Politics

Privilege is Complex and Contextual: A Case Study

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So the BBC has an article that is probably not going to generate a ton of sympathy with anyone: The surprising downsides of being drop dead gorgeous. It’s actually a pretty great article for a serious discussion about privilege, however, because it has attributes of identity privilege (your looks are largely intrinsic and immutable, like your race or gender) but with less (not none, but less) emotional volatility.

The obvious takeaway is that being pretty is basically a good thing:

In education, for instance, Walker and Frevert found a wealth of research showing that better looking students, at school and university, tend to be judged by teachers as being more competent and intelligent – and that was reflected in the grades they gave them.

But one of the interesting things is that this privilege isn’t always beneficial. There are times and places where being pretty isn’t going to work to your advantage. And these aren’t weird, idiosyncratic hypotheticals. These are real-world situations that we all face:

And as you might expect, good-looking people of both genders run into jealousy – one study found that if you are interviewed by someone of the same sex, they may be less likely to recruit you if they judge that you are more attractive than they are.

Here’s another one:

More worryingly, being beautiful or handsome could harm your medical care. We tend to link good looks to health, meaning that illnesses are often taken less seriously when they affect the good-looking. When treating people for pain, for instance, doctors tend to take less care over the more attractive people.

That one is particularly interesting, because the mechanism is identical to a lot of the benefits of beauty. People associate beauty with health, high-functioning, etc. Usually this is good. When you’re beautiful and in pain, however, this exact same mechanism turns against you.

And another one:

And the bubble of beauty can be a somewhat lonely place. One study in 1975, for instance, found that people tend to move further away from a beautiful woman on the pathway – perhaps as a mark of respect, but still making interaction more distant. “Attractiveness can convey more power over visible space – but that in turn can make others feel they can’t approach that person,” says Frevert. Interestingly, the online dating website OKCupid recently reported that people with the most flawlessly beautiful profile pictures are less likely to find dates than those with quirkier, less perfect pics – perhaps because the prospective dates are less intimidated.

This one is interesting, because it shows that the benefits of privilege can entail their own costs. Is it possible, for example, that there’s a connection between the privilege enjoyed by white males and the fact that they have the highest risk of suicide, and often at the peak of their socio-economic power?

888 - Suicide Rate by Gender

887 - Suicide Rate by Race

886 - Suicide Rates by Age

Obviously it’s not as simple as “loneliness of being privileged = high suicide rate.” That wouldn’t explain the very high rate of suicide among American Indians nor the fact that the age group almost as likely to commit suicide as the 45-64 (when white men are typically at the height of their social power) is 85+ (when white men are generally frail and socially vulnerable). But that’s kind of my point: privilege isn’t that simple It’s not just a matter of “this attribute makes your life easier,” whether the attribute is being white or being beautiful.

This also isn’t some kind of appeal to sympathy. As I said at the outset: I hardly doubt that anyone is going to suddenly feel bad for natural born beauties. So this can hardly be construed as an argument that really it’s the white male who has it hardest of all. That’s not my point. My point is simply that privilege–even when we’re talking about identity-based privilege–is more complex and more interesting than the dominant rhetoric allows.

Is There a Difference Between Red State/Blue State Families?

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The outcomes of “red states” and “blue states” are often used to demonstrate the superiority/inferiority of whichever political ideology. But the following report on state-by-state family structures in The New York Times demonstrates the importance of proper analysis:

In the blue-state model, Americans get more education and earn higher income — and more educated, higher-earning people tend to marry and stay married. In Minnesota, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least 51 percent of teenagers are being raised by both biological parents, among the highest rates in the nation. (That figure excludes families in which the two parents are together without being married; such arrangements are still rare — and less likely to last than marriages.)

The lowest rates of two-parent families tend to be in states that don’t fit either model: red states with the lowest levels of education or blue states with only average levels of education.

The entire article is worth reading and is full of useful information and links on family structure and child outcomes. Check it out.

A Great Comic About Privilege

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I’ve got serious misgivings with the way “privilege” is often used in political discourse these days, where the assumption is always that it’s racial, gender, or other forms of privilege that matter most. It’s not in any way that I deny that these forms of privilege exist, but the discussion is too simplistic and too myopic. Privilege is not absolute. It’s contextual. And race and gender and sexuality and other identity-based forms of privilege aren’t the only forms that exist. They aren’t even the most important. More important? The privilege of coming from a stable, two-parent, biological family, for one, and the privilege of a low ACE-score for another.

So, although most of the folks who share this comic (and possibly the author, too) would probably disagree vehemently with me over the topic, I share it because it’s actually a very, very good example of how privilege really works:

This is just the first few panels. Click the image to go to the site and read the entire thing. It's worth it.
This is just the first few panels. Click the image to go to the site and read the entire thing. It’s worth it.

What’s really good about the comic is that it actually illustrates specific examples of privilege and, in this case, the privilege of class. The two children both have strong families, are both white, and gender doesn’t focus prominently in the storyline. Instead, it’s all about who can afford to study while in college vs. who has to shoehorn studies and menial work into the same schedule.[ref]Been there, done that.[/ref] It’s also about who has family connections that can smooth the transition into a competitive job environment, and who has to figure things out on their own.

Class is a better framework for discussing privilege than race or gender (although race-based and gender-based privilege do exist) because it gets closer to the heart of the matter: power. The trouble is that Americans don’t really like class. We’re not sure what it means and we kind of like to pretend it doesn’t exist. No one is more keen to pretend that class is not an issue then the upper-class, of course. This is one reason for the fascinating relationship of brand prominence to price.

Today, anyone can own a purse, a watch, or a pair of shoes, but specific brands of purses, watches, and shoes are a distinguishing feature for certain classes of consumers. A woman who sports a Gucci “new britt” hobo bag ($695) signals something much different about her social standing than a woman carrying a Coach “ali signature” hobo ($268). The brand, displayed prominently on both, says it all. Coach, known for introducing “accessible luxury” to the masses, does not compare in most people’s minds in price and prestige with Italian fashion house Gucci. But what inferences are made regarding a woman seen carrying a Bottega Veneta hobo bag ($2,450)? Bottega Veneta’s explicit “no logo” strategy (bags have the brand badge on the inside) makes the purse unrecognizable to the casual observer and identifiable only to those “in the know.”

One function of this kind of invisible prestige (although not the only consideration) is that it allows the most privileged to avoid attracting attention from those who are less privileged. Only their fellow elites can recognize their subtle status cues. This is also the reason that identity-based privilege is so appealing to middle- and upper-class Americans: it obscures more privilege than it reveals by quietly taking class off the table. Identity-based privilege is loud and boisterous, but it poses a negligible threat to existing socio-economic power structures. It’s about as revolutionary as a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Asset Forfeiture Looks a Lot Like Theft

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893 - Asset Forefeiture

This article describes how police decided that $16,000 in cash being carried by an individual looked suspicious… so they took it.

Joseph Rivers, a 22-year-old Michigan resident, was on his way to Los Angeles in April to fulfill his dream of becoming a music video producer, according to Rivers and his lawyer, when federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) boarded his Amtrak train during a stop in Albuquerque.

DEA agents approached Rivers, the only black passenger in the train car, and asked to search his bag. Inside the bag, agents found $16,000 in cash—money Rivers said he had saved up and received from family members to pursue his music video aspirations.

The DEA decided that carrying a bunch of cash is suspicious, so they took it away. Here’s what’s really troubling about this practice, called “asset forfeiture”:

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police and federal agents can seize property on the mere suspicion that it is connected to criminal activity. The property owner does not even have to be charged with a crime, since asset forfeiture is technically an action against the property itself.

There’s even a great quote the head of the DEA’s Albuquerque office: “We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty.” Nice.

This practice is pretty lucrative for law enforcement organizations, and money for all that fancy military-style gear has to come from somewhere, right?

The Washington Post reported in an investigative series last year that federal, state, and local law enforcement agents have seized $2.5 billion in cash since 2001 from nearly 62,000 people.

It gets really hard for me to read a story like this and understand exactly how this isn’t theft.

New Study: Inequality and Innovation Trade-Off

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Economist Stan Veuger has an article in U.S. News on the costs of redistribution. “Traditionally more common,” he writes, “but recently under sustained assault from the left, is the view that there are tough trade-offs to be made, and that while there may be a role for redistribution, it comes at a cost: It reduces innovation and growth. A new research paper…provides new theoretical and empirical support for this view.” He explains the theory:

The capitalists receive income from the firms they own that derives from their proprietary cutting-edge technology if they recently innovated or from generally available technology if it’s been a while since they or their parents did. The workers either receive wages or become capitalists themselves by innovating and replacing the incumbents. Mark-ups on products and services based on cutting-edge technology are higher than from generally available technology, so the more innovation there is, the more income goes to the capitalists. Of course, the more productive research and development there is, the more often new entrepreneurs join the capitalist class, and the higher social mobility is – unless barriers to entry keep entrepreneurs out. And if research and development is more productive, the economy grows faster, ultimately benefiting workers as well.

Now, what does the evidence show:

To measure innovation, they look at patents granted per capita, between 1975 and 2010, in all 50 states and D.C. When they relate that measure to year-by-year measures of the income share earned by the top 1 percent, they find what their model predicts: More innovative states are also more unequal. And that’s not just because the wealthy few file more patent applications. They exploit variation in innovation driven by whether states have members of Congress on Appropriations Committees and by innovation in other states that they interact with a lot to show that such quasi-experimental variation in innovativeness, not driven by the mere presence of wealth, also actually causes inequality. But only when we measure equality as the share of income that goes to the 1 percent – broader measures of inequality are not much affected; those appear to be the product solely of some of the other trends I mentioned before, like skill-biased technological change.

However, the trade-off is more social mobility:

Remember the social mobility stuff? Well that shows up in the data as well. Areas that innovate a lot show precisely the kind of Schumpeterian dynamics that make income inequality a lot more palatable to most observers who are not of the bitterly envious variety: There may be big gaps between rich and poor, but the poor today still have a reasonable shot at becoming rich tomorrow. And do you know what areas get a lot less of both innovation and mobility? Places with tons of lobbying activity, where the incumbents keep the innovators out. All in all this research suggests that some 20 percent of the increase in the share of income going to the top 1 percent since the mid-70s was caused by innovation alone. That may not sound like that much – but of course, we can’t just eliminate only the inequality we don’t like and keep the inequality that incentivized people to innovate.

This seems to fit with the Thomas Sowell quote above: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. This new study also fits with past research on cut-throat US capitalism vs. cuddly Nordic capitalism, top earners and skill-biased technological change, and Schumpeterian profits.

Do You Own Your Stuff?

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John Deere 8760 farm tractor with a folded farm tractor disc attached driving down a country road in Indiana.
John Deere 8760 farm tractor with a folded farm tractor disc attached driving down a country road in Indiana.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about a technology issue, but a recent article from Wired deserves widespread attention: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership. If you didn’t know that John Deere wasn’t out to destroy the concept of ownership, you’re not alone. But it’s actually not a very new argument. The idea is that you may be able to own physical property, but you can only license software. The trouble, of course, is that an awful lot of physical property does you absolutely no good without the software to run it, and so if you don’t own the software you don’t really own the physical property either. What good is a tractor you can’t turn on? Or a car that won’t drive? There’s a reason that the verb for utterly breaking a piece of hardware by destroying the software is “bricked” as in “to render an electrical gadget as useful as a brick.”

I encourage you to read the article to learn more: it’s mostly about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and whether or not property owners will be guaranteed the right to modify, hack, repair, tinker, and customize their own devices. I’m also curious to hear from folks–especially law-folks–who might know a little bit more about this issue than I do. It’s not like ownership is actually always a trivial concept, and figuring out how to split the rights of consumers to their own property vs. the rights of companies to control their software is probably not going to be a no-brainer in all cases.

Still, the lengths to which John Deere, General Motors, and other corporations seem willing to go to seem like some weird hybrid of amusing and sinister.

Forthcoming ‘Markets Without Limits’: An Excerpt

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Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently made headlines when he stated in an interview, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” Many have criticized the comment, while others have labeled it “one of the most substantive of the campaign so far.” Over at Bleeding-Heart Libertarians, philosopher Jason Brennan of Georgetown University responded to Sanders with an excerpt from the forthcoming book Markets Without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests. I’m quite excited for this volume and those interested in economics and the morality of markets should be too. Here is a snippet:

Philosophers advocate that we do what economists say doesn’t work and avoid doing what economists say does work. On this point, [philosopher] Bas van der Vossen rebukes his colleagues:

As a profession, we are in an odd but unfortunate situation. Our best philosophers and theorists develop accounts of global justice that are disconnected from the best empirical insights about poverty and prosperity. Reading these theories, one might think that our best prospects for alleviating poverty around the world lie in policies of redistribution, foreign aid, reforms to the international system, new global institutions, and so on. And one might think that markets, property rights, and economic freedom are at best incidental, and more likely inimical, to the eradication of global poverty. Such ignorance, if not denial, of the empirical findings about development and growth is irresponsible.

We share van der Vossen’s concerns.

Mainstream development economics, in a nutshell, holds that the poverty is an institutional problem. More precisely, poverty is human being’s natural state. Poverty is normal and does not need to be explained, but wealth does. The main reason some nations are rich and others poor is not because some nations have better geography, better natural resources, or better genes. Rather, rich countries are rich because they have better institutions. Rich countries have institutions that incentivize growth and development. These institutions include strong private property rights, inclusive and honest governments, stable political regimes, a dependable and inclusive legal system characterized by the rule of law, open and competitive markets, and free international trade. Poor countries have institutions that fail to incentive growth and development, and often instead have institutions that encourage predation. These countries have weak recognition or active disregard of property rights, exclusive and dishonest governments, instable political regimes, undependable legal systems characterized by the capricious rule of men rather than the rule of law, and closed, rent seeking, crony capitalist markets, or few markets at all, and little international trade.

Check out the full excerpt and be sure to pre-order Brennan’s book. You can watch an interview with Brennan on his Why Not Capitalism? below:

The Great Gatsby Curve: A Brookings Conversation

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“Every so often,” announces the Brookings Institution, “an academic finding gets into the political bloodstream. A leading example is “The Great Gatsby Curve,” describing an inverse relationship between income inequality and intergenerational mobility. Born in 2011, the Curve has attracted plaudits and opprobrium in almost equal measure. Social Mobility Memos is taking a look at opinions from both sides of the argument.”

Thus far, there are posts by:

Check out the series.

Globalization Leads to Mass Human Flourishing

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That’s what Ronald Bailey argues in the June issue of Reason. What are his reasons? Globalization–which he defines as “the open exchange of goods”–produces:

  • Longer, Healthier Lives
  • Women’s Liberation
  • Less Child Labor
  • Faster Economic Growth
  • Higher Incomes
  • Less Poverty
  • More Trees
  • Peace
  • More Productive Workers
  • Better Job Prospects

Each section has a number of studies to bolster his claim. Check it out.

Feeding the World With GMOs

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Image result for gmos

Golden rice was possible only with genetic engineering. The crop was stalled for more than ten years by the working conditions and requirements demanded by regulations…For example, we lost more than two years for the permission to test golden rice in the field and more than four years in collecting data for a regulatory dossier that would satisfy any national biosafety authority. I therefore hold the regulation of genetic engineering responsible for the death and blindness of thousands of children and young mothers.

This comes from Ingo Potrykus’ rather famous article in a July 2010 issue of Nature and is a written slap in the face to anti-GMO activists and the politicians who embrace them. This opposition has been described as partisan, though the anti-science stances of various parties are much closer than we often assume. I was reminded of the above quote after reading an article in Newsweek discussing new biotechnology and its opposition:

In 2012, a new tool was invented that revolutionizes how scientists can examine—and manipulate—plant genetic processes. It’s called CRISPR-Cas9, and unlike its predecessors in the world of genetic modification, it is highly specific, allowing scientists to zero in on a single gene and turn it on or off, remove it or exchange it for a different gene. Early signs suggest this tool will be an F-16 jet fighter compared with the Stone Age spear of grafting, the traditional, painstaking means of breeding a new plant hybrid. Biologists and geneticists are confident it can help them build a second Green Revolution—if we’ll let them.

…The process can easily modify plant DNA without changing the plant’s essence—except to make it tastier, more nutritious, quicker to market, easier to ship, machine-pickable, less needy of water and/or able to flourish in a heat wave. And we can do it for big companies and small, the world at large and isolated communities…In the old days, relying on hit-or-miss natural processes to breed plants took many years. Norman Borlaug, father of the first Green Revolution—a hugely successful effort to improve food-crop productivity in poor countries that began in the 1940s and eventually doubled or even quadrupled what many plants could produce—needed almost two decades to create a better wheat variety. With CRISPR-Cas9, we can compress that development cycle to a few days or weeks.

And yet, the activists continue to protest:

  • “Mexico, where maize was first domesticated, must now import it to meet local demand because activists there will not allow genetically modified organism hybrids. Mexico’s maize growers get yields 38 percent lower than the world average and three times below the U.S., where 90 percent of the maize crop is an insect-resistant GMO hybrid. Mexico’s fields are beset by such crop ravishers as the corn earworm, black cutworm and fall armyworm, which cost the country up to half its crops and incite farmers to spray their land with thousands of tons of chemical insecticides.”
  • “The European Union has approved just one genetically modified crop, a type of maize used for animal feed. The reasons are political and bureaucratic: A majority of member countries must approve a biotech plant, and anti-GMO sentiment runs strong in places where phrases like naturel and natürliche are more about what’s been done for centuries than what it actually means for something to exist in or be caused by nature.”
  • “The notion of GMOs has spooked environmental groups such as Greenpeace, which has resisted GMOs with violent action, including destroying an experimental Golden Rice field last year in the Philippines. This despite the fact that Golden Rice is being offered to the world by a nonprofit, with no commercial stipulations, and is likely to save many lives.”
  • ““No GMO” is now being embraced by consumer brands; the ascendant “fast-casual” chain Chipotle posts just such a sign in its restaurants. It makes sense: If over two-thirds of Americans think GMOs are unhealthy, declaring yourself GMO-free is a lucrative proposition. Local governments are also weighing in. Vermont now demands that all GMO foods sold there be labeled as such. Two rural counties in Oregon have banned GMO crops within their borders.”

The article ends with a quote from Gengyun Zhang, head of life sciences for BGI (China’s giant state-sponsored genetic engineering center): “With today’s technology, I have no doubt that we can feed the world.” Considering that the number of scientists who think GMOs are safe is slightly higher than those who think climate change is mostly due to human activity, perhaps we should give science a chance and activists the cold shoulder.