New Social Contract Archives
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Dear Friend,
Last Saturday, a truly great American died. Norman Borlaug, known throughout the world as the father of the green revolution, was 95. A farm boy from Iowa, Borlaug revolutionized modern agriculture by developing new seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers that exponentially increased agricultural yields and today sustain more than 6 billion of us globally.
One of the great stains on the modern environmental movement was its opposition to Borlaug's work. Stanford professors Paul Ehrlich and current White House science adviser John Holdren famously argued in the late 1960s that halting food aid and sterilization would be more humane than new agricultural technologies. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned that pesticides would be humankind's downfall. And many prominent environmental groups remain largely hostile to Borlaug's work, for which he won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.
There's little doubt that chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been abused. But to focus exclusively on the unintended consequences of those technologies while ignoring the extraordinary accomplishments of a revolution that virtually ended famine and malnourishment in most parts of the world is ingratitude at its worst. And Borlaug's innovations, along with those of other agricultural pioneers who came before him, did more than save lives.
If you make your living today doing something other than agricultural labor, as virtually all of us do, you can thank Norman Borlaug, and thousands of others like him, for the innovations that make such lives possible. Three hundred years ago, when virtually the entire human population devoted its labors to growing enough food to sustain themselves, such lives would have been unimaginable.
Continue reading "The Trouble with "Sustainability"" »
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Dalton Conley, sociology professor at NYU and senior fellow here at the Breakthrough Institute, recently published an article in The Nation (to appear in the March 23rd print edition) about the US's continual slide down the UN's global Human Development Index (HDI) rankings. We still rank near the top in per capita income, but Conley argues persuasively that income inequality is the driving force behind the seeming contradiction that a nation can have high income levels and low measures of development. For interested readers, the American Human Development Project has an interesting website that goes into detail about these measures at the state and local level.
Please follow the link above for the article, or you can read it below:
Continue reading "America is #... 15?" »
Don't miss the chance to see Conley speak tomorrow, January 27th, at Berkeley Arts and Letters with Michael and Ted introducing.
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Dalton Conley, Breakthrough Senior Fellow, sociology professor at NYU and author of the upcoming book "Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety," sat down with Ted Nordhaus to answer some questions about social and economic inequality in America, and the impacts of the current recession on recent socioeconomic trends in the United States. Don't miss the chance to see Conley speak tomorrow, January 27th, at Berkeley Arts and Letters with Michael and Ted introducing.
Q&A:
Ted Nordhaus:
You have written extensively about the impacts of rising social and economic inequality on American culture and society. What would you identify as the key drivers of rising inequality?
Dalton Conley:
Wage inequality has increased for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most important being what economists call "skill-biased technological change" meaning that the new economy skews rewards heavily toward folks who have the most hi-end cognitive and emotional skills and credentials (i.e. educational degrees). But total inequality has increased also because of family dynamics: more and more families are two-earner households with high-earners marrying high-earners, thereby doubling (almost) household inequality.
Nordhaus:
Over the last few decades, up until the current recession, America has experienced both consistently high levels of economic growth and rising levels, by some accounts unprecedented levels, of economic inequality. How are those two phenomena related and do you think it is possible to have a high growth economy without rising levels of inequality?
Conley:
The rewards of growth have been typically unequally distributed in the U.S. For instance, the last time we experienced inequality levels equal to contemporary ones was 1929, right before the crash. So it remains to be seen what the impact of the current bear market will be. There are, however, examples abroad of societies that have managed to obtain standards of living similar to (or better than) ours without such extreme inequality. Northern Europe comes to mind.
Nordhaus:
What do you think the impact of the current recession will be on social inequality? Are we likely to see declining levels of inequality and if so, what impact would you expect that to have on Elsewhere U.S.A?
Conley:
I think inequality may lessen if the evaporation of all this abstract wealth holds fast. However, already public policy has been directed to restoring the old ways. Even if inequality declines, I still think folks will be haunted by economic anxiety. In good times we fear that others are doing better than us in relative terms. In bad times, we fear losing what we have in absolute terms.
Nordhaus:
You write more specifically about the ways in which rising inequality is self reinforcing. The more money affluent Americans make, the higher the opportunity costs of not working become. The resulting greater incentive for affluent Americans to work more, not less, then exacerbates income inequality all the more. Would you expect a recessionary economy in which income inequality was declining to result in a reversal of this dynamic? With the opportunity costs of family time and leisure declining, would you expect affluent Americans to take more time away from work and with their families? What impact might that have on Americans who work in the service sectors to which affluent Americans have in recent decades outsourced so much of their lives?
Conley:
I could see a potential upside of more folks living a slower lifestyle--cooking at home more and outsourcing less childcare and other aspects of what was once family life; this might be an upside of a tepid economy. However, the monkey wrench in all this is the fact that we are burdened with enormous household (and national) debt thanks to our recent consumption binge. So most of us--thanks to credit card bills or mortgages that exceed the value of our homes--don't have the option of working less and enjoying simpler pleasures we had forgotten about. We are going to be working for our interest payments and feeling perhaps even more pressure to earn.
Nordhaus:
You write a lot about the ways in which modern life, and particularly the market, has increasingly erased many of the old modernist dualities - work and leisure, public and private, market goods and public goods - mostly in the negative; but aren't there real benefits to many of these trends as well, in terms of the creation of all sorts of technologies and new personal/professional spaces that allow for greater flexibility and control over when, how, and where we work, play, shop, and lived?
Conley:
Definitely, but the skills we need to manage these are new. The ability to multi-task--i.e. attend to several streams of interactive data exchange while not losing any of those threads, is perhaps as important as perisistence, brains or other skills that are prized. I am not trying to be judgemental and make some nostalgic claim that things were "better" in the days of yore; rather, I am merely trying to describe a new social landscape that comes with plusses and minuses.
Nordhaus:
You also write about the rise of the intravidual - about the ways in which the collapse of so many of those dualities has led to a fracturing of the self. Is this really a new development? How is this different than Whitman's observation that we "contain multitudes" penned more than a century ago? Haven't we always contained multitudes and multiple selves?
Conley:
That may be the case. However, I think back then there was still a clear(er) division between front-stage (i.e. public persona) and back-stage (our private self). Today with Facebook updates (and so on), public cell phone conversations, and the blurring of home and work, this dichotomy has eroded, combining with other dynamics I describe in the book, to lead to a greater--perhaps--fragmentation of our consciousness, I argue.
Nordhaus:
How do the social safety net and the institutions necessary for its provision need to evolve to address America's increasingly complex social and economic arrangements?
Conley:
We have to face the fact that the social safety net devised in the 1930s (and even the 1960s amendments) were made in the context of a much less affluent society where household budgets were much more devoted to basic necessities. Today what we "need" is much greater (education, high quality health care, family care and so on) and often relative in nature (better schools -- better than what?). These are much more difficult to provide using the old-school social insurance model.
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About the book:
Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles-worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client-all in the same instant?
Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era-the belief in self-actualization and expression-being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.
Progressives must build an intellectual framework for their politics, or the movement will fail.
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With the election of Barack Obama, we are entering a new period of progressive governance in America, but not necessarily a new era of progressivism. Progressivism in this country is still defined by its opposition to conservatism. Opposition is easy. All a movement in opposition must do is deflate the reigning movement's intellectual principles and debunk that movement's narrative. All you have to do is criticize.
But now, as Barack Obama assumes the presidency, the time has come for progressives to create. We must build our own intellectual principles and or own defining narrative. This is the only way for a new progressivism to be born out of this political moment. We must build an identity that is more than "non-conservative."
Continue reading "Movement Building, the Market and a New Progressivism" »
Daschle entrusted by Obama to steer health care reform forward.
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From the Wall Street Journal Online:
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has accepted President-elect Barack Obama's offer to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services, according to an official familiar with the situation.
Atop HHS, Mr. Daschle is expected to play a key role in moving Mr. Obama's ambitious health care agenda through Congress...As a veteran of Washington and of Capitol Hill, he brings knowledge about how to move legislation through Congress. He has a particular interest in health care and is co-author of a book published this year, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis."
Its interesting how many of Obama's appointments are people who have experience in the legislative branch, including Joe Biden. With talk of either Clinton or Kerry at State, Rahm as Chief of Staff, and now Daschle accepting the HHS position, it is starting to look like many key members of the Obama administration will have spent significant time in Congress. Hopefully this points to Obama's willingness to work closely with legislators, a departure from the past eight years and Bush's less-than-Constitutional expansion of executive power.
Does insuring more people really cost less?
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From the Obama Campaign Health Care Plan FAQ:
"Q. Obama says his plan will save $2,500 annually for my family. How?
A. ...[By] ensuring every American has health coverage, which will reduce spending on the "uncompensated" care of uninsured people who end up in emergency rooms and whose care is picked up by institutions and then passed through higher charges to insured individuals."
The claim that we can reduce spending by reducing costly and inefficient emergency care by extending health care to more people certainly made the rounds this past campaign. Obama mentioned this fact in the debates and in his stump speech. It is an ultimate political winner--think about it: "we are going to lower everyone's costs by giving health care to more people." Is there anything that people would support more than this idea?
Continue reading "Health Care and Moral Hazard" »
To understand issues surrounding health care reform in America, it is important to understand the difference between health care and health insurance.
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One of the leading causes of confusion when it comes to health care reform is the misuse and conflation of the terms "health insurance" and "health care." This sort of confusion manifests itself throughout the debate.
Insurance is the pooling of risk. The members of an insurance plan pay a premium that is used to help those members who face an adverse event. In the case of auto insurance this could the cost to repair a rear-end collision, in the case of health insurance this might be the cost to repair broken bone. Insurance as it exists is marked by two pillars:
Continue reading "What is Health Insurance?" »
Barack Obama campaigned with one of the most progressive health care plans America has seen in decades. But before he moves forward, he must recognize the technological and political barriers to making America a healthier nation.
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As Barack Obama takes his place in the oval office, he will be working with the political mandate of an electoral landslide to work towards implementing the pragmatic progressive agenda that he set forth in his campaign. His bold push to expand health care coverage will be among the most scrutinized projects he embarks upon. Throughout the campaign and in the debates he consistently touted his plan to create a public health insurance plan available to every American, creating a large insurance pool that would help keep prices low, in turn making it more appealing to uninsured Americans. He also claimed that the plan would pay for itself by reducing the need for inefficient emergency care.
But are his policy goals realistic? And perhaps more importantly, would America be healthier if more Americans had health insurance (or better access to health care)?
Continue reading "Barack Obama: Health Care Nation?" »
The financial crisis can be partly attributed to good intentions translating into bad social policy. Will we learn our lesson and rethink the way we conceive of solutions to social problems?
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I've spent the past few weeks learning about the financial crisis, but it has felt more like a crash-course in economics and society. One thing that stands out to me is that depending on who you read, and his or her ideological leanings, you will get a different explanation for what caused this crisis. But more often than not, the people writing for "typical-slightly-right-of-center-libertarian.blogspot" and the people writing for "left-wing-trending-socialist-progressive.wordpress" write about all the same causes, but then point to this one thing that made the crisis really bad. Everyone is more than ready to recognize the confluence of variables that caused our current problems, but depending on ideology, one of these variables was obviously wrong and a mistake.
Well, I am taking a stand here and now. As a self-proclaimed progressive (or according to facebook, "pragmatic progressive"), I am choosing to write about one of the causes of our financial crisis that I take the least issue with: trying to create pathways to homeownership for people lower down on the economic ladder who wouldn't be able to otherwise.
Continue reading "Will the Financial Crisis Make America Rethink Social Policy for the 21st Century?" »
Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dalton Conley argues that the social safety nets of the 21st Century may be modeled more on the open source communities of the Wikipedia era than the government programs of the Roosevelt age.
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By Helen Aki, Breakthrough Generation Fellow.
Today's highly networked social order requires a new social contract -- that's the conclusion of Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dalton Conley, who just wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine illuminating the challenges involved in creating social policy for a complex modern society. Although many may be calling for a new "New Deal" to shore up current societal insecurities, the social safety nets of the 21st Century may be modeled more on the open source communities of the Wikipedia era than the government programs of the Roosevelt age.
Continue reading "Network Nation: Building American Empowerment" »
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