Psyche, Science, and Society

Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail

Imagine, a politician who makes sense and spak ordinary language. It took a Harvard professor:

September 21st, 2011

Obama budget still a disaster

Jeffrey Sachs reminds us that even the “new, improved” Obama spouting tax-the-rich language to aid his reelection has a budget plan that is an absaolute disaster for the country and those of who live in it:

Grim Realities in the Obama Budget Plan

By Jeffrey Sachs

President Obama is defending a basic principle of budget fairness against the wretched selfishness of the Republican candidates. The Republican anti-tax position is so stark and greedy that Obama will win the political debate and probably the polls next year. He deserves our support for facing down the extreme right.

Yet we should not kid ourselves about the real direction of this country. Obama may be leaning against the right-wing juggernaut, but he is not changing its direction, only slightly blunting its force. Obama has already given in where it counts by agreeing with the Republicans in August to slash the core of the discretionary civilian budget (non-military spending other than the entitlements programs).

Readers can check this out for themselves by downloading two recent documents from the White House website. I must give advanced warning: they are turgid documents and hard to decipher, even for an expert in budget analysis. Their real meaning is hidden in the fine print, which is why I write about the documents here.

“The Mid-Session Review for Fiscal-Year 2012,” released on September 1, describes the state of the budget after the August debt deal, and on the eve of the new super-committee. Monday’s plan, “Living Within our Means and Investing in Our Future,” takes the story forward by making specific recommendations to the super-committee. Taken together they form the President’s fiscal blueprint, and most likely his re-election platform. If for some reason you’re not worried yet about America’s future, start worrying.

The essence of Obama’s plan comes to this. Obama would protect most but not all entitlements spending against the Republican axe, and would modestly trim military spending. On the tax side, he would raise tax collections as a share of GDP slightly, around 1 percent of GDP. Roughly half of that would come from repealing the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000, and the other half from eliminating various tax breaks, such as for the oil industry.

Both tax changes are good but modest. It is a testimony to Republican extremism that they virulently oppose even these modest measures. And sadly, even with these modest revenue-raising actions, Obama holds out the prospect of cuts in tax rates to offset these revenues.

Now here comes some basic arithmetic, taken from Table S-5 of the Mid-Session Review. (To his credit, Obama called on the Republicans to face some basic arithmetic, so my observations follow in the same vein). Obama’s tax policy would raise a projected 19.8% of GDP a decade from now (2021). He would spend around 3.5% of GDP on the military (compared with 5.6% this year). He would spend 14.4% of GDP on mandatory entitlements programs, mainly Social Security (5.3%) plus Medicare (3.5%) plus Medicaid (2.4%). Interest payments will eat up another 3.4% of GDP.

Note that the military plus entitlements plus interest account for more than the total tax payments! We would still have a budget deficit even before getting to the parts of the budget that help America to be productive, educated, energy secure, and environmentally safe. To be specific, once we account for the revenues needed to pay for mandatory programs, the military, and interest, there are no revenues left over to pay for the rest: highways, long-distance transmission lines, dams, levees, inland waterways, water and waste treatment facilities, national parks, climate safety, renewable energy, clean air and water, conservation, pre-school, student loans, federal courts, prisons, homeland security, international diplomacy, hazard preparedness, disaster response, biomedical research, energy research, agricultural research, public administration, job training, job matching, data collection, space science, computer science, and dozens more areas of federal responsibility.

It’s not that Obama plans to close these down entirely. Rather, his plan would bleed them dry gradually. Without adequate budget revenues, the plan proposes to pay for these programs through deficit financing. To shrink the budget deficit, Obama must therefore shrink the “discretionary” spending. Specifically, the deficit is set at 2.2% of GDP in 2021, with domestic discretionary spending set at 1.8 percent of GDP. This compares with non-security discretionary spending equal to 3.4% of GDP today.

Here’s how I look at this. America today is suffering today from a shortfall of federal efforts on renewable energy, job training, pre-school, higher education, climate change mitigation and adaptation, epidemic disease control nationally and globally, highways, fast rail, water and sewerage systems, and much more. We feel the burden of under-investments in countless ways: poorly trained youth; an epic scale of highway congestion in many places; unprecedented flooding and droughts; and declining global competitiveness.

Instead of addressing these challenges, the Obama plan would cut government roughly in half from today’s level! Obama’s plan calls for 20% of GDP in revenues in 2021. This is simply too low for a decent, productive, and fair America. Taking into account our real needs, revenues as of 2021 should be around 24% of GDP, opening the space for real investments in America’s future.

That level of revenues would still leave the U.S. with one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the high-income world. The higher taxes could be collected heavily from the rich and the corporate sector, still leaving them with ample incomes and profits. Obama’s plan, in short, does not solve problems. It outflanks the Republicans.

Don’t get me wrong. Outflanking the Republicans is vital work, and merits our full backing. George Bush almost brought us to catastrophe, and there should be little doubt that Rick Perry would finish the job.

Still, we need to do better than merely to survive. Those of us who believe that the federal government has a vital role to play in ensuring a productive, fair, and sustainable society need to press ahead beyond Obama’s plan. Let’s find our voice to press for much more. To the cynics today who say that can’t be done, I urge you to revisit the history of Progressivism, when social activists a century ago changed the course of America in the face of similarly grievous ills and corrupted politics. Our shared contribution today should be a new progressivism, to put core values of decency and responsibility back into the American political system.

Jeffrey Sachs is author of “The Price of Civilization” due out October 4.

 

September 21st, 2011

The Maker or the Tool

Review of The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant by Jean Alonso. Leap Year Press, 2011. Available at Amazon here.

Did you ever demand any answers?
The who, the what or the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy?
Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight,
never make a fight, never make a fight?

[From Ballad of Accounting, words and music by Ewan MacColl]

Suddenly jobs are on the political agenda. Politicians from the President on down state that creating jobs for American workers is their top priority. Often any jobs, as with the low-wage jobs that Texas Governor Rick Perry brags he “created.” Sometimes they want to create “good paying” jobs. But in this discourse having a job is everything, because it allows one to pay the bills and avoid poverty.

Those who worked with Jean Alonso making missiles in a Massachusetts defense plant – referred to as American Missile and Communications Corporation but sounding suspiciously like Massachusetts-based Raytheon – knew how important it was to have a job in this society. But they also recognized that ”good jobs” should mean far more than good-paying ones. And they knew, from their own bitter experience, that many jobs can be toxic, destroying the mind and soul, and sometimes the body as well, of those who work them.

Alonso’s book The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant begins as the missiles fly at the start of the first Gulf War. The fragile community in the plant is strained by tensions between the patriotic workers and Alonso with her antiwar views and activities. Alonso copes with her own anguish by conducting an informal survey of how her coworkers feel about their work. She learns that these coworkers are filled with a profound sense of hopelessness and despair:

“I feel like a zero.”

“Inferior.”

“Empty.”

“Helpless.”

“I’m very depressed and anxious.”

“I’m so unhappy here I get aches and pains from it.”

“Apathetic. I can’t do anything at home anymore but watch TV.”

“I was a musician, you know, so I still need to write everyday – if you don’t you have no soul. But I go home and I’m too tired.”

“I feel like there’s something crushed inside – I feel really defeated. It’s like giving up on your whole self in order to make a living – you can’t figure a way out.” (pp. 10-11).

These responses, expressing feelings that had never been spoken among these workers, start Alonso and a small group of coworkers on a journey to make sense of what was happening to them at work and why. Through monthly meetings buttressed by Alonso’s library research, they explore the deadening effects of repetitive work accompanied by social powerlessness in the workplace. They try to understand Alonso’s realization that “something in this work is changing us, as if we were living by Love Canal” (p. 37).

Over the next couple of years this group of defense plant workers examine their dashed hopes and dreams as well as an extensive body of social science literature, in an attempt to figure out just how the work was changing them. They confessed to each other that their ability to reason had diminished after years in the plant. The lack of mental stimulation was reducing their very intelligence. And, indeed, as Alonso learned from her reading, a German researcher had found that IQ declines following years of unskilled labor. This cognitive decline didn’t seem so surprising to the workers when one of them recalled being told by a supervisor, “You don’t get paid to think.” These workers discovered through their own experience that mindless work induces mindlessness.

Alonso later realized that the experience of the American Missile workers wouldn’t have seemed strange to Adam Smith, who in 1776 wrote of the mind-destroying effects of unskilled work as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the then new industrial system:

The understanding of the greater part of men is necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man’s whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations and he naturally loses, therefore, the habit [of solving problems] and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become… But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall (p. 180).

In addition to cognitive problems, the plant workers confronted elevated depression, anxiety, and apathy. Alonso’s research convinced her that these symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of what psychologist Judith Herman called “complex chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome” or CCPTSD. She quotes Herman as saying that those suffering from CCPTSD “have a history of subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period of time” (p. 125).

The shop floor environment that Alonso and her fellow workers experienced daily was, indeed, totalitarian. Every motion was monitored. Bathroom breaks were strictly regulated.  Supervisors yelled at workers as if they were disobedient children. Conversations were monitored and often forbidden. Escape, while not impossible, became ever more difficult as years in the plant went by and economic chains bound the workers.

In her efforts to better understand the totalitarian aspects of her work environment, Alonso studied military culture and found many similarities to the culture at American Missile. The similarities were not accidental. She realized that the company deliberately sought out supervisors with military backgrounds. The fact that the company was part of the military-industrial complex, producing missiles for US wars, probably made military culture especially desirable to management.

At the time that Alonso writes about, relations between workers in the plant were especially stressed as many of the workers sought a sense of meaning and community through patriotic identification with the company’s missile-producing mission and with the war in progress and became less tolerant of those questioning the war. Pressure to not rock the boat increased as demand for the missiles rose.

Like many manufacturing companies, American Missile had a union. Unfortunately, this was as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. Union officials refused to pursue cases of sexual abuse, wouldn’t recognize the women’s committee founded by Alonso and others, and systematically harassed militants. Thus, much of the energy to improve the workplace was channeled into often futile attempts at union reform.

Throughout The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant Alonso weaves her personal account of nearly two decades in the factory with an account of the research into the effects of the work environment on workers. The result is one of the most thought provoking books you will find to read this year. As the politicians talk endlessly about “jobs” while providing few, Alonso reminds us that a good society will provide not just jobs, or even well-paying jobs, but jobs that enhance the spirit and development of those who work them.

Surely today, 235 years after Adam Smith described the mind-destroying nature of unskilled work, an “improved and civilized society,” – as Smith described the new industrial capitalism – should be one that proves him wrong. Such a society would be one in which all who work find that their jobs enhance their thinking, spirit, and sense of humanity. Such a society would be one in which workers are not merely the tools of the already wealthy and powerful, but makers of a more decent world for themselves, their fellow workers, and the rest of society. While the politicians beholden to the powerful are not likely to be concerned with this goal, surely the vast majority of us ought to be.

What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool?
Did the place where you were living
Enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men,
all your fellow men, all your fellow men?

[From Ballad of Accounting, words and music by Ewan MacColl]

September 21st, 2011