Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Who harvests America’s food?

Anyone who is concerned with food security in the United States should be concerned about immigration policy as well:

The government estimates that more than 80% of America’s crop workers are Hispanic (mostly Mexican), and more than half are illegal aliens. But Rob Williams, the director of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project (which represents farmworkers in court), considers those numbers grossly misleading because they rely on self-reporting. He estimates that more than 90% of farmworkers are sin papeles (without papers)[.]

Much of the abuse suffered by these workers apparently relates directly to immigration law, since the constant threat of deportation strips workers of any ability to demand better work conditions.

Citizens arrest

There are good reasons why we restrict powers like arrest to trained agents of the government. While there are certainly many problems with the conduct of police and oversight over them, at least they have training and experience and there are mechanisms in place to evaluate their actions. By contrast, empowering every shopkeeper and random citizen to physically detain people who they think are criminals seems dangerous and unnecessary. In a few cases, it may be the least bad option available, but I think the onus should be on the person performing the arrest to justify it later.

In the grand scheme of things, shoplifting seems a lot less significant than physically detaining somebody against their will. Saying that as soon as somebody steals from you, you have the right to effectively kidnap them seems liable to create harm and abuse. Kidnapping is rightly considered a more serious offense than shoplifting, and I don’t think the fact that someone committed a crime before being thus apprehended has all that much legal or moral significance. It smacks of the sort of crude revenge-based legal systems where people get their hands lopped off (or get thrown into the terrible conditions of prison, but that is another discussion).

That’s why I think it is wrongheaded when people argue that David Chen – the Toronto shopkeeper who physically detained a shoplifter – should never have been criminally charged. When you opt to take the law into your own hands, you are effectively claiming that the situation is so important and so urgent that you should take over from the actual authorities. It seems to me that such cases are rare and involve things like real risks of injury or death – not the danger of losing a few dollars worth of merchandise.

If you feel that you need to usurp the powers of the police, it just seems sensible to expect that you may need to justify that choice in a court of law. They may well find that you behaved reasonably. But the fact that there will be some after-the-fact oversight could in itself act as a minor deterrent to abuses of power.

Upgrade terrors

When you really rely on a piece of software, it is always frightening to see that there is an upgrade available. That sets you to worrying about the day when your version will no longer be supported, when it may even stop working altogether.

You’ve spent so long learning the peculiarities of the software, you naturally worry about how hard it will be to learn the new version, and whether you will still be capable when using it. If they change something that is a core job function of yours, you can be suddenly unable to do your job.

And yet, you’re a nerd and you believe in the possibility of never-ending improvement. You are seduced by the new version, where they promise it will be easier to do all the jobs you have to, and you will look like more of a professional when using it (camera companies promise the same thing for lenses).

And so, everyone is forced along the upgrade path. Ordinary users probably hate every step of the march, because they don’t buy into the seduction of the new (and yet everyone working in an office with an old version of Windows is happy to complain about it) and they still have to deal with the headaches of upgrading. Many geeks will be content with any change since their primary need – novelty – is automatically being served, even when they are cursing the strange new interface. The uber-geeks who actually run everything will work to keep everyone sane: maintaining a lifeline for all the old legacy systems that people absolutely rely on, while also making the investments necessary to service the software and hardware needs of the future.

Greenhouse gas ’emissions’ or ‘pollution’

The phrase ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ or ‘carbon emissions’ doesn’t cary much emotional weight. It sounds like some nerdy, probably unimportant thing.

In reality, our emissions will determine how much the planet warms, which will have a huge effect on humanity. While it’s true that the Earth is better off with some CO2 than it would be with none at all, it is also true that all the additional greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere now are harmful. As climate scientist Gavin A. Schmidt argues: “If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none. All the rest is economics.”

Given all of that, I think it makes more sense to use the phrases ‘greenhouse gas pollution’ or ‘carbon pollution’. It accurately reflects the harmful role these emissions play, and it ties them to ideas like the ‘polluter pays principle‘.

Obama’s 2011 State of the Union

While it did say a fair bit about cleaner forms of energy, climate change wasn’t mentioned at all in yesterday’s State of the Union address.

The absence of any reference was almost certainly politically driven, and based at least partly on an awareness of official Republican hostility to pretty much any government policy that would restrict greenhouse gas pollution. When people read this speech in retrospect – twenty or thirty years from now – perhaps they will reflect on how broken the politics of the time were, and how incapable they were of identifying and acting upon the biggest issue of the day. We are far too distracted by day-to-day and week-to-week blips; as a consequence, we are failing to properly recognize how we are making choices that will establish the conditions in which a huge number of future humans will live.

The segment on green energy does feature some specific proposals. Obama suggests that America could have one million electric vehicles deployed by 2015; he calls for 80% of American’s electricity to come from ‘clean’ sources (including natural gas) by 2035. While these objectives may be laudable, it would be a stretch to call them commitments. The last few years have amply demonstrated President Obama’s limited power, when it comes to determining what course the U.S. government will actually take.

We have to hope that a quick change will somehow take place in American politics and that climate change – this terrifically important fact about the world – ceases to be a hyper-partisan matter to which minimal real effort is devoted. How such a change could be accomplished, in a world where people seem to choose their facts to fit their ideologies, I cannot really say. I cannot help but thinking that my general optimism about humanity’s potential for making the transition to carbon neutrality in time might be excessive. Perhaps the real future we face is one filled with geoengineering, massive chaos, and suffering.

P.S. Kudos to the BBC, incidentally, for setting up a really excellent internet-embedded version of the speech. They have it divided by subject, and clicking at any point in the written transcript makes the quick-loading video jump to the section in question.

Regulating health claims

Arguably, the existence of truth in advertising laws has a perverse effect when they are not rigorously enforced.

For example, all kinds of highly dubious claims get made about herbal supplements. Not only do manufacturers not need to provide high-quality evidence to back them up, but they can print things that are contradicted by high quality studies that have been done.

In Trick or Treament? The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh lists some of these:

  • The evidence that chamomile or lavender helps with insomnia is poor.
  • There is poor evidence that either asian or siberian ginseng helps with impotence, cancer, diabetes, performance enhancement, or herpes. There is also poor evidence that it serves as a ‘cure all’.
  • The evidence that aloe vera helps with herpes, psoriasis, wound healing, or skin injuries is poor.
  • There is poor evidence that evening primrose helps with eczema, menopausal problems, PMS, asthma, or psoriases, or that it is a ‘cure all’.

Singh also lists some side effects of herbal medicines that are often not described on the packages. For instance, hops can interfere with oral contraceptives, and many herbal supplements can interfere with anticoagulant and antidiabetes drugs. St John’s Wort can inhibit the normal operation of over half of prescription drugs, including anti-HIV and anti-cancer drugs, as well as oral contraceptives.

I have personally seen really absurd claims made on products in health food stores, often featuring real scientific terms used in meaningless ways.

What I worry is that people have an inflated expectation about how closely health claims are scrutinized. That could give people a false sense that the claims made on herbal supplement bottles, by dieting companies, and so on deserve to be taken seriously, when they could well be pure hogwash.

I was surprised and disappointed recently to listen to a conversation in which the participants asserted that (a) most or all of the claims made by doctors and pharmaceutical companies are false and made in bad faith and (b) that the claims made by companies selling ‘alternative’ treatments were credible. While the system for reviewing the former may be lacking, there seems to be no system at all for reviewing the latter. As a consequence, there is a lot of dangerous nonsense out there.

Perhaps there should be some sort of mandatory warning included in advertising that contains unverified medical claims. Something along the lines of: “The health claims made in this advertisement have not been evaluated for accuracy”.

Roberta Johnson and Erin Gustafson

This week’s episode of This American Life features a discussion between Roberta Johnson, the Executive Director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and Erin Gustafson, a high school age climate change denier and appreciator of Glenn Beck.

The pattern of the discussion is a familiar one to me. Dr. Johnson lays out the evidence that humans are changing the climate dangerously, based on things like ice core samples and isotopic ratios. Ms. Gustafson brings up some common denier talking points, like the Medieval Warm Period and the leaked climate science emails. Dr. Johnson responds to these criticisms, but Ms. Gustafson remains unconvinced.

The host then asks Dr. Johnson if there is any hope of getting through to people with evidence, once they become skeptical. Her answer is not terribly satisfying, and the whole interview is testimony to the difficulty of the task.

Of course, the word ‘skeptical’ is being misused here. To continue to disagree with a claim, regardless of how weak your arguments are or how strong those backing it have become, is not skepticism. Rather, it is a kind of dogmatism. There are many genuine difficulties in making sense of our complex world, but it seems to me that the modes of thinking about thinking are what are really broken in climate change deniers. They will cling to any scrap of evidence that supports what they want to believe, while subscribing to conspiracy theories that discredit those who argue otherwise.

As I have mentioned before, I was a lot less concerned about climate change a few years ago. I bought the argument from The Economist that we didn’t know whether it would be cheaper to stop or to simply adapt to. Since then, virtually all the new evidence and analysis has given us greater cause for concern. Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a kind of exhaustion among both advocates of action on climate change and society at large. The deniers are winning, at least insofar as they are giving politicians more than enough cover to continue to do far too little about what is probably the world’s most important problem.

People who are concerned about climate change might be wrong. There could be something about the planet we have overlooked, which means humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions don’t need to be curbed. That being said, it seems decreasingly likely that this is the case. More and more lines of evidence demonstrate what is happening and why. There is also the question of risk management. If we believe the deniers and they are wrong, the world is in a lot of trouble. If we believe the activists, move to a zero carbon economy, and then discover the threat was overblown, we will have accomplished a lot of useful things. We will have lost out on a bit of the prosperity that continued use of fossil fuels would have given us, but we would have built a cleaner and sustainable global society. At worst, we would create a better world ‘for nothing.’

* One important exception to this argument concerns extreme poverty. If there is any area where we should let another moral objective trump climate change mitigation, it is in improving the lot of those who are desperately impoverished. Since their emissions are a tiny part of the global total anyhow, this goal can be sought at the same time as the excessive emissions of those in rich countries are aggressively reduced.

Unions and education

Education is one of relatively few remaining industries that are heavily unionized in industrialized countries, including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Given the societal importance it has, it seems worth examining whether that state of affairs serves the interests of the public at large. I certainly remember the disruptiveness of school strikes when I was growing up, and there is a plausible case that unions are one of the most powerful forces protecting the worst teachers. They also seem to have consistently opposed efforts to reward the best, preferring to reward seniority rather than competence. Arguably, the result is mediocrity in the profession and a lack of accountability. For instance, Eric Hanushek – an economist at Stanford – has concluded that if you could replace the bottom 5-8% of the worst teachers in the United States with teachers of average competence, the overall academic performance of American students would rise from near the bottom of international math and science rankings to near the top.

Arguably, unions are also able to exert undue political influence. They are able to lobby left-leaning political parties for favourable treatment, using money collected from membership dues. That is the basic model of lobbying employed by all interest groups, of course, but what is potentially worrisome is how that political support can be used to block the emergence of promising policies that would threaten union power, such as offering parents vouchers which they can use to cover a portion of private school fees, or merit-based pay schemes for teachers. Unions may be able to use wealth from an unjust status quo to fund the perpetuation of that same problematic state of affairs.

Are there any plausible or proven benefits to unions in education, except from the perspective of those who are members of them? Are there ways in which students would be worse off if they were taught by a non-unionized workforce, or one with a more limited right to strike? If so, can those benefits be said to adequately compensate for the harms that seem convincingly documented? If it is indeed the case that unions in the educational sector harm society at large – while benefiting their membership – it seems especially regrettable. Not only would it represent a situation in which a minority is exploiting its power over the population at large, but they would be doing so within an institution that is meant to be one of society’s great levelers. Those who lack access to decent educational options cannot plausibly be expected to thrive subsequently in many important areas of life, such as employment and informed and effective participation in public life.