The Rule of Law Is for Controlling Power, Not Keeping Order

Many Americans on the political right appeal to the idea of the rule of law to justify expelling undocumented immigrants and preventing ostensibly irregular refugee entry, like the “caravan” from Honduras. The broad idea seems to be that even those in dire need who are seeking the aid of the United States must do so through formal legal channels. For example, Tyler Houlton, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said this on Twitter:

Stopping the caravan is not just about national security or preventing crime, it is also about national sovereignty and the rule of law. Those who seek to come to America must do so the right and legal way.

— Tyler Q. Houlton (@SpoxDHS) October 23, 2018

Similarly, Ari Fleischer declares that “[o]pposition to the caravan… is about the rule of law and people taking advantage of our country.”

This story is infuriating. And so off-base.

Opposition to the caravan, it says, is stoked by fear. To me, it’s about the rule of law and people taking advantage of our country.

https://t.co/580xf6OSNE

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) October 28, 2018

This is a serious mistake. The point of the rule of law is to control the abuse of power—, particularly government power—not to force the powerless to submit to formal legal processes.

What is the rule of law, anyway?

At its heart, the rule of law is a moral principle of how government power is to be used. It specifies that government power may be invoked:

• only when authorized by law,
• pursuant to legal procedures that give the people subject to government authority  the ability to demand a justification for official action,
• and on the basis of laws that reflect a public purpose which treats people as equals.

The classic contrast to “the rule of law” is “the rule of men:” the arbitrary use of the powers of governance by petty autocrats and kleptocrats, the show trials and secret police of the Soviet Union, the disappearances of Pinochet, the shameless plunders of Roman imperial governors, and the roaming gangs of semi-official thugs of Papa Doc Duvalier and Rodrigo Duerte.

Commentators like Houlton and Fleischer don’t just get to invoke their own version of the rule of law. It has a real meaning. When we appeal to the notion of the rule of law, we draw on a long history of thought by lawyers and philosophers about controlling the dangers of lawless government power.

Probably the first reference to anything reasonably translatable as “the rule of law” was in Aristotle’s Politics. For Aristotle, the rule of law was a necessary part of a regime in which the people were understood as equals: if all were equal, then it was wrong for some to have the power to rule others. Aristotle argued that in such a regime, officials  were to be understood merely as servants of the law.

A.V. Dicey, usually considered the greatest expositor of the British rule of law, expresses the ideal in a couple of key principles. First, nobody can be punished by the government except pursuant to a violation of law prosecuted via ordinary legal process. Second, nobody is above the law—officials, aristocrats, all are subject to the same law as everyone else.

The canonical documents of our shared legal tradition are filled with Dicey’s principles. Chapter 39 of Magna Carta declares that “[n]o free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect legal equality and forbid life, liberty, and property from being taken by the government absent due process of law.

The great thinkers of this rule of law tradition have also explained why we ought to value the rule of law, understood this way. For Aristotle, as I said, it was a consequence of equality: if the people of a country were genuinely equals, then no one could have the power to rule over others without law.

For F.A. Hayek, the rule of law was about liberty. Hayek argued that a person who could not be punished except according to law could, by consulting the law, have notice of the complete set of forbidden behaviors—giving him or her some guarantee that any other behavior would be permissible. By contrast, someone who could be punished pursuant to the arbitrary will of some petty dictator would have to walk around on pins and needles, afraid to take any bold action for fear of offending the powerful—a phenomenon that free speech scholars call a “chilling effect.” In addition, if officials had to be subject to the same law as ordinary people, they had an incentive to keep that law from being too oppressive—if they made all kinds of silly rules, they burdened themselves like they burdened everyone else. (I have some problems with Hayek’s argument, but they’re not pertinent here.)

Notice how all of this so far has been about the government and its power. Those who fought to establish the rule of law throughout history have always feared the arbitrary use of the monopoly of violence held by states, never the misbehavior of ordinary people. They realized that ordinary people simply didn’t have armies of heavily armed people to do their bidding, and are therefore less of a threat than the state.

The danger of bad rule of law arguments

Yet the American conversation has sometimes featured a troubling second story, according to which this normative principle we call “rule of law” requires ordinary people to obey the law. As the paragraphs above suggest, I think this is a bad mistake—we might call it the obedience mistake. I’ve argued against it at greater length in the academic journals. Taken to an extreme, this kind of talk about the abuse of rule of law actually enables rather than inhibits the overuse of official power.

Nathan Robinson has written a wonderful essay about the absurdity of pretending that a five-year-old immigrant can be held to a document which she signed waiving a right to a hearing—as if the formal rules and signifiers of legal waivers mean anything in the face of the grotesque power disparity between a team of heavily armed federal agents and a toddler. But the obedience mistake almost seems to justify holding the five-year-old to her signature. After all, there’s a formal sense in which it’s just ordinary legal process. The government has the legal power to ask people to waive their rights, and she signed it—in this country, whether at the used car dealership or in the immigration detention, we hold people responsible for the things they sign. If we demand that the government obey the paperwork that formalizes the legal rules established to control its choices, why shouldn’t we make the same demand of those whom the government regulates?

Of course, we all know that’s nonsense. The legal as well as conceptual absurdity of the notion is self-evident here, because a five-year-old doesn’t have the capacity to knowingly and intelligently waive legal rights. Under any even remotely plausible reading of the legal formalities, the document was a nullity from the moment the ink was dry. As it turns out, we don’t let kindergarteners buy used cars either—and not just because they don’t get a license until they’re sixteen.

But what about an adult? Suppose a grown person from Honduras, maybe not so fluent in English, and under pressure (but not illegal pressure) from ICE, signs this document? Must we hold him or her to it as strictly as we’d hold the government to a waiver of its rights?

Or suppose—as doubtless happens every day in the nation’s courts—an innocent criminal defendant agrees to a plea bargain under pressure from the prosecutor. Again, not illegal pressure, as such. Just…pressure. It turns out that America has a lot of really punitive laws, and prosecutors have nearly unconstrained power to [over-]charge people with violating them. Even if you’re innocent, if the prosecutor can charge you with enough crimes to be facing a 20-year sentence, and then they offer you six months, you have to be pretty confident about your ability to convince the jury to risk a trial. So you take the deal. Is this the rule of law?

The rule of law is a one-way street

Here’s one thing that someone might say about the rule of law and these kinds of rights waivers: “we have to respect legal formalities, because the alternative is just to give officials broad discretion: would you rather the rule be that ICE agents get a choice whether or not to give someone a hearing, regardless of what form that person signed or declined to sign?” My imaginary interlocutor might go further, and say that holding government officials to the rules necessarily implies giving legal significance to the individual decisions of people as to whether or not to waive their rights. The choice available to government officials is to strictly follow the law (including holding people to their waivers) or to use their own discretion (and hence have uncontrolled power). There’s no in-between.

Tempting as that thought is, it’s wrong. It’s possible to have one-way discretion. Formally speaking, the rule that “you have to give someone a hearing, unless they sign the paper waiving the hearing” does not entail “if they sign the paper waiving the hearing, you don’t have to give them a hearing.” (To infer the latter from the former would be to commit the classical fallacy of denying the antecedent).

In terms of how we ought to think about discretion and justice, we can and should say that the official does not have the discretion to use the government’s power against the individual when it isn’t authorized by the rules, but does have the discretion to decline to use that power when it is so authorized. Of course, there are some cases, as when the official uses discretion in a biased or self-interested way—never prosecuting people of a particular race or people who pay a bribe—when other rule of law values prohibit the use of discretion. But in most cases we can distinguish between corrupt uses of discretion and the use of discretion to serve justice.

Moreover, sometimes we think that officials ought to exercise discretion to not use their power over people. Suppose a police officer pulls someone over for a minor speeding offense, and then sees a pregnant woman going through labor in the passenger seat. Not only would we praise the officer for letting the driver go, I think most of us would go so far as to say that the officer does something wrong to write the ticket. In such a situation, we ought to describe the use of the government’s power to write the ticket as legally permissible yet unjustified.

The same goes for punitive responses to the caravan. The legality of the prospective actions of caravan members is, at best, complicated. As I understand it, the following three propositions express the legal status of people in the caravan (and I’m not an immigration lawyer, but I’ve run this by some friends who are immigration lawyers, so there’s that):

1. People in the caravan can show up at ports of entry and request asylum without breaking any U.S. laws at all.
2. People in the caravan can enter illegally (in which case, obviously, they do break a law), but they’ll be protected from deportation while an asylum request is adjudicated, as well as win the permission to stay in the country if their request for asylum is granted.
3. U.S. law arguably only entitles people to request asylum when they’re in the country (although another good reading of the statute is that people are entitled to request asylum outside the country, at a port of entry). In principle, Trump could close the ports of entry and make no officials available outside the country for members of the caravan to request entry. Practically speaking, that would mean that in order to make a request for asylum, people in the caravan would have to commit an illegal entry, just to find someone to make the request to. In effect, Trump can set it up so that you have to risk breaking the law in order to seek asylum in the U.S.

So suppose that last contingency happens: Trump closes the border, anyone who asks for asylum has to illegally sneak in to do so.

Improper entry is a relatively minor crime. Shutting down the border is like intentionally closing a major thoroughfare in a big city to force traffic onto side streets knowing in advance that many drivers many will exceed the residential speed limits. That’s irresponsible governance. Still, it’s better if drivers stay within the limits of law. But if they don’t, it’s not a crisis. An increase in moving violations doesn’t call into question the integrity of the legal order.

Likewise, we’re not going to lose anything that we value in the rule of law just because a few people cross the border illegally. Actually, closing the border would be far more irresponsible than shutting down a freeway, because the government would have no purpose for doing so other than to force otherwise innocent people into lawbreaking in order that they might have an opportunity to make lawful claims to asylum that they would otherwise be able to make. It’s analogous less to innocent road construction and more to Chris Christie’s malicious bridge blockade.

The U.S. government has the legal obligation to entertain requests for asylum no matter how the requesters get across the border to make them, and the humanitarian obligation to exercise discretion to allow the requesters to make asylum requests at the border. People like Houlton and Fleischer should stop pretending that it would somehow offend the rule of law for the government to comply with those obligations, even if the requesters do end up having to break the law to get in a position to make the request.

Law and order

Let’s be a bit more charitable to Houlton and Fleischer. There’s surely some reason for people to follow established procedures. If you can enter the country the bureaucratic way, by filling out the forms and waiting at an embassy for a visa, shouldn’t you do so?

I think what Houlton and Fleischer are really getting at, and what a lot of conservative-inclined folks really mean when they talk about the “rule of law” as a reason for people to check the bureaucratic boxes, is something like “order.” And, to be sure, order matters. It’s easier to live in society if your fellow humans behave predictably, as set out by the rules. If nothing else, predictable behavior makes it cheaper to run institutions affecting large numbers of people. And of course violent disorder is unacceptable because violence is morally reprehensible.

But it’s hard to see how nonviolent kinds of rule-breaking are bad other than for those two reasons, that is, because it’s more expensive to deal with disorderly behavior, or because disorderly people sometimes jump queues in an unfair way. Those are the only ways in which rule-breaking even arguably hurts one’s fellow humans.

If that’s what matters to you, that’s fine and good, but you should say so explicitly. Let’s rewrite that Houlton tweet a bit:

Stopping the caravan is not just about national security or preventing crime, it is also about national sovereignty, efficiency, and turn-taking. Those who seek to come to America must do so the inexpensive and bureaucratically-convenient-for-the-government way.

Sounds a lot less convincing, doesn’t it? Traditional rule of law values like freedom and equality might outweigh the humanitarian needs presented by a caravan of refugees—but saving a few administrative costs sure doesn’t.

At most, maybe Houlton can say that it’s unfair to other people who want to request asylum to give priority to considering the requests of those in the caravan—but that argument is implausible too, since we ought to allocate our request-consideration resources according to need, and it’s hard to believe that people who weren’t in dire need would walk thousands of miles to get to a country they perceive as safe. And, at any rate, if we accept that people who are genuinely entitled to asylum under our law are also entitled to request asylum, then if there are more people requesting than our current institutions can accommodate, we ought to spend a little money to expand the capacity of those institutions.

At bottom, this rule of law argument against the caravan seems to come down to nothing but stinginess.

—

Paul Gowder is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa, where he also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy. He is author of The Rule of Law in the Real World.

The post The Rule of Law Is for Controlling Power, Not Keeping Order appeared first on Niskanen Center.

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The Alternative to Ideology

When we launched the Niskanen Center in January 2015, we happily identified ourselves as libertarians. Sure, we were heterodox libertarians, but there are many schools of libertarianism beyond those promoted by Charles Koch’s political operations. The school we identified with was a left-libertarianism concerned with social justice (a libertarian perspective that I’ve defended in debates with more orthodox libertarians here and here). That worldview lacked an institutional voice in 2015. Our ambition was to create a space for it and, in so doing, redefine what it meant to be libertarian in the 21st century.

I have abandoned that libertarian project, however, because I have come to abandon ideology. This essay is an invitation for you to do likewise — to walk out of the “clean and well-lit prison of one idea.” Ideology encourages dodgy reasoning due to what psychologists call “motivated cognition,” which is the act of deciding what you want to believe and using your reasoning power, with all its might, to get you there. Worse, it encourages fanatacim, disregard for social outcomes, and invites irresolvable philosophical disputes. It also threatens social pluralism — which is to say, it threatens freedom.

The better alternative is not moral relativism. The better alternative is moderation, a commodity that is rapidly disappearing in political life, with dangerous consequences for the American republic.

My hope is that I might best convince you to leave ideology behind by holding up a mirror to an ideological culture that is likely not your own — the world of libertarianism — and discussing the reasons why I left it behind. I suspect that, for those who hold to an “–ism,” the ideological culture of my old world doesn’t look too terribly different from your own.

I do not aim here to settle old scores or to criticize friends and former colleagues. After all, the beliefs that I find wanting today are the very beliefs that I myself held for most of my adult life. I simply mean to put in stark relief the pitfalls of ideological thinking, to illustrate those pitfalls in the world I know best, and to make the case for something better.

Ideology = Motivated Cognition

The first pangs of doubt about my old ideological attachments arose from my loss of faith in the case against climate action. As I began to express doubts about the narratives offered by climate skeptics, I found it impossible to offer an argument that resonated with my libertarian colleagues. But just how, exactly, does an ideological commitment to limited government, free markets, and individual dignity inform an understanding of atmospheric physics or paleoclimate records? And what does libertarianism have to contribute regarding the case for hedging against incredibly dangerous risks stemming from the misuse of a common pool resource, such as the atmosphere?

Libertarians have nothing at all to contribute to the conversation about the science of climate change as libertarians. They could, however, marshal ideological insights to suggest the best means of addressing global warming if it indeed turns out to warrant a policy response (as I believe it does). For libertarians, that could mean a carbon tax, but for other, more hardline libertarians, it could mean that greenhouse gas emitters should be held liable for climate-related damages via common-law legal proceedings.

But my old colleagues at the Cato Institute (where I worked at the time) were not interested in engaging in those “if/then” conversations. They were only interested in a fight to the death over climate science. Carbon tax advocacy was removed from the institutional table in 2007 when my former colleague David Schoenbrod used the institute’s byline in a Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting a carbon tax, an act that infuriated management and led to his resignation. The common law approach to address climate change was rejected once and for all in 2010, when the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in American Electric Power Company v. Connecticut, arguing that “it is unconstitutional for courts to make complex policy decisions that should be left to the legislature — and this is true regardless of the science regarding global warming.” Cato’s institutional position was thus adaptation (learning to live with warming), which is only defensible if scientific alarm over the risks posed by climate change is unwarranted.

This problem extended beyond the realm of climate change. Over and over again, libertarian friends and colleagues were engaged in fierce, uncompromising debate about empirical matters that had nothing to do with libertarian principles or commitments. Is the Keynesian multiplier consequential? Is Thomas Piketty correct that returns to capital are greater than the rate of growth? Do tax cuts pay for themselves? A libertarian could take either side of those disputes without having to recant any of their principles or fundamental beliefs. But to cross the party line on these or an ocean of similar empirical matters was to risk unemployment.

The point is that what ideologues fiercely believe about empirical arguments has little to do with their ideological priors. It has to do with the policy implications of those empirical arguments given their ideologically-driven preferences.

We should not shrink from the truth based on what that truth might mean for our pre-existing beliefs. I know libertarians well and they tend to accept this in theory, but like all ideologues, they have difficulty accepting it in practice. Libertarians do not care for government because they believe it is inherently coercive and destructive of individual liberty. Hence, they are highly motivated to dismiss arguments that might suggest an important need for government, or evidence that offers a cautionary warning about the negative consequences that might follow from a curtailment of governmental power.

Reason, as David Hume famously noted, is a slave of the passions, and libertarian passions point in one direction and one direction only: hostility to government. This passion is a powerful engine of motivated cognition, which invariably leads to weak policy analysis and dogmatism.

Principles, Come What May

Some of my old colleagues maintained that their ideological commitments were anchored in moral principle regarding how society ought to be ordered (for libertarians, “freedom, for good or ill!”). When pressed, however, they usually conceded that they thought their ideological commitments would produce better social outcomes, and that if that turned out to be false, they would have to reassess their beliefs. This is an important concession in that it qualifies the ideologue’s commitment to principle: the principle must have good outcomes. As John Rawls once argued, any ideology that does not concern itself with the real-world impact of its ideas on society is a thing of madness.

That madness, however, often arises in ideological communities because their attachment to principle is so powerful that it becomes an end unto itself. For instance, in my old circles, libertarians will argue passionately against the state but marshal little evidence about what sort of society might actually arise in the modern world were the state to largely disappear. Perhaps the most impressive intellectual ever to take up the libertarian cause — Robert Nozick — had absolutely nothing to say about that in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (my bible for most of my adult life).

There is a good reason for this omission. Wherever we look around the world, when we see inconsequential governments with limited power, as libertarians would prefer, we see “failed states.” How much liberty and human dignity can be found there? Very little.

That, in fact, is the main point of one of the best contemporary rejoinders to libertarianism — Mark Weiner’s The Rule of the Clan. Weiner’s argument is that without government, we don’t usually have unconstrained freedom and autonomy. We have instead the rule of family, caste, church, criminal syndicates, or any number of nongovernmental agents. Historically speaking, those nongovernmental agents have done far more violence to individual liberty and autonomy than have modern welfare states. The modern welfare state, Weiner argues, has tended to expand liberty by using its power to free people from the oppression and deprivation that so often followed from the rule of nongovernmental actors.

How much liberty and human dignity can be found in the world where state power breaks down and is overcome by private power? Very little. That point was well made in episode 23 of HBO’s The Sopranos, wherein a man comes forward as a witness to a crime without knowing that it was committed by New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano. He sits in his living room reading Anarchy, State, and Utopia when his lawyer calls to tell him that he has inadvertently put himself in the crosshairs of the mafia. Our concerned citizen turns white, puts the book down, and frantically calls the police to retract his statement. The message, echoed by political scientist Bo Rothstein, is clear: “In a ‘stateless’ Robert Nozick type of society, where everything should be arranged by individual, freely entered contracts, markets will deteriorate into organized crime and corruption.”

For ideologues, adequate concern about the real-world implications of their visions moving from (beautiful) theory to (messy) practice is rare indeed.

The Limited Utility of Principles

How should we interpret and apply our ideological principles? It is often far from clear. It turns out that applying general nostrums in the real world is not such an easy task. Despite the fact, for instance, that most libertarians offer principled objections to state-mandated racial preferences, one can also find libertarians repairing to those very same principles to defend affirmative action and reparations to African-Americans. Despite the fact that most libertarians object to labor unions as coercive, socialist enterprises, libertarian principles have also been marshalled to justify opposition to antilabor laws like the Taft-Hartley Act and right-to-work statutes.  

Moreover, all libertarians agree that there are exceptions to their ethically-driven opposition to the use of government coercion and force. If there were not, there would be no libertarians; there would only be anarchists. But what are the scale and scope of those exceptions?

Once again, it is unclear. Some libertarians adhere to a version of the “night-watchman state,” which offers few exceptions to libertarian principles, while others endorse all kinds of exceptions. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (a book celebrated as required reading in most of the libertarian world) includes clarion calls for state action against social injustice. Plenty of influential libertarian academics and public intellectuals have likewise embraced taxing greenhouse gas emissions, state-provided catastrophic health care coverage, a universal basic income guaranteed by the state, and a number of other progressive-friendly policies.

Debates within the libertarian community about how liberty should be understood, how liberty should be applied, and how to adjudicate exceptions to the rule against the use of government force are fierce and unending. Internecine libertarian disputes inflame passions to the same degree as do disputes between liberals and conservatives about the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Factionalism within the libertarian world is rife and irresolvable because the principles themselves say less than you might think about what public policy ought to be (a point made with great force by my colleague Will Wilkinson).

One Principle to Rule them All?

What I’ve lately come to appreciate is that marshalling libertarian principles (no matter how thoughtfully or liberally considered) to referee public-policy disputes is difficult to justify in the first place. Why, after all, is liberty objectively more important than other considerations that millions of people in this country hold dear, such as the pursuit of social justice, equity, community, virtue (“statecraft as soulcraft,” as George Will once put it), pluralism, material well-being, or any number of concerns that animate people in politics? Ideology is nothing if not the elevation of one particular concern as more important than others. As Michael Oakeshott noted, however, “Obsession with a single problem, however important, is always dangerous in politics; except in time of war, no society has so simple a life that one element in it can, without loss, be made the centre and circumference of all political activity.

There is nothing wrong with policy advocacy that is informed by a commitment to principles. In fact, it is almost impossible for us to do otherwise given that principles are the projection of personal values into the political realm. Thinking about politics without principled considerations is to think about politics as the exercise of power without moral limit.

But there is no obvious reason why we should hold one principle to be more important than any other in nearly every single policy context. All of the worthy principles marshaled in American politics are important, but some will be more important than others depending upon the circumstance. They cannot all be fully realized at the same time with any given policy proposal. Ethically difficult trade-offs are necessary, and those trade-offs must be transparently considered on a case-by-case basis. There is litt

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How the Medicaid Expansion Fuels the Politics of Austerity

The Government Accountability Office recently released a report looking at Medicaid’s effects on access to medical care in expansion and non-expansion states. They found that low-income adults in expansion states were less likely to report having unmet medical needs than those in non-expansion states. Like the Oregon experiment study finding Medicaid expansion reduced financial strain on beneficiaries, expansion advocates interpreted this study as clear evidence of the benefits of expanding Medicaid as widely as possible. Because of this, these same advocates are often at a loss to explain why 17 states have chosen not expand to Medicaid or why 21 states have applied for section 1115 Medicaid waivers to enact work requirements, eligibility restrictions, or benefit restrictions.

One common explanation is what could be called the “mean Republican” theory of Medicaid. The only conceivable reason why states might not expand Medicaid or might restrict access in light of its obvious benefits is because callous Republican policymakers in these states hate Obama, poor people, or both. Does this theory fit the evidence? After all, many of the most restrictive states are deep red southern states with histories of limiting social programs for the poor.

Yet looking non-expansion states through the lens of partisan control misses a crucial confounding factor: Non-expansion states are also deeply poor. Mississippi’s per capita GDP, for example, is less than half that of Massachusetts, while its poverty rate is double. This is important because Medicaid is a state-administered and partially state-funded program for the poor. Poor states like Mississippi are thus being asked to provide coverage to more people with fewer resources. In their zeal to tout the benefits of expansion, advocates have largely ignored the fiscal costs. The source of the problem becomes clear when we compare the fiscal capacity of states that have expanded Medicaid, and those that have either not pursued expansion or have applied for waivers to restrict the expansion’s scope.

Fiscal capacity refers to the total amount of taxable resources available to governments to raise revenue. A cursory examination reveals policymakers pursuing restrictive policies, whether through restrictive waivers or by refusing the Medicaid expansion altogether, are more likely to be found in poorer states with correspondingly lower fiscal capacity.

Critics sometimes contend that Medicaid expansion is worthwhile regardless of the cost. This argument ignores the opportunity costs states face with increasing Medicaid spending, which has more than doubled as a share of state budgets since 1990. Many of these states are already under immense fiscal pressures because they are expected to dedicate what meager resources they have to K-12 education, higher education, and basic social assistance. Budget pressures are compounded by the growth in state Medicaid spending, leading to crowd-out of these and other priorities. None of this is for lack of effort. The notion that red states have lower taxes burdens than blue states is largely a myth. State and local revenue as a percentage of personal income, a standard measure of fiscal effort, is actually higher in Mississippi than Massachusetts.

What About FMAP?

Medicaid recognizes the problem of limited fiscal capacity and attempts to redress it through the federal medical assistance percentages (FMAP) formula, which builds a fiscal equalization component into the program. Under Medicaid’s FMAP formula, states with less fiscal capacity receive a higher federal matching reimbursement rate for their Medicaid spending. Mississippi, for example is reimbursed $0.76 for every $1 the state spends on Medicaid whereas Massachusetts only reimbursed $0.50 for every dollar spent. At first glance, this seems like a highly progressive measure, but two factors significantly blunt FMAP’s equalizing power.

First, the matching requirement leaves poorer states at a disadvantage in the context of broader state obligations. States receive federal reimbursement for every dollar they spend on Medicaid, but they are still responsible for providing basic public services, from police and fire protection to public education, for their residents. None of this state spending is eligible for more similarly generous federal grants. In turn, we expect Mississippi to provide a similar level of public services as wealthy Massachusetts with roughly half the fiscal resources at their disposal. After accounting for basic services, this means Massachusetts has a larger base amount available to dedicate to Medicaid than Mississippi. If Mississippi tries to make more dollars available for Medicaid, it will come at the cost of basic services.

Second, the FMAP formula includes a statutory minimum rate of 50% regardless of fiscal capacity. This lower-bound biases spending toward the states with the most fiscal capacity. The table below shows the spending match that states with above average fiscal capacity receive with and without the statutory minimum. From a fiscal capacity perspective, Massachusetts receives twice as much in federal reimbursements relative to what we would expect based on its ability to pay alone. The willingness to expand Medicaid with unrestricted access in states like Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and California is less a product of a laudable, progressive mindset than it is a simple function of the special treatment they receive from the federal government.

FY 2019 FMAP federal match with and without statutory minimum
State	Statutory minimum	Without statutory minimum	Difference
Connecticut	50.00%	10.14%	-39.86%
Massachusetts	50.00%	24.96%	-25.04%
New Jersey	50.00%	30.72%	-19.28%
New York	50.00%	34.61%	-15.39%
North Dakota	50.00%	38.38%	-11.62%
Maryland	50.00%	38.70%	-11.30%
Wyoming	50.00%	38.94%	-11.06%
Alaska	50.00%	39.72%	-10.28%
New Hampshire	50.00%	42.52%	-7.48%
California	50.00%	42.94%	-7.06%
Washington	50.00%	45.44%	-4.56%
Virginia	50.00%	47.75%	-2.25%
Colorado	50.00%	48.57%	-1.43%
Minnesota	50.00%	49.70%	-0.30%

When we examine the relationship between state fiscal capacity and the allocation of federal Medicaid funding, we find that wealthy states receive more dollars per enrollee than poor states. Contrary to popular assumptions, the FMAP formula does not bring about a progressive distribution of federal funding.

What About the ACA Provisions?

Rather than reduce interstate disparities in funding, the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) enhanced formula for states expanding Medicaid has made the problem worse. The new 90% matching rate does nothing to ameliorate the situation where poor states already have more spending obligations than they can handle. It does, on the other hand, further bias federal spending toward wealthy states in a much better fiscal position to take advantage of the generous matching rate.

After the ACA passed, there was a focus on states that would see savings as a result of Medicaid reimbursements replacing uncompensated care, but a closer look reveal that this too was largely limited to wealthy states. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Medicaid expansion was projected to save money for some wealthier states while disproportionately increasing costs for poor states. The ACA has thus further compounded state inequities in Medicaid.

State Fiscal Relief is Imperative

Medicaid expansion helps those in need and work requirements, eligibility restrictions, and benefit restrictions hurt them. So why do some state policymakers refuse to expand Medicaid or apply for restrictive waivers? Whereas partisan control has received most of the attention, Medicaid’s advocates do not fully appreciate the extent to which limited state fiscal capacity and shortcomings in federal system of intergovernmental grants work together to pressure poor states into limiting Medicaid spending for valid reasons. Indeed, while it easy to blame the problem on the ideology or callousness of red state governors, expansion proponents need to understand how they have in some ways enabled the politics of permanent austerity.

Poor states are drowning in fiscal obligations. The first step toward bolstering Medicaid is to stop blaming poor states for trying to economize in the face of limited resources, and start coming up with ways to provide them with much needed fiscal relief.

 

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Examples & Photos of Office Space Amenities You Will Love

When planning to lease your next office space it’s important that you think about amenities that your employees will love. Ones that will make them want to come to work and encourage better collaboration and productivity. Below are a few office space amenities that you may want to consider incorporating into your next office build-out. I have toured pretty much every office space for lease in Austin and when I do I like to take a lot of photos of spaces that I think are cool and creative. If you would like to see more examples of creative office space photos feel free to 

Office Space With Exposed Ceiling

Creative Office With Polished Concrete

Office Building With Outdoor Green Area

Coffee Bar in Office Space

Office Space Outdoor Green Area

Office Space With Outdoor Seating

Office Space With Fitness Center

Creative Office Break Area

The Secret Sauce Missing from the National AI Strategy

On Tuesday, the Niskanen Center submitted comments to the National Science Foundation in response to the question of “whether the [2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan] should be revised and, if so, the ways in which it may be improved.” We believe it should, and offered two recommendations that could make the strategy significantly better.

First, we argue the National AI Strategy would be immensely improved by adding a strategic goal that would aim to “Review and identify administrative rules, regulations, and policies that may hinder the research, deployment, and adoption of AI systems within the federal government and private sector.” Given that the original 2016 strategy was crafted under the auspices of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), this is an appropriate inclusion. As we note in the comments:

Under its originating statute, OSTP is charged with “provid[ing] the President with periodic reviews of Federal Statutes and administrative regulations of the various departments and agencies which affect research and development activities, both internally and in relation to the private sector, or which may interfere with desirable technological innovation, together with recommendations for their elimination, reform, or updating as appropriate.” This provision is no accident; indeed it was echoed as a priority for OSTP’s predecessor, the President’s Committee on Science and Technology.

Our second recommendation focused on the need to expand the scope of Strategy 3 (“Understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI”) to include consideration of how “ethically-neutral design standards would compare to a framework that prioritizes a static set of ethical value judgments.” In particular, we argued that Strategy 3 should avoid attempting to “solve age-old epistemic and metaphysical questions about ‘justice and fairness’” and focus attention instead on more technically-feasible means of addressing particularized — and identifiable — consumer harms that result from the deployment of automated decision-making systems. In order to ensure the widest range of voices is heard in pursuing such an undertaking, our comments further emphasized the need for Strategy 3 to explicitly actualize this recommendation by convening a multistakeholder process under the purview of OSTP.

We then conclude by noting:

While it is not possible to accurately diagnose all potential future problems that may result from the widespread use of AI, preemptively addressing the rules that may hinder this technology’s deployment is well within the ability of the government. OSTP must help lead this effort, as detailed under its originating statute, by pinpointing those areas of the CFR and other regulations that should be updated to help realize the benefits AI can offer the American people.

From the executive summary:

The 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan was a commendable step forward in crafting a national strategy for research and development in artificial intelligence. Given the intense investments being made by China and other countries, it is imperative that the United States not only matches, but surpasses these efforts. To achieve a vision of continued American leadership in technological progress and innovation, the National AI Strategy requires some updates to maximize the effectiveness of these investments. These comments will argue in favor of two such updates.

First, the National AI Strategy should include an additional strategic aim that focuses on how best to remove burdensome regulatory barriers, which present unnecessary obstacles to ongoing research, testing, and commercial deployment of new artificial intelligence systems and technologies. Second, the third strategy should be expanded to include a consideration of the trade-offs associated with incorporating ethical frameworks into the architectural design of artificial intelligence systems. In particular, we recommend explicitly broadening the strategic aim to consider outcomes-based governance strategies that correct specific, identifiable harms that may result from the application of autonomous decision-making systems.

Read the full comments here.

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William Nordhaus: An Advocate for Immediate and Forceful Climate Action, and Nothing Less

In the wake of the IPCC’s new special report on 1.5C, many commentators have argued that such an ambitious climate goal is preposterous and too costly. Several have looked to the work of nobel-laureate William Nordhaus to do so, citing that his modeling of an optimal global carbon tax points to warming of nearly twice the goal assessed in the recent IPCC report. However, if they were to read and understand the entirety of Nordhaus’ work, they might hesitate before reaching this conclusion. Because while it is totally possible to take a skeptical view of the UN’s goals, it’s hard to embrace Nordhaus’ work as a means to reject climate action far more ambitious than anything we have today and—in particular, a carbon tax.

Recent articles by David R. Henderson and Bjorn Lomborg  suggest Mr. Nordhaus’ conclusions do not support the recommendations of the new IPCC report that urged for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Lomborg argues that Nordhaus’ work is evidence that the “costs of proposed CO2 cuts aren’t worth it,” while Henderson claims that an article by my colleagues Joseph Majkut and David Bookbinder demonstrates that we here at the Niskanen Center have ignored the work of Nordhaus. Not only are these articles by Lomborg and Henderson a disservice to the work Nordhaus has produced for nearly half a century, but they ignore fundamental concepts of environmental economics. It is also worthwhile to point out the factual errors and inconsistencies found in Lomborg’s article in order to present a realistic account of the IPCC special report findings, and the advancements the cleantech industry has made in the last decade.

Optimal Policy: Net-Benefits of Reducing Emissions Today

To use Nordhaus’s findings to argue for no or limited climate action is nonsense. Nordhaus established the foundation of paying today to avoid the worst effects of climate change, as his work clearly demonstrates that there are long-term net benefits for reducing emissions.

A study from Robert Murphy, which Henderson cites in a separate article, uses figures from Nordhaus’ 2008 book titled A Question of Balance to argue that the damages of no controls on global temperature increase are less than the estimated costs associated with limiting temperature increase to 1.5˚C. This is hardly an innovation of Nordhaus’ own work. But Nordhaus also clearly establishes an optimal policy, whereby a carbon tax of $33.8 per ton of CO2 in 2010 would avoid at least $5 trillion in discounted damages, with costs less than half that.

The optimal policy that Nordhaus is suggesting is a tax that would increase incrementally with time, so that by 2025 the carbon tax would be at $53.39 per ton of CO2.

Nordhaus’ optimal policy is far more ambitious than most carbon pricing schemes we’ve seen to date. If Lomborg and Henderson support Nordhaus’ conclusions to discredit the new IPCC report, then they should grapple with his full set of conclusions, including his findings regarding the net-benefits of immediate climate action.

Impacts of Delayed Action

Lomborg’s articles use Nordhaus as a base to argue for delaying climate action, as that will give clean technology enough time to mature and be able to deal with the problem itself instead of “pushing so hard for carbon cuts before alternative energy sources are ready to take over.” Similarly, Henderson has pointed to instances such as the fracking revolution that has reduced emissions to argue the point that stringent climate policy is not necessary.

Delaying climate action is certainly not in line with any of Nordhaus’ conclusions or findings. In fact, Nordhaus’ research shows that there are indeed substantial net benefits from cutting CO2 emission now rather than waiting fifty years. From his 2008 book A Question of Balance, Nordhaus shows that the cost of waiting fifty years to begin reducing CO2 emissions rather than acting immediately is $2.3 trillion in 2005 prices, which in today’s economy is close to $4 trillion dollars. There is clearly no case for delay.

Nordhaus even responded to calls for delayed climate action, saying “waiting is not only economically costly, but will also make the transition much more costly when it eventually takes place.” The article by my colleagues, which prompted Henderson’s criticism, conveys exactly this point by Nordhaus. They  argue that had the world listened to his policy prescriptions in the early 90s, the world economy would have been incentivized in a manner that would have rendered the transition to a low-carbon future less costly than it is today. Henderson ignores the fact that the costs of limiting global warming is a function of time, meaning that the costs of limiting warming to 1.5˚C in 1992 are markedly different than the costs of achieving that today. Using Nordhaus as a voice for delayed climate action is another misrepresentation of his work that clearly demonstrates the net-benefits of tackling the problem of rising emissions immediately.

Uncertainty in Climate Models

Both Lomborg and Henderson are trying to make the point that concerted efforts to reduce emissions today are too costly and cannot be economically justified. It has already been demonstrated that Nordhaus’ work, though cautious with regards to too ambitious CO2 reductions, does support emission reductions immediately in order to achieve net-benefits. However, it is noteworthy to mention that the IPCC’s ambition to limit warming to 1.5˚C does not stand in contrast to Nordhaus’ findings.

In A Question for Balance, Nordhaus acknowledges that the models he employs have a limited ability in looking at the potential catastrophic events and climate tipping points “at which damage functions turn up sharply and damages become infinite,” which might “justify trillions of dollars of abatement costs.” Since 2008, the literature relevant to the risks associated with climate change has grown tremendously, and as a result Nordhaus calibrated his models accordingly. His recent assessment found that cost of carbon to address the growing risks of climate change has grown 50 percent since 2013, to over $30 per ton.

Again, in this work, Nordhaus is cognizant that there is a high degree of uncertainty inherent to his Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model, and that “taking uncertainties into account, the strength of policy as measured by the social cost of carbon or the optimal carbon tax would increase, not decrease.” Although Nordhaus’ models do target an “optimal” emission pathway that is not consistent with the pathway suggested by the IPCC, he is well aware of the damage that unmitigated climate change could entail.

Cost of Unmitigated Climate Change and Alternative Technology: Fact vs. Fiction

Lomborg cites the IPCC 2014 assessment in order to stipulate that unmitigated climate change will cost the planet 0.2% and 2% of gross domestic product, concluding that it’s “simply not the end of the world.” However, Lomborg fails to include the rest of the IPCC’s statements that these are incomplete estimates, and that losses are more likely than not to be greater rather than smaller than that range. This is because those estimates do not account for catastrophic changes, tipping points, and many other factors. The IPCC’s most recent report includes the estimated costs for warming of 1.5˚C and 2˚C, which include market and non-market impacts, impacts due to sea level rise, and impacts associated with large scale discontinuities, and found those costs to be $54 and $69 trillion respectively. These figures definitely do not represent a future that is as encouraging as Lomborg would suggest.

Another assertion made by Lomborg is that all use of fossil fuels would need to stop in less than four years in order to achieve the 1.5˚C target. This is simply not true. Nowhere in the IPCC’s special report do they claim that all fossil fuel use would need to stop in the next four years. The IPCC determines that in order to limit global warming to 1.5˚C, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to drop to 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Source: IPCC Special Report

All the emissions pathways presented by the IPCC show greenhouse gas emissions, and thus fossil fuel use, extending well beyond 4 years, so Lomborg’s assertion is simply incorrect.

Lomborg argues that the focus should not be on cutting carbon emissions, but should rather center around resolving the perceived technology deficit that makes it difficult to move away from fossil fuels because green energy is mostly “uncompetitive.” The notion that alternative energy sources still cannot compete with traditional fossil fuel sources is outdated. The prices of renewables, namely wind and solar have dropped drastically over the last decade.

The figure above found in Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE) represents the full lifecycle costs of conventional and alternative energy sources. The LCOE values for alternative technologies  continue to decline, and in some cases the full-lifecycle costs of building and operating renewables have dropped below the operational costs alone of traditional fossil fuel sources. Thus, the argument that we should not force carbon cuts until the technology is ready is outdated, and the energy market looks well in place to begin converting to a low-carbon future.

Immediate and Forceful Policy

The approach to climate change presented in Henderson’s articles, and the “wait and invest in R&D” approach  advocated for in Lomborg’s piece, are incorrect, dangerous, and most importantly implicitly reject Nordhaus’ views on the issue. To assert that Nordhaus’ findings justify no or tepid action on climate change is an incomplete and simply misinformed picture of an economist who has laid the foundation, as well as the justification for immediate action to curb global emissions. Nordhaus is well aware of the costs on society that climate change will impose, and how uncertainty inherent in estimating these damages means that climate action should be stringent and taken immediately. In his own words, “uncertainties would point to more rather than less forceful policy, and one starting sooner rather than later to slow climate change.”

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How TV and Service Projects Impact What Americans Believe About Inequality

American inequality is high and rising, but much of the public still believes the American dream is alive and well for anyone who works hard. Those views are hard to change, but new research suggests two paths with large effects in opposite directions. Cecilia Mo finds that the national service program Teach for America moved the attitudes of its participants toward those of the racial minority and poor students they teach. But Eunji Kim finds that any efforts are up against a dominant American narrative advanced daily on popular television. Rags-to-riches stories on reality TV shows make their viewers into strong believers in the American dream.

The Political Research Digest features up-and-coming researchers delivering fresh insights on the big trends driving American politics and policy today. In 15 minutes, you’ll get beyond punditry to data-driven understanding. Subscribe here on iTunes.

Transcript

Matt Grossmann: This week on Political Research Digest, how to change American’s views of inequality from television to national service. From the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.

American inequality is high and rising, but much of the public still believes the American Dream is alive and well for anyone who works hard. Those views are hard to change, but new research suggests two paths with large effects in opposite directions. The national service program, Teach for America can move attitudes of the teachers who participate towards those of the racial minority and poor students they teach.

I talk to Cecilia Mo, of the University of California Berkeley, about her new American Political Science Review article with Katharine Conn, “When Do the Advantaged See the Disadvantages of Others?” She finds that those who just barely made the cutoff have lower racial resentment and higher perceptions of structural inequality compared to those who just missed it, but this effort is up against a dominant American narrative that anyone can make it with hard work, a perspective advanced daily on popular television.

I also talk with Eunji Kim of the University of Pennsylvania about her new paper, “Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility.” She finds that rags to riches stories on reality TV shows make viewers into strong believers in the American Dream.

Attitudes toward inequality differ a lot across social groups based on their disadvantaged or advantaged position, and Cecilia Mo set out to find out how to close that gap.

Cecilia Mo: The focus of the study is first recognizing that there’s great divisions by both class and race in our country in terms of how they view the fairness of our society, whether or not meritocracy is something that is just a notion, an idea or something that is real in this country. So when we’re seeing that there is these big differences where those who are more well off, advantaged if you will, are viewing that the American Dream is alive and well, and meanwhile disadvantaged low income individuals or racial minorities are seeing that inequality is really stark in this country. And that this idea that if you just work hard, you can get ahead, that that is just a pipe dream. Our starting point was that, sort of recognizing that difference.

And so the question was, well, what is possible? What can be done short of actually decreasing inequality? What can be done to have advantaged individuals in the society take on the perspective of those who do not have as much as them?

Matt Grossmann: She was motivated by her personal experience in Teach for America, known as TFA, which changed her views.

Cecilia Mo: I was a Teach for America core member in 2002. I served as a high school math teacher in Los Angeles. I think that, not I think I know, that my experience there translated to certain shifts on my end and I think I was curious to see if I was an anomaly or an empirical regularity.

Matt Grossmann: It was a widespread experience. They found that participation had huge lasting effects on the views of society.

Cecilia Mo: We see these participants really taking on and adopting perspectives that are a lot more reflective of disadvantaged members of our country. Seeing that the economic, social, and political status quo is not quite as healthy. That things are not quite as fair, and that racial tolerance actually also increases, and that this is something that happens after they have this immersive experience, but it’s actually quite durable. That even seven years later we still see this effect.

Matt Grossmann: Teach for America moves elite recent college graduates into the nation’s poorest schools.

Cecilia Mo: Teach for America was an organization that started in 1990, and it recruits some of the highest performing kind of college graduates in this country. They do amazing work in being able to track something like over 50,000 individuals to apply each year and, when you look at the numbers, they’re able to attract, say 9% of all seniors at Ivy League schools to apply.

What they do is they place these top college graduates to some of the lowest performing schools in this country, and they serve as teachers in these schools for at least two years.

Matt Grossmann: It’s part of a long tradition of national service programs that sought to both serve communities and transform participants.

Cecilia Mo: Even at the beginning of the creation of these organizations, there was some sense that national service can do something really meaningful for the participant themselves, that eventually it would create a more civically engaged group of individuals that sort of really care about the health of their country.

Matt Grossmann: But that doesn’t make it easy to change attitudes toward inequality and race, which tend to be very resistant.

Cecilia Mo: Racial attitudes are really hard to change and ideas around disadvantage, those are all really hard to change. I think it all starts with the psychology concept known as the fundamental attribution error. There’s sort of this natural tendency to see the behavior of others as determined by their character while excusing their own behavior based on circumstance, and then people also have a tendency to sort of deny discriminatory actions towards outgroups.

Matt Grossmann: Mo and Conn took advantage of Teach for America’s application process change, which now uses a cutoff score to determine who is accepted.

Cecilia Mo: Teach for America, in 2007, started implementing a selection process where there was a cutoff score where those who made, through an interview process, had a score that exceeded this cutoff score were then admitted and those who were below that cutoff score were rejected. This, for an empirical researcher, was really helpful as the main concern with doing studies like this are what we call selection bias. That there might be that certain types of individuals apply to this program. So are we really picking up an effect which is just sorting that people of a certain kind of disposition are applying to these programs?

If we just focused on participants, we might not really be picking up on any effects of the program. We’re just picking up something about the types of people who do the service work. So by leveraging the selection score, we can compare those who were barely admitted to those who were barely rejected. And the idea is that these two groups are largely similar except for the fact that those who were barely accepted actually participated in the program.

Matt Grossmann: That makes it possible to identify the causal effect of participation, but we still don’t know how big the effect on applicants would compare to making the less interested participate.

Cecilia Mo: In an ideal researcher world, we’d just be able to mandate this program and randomly assign people to two different groups. I think there are a number of things in terms of how we generalize. So one could imagine that what we pick up is an overestimate. If the people who are eager to apply for these national service programs are those who are say more open to sort of seeing social injustice, that they are really eager to sort of take in what’s going on and they’re on more of an activist bent. So if that is who is applying for the program, you could imagine that the effects of the program are overestimates.

But on the flip side we can say that there could be ceiling effects. Meaning if these people who are participating in the program are already of this sort of progressive activist bent, who are very much sympathetic to the plights of the marginalized communities in our country, that there wasn’t really much room to change.

Matt Grossmann: For this group, Mo found big changes in both their awareness of inequality and their disappointment in political institutions ability to address it.

Cecilia Mo: TFA participants are more disappointed with how the institutions work and more likely to say that there are systematic injustices. I can take a step back and think about some of the interviews I had with alums and they sort of speak to, “I had no idea. I was a public school kid. I had no idea that some public schools in our country would have chairs falling apart, might have teachers that are largely sort of babysitting and not really teaching their kids anything,” and this sort of disappointment that took over. I think it’s that kind of experience that’s translating to this perspective, that you know what, our institutions are not working for some members of our society. That just because you are a public school kid, depending on what neighborhood you’re in, you are getting a very different type of education that’s going to set you up for more or less success.

Matt Grossmann: They also found massive effects on racial attitudes, enough to close the gap between whites and blacks on attitudes about black disadvantage.

Cecilia Mo: In terms of the magnitude, a 12.6 percentage point reduction in racial resentment. Well, what does that mean? So if we look at sort of how average Black Americans and White Americans answer this racial resentment battery in the American National Elections Study, we see that 12.6 percentage point is equivalent to 72% of the difference between how the average White American and the average Black American answers this question. So the effect sizes were quite huge. We interpret this as a decrease in blaming of minority communities for where they are in life.

Matt Grossmann: They found changes in closeness to particular groups, but only for those who actually taught the group in question.

Cecilia Mo: Across the board we saw racial resentment decrease, but when we asked questions around closeness to these communities, we saw that the closeness questions really only changed among those who really had day to day experiences with those communities. So 80% of the school student population that TFA participants work with are African American or Hispanic, but the range of communities that TFA places in quite vary. So when you’re placing in say the Rio Grande Valley, versus Baltimore, versus Detroit, a participant might be in a school where it’s 90% African American.

Other participants might be in communities where it’s 90%, 100% Hispanic. In addition to sort of like general questions around race, we asked these specific questions around specific groups of like, “Do you view yourself as closer to the African American community, Hispanic community and other groups?” We saw that, in terms of these closeness measures, they were restricted to the participants who actually were in communities.

So if you are a TFA participant that is in a largely Hispanic community, we saw movement and closeness to the Hispanic community, but not necessarily the African American community or Asian American community or any other groups. If you are a TFA participant who was mostly working with African Americans, we saw movement in closeness to the African American community, but not necessarily movement in other groups.

Matt Grossmann: They even found effects on unexpressed implicit biases based on skin color.

Cecilia Mo: We also asked this implicit racial measure. So we use implicit association tests with skin color and traditional studies on implicit bias. So implicit bias is sort of that unconscious automatic bias that people might not be aware that they even have. So we included that measure and studies speak to how amazingly difficult it is to change that and it makes sense. If it’s unconscious, that’s something that’s a bit more difficult to move. And at least in our study, we actually saw that skin color bias went down and that that reduction was actually quite significant and meaningful. So that was also something that gave us pause and hopefulness that even unconscious biases can change with these deep immersive experiences.

Matt Grossmann: Mo was happy to show that encounters with minority groups can lead to positive results, but she knows it’s difficult to scale up the program to give most Americans a similar experience.

Cecilia Mo: I think what makes me optimistic is that there’s been so many studies that sort of speak to how intergroup contact may not necessarily translate to good outcomes. Thinking about say the work of Putnam, that you have greater diversity and it might actually translate to breakdowns in trust. So when we’re thinking and sort of seeing these kind of studies that showed it’s really hard to have groups actually take on the perspective of others, it turns out that sometimes having groups that are very different bump up with one another can translate to greater polarization. This study gives me a little hope and optimism that there is in fact a way to bring people together and bridge differences and not just have these differences be accentuated.

Where I have some pause is Teach for America is not a simple intervention. It’s not going to be an easy sell to just say, you know what, every single person should be doing something like TFA or a Peace Corps and invest multiple years of their life to service.

Where I have some greater optimism is this sort of interest in say these gap years. Encouragement of universities really recognizing service, alternative spring break programs, and other sort of smaller scale service oriented interventions.

What we can’t say from the study is whether or not all two years were necessary to see this movement, and so future research really needs to unpack at what point can you actually start seeing these changes? How long, how immersive? And so that hasn’t fully been sorted out. So in that sense it may be a lighter touch might be possible.

Matt Grossmann: Any efforts will be up against American’s broad and persistent views that mobility is widespread. The related attitude that Eunji Kim sought to explain.

 Eunji Kim: Dependent variable, which is the perceptions of upward mobility, is something about the capturing the general belief that you think that anyone in America can get ahead as long as they are working hard. Or you think that the United States is still the land of economic opportunity. So these are the beliefs that I’m trying to explain. Then the reason why I wanted to explain this variable is because unlike the economic reality of intergenerational mobility rates, which refers to the proportion of children who are making more money than their parents at the age of 30, has been declining sharply by more than 40 percent over the last two decades.

But according to many different surveys and polls, a vast measuring of Americans are still very optimistic about the opportunity for a person to get ahead in the U.S. So this puzzling mismatch between public opinion surveys and the economic reality is something that motivated my entire dissertation project.

Matt Grossmann: Americans believe the dream. We have some explanations, but still need to understand who believes the most.

 Eunji Kim: American political culture has been the most dominant explanation for why Americans believe in the American Dream, and almost all qualitative explanations have been along the lines of believing the American Dream is just deeply embedded in America methodology due to a unique set of historical factors. Whether its existence of the frontier or the persistence and the work ethic in the colonial era.

My dissertation doesn’t really challenge this view per se, as there are multiple factors that can affect perceptions of economic mobility. But what I’m arguing in my dissertation is that while history of experience is unique to America as a nation, can that really explain that much the individual variations and perceptions of mobility? So American political culture can explain the constant in the belief and the mobility, but it doesn’t really tell us the variations. Right now in my paper, I’m linking the media exposure to mass media to the individual variations in the belief in the American Dream.

Matt Grossmann: The answer she came up with was television, the entertainment media Americans watch most.

Eunji Kim: The important takeaway is that contemporary Americans are watching a lot of rags to riches entertainment media. Ranging from America’s Got Talent to Shark Tank, and so this content that we consume for leisure everyday matters for the study of politics as they affect perceptions of upward economic mobility.

Matt Grossmann: Americans stand out internationally, both for our high belief in mobility and our extraordinary television diet.

Eunji Kim: Even up to now, the Americans are a much more optimistic any other Europeans, and indeed Americans are the only developed economies according to the latest study that overestimates extent to its upper mobilities possible. Europeans tend to be more pessimistic than economic reality. So that’s that. And when it comes to entertainment media, the answer is yes, because when it comes to TV consumption, there’s no other country that comes close to America when it comes to entertainment media consumption.

Matt Grossmann: The reality TV boom is global, but no one has caught up to us.

Eunji Kim: The rise of reality TV shows is definitely a global phenomena, but what’s interesting is because the sheer number of hours that Americans watching TV are just overwhelmingly higher than the other countries. So the effects of entertainment media, whether that’s reality TV shows that I’m examining in my paper, or others, has to be stronger in the U.S. because we just watch more in this country.

Matt Grossmann: Kim focuses on rags to riches television shows whic

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