Corruption in interior

What is the institutional culture that permits the senior management of a federal agency to engage in an extended practice of conflict of interest, exchange of gifts, drugs, and sex, and corrupt collusion with energy companies leading to the loss of millions of dollars of revenue for the Federal budget? These allegations are contained in a series of reports issued today by the inspector general of the Department of Interior, concerning the practices of the Minerals Management Service, the division of the Department of Interior responsible for collecting billions of dollars in royalties from energy companies (New York Times article, Washington Post article).

What these investigative findings look like from the outside is fairly simple: officials who are in positions to convey favorable treatment to major businesses, who profit from this position in the most venal way imaginable. It looks quite a bit like a very ordinary kind of big-city corruption -- except that it is occurring within a major Federal agency, under the supervision of the President of the United States.

So it's a tough question: what explains this behavior? Is it greed? Is it contempt for the fiduciary obligations that officials in these roles have to the public? Is it a deep blindness to the meaning of the conduct?

And what explains the blindness of higher-level supervisors to these apparently widespread practices? Where is the accountability that our system of civil administration must depend upon? Where was the Secretary of the Interior during this period of abuse? Where were the effective management structures that could give managers at each level the confidence he/she needed that behavior within his/her scope was honest and mission-driven?

And while we're asking tough questions, let's ask another: why is it that the Department of Justice has decided not to pursue charges against the most senior officials engaged in these practices? Are these officials above the law? Are the standards governing official misconduct more exacting in Detroit than in Washington? Does the Department of Justice intend to give the impression that the improper exercise of the powers of office is excusable, if the party affiliation of the officials in question is aligned with the executive branch?

How much self-dealing and hoodwinking of the public will American voters tolerate before they insist on a change of party and executive behavior?

Sustainability and biofuel farming

James Gustave Speth has written a really important book on sustainability within a modern society. The book is called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, and it's an important contribution. One of the most fundamental conclusions that Speth arrives at is the idea that sustainability will require a truly profound transformation of how we think about a "good life," and a rethinking of the kinds of material circumstances we might aspire to in order to create a world system that is genuinely sustainable.

One way we might try to pursue this line of thought is to consider whether gardens and local biofuel production might provide a basis for more sustainable human activity. Could we use more of our own time and labor to create some of the material necessities of our lives, and do so in a way that imposes a smaller footprint on the world's energy and resource system?

David Blume was a guest on NPR's Science Friday on August 15. Blume is the author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century. Blume is an advocate for the idea that alcohol can be a large and ecologically positive component of our modern energy economy (website). And he believes that it is possible to imagine a more decentralized energy economy for the United States in which local producers and distillers satisfy a large percentage of the energy needs of a region.

Blume made an observation that I found intriguing: that the common wetland plant, the cattail, can be a fuel source for producing ethanol. (Here's a news story on Blume's comments about cattails on an earlier occasion.) Corn produces about 250-300 gallons of ethanol per acre, and it is estimated that cattails would produce something less than this. (Blume himself estimates that the yield of cattail ethanol production would be "many, many times" that of corn, and says that 7,000 gallons per acre is feasible. This seems unsupportable, given the potential yield of other biofuel crops.) But cattails also have ecological advantages: they soak up excess nutrients (e.g. agricultural fertilizer runoff or sewage waste plant effluent), and they require little cultivation. Here are a few news stories (story, story) with some interesting background.

So here's the question: what would be involved in creating a community that is energy self-sufficient based on ethanol production? Could households grow their own fuels? What would the economics of a cooperative community-based distillery look like? How much land, labor, and money would be required for the household?

It should be noted that there is serious disagreement about the most basic features of the commercial ethanol economy: does ethanol production lead to a net gain in energy, or do the inputs into the cultivation and distilling processes exceed the energy content of the resulting volume of alcohol? Here's a discussion at FuturePundit and a summary of the findings of a national expert, David Pimental from Cornell University. Here are the central conclusions of a recent study by Pimentel and Tad Patzek at UC-Berkeley:

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study. "There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable."

But still, let's think it through a bit. The scenario I'm imagining is labor-intensive and local, so the costs of energy associated with mechanization and transportation are reduced or eliminated. Could we imagine a local energy economy based on crops and distillation that could be fitted into an otherwise acceptable lifestyle? (The analysis will begin to sound like Piero Sraffa's exercise, Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory.)

A family's energy budget might look something like this, estimated in gallons of ethanol:

• transportation 800 gallons (10,000 miles)
• cooking 300 gallons (365 days)
• heating 1000 gallons (180 heating days)
• illumination 100 gallons (365 days)
• refrigeration 200 gallons

This adds up to 2,400 gallons of ethanol required for a year's energy use. But we aren't finished yet, because cultivation and distillation also have an energy cost, and this cost is a function of the volume of alcohol required. Let's take a more optimistic estimate than that provided by Pimental above, and assume that the energy cost of distillation is 30%. (We're working with a coop, after all!) To produce a gallon of ethanol we have to expend .3 gallons in the distillation process. And let's assume that cultivation is done by hand without mechanization, but that the crop needs to be transported to the distillation facility at a 10% cost. (That is, I assume that the net transportation cost of transporting the thousands of pounds of feed crop to the processor is 10% of the net alcohol product of the crop.) These estimates imply that the household requires 4,000 gallons of alcohol.

Now assume that the alcohol yield of an acre of cattails is 250 gallons; this implies a fuel farm size of 16 acres. (It would be nice to extend the exercise to include a food garden as well; this is left for the reader! Here's an interesting United Nations article from the 1980s on the economics of family gardening that can help get the analysis started.)

Now how many hours of labor time need to be devoted to cultivating and harvesting this crop? Evidently cattails don't require much by way of fertilizers, irrigation, and pest control. But I'm sure there is some level of maintenance needed, and 16 acres is a large area. In fact, it represents a rectangular plot that is 200 feet by 3,500 feet -- more than half a mile long. So let's assume that basic maintenance of the cattail crop requires 2 hours a day of adult labor. The large investment of labor, however, occurs at the harvest. About 14,000 pounds of cattails will be harvested per acre, or 224,000 pounds for the farm over the course of the harvest. If we assume that an adult can harvest 200 pounds per hour, this represents 1,120 hours of harvest work. Let's assume that harvesting can be spread out over a couple of four-week periods or 56 days; this implies 20 hours of adult labor per day during the harvest season. So it would take 10 hours a day, 7 days a week during the eight weeks of harvest season for two adults to harvest this volume of cattails. Two months of very hard work devoted to harvesting will eventually produce enough ethanol to support the household's chief energy needs.

Now what about the economics of the cooperative's distillery? If we assume a cooperative involving 100 households of the scale just discussed, the distillery needs to process 22,400,000 pounds of material in order to produce 400,000 gallons of ethanol. The households will be farming an area of 1,600 acres of cattails -- about three square miles. And the system will be supporting the energy needs of about 500 people. If we keep our assumption of a 30% ratio of input-to-output, this process will consume 120,000 gallons of ethanol. The coop members will need to fund the purchase and maintenance of the still and the labor costs associated with operation of the still. Perhaps it's a labor coop too? In this case, each household will need to devote several hours a week to work in the distillery. And we might imagine that the coop would require a "tax" of some small percentage of the alcohol produced to cover maintenance and operating expenses. Here's a research article from AGRIS that examines the costs of a small distillery of roughly this size. The conclusion is somewhat discouraging: "The analysis indicates that the distillery would not be profitable at current prices for corn and ethanol." In other words, the cost of inputs and operation of the distillery exceed the value of the alcohol produced, according to this analysis. But this conclusion isn't quite relevant to our scenario, because the raw materials are not purchased through the market and the product is not sold on the market. Nonetheless, the finding implies that there's a shortfall somewhere; and it may well be that it is the unpaid labor of the fuel farmers that is where the shortfall occurs.

So here's the upshot of this back-of-the-envelope calculation: it would be a major commitment of land and labor for a household or a village community to achieve energy self-sufficiency through cooperative-based ethanol distillation. And I've made an assumption I can't justify: that the energy input to the distillation process is 30% of the energy content of the resulting quantity of ethanol. If that ratio is 60% instead of 30%, then the land and labor requirements for each household are greatly increased; and if the ratio approaches or exceeds 100%, then the whole idea falls apart. But even on these assumptions, the life style associated with this model sounds a lot closer to that of a peasant village in medieval France or traditional China than to that of a modern US citizen. It involves hard physical labor during several months of the year and a moderate level of labor effort during the remainder of the year. And if we imagine that the scenario is extended by incorporating a substantial amount of food gardening for family consumption, then the balance of necessary labor to free labor tips even further in the direction of the peasant economy.

Causes of the food crisis

Today's New York Times has a good story on some of the background of the current food crisis (story). The basic point is fundamental: donor nations and international development institutions have substantially disinvested in the great agricultural research institutes that were founded in the sixties and seventies to provide a scientific basis for increasing food security. The story highlights the significant decline of institutions like the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines -- with disastrous consequences for the continual challenge of increasing agricultural productivity and -- usually -- rural incomes. (Click on the graphic to see a great set of graphs documenting investment, productivity, and rice stockpiles.)

There is a direct relationship between investment, scientific activity, and improvement in agricultural techniques, seed varieties, and new forms of pest control. If the world makes those investments, we have a good reason for confidence in the ability of the planet to keep food supply ahead of food demand. But if funding agencies and international institutions falter in their attention to the continuing struggle for agricultural progress -- as they most certainly seem to have done -- then food security will indeed be a center-stage issue for the coming decades.

Many commentators have also emphasized another crucial point: that hunger and poverty are directly connected. We've seen the impact that rising rice prices have on poor people in dozens of countries in the developing world -- essentially pushing poor people into ultra-poor crisis. But there is also a virtuous circle that economic development policy makers need to be striving for: increasing the incomes of the poor, leading to greater purchasing power, leading to rising demand for locally and nationally produced food, leading to increased incomes for rural poor people. Seen from this perspective, agricultural development has to be a top priority within economic development policy thinking.

The struggle for racial justice

The struggle for racial justice in America was in its sharpest form in the 1960s, from the Freedom Marches in the South in the early sixties to the militant and determined struggles in the North in the later sixties. Organizers, militants, activists, leaders, and volunteers gave their best energies, brains, and courage to this extended effort to change American society. And when you think about it, this decentralized movement was remarkably successful in terms of its reach, the ability of various civil rights and activist organizations to motivate followers, and some of the concrete structural changes that were achieved. (It goes without saying that we have a very long way to go in pursuit of racial justice today, in 2008.)

One way of getting a better understanding of the Civil Rights movement is to read some of the very good historical and sociological scholarship that has been done on the period -- for example, Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 or Doug McAdam's Freedom Summer. But another way is to talk with people who lived through the struggle -- people who went "went South", people who worked as organizers and activists in Chicago or Detroit, people who got involved in some of the militant organizations such as the Black Panthers. And often what you gain from conversations like this is somewhat different from what comes across in the organized historical scholarship. It's more intense, for one thing -- just as it must have been in the 1960s to talk with veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade about their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. But it also gives you the participant's perspective on things rather than the historian's view. And it focuses often on the process of mobilization and consciousness-raising, rather than the eventual outcome.

I've done two recent interviews with scholars whose own experiences of the Civil Rights movement are genuinely absorbing. One is Ahmad Rahman, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the author of The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora. Rahman is an accomplished historian and a rising authority in African and African-American history. He was also an activist and member of the Black Panther Party in Detroit in the 1960s. The second interview is with Dr. Gloria House, a professor of humanities and African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. House is a well-respected poet and author, and has played an important role in the continuing prominence of Broadside Press. She edited a great volume celebrating the press; A Different Image: The Legacy of Broadside Press: An Anthology. Her own experience of the Civil Rights movement began at UC-Berkeley, followed by time in Alabama and Detroit. Her experiences with SNCC and the struggles in the South are very intense, and she finds the voice to express what she experienced powerfully. She has spent decades as a scholar-activist in Detroit.

Both interviews are absorbing and eye-opening. One point that comes out of both Rahman's and House's recollections is the importance of the struggles for African national liberation in the development of consciousness within the African-American movements -- and the "echo" of American developments in African liberation thinking. There is a very clear demonstration of the political-intellectual work that went into framing an understanding of American society and liberation that was suited to the African-American experience. But there are dozens of other important insights -- the ways in which the struggle for Black Consciousness developed, the importance of youth engagement in the struggle, and the power of poetry during those decades. Rahman brings some of the issues forward to the present day, by comparing the struggles of French immigrant people against police brutality with the struggles of the African-American community in the earlier decades. And House shares some of her thinking about where the quest for racial justice may be going today -- emphasizing community-based activism. She also shares several of her poems about the early days of the struggle at the end of the interview.

It is a constant struggle for all of us to go beyond clichés and cartoons in our understanding of our society and our history. And a very powerful way of doing that is to listen to the voices of people whose experiences are so directly connected to the major fault lines and turning points in our history.

The video interviews with Rahman and House are posted on YouTube, and audio versions are posted as well; Rahman, House part 1, House part 2. The audio interviews are also included in the UnderstandingSociety podcast, available through iTunes.

Visit also this relevant posting on Jim Johnson's blog, with information about the recent publication of Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.

Higher education and social mobility

There is an appalling level of inequality in American society; and even more troubling, the multiple dimensions of inequality seem to reinforce each other, with the result that disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged across multiple generations. We can ask two different kinds of sociological questions about these facts: What factors cause the reproduction of disadvantage over multiple generations? And what policy interventions have some effect on enhancing upward social mobility within disadvantaged groups? How can we change this cycle of disadvantage?

Several earlier postings have addressed some aspects of the causal question (post, post). Here I'd like to consider the policy question -- and the question of how we can use empirical evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of large policy initiatives on social outcomes such as mobility.

One social policy in particular seems to have a lot of antecedent plausibility: a policy aimed at increasing the accessibility of higher education to the disadvantaged group. The theory is that individuals within the group will benefit from higher education by enhancing their skills and knowledge; this will give them new economic opportunities and access to higher-wage jobs; the individuals will do better economically, and their children will begin life with more economic support and a set of values that encourage education. So access to higher education ought to prove to be a virtuous circle or a positive feedback loop, leading to substantial social mobility in currently disadvantaged groups.

It is a plausible theory; but are there empirical methods through which we can evaluate whether it actually works this way?

Paul Attewell and David Lavin undertake to do exactly that in Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?, published in 2007. Their research consists of a survey study of a cohort of poor women who were admitted to the City University of New York between 1970 and 1972 under an open-admissions policy. Thirty years later Attewell and Lavin surveyed a sample of the women in this group (about 2,000 women), gathering data about their eventual educational attainment, their income, and the educational successes of their children. Analysis of their data permitted them to demonstrate that attenders were likely to enjoy higher income than non-attenders and to have children who valued education at levels that were higher than the children of non-attenders.

The benefits of higher education in increasing personal income were significant; they find that in the population surveyed in 2000, the high school graduate earned $30,000, women with some college earned $35,000, women with the associate's degree earned $40,783, women with the bachelor's degree earned $42,063, and women with a postgraduate degree earned $54,545. In other words, there was a fairly regular progression in income associated with each further step in the higher education credential achieved. And they found -- contrary to conservative critics of open-access programs in higher education -- that these women demonstrated eventual completion rates that were substantially higher than 4-6 year graduation rates would indicate -- over 70% earned some kind of degree (table 2.2). "Our long-range perspective shows that disadvantaged women ultimately complete college degrees in far greater numbers than scholars realize" (4).

So access to higher education works, according to the evidence uncovered in this study: increasing access to post-secondary education is the causal factor, and improved economic and educational outcomes are the effect.

This is an important empirical study that sets out some of the facts that pertain to poverty and higher education. The study provides empirical confirmation for the idea that affordable and accessible mass education works: when programs are available that permit poor people to gain access to higher education, their future earnings and the future educational success of their children are both enhanced. It's a logical conclusion -- but one that has been challenged by conservative critics such as Bill Bennett. And given the increasing financial stress that public universities are currently experiencing due to declining state support for higher education, it is very important for policy makers to have a clear understanding of the return that is likely on the investment in affordable access to higher education.

Consumption and environmental collapse

Today the Dalai Lama presented a lecture on global environmental sustainability at the University of Michigan. One of his central points had to do with personal consumption and personal happiness: the fact that the planet simply cannot sustain the level of material consumption characteristic of affluent countries, in support of the world's population of over 6.5 billion people. He expressed his hope that we will come to think differently about happiness, fulfillment, and material consumption.

This message made me think of the very powerful analysis that is conveyed in an important recent book by James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth has been an environmental scientist and policy expert for decades -- he is currently the dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies -- and he has an understanding of the crisis that our global society faces that is just as powerful and fact-based as any I have read.

Speth opens his argument with a set of sixteen graphs over a time scale of 1750-2000. And they all have roughly the same shape: beginning at moderate levels in 1750, each of the variables show exponential growth that begins to accelerate in roughly 1900-1950. The variables? Population, total real GDP, foreign direct investment, damming of rivers, water use, fertilizer consumption, paper consumption, motor vehicles, CO2 consumption, ozone depletion, average surface temperature, great floods, ocean ecosystems, coastal biogeochemistry, loss of rain forest, global biodiversity. These graphs tell a powerful story in the aggregate: these are trends that cannot be sustained.

Or consider the second paragraph of the book:

Half of the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us. (1-2)

This is the "edge of the world" to which the title refers.

Speth correctly notes that these environmental crisis lines all derive from the economic realities of accelerating economic growth since 1900. Economic activity consumes resources, produces waste products, and clears land for development. Moreover, he observes that the economies that we have created in the modern world place growth at the value center: the central goal of economic activity is to accumulate and grow. And yet he notes as well that often this growth is counter-productive; for example, he quotes the UNDP Human Development Report 1996 and its findings of jobless growth, ruthless growth, voiceless growth, rootless growth, and futureless growth. And he reviews some of the survey data about "personal happiness" that seems to support the point as well: past a certain threshold point, greater income doesn't bring greater happiness.

So if there is a bridge at the edge of the world -- what is it made of? What kind of transformation of the world's activity can slow and eventually reverse these catastrophic environmental trends?

Speth provides a hard but achievable prescription, and it is very much like that expressed by the Dalai Lama today in Ann Arbor: we must re-evaluate the meaning of life, we must change the way we think about material consumption, we must find happiness in activities that are not resource intensive, and we must tame our growth engines in the economic structures in which we live. Nothing less than a fundamental change in our personal philosophies and our economic structures will save the planet's welfare -- from rain forest to Great Lakes to fisheries to the air we breath and the water we drink.

Can we do it? It seems most unlikely. But it's probably the only way out.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is a sad day of remembrance in America and the world. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis. And, followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy only a few months later, America's heart and history were jolted.

Dr. King's life devotion to the cause of racial justice in America is one of the most important legacies we have in this country. His moral clarity and his personal courage provided our generations with signposts we still haven't fully absorbed. And the work to which he devoted his life is unfinished. It is crucial for our future as a country that we make intelligent and compassionate progress based on this legacy.

It is so remarkably striking to me to see the different life experiences that white and black Americans have lived, especially the generation who are in their fifties and sixties today. These men and women were in their teens and twenties in 1968. They have clear, personal memories of that day in April forty years ago, and of the months that followed. For most African-American people in this group there are very specific, vivid, and personal memories of segregation and racism in their years of childhood and adolescence. Whether their experiences were of growing up in Arkansas or Chicago in the 1950s, most African-American people of this age cohort have deep and personal experiences of racism. And their memories of the murder of Dr. King have an urgency and personal sorrow that feels very different from the experience of white Americans of the same age.

My discipline is philosophy and I have taught social and political philosophy intermittently throughout my teaching career. At this stage of my career it is very striking to recall how mute this field of philosophy has been to the experience and structure of American racism. The ideas of equality, liberty, and justice are defining values in the field of social philosophy. And yet the topic of racial justice has not been a central focus; only rarely has it been even talked about as we consider the theories of Kant, Rousseau, Mill, or Rawls. And yet my whole education and career are framed by the murder of Martin and the candidacy of Barak. How could race not have been the central problem of social philosophy in America during these decades? It is a failure of collective social cognition, an instance of willful social blindness.

I think there is a connection between these two points. A part of teaching about principles of social justice should be a serious learning of the lived experience of injustice.

The majority in America is inching its way towards a commitment to racial justice. We can make further progress along this road if we will only listen in humility and silence to the experiences of racism that shaped the lives of so many millions of our fellow citizens.