The last generation has famously lifted millions out of poverty in rising economies such as China and India, but countless millions more lag behind, caught in societies that fail to gain a foothold on material progress. What to do for them? Lant Pritchett, an Oxford development researcher formerly of the World Bank, has an idea in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/global-economy-immigration-before-automation-people-over-robots) He cites studies showing that the default approach–aid programs to the lagging countries–produces scant relief, whereas voluntary migration to better opportunities has a 10X better result. And that’s even when the migrants take the lowly work that is usually on offer to them. So, suggests Pritchett, the same world institutions that try to coordinate relief (and many other global functions, from transport to public health), should convene to offer migratory work passes. The holders would come alone, stay for only a designated time, be protected from abuses, and return to their origins with a nest egg. This is obviously recognizable as a formalization of what partially happens, massively but with great uproar, around the world already. Pritchett makes the standard argument that receiving economies benefit from having gaping labor gaps filled. (He gets sidetracked, as the article’s title suggests, in a riff against automation.) What he does not address is the acute resistance in many lands to having the composition of towns and cities changed by immigration. Perhaps he has too much faith in the operation of his plan–something you might call a humane Bracero program–to see that these visits are solitary and transitory. Human beings tend to aggregate where there’s a better life. But he does make an intriguing point about the currently unrealized potential in so many of the destitute. Consider this: “…the massive expansion of education in the developing world since the 1950s means that the average adult in Haiti today [an extreme basket case] has had more schooling than the average adult in France had in 1970.”
Chicago Is One Kind of Town
The geographical resorting of America continues apace–the separation of peoples based broadly on ideology. You see this population movement on both coasts, accentuated by the pandemic and remote work. It’s about other things, of course–costs, space, weather–but it’s a lot about politics. And after Tuesday’s mayoral election result in Chicago (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/us/elections/chicago-mayor-election-brandon-johnson.html), we can expect more resorting in the middle of the country. A majority of the closely-divided city electorate chose a higher-tax, less-policing candidate backed by most of the powerful public-employee unions. On top of the immediate worries that conservative Chicagoans might have, there’s the ongoing pensions deficit that the city, Cook County and the state of Illinois (also dominated by Democrats of the left) are running, which is a lien on taxpayers who hang around. Unless attempts succeed to garnish the higher income of fleeing residents (moves under consideration in a few states), or a bailout from Washington is forthcoming, Illinoisans-in-place are squarely under this cloud. So the movement into “two Americas” can expect another rush. I don’t know whether this pace and degree of separation is unprecedented (obviously blacks had reason to escape the Antebellum and Jim Crow South) or necessarily harmful on balance in such an already-sundered society, but it is happening nonetheless.
When Data Don’t Compute to Equity
It is implored, by one side of America’s political divide especially, that we “follow the science.” And that is good guidance, but is it consistent politics? Perhaps not. Many on the same left side have a problem with, for example, data science. This emerges in a New York Times Magazine interview with Colin Koopman, an Oregon philosophy professor who is publishing books questioning the social impact of algorithms that increasingly guide the digital economy. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/20/magazine/colin-koopman-interview.html) Those codings, and indeed the data that underlie their results, get in the way of equity, Koopman suggests. “We need to be doing more work on this,” he says, by which he ultimately means legislation or regulation (“engage democratically”) that would curb their application in the various marketplaces that use them for product development and pricing. As the window quote from the piece puts it, “We’re still in this wild west, highly unregulated terrain where inequality is just piling up.” Anyone who follows the financial sector, with its challenged use of credit scoring and insurance rating, will recognize where this larger impulse to tame measurable and predictive data is going. Such use categorizes people in ways that offend widespread fairness and justice sensibilities because it condemns individuals to demographic damnation. Now, a libertarian might respond that unless a business has an irrational desire to sacrifice potential profit in pursuit of racial or other bias, it would seek to refine data as precisely as possible to weed out false signals (as, for example, some banks have done in order to extend loans to worthy applicants who don’t check all the standard boxes). But Koopman has a better idea. “A fuller approach would be reparative with respect to the ongoing reproduction of historical inequalities,” he academically puts it. So: “…systems that would take into account ways in which people are differently situated and what we can do to create a more equal playing field… .” Affirmative action, meet data entry (withhold some identifiers) or data analysis (thumb on algorithm). Maybe the zeitgeist needs to be supplemented: “Follow the social science.”
Legislative Action Is a Real Thing
Outfits on both the political left and right in the U.S. have been beefing up their digital news coverage of America’s statehouses, where lawmaking is both meaningful and sometimes quick. Just such political action was spotlighted in last week’s New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/us/michigan-democrats-right-to-work-lgbtq-guns.html) on the Michigan legislature after last November’s electoral sweep of the state by Democrats. Elections do matter. Reapportionments matter. Judicial choices that oversee balloting matter. Yet coverage in the state capitals has rarely been a media strong suit–particularly in the broadcast sector–and that’s only gotten sparer as the nation’s daily newspapers have withered. (A good, mostly-neutral national roundup of what does appear can be found at pluribusnews.com.) One reason the action at this level of government can be brisk is that many legislative sessions have compressed calendars, a vestige of when America mostly had part-time, citizen legislators. If the states are the U.S. laboratories of democracy in the federal system–an aphorism that Washington too often ignores–it’s a shame not to know what they’re cooking up.
Is Modi Chasing Away His Brightest?
Pundits are pointing to new trade potential with India as the U.S. works to disengage with much of the Communist Party-linked economy in China, but one American “export” opportunity isn’t getting enough attention: enrollment in post-secondary education.
U.S. universities, for all their widely discussed flaws, nonetheless have long been a draw to talented or wealthy foreigners. This inflow suffered mightily during the Covid pandemic, but now has resumed from most of the world (less so, China). In some cases, not only is there a “pull” to attend in America, but a “push” to escape sub-par conditions at home. India appears increasingly to be in the latter camp, and this is true even in graduate-level programs where it has famously top schools.
The reason, according to scholars here and there, is more pervasive interference in academic and intellectual affairs by the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. The problems were laid out last fall in this article by historian Ramachandra Guha. The impact was flagged last week at a Council on Foreign Relations symposium by Prof. Lisa Mitchell of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of South Asia Studies, who noted an “explosion of applications” from Indians to U.S. programs.
The evidence at the application stage is still anecdotal–Mitchell reports a doubling at her base from past years–and even the matriculation data from last fall aren’t catalogued nationally. But the Modi effect, both from the outside on India’s institutions as well as from nationalist intimidation on the inside, has been increasingly felt. That could explain a jump to 102,000 Indian graduate students in the U.S. for the 2021-2022 term, after a string of declines pre-pandemic, to 85,000 in 2019-2020. (The trend in the smaller numbers of undergraduate is more mixed, though the most recent total of 27,545 is a high.) These figures come from the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors database.
“I’m hearing from many that there’s a feeling that India’s top universities are being destroyed (especially programs in the Humanities/Social Sciences) through political appointments of Vice Chancellors and harassment of faculty, and that universities are ceasing to be sites for the free exchange of ideas,” Prof. Mitchell emailed me.
The latest enrollment count, when it emerges, will tell an important story, as will the applications that can lead to attendance starting later this year. It is possible that graduate interest in the U.S. diminished in the U.S. from 2017 because of President Trump’s hostility to many visa-dependent employment opportunities, and has now jumped back up with perceptions of more openness. But elite Indians have all the while enjoyed access to Institute of Technology campuses (IITs) and other premium-flight options at home leading to international careers. If more choose to study–and discourse–in America instead, it is our gain and India’s loss.
–March 7, 2023
Should Your New Road Hog Be EV?
The New York Times’ climate crew produced this moral guide for prospective purchasers of Ford’s mainstay F-150 pickup truck–go electric or not? The battery-powered Lightning model, it happens, weighs 6,000 pounds or nearly 50% more than the gasoline counterparts, and that raises various issues explored in the article: Not just whether EV power needs negate the sparing of (direct) carbon emissions, but also the safety implications from when the big boys bash into humans and other objects. (Also, not noted: Heavier vehicles cause more wear and tear on roads and whatever “all terrain” they cross.) The Times gets into the “life-cycle emissions” per mile, and concludes the Lightnings “end up just as polluting as some smaller gas-burning cars.” Whether this calculation takes into account the upgrading of the electricity grid and alt-energy sourcing that will be necessary to accommodate a full fleet of American EVs in the future is not clear. Or, whether such infrastructure is even in the cards. There’s a lot to the all-electric boom that is uncertain, even as many underestimate the efficiency gains that are being made in internal-combustion engines. (Lighter materials on vehicles, such as the aluminum frames on all F-150s now, are another advancement–unless you are bothered by a new Bloomberg investigation into some Brazilian sourcing misery.) Ultimately, the quandary of how paragons of sustainability should transport themselves and their cargo comes down to this, the Times quotes: “Consumers should think about buying the highest-efficiency vehicle that still meets their needs.” At present, alas, they seem to need more and more. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/climate/electric-vehicle-emissions-truck-suv.html
Title IX’s Ticket to Training Camp
The big business of college sports in the U.S. is for the better or worse, and has many causes and consequences. One reason that the two highly commercial features of most programs–football and men’s basketball–are such big tickets is that they not only carry their own ever-heavier weight but also that of most of the other team competitions, including those for women. For half a century, federal “Title IX” strictures have been requiring schools to aim for equitable treatment of the two sexes in athletic as well as other activities. As the weekend’s New York Times article shows, this has had an unexplored and rather awkward result: The American campuses have become a training ground for the world’s female athletes, many of whom go on to compete in the Olympics for their home nations. In most of those countries, there is no comparable level of facilities and training available to women, particularly, and not with college attached. They don’t have Title IX, and they don’t have big-money spectator sports like football and March Madness to provide for such support. Now, what you make of this depends on whether a) you’re bothered by college sports being more about “Inc.” than “B.A.”; b) you think bringing in star athletes benefits everyone involved with the school; and c) you don’t care where the recruits come from or whether they go back there. (It’s a financial double-whammy: foreign students on scholarships are getting a free ride on what would typically be an institution’s highest tuition charges.) Maybe, on some level, this still amounts to a premium American “export.” It is probably not what the authors of Title IX envisioned.
A Tale of Montauk’s Camp Hero
This personalized recollection from the retired Hamptons publisher Dan Rattiner in the current issue of his old magazine, Dan’s Papers, sets the historical scene for one of eastern Long Island’s most unusual preserves: Camp Hero near Montauk Point. Now an ocean-facing state park on nearly 280 acres, it was a secretive military base during the middle decades of the 20th century, as Rattiner describes. What he leaves out of his tale is its crucial final years as U.S. government property, and how it almost was sold for luxury residences during one of the South Fork’s early boom periods. At the time, the new Reagan administration was driven by budget director David Stockman’s wish to unload surplus parcels to the highest bidders. As often happens, local officials and representatives protested–including in this case Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, a key Republican ally of the White House. That proved decisive, and after extended and complex negotiations, the land was turned over to the state of New York in 1985. Several years later, the onetime Montauk Air Force Station was opened to the public, mostly “as is,” as Camp Hero. Ironically, given its brush with resort-type development, the site first became host to an early “worker housing” project of the town of East Hampton, which includes Montauk. Camp Hero Estates, as the 27 units were called, repurposed base housing into bargains for lucky winners of a lottery, though rubs soon were apparent. Not paradise, it turned out, but not to be a parking lot, either.
SEE: https://www.danspapers.com/2023/02/inside-camp-hero-montauk-military-past/
Will State Pensions Pay Off?
This Bloomberg article captures the growing worry about state pension promises, and the resistance to reforming them, such is evident on the streets of France. In the U.S., we call these benefits Social Security, and efforts to contain its taxpayer cost are said to touch the political “third rail.” The authors here speculate that only the privileged will someday enjoy their retirements. Will this include government employees? In a new article at Discourse Magazine, I discuss the threat even to these paydays posed by unfunded plans at the state and local levels. Too much is being expected in most places, and too little is being contributed. It’s time to be “thinking about tomorrow.”
How a Good Retirement Risks Becoming Just for the Privileged
Popular discontent with the idea of having to work for longer is building as state pensions feel the strain.
Socialized Medicine a Dream? NY Is Nearly There
Vermont notably tried a form of socialized medicine a few years back and had to give up on the program for fiscal reasons. But the dream endures and New York State is coming close to realization: This New York Post article reports how 9 million residents are due to participate in Medicaid this year, per the governor’s budget. That’s 45% of the population, and a growth from 5.2 million in 2012, when New York was already at the forefront of the federal-state program for the poor. Add those relying on Medicare for the elderly and easily more than half of New Yorkers have government medical coverage. (Termination of the official pandemic “emergency” on May 11 may retard the number somewhat, as supplemental eligibilities end.) Some will see this as a positive development for public health, although as my December article for Discourse detailed, there’s reason to think part of this enrollment is a scam. Whether New York, which is losing its bigger income-earners, can continue to pay these bills is another matter.
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Tim W. Ferguson 