniques of competition.” Morozov’s talk aimed to “explore the intellectual and political benefits of placing ‘discovery’ at the center of our debate about the future of the digital public sphere” and to “suggest potential directions for adequate policy-making on the issue.”

In his lecture, Morozov reflected on his past work on “solutionism,” which he noted was missing “ingredients” such as capitalism, liberalism, finance, and what is happening beyond the United States. “Since then I’ve moved out of the U.S. and tried to understand what the same phenomena would mean if you were to look at them from the perspective of Europe, or Latin America, or Asia. And of course, not surprisingly, a lot of other different facets came into view that were not visible to me when I was at Stanford, or Harvard, or Georgetown — questions related to developmentalism, colonialism, or imperialism.

Morozov explained that he has a forthcoming book that takes a broader look at the topic of solutionism, but also uses a particular lens: that of “the inability of progressive forces to the left to not only make sense of digital technologists and what to do with them, but also to make sense of their own project. What should their future be, other than just defending the welfare state, and insisting that they can humanize capitalism?”

Watch the lecture above or on YouTube

Authors Meet Critics

Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica

Published March 15, 2021

A panel discussion on "Scammer's Yard" featuring Jovan Lewis, Nadia Ellis, and Deborah Thomas

Recorded on March 10, 2021, this video features a panel discussion about Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica, a book by Jovan Scott Lewis, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. Scammer’s Yard tells the story of three young and poor men striving to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. The book describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation.

As part of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series, Lewis discussed the book with Nadia Ellis, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Department of English; and Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

 

Matrix On Point

Pandemic Lessons: Assessing Educational Inequalities in the Wake of COVID-19

Published March 15, 2021

A "Matrix on Point" panel addressed what we have learned about educational inequalities after a year of pandemic-related school closures.

Presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix on March 9, 2021, this video features an online panel discussion from the “Matrix on Point” event series.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the shutdown of schools and colleges around the world. In the United States, the prolonged shutdown exacerbated the myriad inequalities that pervade our educational system. While the shift to online learning amplified the digital divide, exacerbating losses in learning for students who lack access to modern technologies, it also revealed enduring racial and economic divisions within urban, suburban, and rural communities across the country.

This panel addressed what we have learned about educational inequalities after a year of pandemic-related school closures.

Panelists included: Prudence L. Carter, the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley; Emily J. Ozer, Professor of Community Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; and Matthew Rafalow, a Sociologist (PhD, University of California-Irvine), a social scientist at Google, and a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Zeus Leonardo, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

 

About the Panelists

Prudence L. Carter

Prudence L. Carter is the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley. Dean Carter’s research focuses on factors that both shape and reduce economic, social and cultural inequalities among social groups in schools and society.  A sociologist, she examines academic and mobility differences influenced by the dynamics of race, ethnicity, poverty, class, and gender in U.S. and global society.  Before being appointed Dean at Berkeley, she was the Jacks Family Professor of Education and Professor of Sociology (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She was also the Faculty Director of John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, and the Director of the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, she was Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Dean Carter’s award-winning book, Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press, 2005), engages with and interrogates cultural explanations used to explain school achievement and racial identity for low-income Black and Latino youth in the United States. Her other books include Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. & South African Schools(link is external) (2012) and Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance(link is external) (2013), co-edited with Dr. Kevin Welner — both published by Oxford University Press. Her other publications have appeared in various journals and book volumes. Her research has also been featured in the Peabody Award-winning documentary “Mind the Gap: Why Are Good Schools Failing Black Students” by journalist Nancy Solomon and has been featured on dozens of National Public Radio (NPR) shows across the United States.

Emily Ozer

Emily J. Ozer is a clinical and community psychologist and Professor at the UC-Berkeley School of Public Health whose research focuses on the role of school climate in adolescent development and mental health; school-based interventions; and participatory action research (YPAR), an equity-focused approach in which youth are trained to generate systematic research evidence to address problems they want to improve in their schools and communities. She is the co-founder and co-Director of Innovations for Youth (I4Y) at UC Berkeley. Much of her research on YPAR including the development of the YPAR Hub has been in partnership with San Francisco Peer Resources, a non-profit youth social justice organization. Funded by a William T. Grant Institutional Challenge Grant, she is actively working in a research-practice partnership (RPP) with the San Francisco Unified School District to integrate student-led research in equity and school improvement initiatives. She also leads a 6-district study funded by WT Grant in California, Colorado, NJ, and Ohio on the use of research evidence from YPAR in K-12 school systems.

Matthew Rafalow

Matt Rafalow is a Sociologist (PhD, University of California-Irvine), a social scientist at Google, and a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. At Google, he leads a research program on live streaming experiences. He strives to conduct research that blends academic inquiry with applied solutions that have a meaningful impact. Most of his publishing is on education. In Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020), he studied how digital technologies are used in middle schools. He found that teachers draw on organization-level understandings of student race and class to construct students as either risky hackers or Steve Jobs potentials. Digital technologies were not magic bullets to address educational inequities – rather, teachers adopted very similar technologies quite differently depending on the race and class of their student body. In Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning (NYU Press, 2018), he and his co-authors studied how informal learning communities online function to help youth and young adults level up in digital skills.

Zeus Leonardo (moderator)

Zeus Leonardo, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, has published numerous articles and book chapters on critical social thought in education. His articles have appeared in Educational Researcher; Race, Ethnicity, and Education; Teachers College Record; and Educational Philosophy and Theory. Some of his essays include: “Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge,” “The Souls of White Folk,” “The Color of Supremacy,” “Contracting Race,” and “Dis-orienting Western Knowledge.” His most recent books are Race, Whiteness, and Education (Routledge), Race Frameworks (Teachers College Press), Education and Racism (with Grubb, Routledge, 2nd ed), and he is the editor the Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education (SensePublishers). Professor Leonardo’s current research interests involve the study of ideologies and discourses in education with respect to structural relations of power.

Solidarity and Strife

The True Costs of Misinformation: Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

Published February 28, 2021

Recorded on February 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This event was presented as part of the "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic" initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab.

Recorded on February 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This event was presented as part of the “Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic” initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab.

Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC), which explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns. Dr. Donovan’s research and teaching interests are focused on media manipulation, effects of disinformation campaigns, and adversarial media movements.

“I am a sociologist and an ethnographer by trade,” she said. “One of the things we really try to help people understand is that you don’t need an advanced degree in data science (though sometimes it’s nice) to do this kind of work. What you really need is a mind for sniffing out the BS. You really need to try to figure out what kind of power is at play, who is being manipulated, and what kind of content is being used? And then of course, as the sociologist, the question for me is always, who is being harmed? What kind of social institution is in the crosshairs of misinformation at scale?”

In her talk, Donovan draws important distinctions between disinformation and misinformation, and she uses case studies to illuminate how misinformation spreads. “When I’m thinking about this pandemic moment, I’m really thinking about, what is people’s access to timely local, relevant, and accurate information?” she explained. “And how is the presence of disinformation disrupting or displacing our human right to truth? But I also know that we’re living in a bit of pandemonium…. We’re looking at an evil spirit, a divine power, a kind of an intentional moment in which chaos reigns. And so with the pandemic, of course, I feel like we’re living through pandemonium.”

Watch the lecture above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

Bloc by Bloc: How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order

Published February 19, 2021

Joined by a panel of scholars, CLTC Faculty Director Steve Weber discussed his book, which outlines a framework for how firms should position themselves for the new economic geography.

Watch the video

At a time when globalization is taking a step backward, what’s the best way to organize a global enterprise? This question is at the heart of CLTC Faculty Director Steven Weber’s book Bloc by Bloc: How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order, which argues that firms should prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions defined by their own rules and standards — including data and technology standards.

Weber’s book (and its thesis) was also the focus of an “Authors Meet Critics” book talk, presented on February 11, 2021 by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix.  Professor Weber discussed the book with Vinod K. Aggarwal, Professor of Political Science, and Homa Bahrami, Senior Lecturer in the Haas School of Business. The panel was introduced by Matrix director Marion Fourcade and moderated by AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Bloc by Bloc, Weber explained in his introductory remarks, is “a book about economic geography that tries to ask the question, how should a global enterprise organize to reach the world in the coming decade? The assertion for me is that, if a leader today asks a a deceptively simple question — about where to store her firm’s data, where to seek legal foundation for its intellectual property, where its employees should live and work, where its robots should live and work — there’s really no coherent conceptual framework to guide those decisions right now.”

Drawing upon centuries of history, the book is an attempt to “set out that conceptual framework and try to explain where it comes from,” Weber explained, and to provide “concrete advice about how to make those decisions to maximize the upsides of what we can expect in this new economic geography.”

The book evolved in part from Weber’s past research and consulting with IBM’s then-CEO, Sam Palmisano, who coined the term “globally integrated enterprise” (as described in a 2006 article in Foreign Affairs) to describe how a company should prepare for a world of globalization.

“IBM actually took its own advice,” Weber said. “The problem was, by the time we figured it out, it was too late. It was one of those moments where you feel like got the argument exactly right, just at the moment when the story we were telling was coming to an end. That was the single most important moment and really the inspiration for the book, that the technical and political landscape that had enabled the globally integrated enterprise was gone.”

“The ability to see the landscape of economic geography in any particular era, assess how close it is to a stable equilibrium, and then figure out the right model for organization is the central problem of organizational strategy,” he said. “But to get it right is a lot harder than it sounds.”

Weber said that the era of globalization that was supposed to be made possible by the world wide web and “outsourcing” talent failed in part because “many corporate leaders… thought about cost reduction through the gap model, rather than growth and value creation.” The financial crisis of 2008 gave way to economic nationalism and the “introduction of new, non-Western rule sets and standards which were aimed at tilting the playing field toward China and Europe.”

“Of course, now we see this everywhere,” Weber said. “The Chinese talk about it as a national security priority to control standards. The Europeans talk about it as a human rights battle for privacy to control standards. The consequences for global organization are exactly the same.”

These shifts have resulted in the rise of “logical regions,” defined by divergent rules and standards, and to succeed in this world, “a global organization needs to develop three or four full copies of itself that operates substantially on their own in an individual region.”

“What’s my rule of thumb advice for global enterprise strategy in this world?” Weber concluded. “I’ll sum it up in five commandments. Keep your robots close to home. Keep your data close to your chest. Keep your capital expenditure under tight control, no matter how loose monetary policy gets. Keep your job creation firmly in the spotlight. And finally, keep your fingers crossed for minimum viable global security cooperation between governments — and don’t expect to get a whole lot more than that.”

Keep your robots close to home. Keep your data close to your chest. Keep your capital expenditure under tight control, no matter how loose monetary policy gets. Keep your job creation firmly in the spotlight. And finally, keep your fingers crossed for minimum viable global security cooperation between governments — and don’t expect to get a whole lot more than that.

In her response, Professor Homa Bahrami drew upon her own past research on studying how businesses organize themselves. “My interest in organizational forms is, what are the new forms that are going to evolve through the impact of technology?” she said. “If you look at the first modern industrial corporation, it was nurtured and enabled by the development of railways and telegraph. Before that, the enterprises, we knew were more local in nature, just because you have the barriers of transfer, transportation and information sharing.”

Bahrami said she agreed with Weber’s point “about regions defined by technology standards, not by physical boundaries,” which is “the bedrock assumption that we have to keep in the back of our mind as we think about new organizational forms. Having said that, however, I think they’re going to be variations across industries. So if you think about financial services, its government control is  much tighter than if you think about technology industries, for example. We really have to apply somewhat of an industry lens, and if you look at some of the things that are going on in biotech and life sciences, those are going to be governed by different set of government rules and standards.”

In his comments, Professor Vinod (Vinnie) Aggarwal praised the book for “making a grand synthesis of about 50 different topics,” but noted that the book seems to shift in its argument about whether the world will be defined by physical boundaries and rules and standards. “Steve does say, in a nuanced way, in the last chapter, that we’re not saying this is completely divorced from physical space,” Aggarwal said. “This, to me is the original contribution of the book… I had hoped for a kind of economic geography that goes beyond the physical space view.”

To find out how Weber responded — and to hear the rest of this engaging discussion — watch through the link above, or watch it on YouTube.

 

Matrix Lecture

Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century

Published February 5, 2021

Recorded on February 3, 2021, this video features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Recorded on February 3, 2021, this video features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. The lecture was introduced and moderated by Henry Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Allen’s lecture focuses on the findings of Our Common Purpose: Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century, a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Allen served as co-chair of the Commission, which convened weekly for two years in support of this project. As detailed in the report, the Commission was established to “consider what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens…. Through its recommendations, the Commission has looked to increase citizens’ capacity to engage in their communities, counter rising threats to democratic self-government, and rebuild trust in political institutions.”

Allen noted that the messages in the report are particularly urgent in the wake of the the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “I think all over the country and world, people are asking really deep, important questions about American democracy and its viability at this point in time,” Allen said. “Those same kinds of questions are what motivated us in our work on the commission.”

She noted that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is itself the child of revolution, as it was founded in 1780, in the middle of the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, and others “who thought of themselves as scholar patriots.”

The project emerged from a growing awareness of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of our democracy. “In 2017, there were a number of us affiliated with the Academy… who found ourselves expressing these worries to one another,” Allen said. “And we were fortunate that the Academy thought it made sense to pull together a commission to dig into the question of what was happening with the practice of democratic citizenship. What could the future be in the 21st century? Why did we see this rise of disaffection and alienation? And what can we do about it?”

The Commission included stakeholders from across the political spectrum, Allen said. “We gathered a group of about 35 people from different professional sectors, different disciplinary sectors within the Academy, and also across the ideological spectrum,” Allen said. “We were indeed a cross-ideological group, and that was really important to our work. We really wanted to see whether we could find a way of bridging some of the cleavages that separated us as we think about the future of democracy in this country.”

Watch the video of the panel above or on YouTube. 

Solidarity and Strife

Measuring Belief in Fake News Online

Published February 5, 2021

A lecture on why people believe fake news — and what can be done about it, by Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics at New York University

Recorded on January 29, 2021, this video features Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. In his lecture, Tucker discussed his recent research, which focused on understanding how well can ordinary people do in identifying the veracity of news in real time.

Using a unique research design, Tucker compared the performance of both ordinary citizens and professional fact checkers in identifying fake news, and gained insights into the individual-level characteristics of those likely to incorrectly identify false news stories as true. He also researched what interventions can reduce the prevalence of this behavior, and the prospects for crowdsourcing to serve as a viable means for identifying false news stories in real time. He also reported preliminary findings from a replication of this study focusing exclusively on news about COVID-19.

This lecture was presented as part of the “Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic” initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I’m going to try to give you answers to the following five questions,” Tucker said. “The first is, how often do ordinary people believe fake news when they encounter it online, and crucially, when do they do so in real time? The second question is, what individual-level characteristics are associated with susceptibility to believing fake news? The third is, do these findings…change when we move from traditional fake news around more political and hard news issues, to when we move to fake news around COVID-19? We might think that this might change a bit when someone’s health is at risk. The fourth is whether or not there are certain task flows we can enact that will reduce the likelihood of people believing fake news. And fifth is whether or not we can crowdsource fact checking fake news.”

Tucker said that his research revealed that people in general fare poorly at spotting fake news when they see it. “Unfortunately, untrained people are not particularly good at identifying fake news,” Tucker said. “And when we look at what types of covariates determine who is better at doing this…the biggest thing that we find that matters has to do with politics, not what we would think of as more conventional demographics.”

An additional challenge, Tucker said, is that people tend to use the internet to corrobate the false information a fake news story contains. “If we send people out into the internet to search for corroboration, to see if they can find additional evidence to see whether a story is false or not, that actually makes people worse,” Tucker said. “Sending them on the internet will actually make people more likely to believe that a false news story is true…. This turns out to take place when there is other corroborating evidence out there on the internet.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Disaster and Displacement – Inequalities in Climate Migration

Published December 22, 2020

Recorded on Dec. 11, 2020, this "Matrix on Point" panel addressed the consequences of climate migration.

Within the next 30 years, slow-onset climate change may impel as many as 143 million people living in the Global South to relocate within their countries of origin. Longer-range forecasts predict that by 2070 rising temperatures may render one-fifth of the earth’s landmasses uninhabitable, forcing international migration on a massive scale. Among the displaced, low-income populations will be particularly vulnerable, and cities in the Global North may have to absorb and provide services for these immigrants. Given the politicization of migration in recent years, and the lack of international policies to protect climate refugees, climate change is anticipated to reinforce global inequalities.

Recorded on December 11, 2020, a Matrix On Point panel discussion brought together a group of esteemed scholars to discuss the humanitarian, ecological, and geopolitical impacts of climate migration, along with forward-looking policies that can help mitigate displacement, address global inequalities, and support refugees forced to leave their homelands due to extreme weather, devastated ecosystems, and other climate-related issues. This event was presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix (as part of the “Matrix on Point” series), and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Center for Effective Global Action, and Human Rights Center.

Panelists included Kanta Kumari Rigaud, Lead Environmental Specialist at the World Bank; Daniel Kammen, Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair; the Goldman School of Public Policy, where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy; and the Department of Nuclear Engineering; Elizabeth Fussell, Associate Professor of Population Studies and Environmental Studies at Brown University; and Teevrat Garg, Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. The panel was moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley, and Founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Watch the video above or on YouTube

Matrix On Point

The Economic Consequences of COVID-19

Published December 6, 2020

A panel of scholars weighed in on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented shutdown of the global economy. Governments (mostly in advanced economies) responded with an array of programs, from increased unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, small business assistance loans, and broad monetary support. In spite of these unprecedented interventions, all financed by a rapid expansion of public debt, the economic outlook continues to be very uncertain nearly nine months into the pandemic. What are the likely near- and long-term consequences of the pandemic for the global economy? Which populations have been most affected?  Which industries are likely to recover, and which will not? How should we evaluate the success of economic measures taken by governments in the U.S. and around the world?

Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy, and presented as part of the Berkeley Haas “New Thinking in a Pandemic” series, this “Matrix on Point” panel discussion — recorded on December 3, 2020 — brought together a panel of scholars to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panelists were Mitu Gulati, Professor of Law at Duke University; Hilary Hoynes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at UC Berkeley; Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan, the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Maryland; and Maurice Obstfeld, the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at Berkeley and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The panel was moderated by Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Professor of Economics in the UC Berkeley Department of Economics; and S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Haas School of Business.

Watch the panel above or on YouTube.

 

Matrix On Point

The New Authoritarians

Published December 5, 2020

A "Matrix on Point" panel discussion focused on the rise of right-wing autocrats around the world.

A new generation of authoritarians has risen to power in democracies around the world. Since coming to office, these rulers have manipulated laws and reconfigured state bureaucracies, undermining civil liberties, flouting representative institutions, attacking the free press, and subverting international law. Figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Mihály Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States have all attained office by embracing, and in some instances co-opting, conservative populist movements.

Recorded on November 30, 2020, this Matrix On Point panel considered not only the illiberal tactics these right-wing autocrats have used to consolidate power and further their objectives, but also what it will take to undo the damage they have inflicted upon democratic institutions.

Panelists included Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University; Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; Lena Lavinas, Professor of Welfare Economics at the Institute of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Senior Researcher at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPQ); and Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. The panel was moderated by Paul Pierson (moderator) is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

2020 Election Post-Mortem: Why It Happened and the Implications for American Democracy.

Published November 30, 2020

Recorded on November 12, 2020, this panel was presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Recorded on November 12, 2020, this video features a “post-mortem” analysis of the 2020 election — and what the implications are for the future. The panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix.

Panelists included: Peter Hart, Founder of Hart Research; Lyn Vavreck, the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA; and Nathan Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. The panel was moderated by Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Learn more about the Citrin Center at https://citrincenter.berkeley.edu.