Monthly Archives: February 2024

a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money

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In class yesterday, we discussed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which funds green technologies and jobs in disadvantaged communities. I tried to present the Act neutrally, with lots of room for criticism from several directions, but I also conveyed its magnitude and significance as a change of direction for America.

I think the strategy of the IRA was new to these students, which is not a criticism of them–the Act receives extraordinarily little attention and debate. However, its projected price-tag is above $800 billion, and Goldman Sachs estimates that it generated about $282 billion in investment and roughly 175,000 jobs in its first year alone. It’s also closely related to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $280+ billion CHIPS Act. In other words–like it or hate it–it is big.

In July 2023, a Washington Post survey found that most Americans had not heard of the main provisions of the IRA. In that survey, 39% favored and 39% opposed the law, yet majorities expressed support for each of its main provisions. For instance, 65% favored tax credits for solar panels, although just 24% had heard of that provision in the law.

We discussed why this significant policy gets so little public attention. Some of my students’ astute explanations were about the general flaws of our media landscape and public attention. I have previously noted the odd politics of this particular issue, which dissuades both Democrats and Republicans from talking about it much. Even the name of the “Inflation Reduction Act” is so misleading that it distracts attention.

The students also made a good point that hadn’t been clearly on my mind before. They said that the numbers in the bill fail to capture attention because it’s hard to know what counts as a large amount. Politicians and reporters are always talking about billions for this and billions for that, and these numbers just wash over us.

So some comparisons might be useful. …

The IRA is projected to cost over $800 billion by 2033. In the United States, we spend $795 billion per year on K-12 education: teacher’ and administrators’ salaries, facilities, school lunches, equipment, buses, and everything else. So one year’s spending on all of US schooling equals the projected cost of the IRA.

The IRA has many provisions, and I am primarily interested in support for green manufacturing, which represents about $369 billion. This means that if we could take about half the money that it costs to operate all our schools for a year and spend it on green manufacturing, that would be the size of the IRA.

Another comparison: the US federal prison system is allocated about $7.8 billion in the president’s latest budget request. Therefore, the annual amount of new subsidies for green manufacturing will be about the same as the cost of all federal prisons each year for ten years, due to the IRA.

A third comparison: the GDP of Taiwan is about $790 billion, so all the goods and services sold by that country in one year are worth about as much as the IRA over ten years. Belgium is also a pretty close comparison. If you want to focus only the support for green manufacturing, then the IRA’s provisions are worth about as much as all the goods and services sold in the Czech Republic in a given year.

See also: a different way in which the 2024 election is a failure for democracy; federal spending for both climate and democracy; the major shift in climate strategy

Pagels, the Gnostic Gospels

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Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels (1979) hardly needs a review from me. It won the National Book Award and has been listed among the 100 most influential works of the 20th century. However, I hadn’t read it until lately, and I can recommend it with the following summary.

Pagels classifies early Christians into two large groups, each of whom based their beliefs on sayings of Jesus that we can plausibly date to the earliest Christian period.

One group called themselves catholic (universal) and orthodox (right-believing). They taught that God was omnipotent and perfectly good, which meant that creation must be good, yet distinct from the Creator. The whole story of creation was divinely planned and hinged on the Incarnation, when God and nature came together in the figure of Christ. Jesus experienced physical resurrection, which will also happen to all people, whether saved or damned. By participating in the actual, embodied, and universal church (with its emerging structure of bishops, priests, and deacons), any person could be saved. Salvation required faith in the core doctrines of the Church, which represented sufficient knowledge. Christians were obliged to profess their faith even in the face of persecution, and martyrdom was understood as a sacrifice for the church. Everyone who confessed and practiced the sacraments belonged to that one living body.

Pagels calls the other group gnostics, although few of them may have used that name. They saw nature as rife with suffering and confusion; hence no omnipotent and benign force could have created it. Instead, they told various stories that explained present reality as a mistake caused by at least one powerful force interposed between us and the true divine. Like everything physical, the body was a trap. However, the soul was a piece of the divine, and some people could discover this truth through introspection and meditation—even including the use of mantras. We were not saved by the divine but could rather discover that we had always been fully divine. This discovery or knowledge (gnosis) was liberating. Gnosis was essentially individual, not assisted by belonging to any church, which would attract misguided human beings. Courting martyrdom for an ill-advised church was certainly a waste. True knowledge might be ineffable, or it might require concealment, or it might be specific to each questing soul, but in any case, it went far beyond what one could read in an explicit statement of faith. And the process of discovering it might be more important than the result.

Pagels understands these two views as rival theologies (structures of ideas), but she emphasizes that living persons in social contexts experience ideas, and ideas can influence social institutions that then shape people. She argues that the orthodox or catholic view prevailed because it reflected people’s lived experience of embodiment—we love our own bodies—and because it organized individuals into a functioning institution, the church, that was able to sustain itself. Even today, after many schisms, denominations as different as Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism share the same anti-gnostic roots. Gnostics were too otherworldly and individualistic to prevail.

Gnostic ideas have sprung up regularly since classical times—for instance, Blake was in tune with the gnostics, whether he knew those authors or not—but gnosticism has inspired individuals rather than large movements.

Although it’s interesting to compare religious views, one should be careful. Highly abstract statements of ideas from different traditions can look similar, yet actual religions are networks of people who share experiences, practices, and concrete stories. For that reason, even if a 2nd-century gnostic sounds like William Blake—or like a Zen practitioner—their experiences were vastly different.

Buddhists and Brahminic Hindus had many actual contacts with gnostics during the Roman era. According to shared Christian tradition, Thomas ended his life in India. Pagels writes that his biography could suggest the influence of Indian ideas on gnosticism and its critics. Thomas is the biblical figure who has the most explicit relationship with Jesus’ embodiment after the resurrection. In the canonical Gospel of John, Thomas doubts that Jesus has returned in his physical body, and Jesus encourages him to touch him—as if to refute gnosticism (John 20:27). But there was also a whole gnostic Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus teaches the disciple that they are equals as fully divine and incorporeal souls.

It doesn’t seem that a huge amount has been written about gnosticism and the Dharmic religions since Pagels. She already cites Conze (1967), which still comes up as the main source on this topic today. I think that recent scholars have been skeptical of Pagels’ categories: they think that the gnostics were too diverse and they overlapped too much with the orthodox to qualify as a separate group. I cannot assess this trend, except to note that categories are always simplifications and subject to challenge, and Pagels seems pretty persuasive. Anyway, I suspect the gnostics would have found more success if they had accepted the Buddha’s Middle Way, but that idea might have struck them as a snare.

See also: notes on religion and cultural appropriation: the case of US Buddhism; are religions comprehensive doctrines?; a mistaken view of culture; individuals in cultures: the concept of an idiodictuon; and Zenobia of Palmyra.

different kinds of social models

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In my public policy course this week, we used a Harvard Kennedy School case entitled “A Rising Storm: Eric Garner and the Explosive Controversy over Race & Policing,” which introduced questions about criminal justice, violence, and race in New York City.

In my own work based on national survey data, I find that being Black raises the odds of being mistreated by the police almost five-fold (4.6 times) when considering gender, education, age, English-language proficiency, household income, housing type, county-level income, and any mental health diagnosis. However, the Kennedy School case also draws our attention to the 75% drop in homicide and 50% drop in rape in New York City between 1990 and 2013, which require explanation and assessment.

I suggested that we all use mental models (simplified representations of the world) to think about such issues. Our models may be more or less precise and articulated in our own heads. If we want to know what’s best to do, we are obliged to clarify our models to ourselves and seriously consider whether alternatives might be wiser.

I asked students to consider models of different forms and types:

  • A root-cause model explains many phenomena as the result of one underlying cause. Just as you should expect a weed to return unless you pull it up by its roots, so you should expect a social injustice to recur unless you remove its roots–that is the implication of the metaphor. “Radical” comes from the Latin for “root,” and proponents of root-cause models often feel that they are the radicals.

In this case, the root might be white supremacy, invoked to explain police bias, the distribution of wealth and poverty, the unequal impact of public schools, and other current realities.

Classical Marxism recommends a different root-cause model: the economic system always gives rise to the state, and a bourgeois state employs police to protect the economic elite. Substantial reform is impossible without a revolution. Finally–as a student astutely noted–some libertarians might offer a root-cause model in which the underlying problem is state power, always fundamentally violent (regardless of the economy); police violence is a predictable manifestation.

  • A cyclical model is built of components that affect each other, often reciprocally or in loops. For instance, perhaps racial discrimination worsens poverty, poverty increases the prevalence of crime, and crime exacerbates poverty by raising costs for victims and perpetrators and by discouraging investment. Those elements might be only a few parts of a more elaborate cyclical model.

This kind of model resists the notion of a “root” and instead encourages us to “break the cycle” by acting on vulnerable links. For example, reforming police union contracts would not address white supremacy, but it might break a specific cycle that involves impunity for violent officers, and that change could have positive effects across a connected system.

  • An organizational model would treat the NYPD as an entity with a mission, budget, personnel, and outcomes. We might presume that by changing the organization, we can get different outcomes. For instance, it may matter what the NYPD measures when it assesses its employees. Should officers be promoted for making many arrests for minor offenses, or not?

We might consider two variants of an organizational model:

  • In one, the NYPD is fundamentally a bureaucracy, per Max Weber. It is made of people who have clear responsibilities within a hierarchy. Bureaucracies are supposed to make reliable, predictable decisions. However, some degree of discretion is inevitable, and bureaucracies strive to handle human choices by either (a) minimizing discretion or (b) ensuring that bureaucrats are as professional as possible. Professionalism means competence and trustworthiness. Per Michael Lipsky (1969), police are “street-level bureaucrats,” faced with constant discretionary decisions. If data show that actual police officers’ choices are biased or otherwise detrimental, then they should either (a) lose discretion or (b) become more professional as a result of better hiring and training.
  • In another variant of the organizational model, the NYPD is a public agency. The people of New York vote for elected leaders, who appoint senior police officers as their agents. If we object to the outcomes, then (a) a majority of voters have the wrong beliefs or values, or (b) the electoral system is flawed so that elected leaders don’t represent the people, or (c) those leaders’ will is being frustrated by their agents.
  • In a genealogical model, the NYPD and related institutions (such as the New York City Public Schools) derive from predecessors. Like you and me, these organizations have ancestors that are responsible for much that’s true about them today. Among the NYPD’s predecessors were slave patrols that arose in 19th century America to prevent enslaved people from escaping to freedom. However, institutions typically have many ancestors, not just one, and the NYPD could also be traced back to village constables in England or to law enforcement bureaucracies in 19th century France and Germany. (After all, the word “police” is French.) The point of a genealogical model is to uncover historical causes that may require recompense, reparation, and repair.
  • In a behavioral model, you might think of human beings as a species that has proclivities to violence (including sexual violence) as well as tendencies to cooperation and care. You might think that mass societies with high degrees of anonymity will permit violence unless it is surveilled and deterred. Relatedly, you might think of peace and social order as collective goods that pose dilemmas at large scales. (Why should individuals sacrifice to protect strangers against violence?) In that case, police departments might represent solutions to a problem of collective action. This analysis is not necessarily conservative–in the sense of protective of the status quo–because the 30,000 armed police officers of the NYPD represent at least an implicit source of violence. A behavioral model might suggest that the police also need surveillance and deterrence. And we might consider alternative ways of achieving the collective good of peace, without armed officers.
  • In an interest group model, the population of New York City is configured into many organized groups, although some people (such as unlicensed street vendors like Eric Garner) may not have effective organizations. Groups gain power from numbers and/or money. Among the most relevant groups in this case are the police unions, civil rights organizations, the city’s Democratic Party and specific political campaigns, and business interests. The reality on the streets is the result of competition and negotiation among interest groups. The best way to change outcomes is to form or strengthen groups that reflect the interests that concern you.

Different types of models can certainly be merged. That said, a model should not be excessively complicated, because the point is to enable wise judgement. A huge page of symbols and arrows will not yield clarity.

Also, there is a risk of letting our initial assumptions drive everything, so that we go looking for any components that confirm what we already thought. (A genealogical argument here, a bit of root-cause rhetoric, a specific proposal for breaking a vicious cycle ….) I think we are more likely to learn something new by following the logic of a particular model to its conclusion and then seriously considering alternatives to it.

See also: social education as learning to improve models; making our models explicit; police discrimination, race, and community poverty; the political economy of policing; professionals as grizzled veterans or as reflective learners; what must we believe?; and Complexities of Civic Life.