For the past 30 years, redistricting in Texas has provided great theater. As the state has gone from one-party Democratic to a Republican stronghold to renewed stirrings of bipartisan competition, the controlling party has exploited the decennial line drawing to lock in gains. And just as certainly, the courts have provided refuge for those on the outs.

The Supreme Court has recognized the problem on a national scale but has been unable to see a solution. The justices have failed to find an easy definition of what is fair, what level of manipulation is permissible, how much greed is tolerable, how many districts should be assigned to this group or that group.

Unfortunately our democracy has done little to bring order to the self-serving spectacle of political insiders trying to cement their advantage, the voters be damned. Fifty years ago the Supreme Court decreed that it would strike down unequal population in districts, but other than translating that into a one-person, one-vote requirement, the Court has done little else. We are told that gerrymandering offends the Constitution, but that nothing can be done about it.

So, following the logic of going where the getting might be good, litigants have learned that partisan grievances only get traction if adorned in the inflammatory garb of racial claims.

Of course, race and politics are difficult to separate. The polarization of the parties nationally yields a heavily minority Democratic party and an overwhelmingly white Republican party. The richest partisan gains follow the lines of race and ethnicity.

Which brings us to the current Texas showdown. Since the last redistricting a decade ago, the state gained nearly four million residents, mostly the result of surges in the minority population. In turn, Texas received an additional four congressional districts. As a general rule, states more easily distribute population gains than losses. But with a divided Congress, every seat has become part of the national battleground. With Republicans in control of the Texas Legislature, the state was carved up to create four districts that they would likely control. So, off to litigation we go, where the story becomes inordinately complicated.

Texas is a “covered jurisdiction” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which means that it cannot put its plan into effect unless it is “precleared” by either the Department of Justice or a special three-judge court in Washington, D.C. This year, for the first time since the VRA was passed in 1965, the Justice Department is headed by Democrats at the time of redistricting. Texas decided to try the D.C. court instead, and the state is now about to go to trial to prove that the new plan is not discriminatory in either its effect or its intent.

Meanwhile, suit was also filed in Texas before a special three-judge federal court claiming that the new plan could not be implemented before it was precleared, that the pre-2010 Census plan on which the lines were based could no longer be used because it failed to account properly for the population of Texas, and that the new plan was in fact discriminatory. That case, too, was scheduled for a quick trial.

In the meantime, some plan had to be in place for the 2012 elections, so the Texas court properly took the reins and then ordered its own plan. The court redrew the state lines, handing a victory to the Democrats, who would now were set to control three of the new seats. That result led to a rushed appeal to the Supreme Court, which last week declared the new plan improper, because it was insufficiently respectful of the state’s redistricting objectives.

As byzantine as this contest may sound, the legal result was more or less in line with prior law. Texas was both prohibited from proceeding with its plan because it had not dispelled the presumption of discrimination, and yet entitled to have courts defer to its policy objectives in redistricting. The real difficulty was to come.

Why do we allow self-serving manipulation by insiders in politics when we strive to constrain it in all other walks of public life?

In order to create a new plan, the Supreme Court held, the Texas court would have to be deferential only to the extent that the state’s objectives were presumptively legitimate. That in turn would require an investigation in Texas into the motives behind the new plan and an assessment of its impact on minority voters. All this will happen quickly, and the Republican gain from the Supreme Court victory may well evaporate in the process.

From the judicial perspective, this is chaos. There are now two three-judge courts—one in Texas, one in D.C.—heading into trial on the same issues in rapid succession. Each court will likely hear the same evidence and, even if there is agreement on the Texas state plan, the resulting waste and disorder calls out for change.

Debate on the VRA tends to focus on whether the intrusion into state processes continues to pass constitutional scrutiny, but this is not the root of the problem. Race is still a defining issue, but Texas history shows that race and politics form a combustible mix in redistricting. It proved to be in the 1980s, when a Republican effort to gerrymander Democrat Martin Frost out of his Dallas-area district was struck down as racially discriminatory by Democratic-leaning judges—even though the challenged districting increased minority representation. So it was again in the 1990s, when a Democratic plan that gave all three new seats to minorities was challenged under the VRA by Republicans in Texas and in the Department of Justice. (I helped represent the state of Texas in that round of litigation.) Then in the 2000s, after multiple efforts, the DeLay gerrymander passed despite Democratic legislators fleeing from the state to stop legislative business by preventing a quorum. A disbelieving Supreme Court finally had to resort to the VRA to find that a contorted district running from Austin to the Mexican border was offensive. The reason was not that it was designed to remove Democrat Lloyd Doggett from Congress, but, oddly, that the plan was thought to unite a Hispanic population of the Austin suburbs with insufficiently culturally aligned brethren from the border valley…

Read it all.

By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that’s happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness.

The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson’s new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement’s emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac’s fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Davidson’s keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: “What three things do students need to know in this century?” Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as “information literacy” and “creativity,” no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise.

Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the steam age; it is designed to support a factory system by cultivating “attention, timeliness, standardization, hierarchy, specialization, and metrics,” Davidson said. One could say it was based on the best research of the time, but the studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor, among others, that undergird the current educational regime (according to Davidson) depend upon faked data supporting the preconceptions of the managerial class. Human beings don’t function like machines, and it takes a lot of discipline—what we call “classroom management”—to make them conform. Crucial perspectives are devalued and rejected, stifling innovation, collaboration, and diversity.

It wasn’t always that way. Educational practices that seem eternal, such as letter grades, started hardly more than a century ago; they paralleled a system imposed on the American Meat Packers Association in the era of The Jungle. (At first the meatpackers objected because, they argued, meat is too complex to be judged by letter grades.) The factory assembly line provided inspiration for the standardized bubble test, which was adopted as a means of sorting students for admission to college. Such practices helped to make education seem efficient, measurable, and meritocratic, but they tended to screen out collaborative approaches to problem-solving.

Drawing on her scholarly work in American literary history, Davidson argued that resistance to technology in education is not new. Every new technology takes time to become accepted by institutional cultures. Writing, for example, was once considered a degenerate, impoverished form of communication; it’s why we know about the teachings of Socrates only from the writings of Plato. When the print revolution produced cheap novels for a mass audience, popular works were regarded as bad for young people, especially women, who secreted books in their skirt “offices.” Following the long trajectory of the Protestant Reformation, you no longer needed someone to tell you what to think: You could read for yourself, draw your own conclusions, and possibly select your own society. Now the Internet offers a radical expansion of that process of liberation: It challenges institutional authority, it’s uncontrolled, and it has the potential to disrupt existing hierarchies, opening up new fields of vision, and enabling us to see things that we habitually overlook.

Browsing the 2012 conference program of the Modern Language Association, which includes nearly 60 sessions involving the digital humanities, Stanley Fish recently observed that “I remember, with no little nostalgia, the days when postmodernism in all its versions was the rage and every other session at the MLA convention announced that in theory’s wake everything would have to change.” Now the isms of prior decades—“multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, racism, racialism, feminism, queer theory”—seem to have retreated. But the ethos and disciplinary range of the digital humanities on display at Hastac suggest that this movement is not a replacement for the old order of “Theory” that reigned in the 80s and 90s so much as it is a practical fulfillment of that movement’s vision of a more inclusive, egalitarian, and decentralized educational culture.

Providing examples of how people have worked collaboratively, using the Internet, to develop effective responses to real-world problems, Davidson made a compelling argument for significant reforms in higher education (many examples are provided in her book). Too many of our vestigial practices, such as the tenure monograph and the large-room lecture, have become impediments to innovative scholarship. Students often learn in spite of our practices, learning more outside of the structured classroom than in it. Google is not making the rising generations stupid, Davidson argued; on the contrary, they rely on it to teach themselves, and that experience is making students aware that invisible gorillas are everywhere—and that one of them is higher education as most of us know it.

I might add, as the cost of traditional education increases beyond affordability for more and more students, that they (and their employers) may increasingly decide that they don’t need us. We need to find more ways to expand and diversify higher education beyond traditional degrees earned in late adolescence. Without abandoning the value of preparing students for citizenship and a rewarding mental life, we need to develop more-flexible systems of transparent long-term and just-in-time credentialing, earned over the course of one’s life in response to changing needs and aspirations. Apparently to that end, Hastac is now supporting the exploration of digital “badges” signifying the mastery of specific skills, experiences, and knowledge.

Whatever the means, there is an emerging consensus that higher education has to change significantly, and Davidson makes a compelling case for the ways in which digital technology, allied with neuroscience, will play a leading role in that change.

Nevertheless, graduate students on Hastac panels—and especially in conversation—complain bitterly that their departments are not receptive to collaborative, digital projects. In most cases, their dissertation committees expect a written, 200-page proto-monograph; that’s nonnegotiable. Meanwhile, assistant professors complain that they can earn tenure only by producing one or perhaps two university press books that, in all likelihood, few people will read, when their energies might be more effectively directed toward online projects with, potentially, far greater impact.

In the context of a talk at Hastac on publishing, one graduate student observed that digital humanists—for some time, at least—must expect to perform double labor: digital projects accompanied by traditional written publications about those projects. The MLA and the American Historical Association have established guidelines for evaluating digital projects, but most faculty members are not yet prepared to put those guidelines into effect. It requires a radical change of perspective for scholars who have invested so much of their lives in written criticism as the gold standard. “The associate professors, especially,” one panelist noted, “judge the next generation by the standards they were expected to meet.” Senior professors seem more prepared to “let the kids do their thing.”…

Read it all.

Central plazas were key places for political action in 2011, but historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom says the Town Square Test fails as a method for assessing the divide between democracy and authoritarian.

Many of last year’s most dramatic photographs showed people packing public places to sound off. We saw memorable images of crowds gathering at Tahrir Square to lambast one government then castigate its successor, protesters at Zuccotti Park to voice outrage at Wall Street, and public outcry on the grounds of the Mazu Temple in the South China village of Wukan in December to denounce government land grabs. We saw gatherings in Syria, in Tunisia, in Greece, even in North Korea.

If, as TIME magazine declares, 2011’s Person of the Year was “The Protester,” then 2011’s Place of the Year was the town square. This makes the start of 2012 an ideal time to revisit the “Town Square Test,” which was first spelled out by the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his 2004 book, The Case for Democracy.

Soviet specialist Condoleezza Rice gave the test a boost in 2005 when she praised it in her opening statement during her Senate confirmation hearings to be U.S. Secretary of State; her boss, George W. Bush, extolled it as well.

At the heart of the Town Square Test is the notion that the difference between living in a “free” state and living in a “fear” state is clear and comes down to whether a person can go to the town square and “express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.”

At first glance, it would seem both an attractive idea and one whose value and wisdom was confirmed by the dramatic events of 2011. Sharansky is clearly onto something when he says we can learn a lot about any country by what people are, and are not, allowed to say and do in public spaces.

On closer inspection, however, a survey of last year’s gatherings in public places around the world actually reveals the fundamental problems with the Town Square Test — despite its superficial appeal, it’s always been far too blunt an instrument to be very useful. And 2011’s events remind us that embracing the test’s simple vision of a world divided neatly into “fear” states and “free” states can lead to a distorted view of political life.

For Bush, Rice, and Sharansky, the Town Square Test fits in with a specific vision of human nature and a specific vision of recent history. They assume that there is a universal desire among people living in “fear” countries to want their nations to become “free” ones.  They celebrate the European revolutions of 1989, which often involved mass gatherings in town squares, as having transformed totalitarian countries into democracies.

Washington, Rice said, should use the test to increase the odds that the first decades of the 21stcentury would return the 1989 tide, changing more “fear” states into “free” ones. The White House should identify nations that fail the Town Square Test, then encourage and support efforts by the citizens of those countries to liberate themselves.

How do the events of 2011 fit into this picture? News stories from that dramatic year provided plenty of fresh evidence that people in many parts of the world thirst for a greater degree of freedom and often are willing to take great risks in pursuit of this goal, but in many other ways, the year’s events challenged, rather than reinforced, the Town Square Test worldview.

Consider these five points:

1) The year reminded us that even in liberal democratic states, limits always exist on what one can say and do in the town square. Thanks to American laws against hate speech, for example, and German ones that make expressing pro-Nazi sentiments a crime, there are no countries where people are completely free to say anything they want in public without fear of negative consequences. In addition, as the Occupy Wall Street movement showed, there are often limits to how long one can stay in the town square of a “free” state to express one’s opinion. The best known proponents of the Town Square Test have always taken it for granted that the United States passes it with flying colors; but in 2011 when those in authority thought specific Occupiers tarried a bit too long, force of varying kinds, including most infamously pepper spraying (which became to Occupy what fire hoses had been to civil rights protests), was used to get people out of public spaces, from New York’s Zuccotti Park to University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis. This was done even though the people cleared from those locales were not engaging in taboo forms of speech.

2) Town Square Test thinking tends to assume that within any country all public spaces are created equal, with similar rules governing their use. This makes it a fairly simple matter to say which nations pass and which fail the test. But in 2011 as always, it was much safer speaking out in some regions than others. In his December 17 New Yorker report on Russian protests in Moscow public spaces, for example, David Remnick makes it clear from interviews with human rights activists and crusading journalists that doing anything seen as challenging the authorities is riskier in Chechnya than in Russia’s capital city, suggesting that there is not just one kind of town square in that country.

This is definitely the case in the People’s Republic of China. For example, it is possible to gather in a Hong Kong park to mourn the victims of the June 4 Massacre of 1989 (that took place near and put an end to the protests in Tiananmen Square) without risking arrest, but arrest is certain if you do the same thing in Tiananmen Square or indeed any public space in Beijing or Shanghai. Yet it is possible to go to parks in Beijing or Shanghai and talk loudly about your disgust with local officials and not get into trouble, while doing the exact same thing in a park in Xinjiang or Tibet would be exponentially riskier.

3) Just as not all town squares in a country are necessarily the same, different rules of town-square freedom may apply to different residents thanks to variables such as race, class, and gender. Historical examples abound, including the limited access to town-square rights that African Americans had in the American South in the Jim Crow era. That the issue is not just of historical significance was driven home by the changing nature of Tahrir Square protests, which by late in the year focused at times on the danger that women faced in expressing opinions in public in a post-Mubarak Egypt. The same country provides evidence of religion as a variable, since the ease with which Egyptian Christians could express grievances without fear in public spaces changed dramatically between early in 2011 and October of that year….

Read it all.

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via Newsday

IN APRIL 2010, as part of a scheme to beautify the rundown port near the centre of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic games, workers were replacing the drainage system in a shabby square when they found some old cans. The city called in archaeologists, whose excavations unearthed the ruins of Valongo, once Brazil’s main landing stage for African slaves.

From 1811 to 1843 around 500,000 slaves arrived there, according to Tânia Andrade Lima, the head archaeologist. Valongo was a complex, including warehouses where slaves were sold and a cemetery. Hundreds of plastic bags, stored in shipping containers parked on a corner of the site, hold personal objects lost or hidden by the slaves, or taken from them. They include delicate bracelets and rings woven from vegetable fibre; lumps of amethyst and stones used in African worship; and cowrie shells, a common currency in Africa.

It is a poignant reminder of the scale and duration of the slave trade to Brazil. Of the 10.7m African slaves shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries, 4.9m landed there. Fewer than 400,000 went to the United States. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Brazil has long seemed to want to forget this history. In 1843 Valongo was paved over by a grander dock to welcome a Bourbon princess who came to marry Pedro II, the country’s 19th-century emperor. The stone column rising from the square commemorates the empress, not the slaves. Now the city plans to make Valongo an open-air museum of slavery and the African diaspora. “Our work is to give greater visibility to the black community and its ancestors,” says Ms Andrade Lima.

This project is a small example of a much broader re-evaluation of race in Brazil. The pervasiveness of slavery, the lateness of its abolition, and the fact that nothing was done to turn former slaves into citizens all combined to have a profound impact on Brazilian society. They are reasons for the extreme socioeconomic inequality that still scars the country today.

Neither separate nor equal

In the 2010 census some 51% of Brazilians defined themselves as black or brown. On average, the income of whites is slightly more than double that of black or brown Brazilians, according to IPEA, a government-linked think-tank. It finds that blacks are relatively disadvantaged in their level of education and in their access to health and other services. For example, more than half the people in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (slums) are black. The comparable figure in the city’s richer districts is just 7%.

Brazilians have long argued that blacks are poor only because they are at the bottom of the social pyramid—in other words, that society is stratified by class, not race. But a growing number disagree. These “clamorous” differences can only be explained by racism, according to Mário Theodoro of the federal government’s secretariat for racial equality. In a passionate and sometimes angry debate, black Brazilian activists insist that slavery’s legacy of injustice and inequality can only be reversed by affirmative-action policies, of the kind found in the United States.

Their opponents argue that the history of race relations in Brazil is very different, and that such policies risk creating new racial problems. Unlike in the United States, slavery in Brazil never meant segregation. Mixing was the norm, and Brazil had many more free blacks. The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.

Few these days still call Brazil a “racial democracy”. As Antonio Riserio, a sociologist from Bahia, put it in a recent book: “It’s clear that racism exists in the US. It’s clear that racism exists in Brazil. But they are different kinds of racism.” In Brazil, he argues, racism is veiled and shamefaced, not open or institutional. Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.

Importing American-style affirmative action risks forcing Brazilians to place themselves in strict racial categories rather than somewhere along a spectrum, says Peter Fry, a British-born, naturalised-Brazilian anthropologist. Having worked in southern Africa, he says that Brazil’s avoidance of “the crystallising of race as a marker of identity” is a big advantage in creating a democratic society.

But for the proponents of affirmative action, the veiled quality of Brazilian racism explains why racial stratification has been ignored for so long. “In Brazil you have an invisible enemy. Nobody’s racist. But when your daughter goes out with a black, things change,” says Ivanir dos Santos, a black activist in Rio de Janeiro. If black and white youths with equal qualifications apply to be a shop assistant in a Rio mall, the white will get the job, he adds.

The debate over affirmative action splits both left and right. The governments of Dilma Rousseff, the president, and of her two predecessors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, have all supported such policies. But they have moved cautiously. So far the main battleground has been in universities. Since 2001 more than 70 public universities have introduced racial admissions quotas. In Rio de Janeiro’s state universities, 20% of places are set aside for black students who pass the entrance exam. Another 25% are reserved for a “social quota” of pupils from state schools whose parents’ income is less than twice the minimum wage—who are often black. A big federal programme awards grants to black and brown students at private universities.

These measures are starting to make a difference. Although only 6.3% of black 18- to 24-year-olds were in higher education in 2006, that was double the proportion in 2001, according to IPEA. (The figures for whites were 19.2% in 2006, compared with 14.1% in 2001). “We’re very happy, because in the past five years we’ve placed more blacks in universities than in the previous 500 years,” says Frei David Raimundo dos Santos, a Franciscan friar who runs Educafro, a charity that holds university-entrance classes in poor areas. “Today there’s a revolution in Brazil.”…

Read it all

Outrage has predictably followed Twitter’s announcement yesterday that it has developed a system to block (or, as the company euphemistically puts it, “withhold“) specific tweets in specific countries if they violate local law, while keeping the content available for the rest of the world. The hashtag #TwitterBlackout is bursting with calls for a boycott of the microblogging service on Saturday, and headlines like “Twitter caves to global censorship” abound.

But the indignation may be overwrought. The Next Web‘s Anna Heim points out that Twitter users who want to see a blocked tweet can simply change their country setting. In fact, Twitter’s decision to link to instructions on how to change that setting as part of its announcement has some speculating that the company is actually feigning respect for local laws while winking at its users.

“Chances are that Twitter perfectly knows about this workaround,” Heim writes. “Users won’t need to hide their IP address with a proxy: Twitter lets them change it manually, despite the potential loss in hyperlocal ad dollars for the platform.” Indeed, in an email exchange with Foreign Policy, Twitter spokeswoman Rachel Bremer emphasized user control. “Because geo-location by IP address is an imperfect science,” she explained, “we allow users to manually set their country.”

What’s more, Twitter has promised to disclose any information it withholds through a system that looks a lot like Google’s Transparency Report, which tracks requests by government agencies and courts around the world for Google to hand over user data or remove content from its services. Twitter pledges to alert users when their tweets or accounts have been removed, clearly mark withheld content, and post notices on the website Chilling Effects. The company will only remove content in reaction to “valid legal process — we don’t do anything proactively,” Bremer explained. She insisted that Twitter’s commitment to free speech, which “has been demonstrated in our actions since the company was founded,” is “not changing.”

But that’s just the problem. Twitter has long built its brand around free expression. While the company has never joined tech giants such as Google and Microsoft in supporting the Global Network Initiative, which seeks to protect online privacy and free speech, Twitter has championed those values in other ways. CEO Dick Costolo likes to say that Twitter is the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” while former CEO Evan Williams once described the company’s goal as reaching the “weakest signals all over the world,” citing protests in Iran and Moldova as examples. Not only did Twitter famously postpone a planned outage at the height of the Iranian protests in 2009, but when the Egyptian government shut down social networks last year at the start of the revolution, Twitter teamed up with Google to develop a “speak-to-tweet” service. While “Google only promises not to be evil,” Jeff Bercovici writes at Forbes, “Twitter’s devotees have built it up into something much more exalted: a force for global progress and human enlightenment.”

And, so far, Twitter has not done a particularly good job of explaining how this week’s changes will alter its process for removing content and why the company is willing to imperil its brand by implementing the new rules. In announcing the policy, Twitter explained that it will need to “enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression” as it grows. But what does “enter countries” mean for a website theoretically available from anywhere? Spokespeople have since added that there are still countries where Twitter will not operate as a business (read: China, where Twitter is blocked) and that the changes have nothing to do with Saudi Prince AlWaleed bin Talal investing $300 million in the company. But when asked byForeign Policy for an explanation of how notices under the new system might differ from the copyright complaints currently clogging Twitter’s section on Chilling Effects, Bremer declined to comment on “hypothetical situations about when or how we might have to remove content in the future.”…

Read it all.

Terrorism isn’t a 20th-century phenomenon, but the circumstances of September 11—the way al Qaeda organised and funded itself and conducted its operations—could only have come out of the globalising world of the 1990s.

That decade began with one of the 20th century’s most unanticipated events, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of the Cold War structures that had shaped global politics.

This is a good place to begin because, however we weigh up the reasons for the fall of the Soviet empire, a central element was economic; the incipient impact of emerging technology that led to a revolution in the cost of transferring information and distributing goods. By driving the opening of markets and the rapid dissemination of data, these brought out starkly the inability of autarkic economies to compete with their rivals, and made closed political systems much harder to sustain.

Such changes—the growth of the internet and mobile communications especially—dominated the 1990s. They led to a greater integration of international and domestic economic policy than the world had seen before, a fusing of the external and internal economies.

The disappearance of the barriers between the Cold War blocs of East and West gave a new vitality to regionalism, enabling the EU to expand, ASEAN to embrace Indochina and APEC to be formed.

The emerging economies of Asia set themselves up best to benefit from this globalising world. It was the “Time of the Tigers”, and the Asian miracle accelerated, as rapid growth spread from North to Southeast Asia.

The first big challenge to this emerging story came with the Asian financial crisis from July 1997 onwards. In Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia, currency links with the US dollar broke under pressure, sharemarkets collapsed and foreign capital fled. In a single year we saw a reversal of capital inflows to Korea and the ASEAN countries on the order of $100 billion.

Asia experienced the worst slowdown in the developing world for thirty years. But it was the political rather than the economic results of that crisis that mattered most for Australia, and shaped our contemporary environment more directly than September 11.

In May 1998, Soeharto’s new order government fell. But contrary to the pundits who predicted the imminent break-up of Indonesia, a more diffuse and decentralised power structure emerged, shaped by an authentically Indonesian democracy.

This reform and democratisation in turn transformed Southeast Asian regional politics and made possible the development of a deeper and more politically sustainable Australia-Indonesia relationship. And in the aftermath of September 11 and the Bali bombings, it would underpin one of the world’s most successful efforts against terrorism.

And the crisis led directly to the independence of East Timor, the final act in the long process of decolonisation in Asia, which had defined so much of Australia’s foreign policy since the end of the World War II; and provided Australia with pre-September 11 experience in stabilising fragile states.

But perhaps most importantly, the crisis consolidated the rise of China. A lesson Beijing had drawn from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that economic growth was essential for the party’s continuing hold on power. So, during the 1990s, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji drove greater economic openness and pushed forward market-oriented reforms. In 1997 the loss-making network of state-owned enterprises was opened to diversified ownership, and reform of the bloated public service began. In the same year, the private sector was officially described as “an important part of China’s socialist market economy”.

But China’s capital account remained resolutely closed. So when the Asian crisis came, China was insulated from exposure to international financial markets. Its share of Asia’s foreign direct investment had begun to edge up from 1992, but after the crisis, more foreign investors asked themselves why they should fiddle around on the edges when they could go directly to the world’s most populous market. Investment stampeded northwards from Southeast Asia and China’s total stock of foreign direct investment grew to become second only to that of the United States.

By 2001, China was ready to take the most important step towards its integration with the global economy by joining the World Trade Organisation. Just months before its accession, and facilitated by the same technology which made China’s growth possible, al Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre. So globalisation’s two sides—dark and light—were brought into sharp focus.

The 9/11 attacks shook to its core the confidence the US felt in its traditional security between the moats of two great oceans. The world that changed after September 11 was principally the world as the United States felt it to be; and to that perception in varying degrees the world had to adjust.

Threats from radical Islamist terrorist groups against American targets, and even on American soil, weren’t new. Important sections of the national security administration of the United States had been focusing on them during the 1990s. But the World Trade Centre and Pentagon atrocities moved the issue to the very centre of American thought.

For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, there was an urgent weighing-up of the possibility of some nightmare scenario—not just the prospect of more big terrorist attacks, but the potential use of weapons of mass destruction, even of crude nuclear-explosive devices.

The sense of vulnerability and anger sparked by September 11 made the US much more ready to act against threats to the US homeland and to US global interests.       For many Americans, this was worse than Pearl Harbour: an attack on the core symbols of the US economy and government.

The US response answered dramatically the question which had been unresolved since the end of the Cold War of what American grand strategy would be. The “post-Cold War” hiatus was over. The war on terror had begun.

In September 2002, President Bush outlined a National Security Strategy of exceptional ambition. It brought together a series of themes he had spoken about since the attacks on the American homeland, beginning with the belief that “the 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress”: freedom, democracy and free enterprise. America’s actions in confronting terrorists and tyrants were not to be undertaken for unilateral gain, but to create “a balance of power that favors freedom”. The terrorist attacks of September 11 had provided a moment of opportunity for the US to “extend the benefits of freedom across the globe”.

That required US power, and it was the goal of the United States, in the president’s words, “to build and maintain our defences beyond challenge … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equalling, the power of the United States”.

Pre-emptive action would be necessary to prevent the use of WMD by terrorists, as would national missile defence and cooperation with other states on non-proliferation. A common threat would help to bind all the great powers of the world for the first time.

Australia’s response to September 11 was heavily shaped by the coincidental presence in Washington on that day of the prime minister John Howard. The force of his response to the disaster and the first-hand understanding it gave senior Australian policy makers of the impact of the catastrophe, set the scene for a deeper political, security and economic relationship with our major ally.

The ANZUS alliance was invoked for the first time—and remains the basis for our engagement in Afghanistan. Australia was also an early participant in Iraq in 2003. These military commitments, helped by the personal closeness of Bush and Howard, intensified Australia-United States security integration. There is no doubt they also helped congressional passage of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

After the 2002 Bali bombings—killing 202 people, 88 of them Australian—Australia’s regional relationships took on more of the dimensions of the emerging, post-September 11 transnational agenda.

It was understood by then that borders that were increasingly permeable to trade and tourism were also open to threats ranging from terrorists to money launderers, from nuclear proliferators like Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan to pathogens like the SARS virus.

Counter-terrorism co-operation was an important element in bringing Australia closer to newly democratic Indonesia. Indonesia’s successful prosecution of more than 470 terrorism suspects in public and transparent trials was a major achievement of the counterterrorism effort, and has been a key factor in turning Indonesian public sentiment against terrorism. But other aspects of the transnational agenda such as the Bali processes on people smuggling were also engaged.

One lesson we drew from September 11 and from al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan was that if you let problems fester they could become major international security threats. The mode of the time was interventionist.

IF the 10 years before September 11 were marked by the merging of domestic and foreign economic policy, in the decade afterwards it was the amalgamating of domestic and foreign security policy that mattered.

We’ve lived through what will be seen in retrospect as the “national security” decade—a period in which most governments, including Australia’s, revised fundamentally their ideas of what national security is, who is responsible for it, and how it is done…

Read it all.

Via Newsday

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via About

Via About

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Interrogation. Surveillance. Ethnic profiling. Censorship. The words come from 21st-century headlines, but they have an ancient pedigree. Cullen Murphy on how the Inquisition ignited the modern police state

On a hot autumn day in Rome not long ago, I crossed the vast expanse of St Peter’s Square, paused momentarily in the shade beneath a curving flank of Bernini’s colonnade and continued a little way beyond to a Swiss Guard standing impassively at a wrought-iron gate. He examined my credentials, handed them back and saluted smartly. I hadn’t expected the gesture and almost returned the salute instinctively, but then realised it was intended for a cardinal waddling into the Vatican from behind me.

Just inside the gate, at Piazza del Sant’Uffizio 11, stands a Renaissance palazzo with a ruddy ochre-and-cream complexion. This is the headquarters of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose job, in the words of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor bonus, promulgated in 1988 by Pope John Paul II, is “to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals throughout the Catholic world”. Pastor bonus goes on: “For this reason, everything which in any way touches such matter falls within its competence.” It is an expansive charge. Every significant document or decision emanating from anywhere inside the Vatican must get a sign-off from the CDF. The Congregation has been around for a very long time, although until the Second Vatican Council it was called something else: the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. From the lips of old Vatican hands, one still hears shorthand references to “the Holy Office”, much as one hears “Whitehall”, “Foggy Bottom” or “the Kremlin”.

But before the Congregation became the Holy Office, it went by yet another name: as late as 1908, it was known as the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. Lenny Bruce once joked that there was only one “the Church”. The Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition was the headquarters of the Inquisition – the centuries-long effort by the Church to deal with its perceived enemies, within and without, by whatever means necessary, including the most brutal ones available.

The palazzo that today houses the Congregation was originally built to lodge the Inquisition when the papacy, in 1542, amid the onslaught of Protestantism and other noxious ideas, decided that the Church’s intermittent and far-flung inquisitorial investigations needed to be brought under some sort of centralised control – a spiritual Department of Homeland Security, as it were. The Inquisition had begun in the Middle Ages, to deal with Christian heresies, and been revived in Iberia, under state control, to deal with Jews and Moors. Pope Paul III considered the task of his new papal Inquisition so urgent that construction on the basilica of St. Peter’s was suspended and the labourers diverted so that work could be completed on its headquarters. At one time the palazzo held not only clerical offices but also prison cells.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inherited more than the Inquisition’s DNA and its place on the organisational charts. It also inherited much of the paper trail. The Inquisition records are kept mainly in the palazzo itself, and for four and a half centuries that archive was closed to outsiders. Then, in 1998, to the surprise of many, the Vatican decided to make the archive available to scholars.

Any archive is a repository of what some sliver of civilisation has wrought, for good or ill. This one is no exception. The archive may owe its existence to the Inquisition, but it helps explain the world that exists today. In our imaginations, we offhandedly associate the term “inquisition” with the term “Dark Ages”. But consider what an inquisition – any inquisition – really is: a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organised systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power and justified by a vision of the one true path. Considered that way, the Inquisition is more accurately seen not as a relic but as a harbinger.

The opening of the archive at the Vatican is one more development in what has, during the past several decades, become a golden age of Inquisition scholarship. Until the appearance of Henry Charles Lea’s magisterial History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, in the late 19th century, most writing about the Inquisition had consisted of bitter polemics by one side or another. In recent years, using materials newly available in repositories outside the Vatican, and now including those of the Holy See itself, historians throughout Europe and the Americas have produced hundreds of studies that, taken together, revise some traditional views of the Inquisition.

To begin with, the notion of “the Inquisition” as a monolithic force with a directed intelligence – “an eye that never slumbered”, as the historian William H Prescott once phrased it – is no longer tenable. Rather, it was an enterprise that varied in virulence and competence from place to place and era to era. “The Inquisition” remains a convenient shorthand term, but there were many inquisitions. Another finding of modern research is that, insofar as their procedures were concerned, Inquisition tribunals often proved more scrupulous and consistent than the various secular courts of the time. Of course, the bar here is low. Modern scholarship has also revised the casualty figures. Some older estimates of the number of people burned at the stake by the Inquisition range to upwards of a million; the actual number may be closer to ten thousand – perhaps two per cent of those who came before the Inquisition’s tribunals for any reason. Whatever the number killed, the Inquisition levied penalties on hundreds of thousands of people, and the fear and shame instilled by any individual case rippled outward to affect a wide social circle. Little wonder that the Inquisition has left such a lasting imprint.

But from between the lines the new scholarship has some larger lessons to offer. The Inquisition can be viewed as something greater and more insidious than an effort pursued over centuries by a single religious institution. It was enabled by the broader forces that brought the modern world into existence, and that make inquisitions of various kinds an inescapable feature of modern life. Inquisitions advance hand-in-hand with civilisation itself.

It’s a troubling conclusion but an inescapable one. Here’s the central question: why did the Inquisition come into being when it did? Intolerance, hatred and suspicion of one group by another had always existed. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution – to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life – did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those embers of hatred did not exist. Once the tools do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.

The tools are these: there needs to be a system of law, and the means to administer it with a certain amount of uniformity. Techniques must be developed for conducting interrogations and extracting information. Procedures must exist for record-keeping, and for retrieving information after records have been compiled and stored. An administrative mechanism – a bureaucracy – is required, along with a cadre of trained people to staff it. There must be an ability to send messages across significant distances, and also an ability to restrict the communications of others – in a word, censorship…

Read it all.

January 25th and the Revolution Egypt has made.

Ain Sukhna is stunningly beautiful. After a two-hour drive east from Cairo through the featureless desert, the road rolls toward the steel blue waters of the Gulf of Suez. Nestled beneath ocher-colored hills, the town is a string of industrial buildings, ramshackle half-built structures, and the weekend villas of Cairo’s well-heeled. This is where the falool — the former officials, businessmen, and intellectuals who, for almost three decades, rationalized for the Mubarak regime — fled when their leader fell. With its manicured lawns, pristine infinity pools, and towpaths to the beach, Ain Sukhna couldn’t be more different from the threadbare and creaking Egypt that former President Hosni Mubarak bequeathed to his people.

The falool remain convinced that Mubarak’s fall was a tragic error that will bring lasting ruin to their country. They still believe the refrain that was so familiar on the eve of the uprising — that Egypt was an emerging democracy with an emerging economy. They cannot understand how their fellow Egyptians failed to grasp how good Mubarak was. According to their circular logic, Mubarak’s progressive politics brought about his demise: had Mubarak not been a modernizer and democratizer, the protests never would have been permitted in the first place. Hence Suzanne Mubarak’s furtive phone calls to her courtiers, reportedly asking, “Doesn’t anyone see the good we did?”

Indeed, the Egyptian people do not. But the despot’s wife might be forgiven for thinking that the numbers were on her side. Between October 14, 1981, when Mubarak first assumed the Egyptian presidency, and February 11, 2011, when he stepped down, the country ostensibly made progress. Foreign direct investment increased. Gross domestic product grew. According to the World Bank, life expectancy, child immunizations, household expenditures, and the number of telephones per household all rose, suggesting that Mubarak’s reign made Egyptians healthier and wealthier.

Any vindication the former first lady might find in the raw numbers, however, would be profoundly hollow. The World Bank’s surveys used data provided by Egyptian officials, whose methods and rigor were subject to politics. There have long been rumors that the World Bank kept two sets of books on Egypt — one for public consumption, statistics that backed claims that Egypt was at the economic takeoff stage, and another that revealed a far more complicated and challenged country.

That was the heart of the problem: the gap between Mubarak’s manufactured reality and the real Egypt. What did it matter when Egyptian officials touted 2008 as a banner year for foreign direct investment if, at the same time, Egyptians were forced to stand in long lines for bread? Mubarak’s patronage machine could hold conference after conference trumpeting reforms and the coming transition to democracy. But when the People’s Assembly (the lower house of Egypt’s parliament) repeatedly renewed the country’s decades-old emergency law, bloggers, journalists, politicians, judges, and activists of all stripes rushed to tell the tale of an Egypt in which life was far more circumscribed by the iron grip of a national security state. That story resonated. Few, if any, believed the regime’s happy talk. And those who pointed out its contradictions were subject to brutality.

Mubarak, for his part, pushed back hard. Harking back to October 1973 and the heroic crossing of the Suez Canal, he said that he would propel Egypt’s “crossing into the future.” But his rhetoric stood in stark contrast to the rattan canes and metal truncheons he unleashed on his critics. Isolated at the presidential compound in Heliopolis, or at his retreat in Sharm el-Sheikh, Mubarak never appreciated the irony that his repression only reinforced the arguments of his critics. With each crackdown, he only widened the gap between principle and practice.

This week, a democratically elected parliament chose its first speaker, Mohamed Saad el-Katatni, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, opening a new chapter in the country’s history. But a year after the uprising began, distortions from the past haunt the future. Egyptians are learning what social scientists have long understood: uprisings can bring down leaders, but changing institutions is hard. It is not just redrafting laws and regulations but also reforming those uncodified norms that have been derived from decades of practice. For instance, in Egypt there is neither a constitutional article nor an official decree that links the armed forces to the presidency, yet that office has always been in the hands of the officers. For all the change that has come to Egypt in the last year, the people vying for leadership are all too familiar, and many of the restrictive laws constraining NGOs and the press remain firmly in place.

Egypt’s activists are certainly correct in saying that their revolution remains unfinished. Even as Mubarak, his sons Gamal and Alaa, and a raft of lieutenants, including the former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, are all on trial, others are on the run in London, Dubai, and Beirut. This perverse political order in which institutions are rigged to serve the elite remains intact.

Yet how to finally finish the job? The instigators of the uprising have taken a principled stand against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and its leader, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, because they believe the military is a counterrevolutionary force. But the activists’ permanent revolution has had diminishing returns. They may have started the revolt, but as the first phase of Egypt’s transition comes to a close they are finding themselves marginalized….

Read it all.

OF all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format — meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.

And so there may be rejoicing among legions of students who have struggled to write a lucid argument about Sherman’s March, the disputed authorship of “Romeo and Juliet,” or anything antediluvian. They have a champion: Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.

Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how best to teach writing in the digital era.

“This mechanistic writing is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails against the form in her new book, “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”

“As a writer, it offends me deeply.”

Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog and the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. Instead of writing a quarterly term paper, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog about the issues and readings they are studying in class, along with essays for public consumption.

She’s in good company. Across the country, blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree with the transformation? Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the sea and more about how the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.

Their reductio ad absurdum: why not just bypass the blog, too, and move right on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?

“Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market,” says Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal and founder of the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”

The National Survey of Student Engagement found that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than half of seniors weren’t asked to do a single paper of 20 pages or more, while the bulk of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.

The term paper has been falling from favor for some time. A study in 2002 estimated that about 80 percent of high school students were not asked to write a history term paper of more than 15 pages. William H. Fitzhugh, the study’s author and founder of The Concord Review, a journal that publishes high school students’ research papers, says that, more broadly, educators shy away from rigorous academic writing, giving students the relative ease of writing short essays. He argues that part of the problem is that teachers are asking students to read less, which means less substance — whether historical, political or literary — to focus a term paper on.

“She’s right,” Mr. Fitzhugh says of Professor Davidson. “Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.”

He proposes what he calls the “page a year” solution: in first grade, a one-page paper using one source; by fifth grade, five pages and five sources.

The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.

“We’re at a crux right now of where we have to figure out as teachers what part of the old literacy is worth preserving,” says Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford. “We’re trying to figure out how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging with the most exciting and promising new literacies.”…

Read it all.

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via About

New research reveals that college freshmen hold increasingly liberal views on key social issues like same-sex marriage and rights for illegal immigrants. But the progressive viewpoints haven’t translated into significantly greater levels of activism or heightened enthusiasm for national politics.

Those findings, published Thursday in an annual survey from the University of California at Los Angeles, paint a complicated election-year portrait of the country’s newest prospective voters. Are they progressive-minded and eager to embrace more-tolerant social views? Are they cynical products of a sour economy and a fractious political era, bent on punishing the establishment by staying home on Election Day? Or are they simply more inclined to favor civic engagement on a local level—volunteering in their communities, say—over national politics?

Or are they all of the above?

The research, done each year by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, along with other recent reports, provides some clarity, but only to a point. Consider these trends: In 1997, the year that UCLA researchers first began asking freshmen for their views on same-sex marriage, slightly more than half of all respondents said they supported it. In the latest survey, that percentage had reached an all-time high of 71 percent. (For more on how students’ views on social issues have changed over time, see related charts.)

Other findings from this year’s survey point to whether students act on those political beliefs.

Ten percent of respondents said they had worked on a local, state, or national campaign during the past year, placing them on the low end of a figure that has fluctuated between 8 and 15 percent over the past four decades.

At a time when angst over student debt and demonstrations linked to the Occupy movement have ignited some campuses, only 6 percent of respondents said they anticipated taking part in student protests while in college. (In the late 1960s, those numbers were, perhaps surprisingly, even lower: In 1968, 5 percent of respondents said they planned to take part in protests. The figure has never topped 9 percent.)

Numbers, of course, tell only part of the story. For every statistic that portends an apathetic future for today’s young voters, there is a student whose behavior augurs something quite different.

“I used to hate politics like crazy,” says Kavita Singh, the founder and lone member—so far—of the Youth for Ron Paul chapter at Southwestern University, in Texas. Growing up in a conservative Indian family in California’s left-leaning Bay Area, Ms. Singh said her view on politics during her early high-school years was simple: “What does it matter?”

“But I eventually I got into it,” she recalls. By the time she arrived at Southwestern in the fall of 2010, Ms. Singh, who is now 19 and majoring in economics, was a self-proclaimed libertarian.

She soon joined the campus’s libertarian group, did a marketing internship for a school-choice organization, and last month worked remotely to register voters for Ron Paul’s campaign in Louisiana. This semester, she is attempting to drum up support for Representative Paul on Southwestern’s tightly knit campus of 1,400 or so students.

In doing so, Ms. Singh has unwittingly acquired a reputation on campus as “the Libertarian.”

“People have been just very curious about me as a person,” she says. “They come up to me and they say, ‘You’re a woman and you’re not white and you’re not a racist or a bigot, so why are you a libertarian? Why do you believe what you believe?”

‘Politics Is Personal’

It’s a question that presidential candidates might well consider as they battle their way toward November. The recent research on freshmen, for starters, could provide hints on how to recapture the youthful vigor that defined the 2008 race.

Most freshmen responding to the UCLA survey will be eligible to vote for the first time in the forthcoming election. And they appear to have different views from arriving students in the past, says John H. Pryor, the report’s lead author

“What might be a more polarizing issue among the general population might not be polarizing for this population,” he says. “So even though more people are espousing these liberal views, they’re not necessarily thinking, ‘OK, I have this liberal view, therefore I’m a liberal.’”

Indeed, many of the hot-button social and political issues the survey asked students about yielded responses that lean liberal. Yet there have been no major shifts in the percentages of students who identify themselves as liberal or conservative.

The proportion who viewed themselves as “liberal” has varied from a high of 38 percent, in 1971 to a low of 19 percent, in 1981; in the newest survey, it was about 28 percent. “Conservative” students, who constitute about 21 percent of the 2011 respondents, have seen their representation fluctuate from 14 percent in the early 1970s to 24 percent in 2006.

Most students, it is clear, see themselves as someplace in between: In the survey’s 45-year history, the largest proportion of students have consistently characterized their views as “middle of the road.” (In the latest survey, 47 percent do.)…

Read it all.

In this moment of economic challenge, it can be difficult to keep our problems in perspective. The scale of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession, the weakness of the recovery, the persistence of high unemployment, and the possibility of yet another shock — this time originating in Europe — have left Americans feeling deeply insecure about their economic prospects. Unfortunately, too many politicians, activists, analysts, and journalists (largely, but not exclusively, on the left) seem determined to feed that insecurity in order to advance an economic agenda badly suited to our actual circumstances. They argue not that a financial crisis pulled the rug out from under our enviably comfortable lives, but rather that our lives were not all that comfortable to begin with. A signal feature of our economy in recent decades, they contend, has been pervasive economic risk — a function not of the ups and downs of the business cycle, but of the very structure of our economic system. According to this view, no American is immune to dreadful economic calamities like income loss, chronic joblessness, unaffordable medical bills, inadequate retirement savings, or crippling debt. Most of us — “the 99%,” to borrow the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protestors — cannot escape the insecurity fomented by an economy geared to the needs of the wealthy few. Misery is not a marginal risk on the horizon: It is an ever-present danger, and was even before the recession. But compelling though this narrative may be to headline writers, it is fundamentally wrong as a description of America’s economy both before and after the recession. When analyzed correctly, the available data belie the notions that this degree of economic risk pervades American life and that our circumstances today are significantly more precarious than they were in the past. Even as we slog through what are likely to be years of lower-than-normal growth and higher-than-normal unemployment, most Americans will be only marginally worse off than they were in past downturns. The story of pervasive and overwhelming risk is not just inaccurate, it is dangerous to our actual economic prospects. This systematic exaggeration of our economic insecurity saps the confidence of consumers, businesses, and investors — hindering an already sluggish recovery from the Great Recession. It also leads to misdirected policies that are too zealous and too broad, overextending our political and economic systems. The result is that it has become much more difficult to solve the specific problems that do cry out for resolution, and to help those Americans who really have fallen behind. Only by moving beyond this misleading exaggeration, carefully reviewing the realities of economic risk in America, and restoring a sense of calm and perspective to our approach to economic policymaking can we find constructive solutions to our real economic problems. INCOME AND EMPLOYMENTPerhaps the broadest measure of economic insecurity is the risk of losing a job or experiencing a significant drop in income. And the idea that this risk has been increasing dramatically in America over the past few decades has been absolutely central to the narrative of insecurity. It has fed into a false nostalgia for a bygone age of stability, one allegedly supplanted (since at least the 1980s) by an era of uncertainty and displacement. President Obama offered a version of this story in his 2011 State of the Union address:

Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets. I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear — proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game.

The tales of both this fabled golden age and the dramatic rise in the risk of declining incomes and job loss are, to put it mildly, overstated. But this popular story did not originate with President Obama: It has been a common theme of left-leaning scholars and activists for many years. The clearest recent example of this trope may be found in the popular 2006 book The Great Risk Shift, by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. Hacker’s fundamental argument was that economic uncertainty has been growing dramatically since the 1970s, leaving America’s broad middle class subject to enormous risk. Using models based on income data, he argued that income volatility tripled between 1974 and 2002; the rise, he claimed, was particularly dramatic during the early part of this period, as volatility in the early 1990s was 3.5 times higher than it had been in the early 1970s. Hacker’s conclusion — that the middle class has, in recent decades, been subjected to horrendous risks and pressures — quickly became the conventional wisdom among many politicians, activists, and commentators. As a result, it has come to define the way many people understand the American economy. But that conclusion turned out to be the product of a serious technical error. Attempting to replicate Hacker’s work in the course of my own research, I discovered that his initial results were highly sensitive to year-to-year changes in the small number of families reporting very low incomes (annual incomes of under $1,000, which must be considered highly suspect). Hacker was forced to revise the figures in the paperback edition of his book. Nevertheless, he again overstated the increase over time by reporting his results as a percentage change in dollars squared (that is, raised to the second power) rather than in dollars and by displaying his results in a chart that stretched out the rise over time. While he still showed an increase in volatility of 95%, my results using the same basic methodology indicated an increase of about 10%. In July 2010, a group led by Hacker published new estimates purporting to show that the fraction of Americans experiencing a large drop in income rose from about 10% in 1985 to 18% in 2009. But the 2009 estimate was a rough projection, and would have been a large increase — up from less than 12% in 2007. Then, in November 2011, an updated report (produced by a reconfigured team of researchers led by Hacker) abandoned the previous year’s estimates and argued that the risk of a large income shock rose from 13% or 14% in 1986 to 19% in 2009. Where did these assertions come from? The team’s 2010 claim was  again based on a failure to adequately address the problem of unreported income in the data. Their November 2011 claim, meanwhile, used a different data set that was much less appropriate for looking at income loss (because it does not identify the same person in different years, does not follow people who move from their homes, and suffers greatly from the problem of unreported income). In fact, the most reliable data regarding income volatility in recent decades (including the data used by Hacker in his early work and in 2010) suggest a great deal of stability when analyzed correctly. The chart below shows the portion of working-age adults who, in any given year, experienced a 25% decline in inflation-adjusted household income (a common definition of a large income drop, and the basis for Hacker’s recent estimates). Viewed over the past four decades, this portion has increased only slightly, even though it has risen and fallen within that period in response to the business cycle…

Read it all.