*Feature* Greg Fischer Greg Fischer Mayor of Louisville, KY Spring 2018 I came to public service after spending 30 years working as an entrepreneur. In the business world, I found that the best way to accomplish goals was to envision a bright future, and then work hard in collaboration with others to make that vision a reality. That’s the approach I brought to city government when I became mayor of my hometown in 2011. Louisville, like our country as a whole, was still coming out of the Great Recession; unemployment was over 10 percent; we’d been losing jobs; and there was a general sense of anxiety about the future. My team and I worked to address those fundamental economic concerns but we also knew that you don’t solve one challenge by neglecting the others. To prime our city for 21st-century success, we needed to change Louisville’s culture, and that meant cultivating an attitude of optimism, while also working to strengthen the bonds among the members of our increasingly diverse city of 760,000. In my inaugural speech, I set out the three core values my team would use to guide our work: We would make Louisville a city of lifelong learning, a healthier city, and an even more compassionate city. I emphasized these values because they’re essential for citizens in any successful, modern, global city: Lifelong learning is essential because, in a world where we’re seeing constant technological, economic and societal changes, it’s the lifelong learners who are best equipped to adapt and thrive. Health, which we define as both human and environmental health, is the most fundamental human need. Compassion helps build what I call our city’s “social muscles” – the bonds that form among the members of our community and that help us stay united in challenging times. Our focus on compassion compels us to help everyone in our city regardless of race, gender, wealth, nationality or circumstance reach their full human potential. My decision to highlight compassion as a core value earned me some criticism from a few people who said it would make our city look weak, but it’s clear that compassion is a smart leadership strategy for any city. Seven years in, the results of our work show that compassion and economic growth can go hand-in-hand: Since 2011, our city has created over 70,000 new private sector jobs, opened 2,500 new businesses, reduced unemployment to 3.2 percent, and attracted nearly $13 billion in capital investment. Though we’re proud of these accomplishments, a city’s prosperity is only real when it is shared by all. That’s why it’s tremendously encouraging to see signs of growth in some of our historically underserved neighborhoods, particularly in west Louisville, where too many people have been hindered by racist practices like redlining and urban renewal in the 20th century. These were official government policies that targeted African-Americans in our community and many others. As public servants, we have an obligation to address these historic injustices. We’ve been working with partners in the public and private sectors to create opportunities in underserved areas, and have recently seen more than $800 million of public and private investment pour into west Louisville. City government is also working to clear the path to prosperity through programs that encourage entrepreneurs, job training and home ownership. We’re also working on digital inclusion, attempting to increase access to the tools of 21st-century learning and communication. Compassion fuels these and all our decisions at Louisville Metro Government because it’s the morally right approach and because helping more people realize their full potential helps our city reach its own. For example, if every Louisville family earning poverty-level wages earned a living wage, it would add almost $900 million to our city’s economy every year. That’s a win for everyone. One way we’re working to accomplish this is by creating opportunities for our young people. This year will mark the seventh year of our SummerWorks program, which we created to help counter the high rates of youth unemployment that lingered after the recession. Focusing on people ages 16-21, SummerWorks is now helping more than 5,000 youth find summer jobs with more than 170 local businesses, from mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 companies. We also have to continue working to help our citizens at every stage of their careers get the skills they need to compete and win in the careers of the future. Partnering with key local industries, we’ve helped establish public-private initiatives like Code Louisville, which provides free training in software coding, as well as the Kentucky Health Career Center and Kentucky Manufacturing Career Center. In addition, as a welcoming, globally-minded city, Louisville must support the members of our growing immigrant community. That’s why we provide the opportunity to earn professional certifications through our MTELL program: Manufacturing Training for English Language Learners. Our core values of compassion and lifelong learning come together in many of our programs, including the Compassionate Schools Project, which we launched in 2015 in partnership with Jefferson County Public Schools and the University of Virginia. Today, many of Louisville’s elementary school children are learning a revolutionary new curriculum that integrates mindfulness, compassion, nutrition, wellness and more into the school day to help our youth become better learners and better citizens. Creating pathways to opportunity also means removing barriers, including violent crime. We created our Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods, whose mission is to encourage peace and health in every neighborhood and reduce the violence too often experienced by young adults in under-resourced communities. Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods works with local and national partners to fund and facilitate innovative programs such as Pivot 2 Peace, which identifies victims of violence from ZIP codes that have high rates of violent crime – and while those victims are recovering, a social worker visits them in the hospital and provides information about pathways to education, employment and more in an effort to break the cycle of violence. Compassion-driven programs like these have helped us respond to the challenges that Louisville, like any city, inevitably faces, and emerge stronger and more invested in one another and our collective future. Looking ahead to the future of Louisville (and I hope, other cities as well), the vision guiding us remains the same: I see a growing community that honors and learns from the past, lives fully in the present and prepares for the future. I see a thriving city that competes and wins in the global marketplace and whose reputation for compassion, innovation and opportunity continues to grow on the world stage. I see a sustainable city, filled with safe and healthy neighborhoods, where good health and prosperity are equally available to people of every age, race and background. I see a connected and compassionate city, where every person has the chance to reach their full human potential. Even as so much of our country and our world seems to be focused on division, and embracing an us-vs-them ideology, I remain optimistic about our future. That’s because I see so many determined people of all ages, races and backgrounds working to create a better future. They believe in what Louisville’s great native son Muhammad Ali called, “the work of the heart.” The world-champion boxer and humanitarian loved his hometown and in challenging moments, I take comfort from The Champ’s words, “All through my life I have been tested. My will has been tested, my courage has been tested,” he wrote in The Soul of a Butterfly. “My soul has grown over the years, and some of my views have changed. As long as I am alive, I will continue to try to understand more because the work of the heart is never done." The City is taking a holistic approach to our economic revitalization process by hosting hundreds of community conversations across the City to help inform decisions around major projects. After hearing from our residents, we’ve prioritized investing in innovative educational programming to address historic inequities; creating dynamic workforce programs more suitable for an inclusive new economy; and leveraging our inherent strengths to produce more sustainable growth.

Bess Markel Rural Despair and Decline: How Trump Won Michigan in 2016 Bess Markel Introduction When Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote in 2016, he shocked the entire world. In part, people believed he could never win because he would never crack the Democrats’ famous “Blue Wall”: the combination of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But he did, winning counties that John McCain and Mitt Romney could not. Political pundits asked themselves: How did this entitled, brash, inexperienced New York millionaire appeal to rural voters? What seems like thousands of think-pieces have been written on the issue, each suggesting that Trump won the election because of Russian interference, deeply rooted misogyny, racial backlash to Obama’s presidency, the rise of social media, and a myriad of other factors. However, some scholars have suggested that Trump’s unexpected triumph could be traced to another factor: pain and discontentment across rural America. Over the past several decades, America’s working class has seen its way of life disappear. With a loss of jobs due to innovative technology, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and mass migration out of Rust Belt states, residents of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin—areas that used to be vibrant parts of America’s heartland—feel left behind (1). Some believe that this downward trajectory helped spark the rise of Trump. While this might seem counterintuitive at first because Trump is viewed by the liberal media as an uncaring, East Coast elite, scholars have strived to understand the appeal of Trump among working-class, white voters, particularly in the Midwest. This line of research is particularly important for the future of electoral politics. The movement Trump’s election sparked, and even Trump himself, are not going away anytime soon. Understanding Trump’s appeal can explain his continued support and how other candidates can seize upon the movement he built. This research paper will explore the connection between despair and the rise of Donald Trump. It will use data on unemployment, education levels, and levels of drug- and alcohol-related deaths and suicide taken from the swing state of Michigan, which narrowly helped Trump win the 2016 election. The data section will show that Trump performed better in places where residents seemed more likely to feel economically and socially left behind. However, we must first classify and understand what scholars mean when they discuss despair in rural, working-class America. Understanding Rural Support for Trump Political scientist Katherine Cramer, in her book Politics of Resentment, argues that rural politics can be understood as stemming from the creation of a rural community consciousness, rooted in resentment toward “elites” and urbanites (2). Through interviews with a group of locals in rural Wisconsin, Cramer discovered what rural consciousness looks like and defines it as three sentiments: caring about perspectives of power, primarily that urban areas have all of it and rural areas have none; respect for the “rural way of life”; and the perspective that too few resources are allocated to rural areas (3). All in all, her definition of rural community consciousness paints a picture of rural Americans feeling that urban Americans, and by extension government officials who are overly influenced by urban values, have no respect for their way of life, and are draining rural resources and livelihoods through welfare programs and other legislative efforts that advantage urban areas. This perceived allocation of resources toward exclusively urban areas is not actually the case, and many government funds and programs target rural areas. However, governmental bodies do not always prioritize marketing their budget allocations and as a result many rural communities are uninformed about the inner workings of the political system. In addition, because rural Americans are disillusioned, they have low desire to learn about government activities, leading these causal beliefs to go unchallenged and unresearched (4). This breakdown in communication and understanding has long-reaching effects. The Republican Party has seized upon these sentiments to further its agenda. Many rural Americans are wary of governmental employees and programs that they view as elite and guilty of stealing rural money for personal or political gain (5). Journalist Thomas Frank understands the power of rural resentment but argues that it is not necessarily about a lack of understanding of budgetary inner workings or community anger but is rather about character assessment. He asserts that while resentment and hostility are important in understanding the rural vote, the most crucial factor is actually authenticity.6 Republicans, he argues, have successfully rebranded Democrats as out-of-touch city elites worthy of scorn. Even as Republican political figures push legislation that hurts working-class Americans, they successfully market themselves as relatable, the politicians that a voter would want to have a beer with (7). This authenticity wins them voters despite their lack of concrete political achievements for lower-income, working-class Americans. When putting these scholarly findings in conversation with the campaign message on which Trump ran, it is easy to see how in 2016 Trump played upon the resentment and despair of rural areas by framing the Democrats, and by extension the urban liberal elite, as the cause for all problems. Throughout the campaign, Trump had a habit of saying exactly what was on his mind, perhaps giving him an air of over-a-beer-authenticity and relatability—he certainly appeared honest due to his unfiltered dialogue. Moreover, his lack of political experience likely worked in his favor in areas where government officials are seen as untrustworthy. By contrast, his opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had held governmental office at various levels for many years, which played into Trump’s painting of her in the eyes of many rural communities as an urban elite living off the people’s hard earned money. Further complicating the relationship between rural and urban areas is the perception that urban areas are more liberal or have different ways of life. Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva argues that some rural voting patterns can be explained by the considerable amount of fear that exists in many of these places, both around shrinking economic opportunities and the general future of communities (8). This fear often manifests itself as a feeling that America must return to “disciplined values” such as hard work, or worries that immigrants are stealing all the well-paying jobs. In his campaign, Trump certainly identified these fears (9). This could be seen in his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, seemingly placing the blame on them for the lack of decent-paying jobs. Trump also emphasized his skills as a businessman, arguing that they would help him run the country and increase the job market. Many authors believe that Trump’s strong performance in rural counties can be explained by the “landscapes of despair” theory, arguing that all of the areas in which Trump over-performed or Clinton underperformed have experienced immense social, economic, and health declines over the past several decades. These authors believe that Trump appeals to voters who are not necessarily the poorest in America but whose lives are worse off than they were several decades ago (10). Trump spoke to that pain and offered these Americans a message that appealed to their despair. Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens find that economic conditions have changed over time throughout rural communities, with urban centers becoming more prominent and fewer agricultural jobs available. However, they find that not all rural areas are doing uniformly poorly economically across America. Instead, there has been “profound structural change” in most of these areas in terms of the types of employment available (11). This structural change could contribute to the feeling among many rural Americans of having been left behind and could also explain some of the draw to Trump’s nationalism, as trade and increased globalization, along with new technology, have contributed to this extreme change (12). Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown agree with this theory and find a correlation be- tween higher rates of opioid addiction in a county and the percent of the county that voted for Trump (13). They found that opioid addiction is one way to measure the sociocultural and economic factors that often created support for Trump and noted that simple unemployment measurements fail to capture this same trend. These two pieces of data imply that the voting patterns of Trump’s supporters do not correspond with being worse off economically than the rest of America, but rather are related to whether people personally feel like they and their communities are backsliding, with opioid addiction as an indicator of this attitude. Gollust and Miller argue that the opioid crisis triggered support for Trump, not necessarily because it is a measurement of sociocultural factors within communities, but because it triggered a comparison in the minds of people living in communities where the crisis was rampant (14). Through experimentation, Gollust and Miller found that Republicans and Trump supporters were more likely than Democrats to view whites as the political losers in the country (15). It is easy to see how Trump’s aggressive rhetoric appealed to people who felt like they were losing and that they needed a fighter to advocate for them. Journalists and Political Research Associates Berlet and Sunshine believe that Trump’s rise can be attributed to changing ways of life and Trump’s connection to right-wing populism (16). They argue that there was a rise in the notion that the white-Christian-heterosexual-American way of life is “under threat” in the years preceding the election. They believe that Trump’s brash candidness, his willing- ness to invoke Islamophobia, homophobia, and xenophobia, and his appeals to Christianity and the patriarchy tapped into a deep-simmering rage that had been growing among rural people (17). In this way, white racial antagonism contributed to Trump’s success. Rural Americans redirected their despair into rage toward those individuals and collectives that they perceived as a threat to their way of life. This argument is heavily focused on the effects of bigotry and anger on people’s voting choices, whereas several other authors, such as Cramer and Frank, believe that rural support for Trump was much less rage-based and much more about a lack of trust in government and the feeling of being neglected for years. We believe that the theories of despair and feelings of backsliding can explain some of the trend toward rural support for Trump in 2016. We believe that data will show that the most important despair factors depict not how badly off a community was in 2016, but rather the comparative: how much worse off it was in 2016 compared to several decades earlier. Finally, we agree with Cramer’s theory of rural consciousness and feel that it may have played a role in general distrust for Clinton as a candidate, but found it impossible to test those attitudes given the data available. Methodology To test the effect of rural pain and despair in connection to GOP voting share in Michigan, we used data at the county level, primarily from 2016, which came from the United States Census Bureau and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (18). We focused specifically on the 2016 election because of the connection between Donald Trump’s share of the vote and struggling rural voters, which was higher than previous GOP candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain (19), as well as Trump’s reputation as an outsider (20). We chose to look at data from all Michigan counties, regardless of which candidate the county voted for or whether the county flipped parties between 2012 and 2016. We chose not to look exclusively at flipped counties because Trump flipped only twelve counties in Michigan. In order to obtain a statistically significant and unbiased result about the effects despair factors had on county result data, more than twelve data points were needed. We instead measured the effect of despair factors on the vote share that Trump received in each county in 2016. We defined six despair factors to represent the challenges and pains each county faced at the time of, or leading up to, the 2016 election. The first three of these factors are defined as the percent change in age-standardized mortality rates be- tween 1980 and 2014 for the following: alcohol use disorders, drug use disorders, and self-harm injuries ( alcoholchange , drugchange , and selfchange , respectively). The source from which we obtained information on drug use disorder–related fatalities did not provide a breakdown by substance so we are unable to determine how much of this factor can be attributed to the ongoing opioid crisis. However, due to the sweeping nature of the crisis, particularly in rural working-class communities, we believe there is some relationship between the drug-use-disorder mortality rate and the opioid crisis (21). Factors that measure changes in living conditions over time, such as changes in fatal overdoses, alcohol deaths, and suicides, will test whether despair is truly about voters’ communities becoming worse than they were before. The fourth despair factor ( undereducated ) represents the education level of each county, using the percent of adults over 18 whose highest educational attainment in 2014 was a high school degree or less. This is an important factor to examine while exploring despair because lower levels of education limit career and income options and are often correlated with greater instances of feeling trapped or stuck in a community (22). The final two factors in the exploration are unemployment and the percentage of the county population that died of any cause in 2016. This last factor is important to consider because higher death rates often show that a county has an aging population and can accordingly suggest that younger people are choosing to leave. If the theories described above are true, unemployment should not matter as much because the “landscapes of despair” theory focuses on decline in communities and in economic opportunities, meaning many voters could be employed but working longer hours, harder jobs, getting paid less, or feeling like they have fewer opportunities than they once did. To test this we ran the same statistical analysis for unemployment but specifically looked at whether the variable was statistically significant in predicting the Trump vote. If it was not, that would prove Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theory that unemployment is not the best measure of Trump’s support in 2016. We used two statistical methods of analysis. First, we used histograms to compare a single despair factor, such as percent change in alcohol use disorder–related deaths, against the way that the county voted in 2016 to see if certain factors of despair disproportionately affected one party’s vote share. Second, we used the regression equation below to test our hypothesis that the six aforementioned despair factors led to Trump’s higher vote share in Michigan. Finally, we analyzed the despair factors individually to show their discrete effects on the GOP vote share in Michigan’s 2016 election. TRUMPSHAREi = β0 + β1DRUGCHANGEi + β2ALCOHOLCHANGEi + β3SELFCHANGEi + β4UNDEREDUCATEDi +β5UNEMPLOYMENTi +β6PRCNTDEATHSi +εi We fit the model using the county-level data we gathered to examine whether the test statistic led us to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between these six despair factors and the percent of the vote share that Trump received in Michigan in 2016. We also used the R-squared from this regression to determine how strong the linear relationship of the regression equation was. Results and Discussion The results we found conclusively show that we can reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between the six despair factors and Trump’s success in a county. The first statistical method we used was comparing histograms of each factor broken down by party identification. We found graphical evidence to suggest that death rates, suicide, undereducation, and unemployment were disproportionately higher in Republican counties. Changes in alcohol and drug deaths ( alcoholchange and drugchange ) did not seem to be strongly correlated with one specific party, though counties that voted very strongly for Republicans did seem to have the highest values (highest percent changes from 1980 to 2014) for both of these variables. In some respects, the fact that many of these despair factors were higher in counties that voted Republican makes sense. By 2016, Barack Obama had been president for eight years, and often people who are unhappy with how the economy has been faring or who are unemployed vote for the candidate from the opposite party of the sitting president. However, large values of other factors, such as percent change in deaths from self-harm, are more alarming, as these first three variables measure changes dating back to the 1980s. We were surprised that alcohol and drug deaths seemed to be more evenly spread out between the parties than self-mortality, which was particularly unexpected due to the amount of literature on the correlation between those affected by the opioid epidemic and votes for Trump (23). Perhaps Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theory that increased opioid usage is a good instrumental variable for Trump support still holds because this data only looks at drug mortality, not drug use. It is entirely possible that Trump counties have higher drug use, but we could not make a conclusion based on the data (24). However, due to the large percentage of drug overdoses that can be attributed to the opioid crisis, it is surprising that more of Gollust and Miller’s and Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theories did not seem to be supported in this data set (25). The 3-D graphs in the appendix look at the relationships between the vote share that Trump received and percent changes in alcohol, drug, and self-harm mortality rates (26). The regression planes on these 3-D graphs show that percent change in self-harm mortality is the only variable with a clearly positive relationship to Trump votes. The other two changes in mortality variables have weaker linear relationships with Trump votes in part due to several county outliers. Exploring those outlier counties more and investigating why specifically they might not follow the common trend would be an interesting topic for ethnographic research. When we ran the regression analysis the first time, we included all six of the variables we categorized as measures of despair. We also ran the regression analysis with different combinations of these variables to see if we could increase the adjusted R-squared variable, which shows the accuracy of adding another variable to the model. We found that the model was most accurate when we excluded the unemployment value, and because its t-test statistic was not statistically significant, we made the decision to exclude it from the final regression we ran in order to have a more accurate model. At first, we were surprised that unemployment was not significant in the model; however, this seems to support the theory that many “despair voters” do have jobs—they are just low paying and highly stressful (27). This supports Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s analysis that the unemployment level is not a good measurement alone of whether a county voted heavily for Trump. More- over, the histogram shows that high levels of unemployment are not necessarily correlated with high percentages of the vote going to Trump. Clearly, there are other factors at play that this statistic fails to capture, and unemployment could be an incomplete benchmark for despair because it does not measure satisfaction in jobs nor whether a job pays a living wage. Overall, we found that a model with the five factors of despair besides unemployment gave an R-squared of .552, meaning that 55% of the variance among the percentage of votes Trump won in a certain county could be attributed to these factors alone. This is remarkably high considering that neither policies nor previous voting records were added into this regression. However, the only variables that were found to be statistically significant on their own were percent changes in self-harm deaths and percent of undereducated voters. We were surprised that percent changes in alcohol and fatal drug overdoses were not more significant than changes in self-harm deaths, but again, that could be partially attributed to the fact that the data only measures overdoses rather than frequency of use. While one would assume that there would be a positive representative relationship between the two, it is hard to know for sure. However, we can say that, on average, increases in despair in certain aspects of life are correlated with an increase in support for Trump in the 2016 election, supporting the original hypothesis of this paper that rural despair played into Trump’s win in Michigan in 2016. However, we fail to find definitive conclusions regarding some of the connections drawn in previous scholarly literature between opioid overdose and the Trump vote. Perhaps the most striking analysis is running the same regression but with Democratic vote share in the 2016 election and comparing the results with those from the Republican vote share. As seen in the table below, the coefficients for each variable nearly flip signs. A decrease in suicide-, alcohol-, and drug-related deaths, or other despair factors, can be expected on average to be associated with a positive increase among the percentage of the county “voting blue.” Counties that vote Democratic, at least on average, tend to have had some sort of positive change, on the individual or communal level, around certain measures of despair (28). This does not mean that Clinton voters were necessarily better off than all Trump voters across Michigan, but rather that Clinton voters had seen their lives improve, if only marginally, and Trump voters had not. Theories of despair regarding rural voters do not compare the lives of rural voters to those of voters in other areas of the state but rather investigate whether rural communities are worse off than they were several decades ago. Similarly, just because certain counties have seen an improvement in certain despair factors does not mean that their communities are not also grappling with alcohol, drug, and mental health issues. Additionally, better-educated counties tend to vote Democratic, with less-educated counties voting Republican. This is a reversal of certain historical trends (29). Again, at some level it is logical that voters who are doing better vote for the party that has been in power for the past several years. However, the data in these studies capture decades of crumbling communities. There is a downward trend in these communities in terms of levels of despair that shows that regardless of which party these counties vote for (whether they vote for the opposite party when they feel dissatisfied with the current one, or for the same party when things seem to be going well), neither party has been able to stop the 34-year trends of increases in suicide-, drug-, and alcohol-caused deaths. This validates theories of “rural consciousness” and “rural despair” by Cramer and Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens that rural communities clearly see and feel suffering in their communities and perceive a lack of attention and resources given to them (30). One could also argue that this supports Silva’s theory that many rural communities fear for their futures based on the downward spiral these communities have experienced for several years or decades (31). This fear could motivate voters to act more drastically or to believe that a massive change is necessary. In the voting booth, this could lead to their voting for a more unconventional candidate. Trump’s main slogan was “Make America Great Again,” suggesting that, at some level, he understood and was trying to court those experiencing this sense of despair. For many voters, America is the best it has ever been: we have unprecedented levels of rights and acceptance for women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Going back seems like regression, not progress. But as shown by this data, many of the counties that voted for Trump in 2016 were better off by certain metrics in 1980 than they are now. It makes sense that residents of these counties could be worried about the continuing decline of their communities and could want to go back to a better time and quality of life. Not to mention, according to Cramer’s thesis of rural consciousness, voters in rural Michigan could be very distrustful of any type of governmental employee promising change. Trump’s brand as a businessman with no prior political experience could have especially appealed to those affected by rural-consciousness thinking. His role as an outsider was relatable. His phrase “drain the swamp” directly spoke to the prevailing belief in these communities that Washington, DC is full of people who take taxpayers’ money and waste time. His opponent had been in the public eye for years in various government positions and was by extension seen, and marketed by conservative news outlets, as the leader of the “liberal elite.” Particularly in contrast with her, Trump could have seemed particularly appealing to those rural voters. The data we found strongly supports Cramer’s thesis that rural despair and resentment led to the crumbling of the Blue Wall. In order for Democrats to rebuild their former strongholds in these states, the party must examine the real pain and anger that many rural voters experience. They need to understand the hopeless- ness people are feeling and recognize why Trump specifically appeals to them. Trump, and the Republican Party, have been strategic in tapping into the anger, fear, and pain that rural voters feel. Democrats contributed to the phenomenon of rural consciousness and the belief that Democrats are coastal elites who neither care about nor understand middle America (32). Clinton and other Democrats have made several public missteps, including making fun of these voters, that have further reinforced this idea. Trump has succeeded in directing rural voters’ anger and mistrust toward the government, specifically bureaucracy and governmental programs that could actually help rural areas. Overall, Democrats need to strengthen their relationship with white working-class voters, and understanding rural despair and consciousness might be the first step to doing so. They need to consider creating messages that specifically address and appeal to rural voters and find and support candidates who can connect with them. To win back rural voters, Democrats also need to focus on messaging in rural America. That includes creating programs that provide resources and relief to these struggling areas, but also, perhaps more importantly, it requires making sure that rural communities are aware of these resources. If rural communities still view government as ineffective and uninterested in their problems, these programs will not be sufficient. It will take significant effort and messaging on behalf of Democrats to convince enough voters that the Democrats’ party, not Trump’s, actually represents rural Americans’ best interests. While President Biden managed to do this in 2020, very narrowly, it remains to be seen whether other Democratic candidates will be able to or will even want to capitalize on this messaging. It also remains to be seen which candidates will seem authentic to rural voters—clearly this was a big factor in Trump’s victory and was maybe an even bigger factor contributing to Clinton’s loss. Going forward, the Democrats will need to support candidates who can reach rural voters effectively and authentically, which remains a tall order. While Trump, not establishment Republicans, created a new coalition that drew on rural pain and despair, it would be naive to assume that the Republican Par- ty will not continue to take advantage of rural despair to win elections. Since Trump’s defeat, the messaging of the Republican Party has remained largely the same as when Trump was in office. If Democrats do not devote resources to successfully addressing these voters, they will have to accept the possibility that their once reliable Blue Wall will fall again or will never be rebuilt, and they will need to find another sizable coalition of voters to target in order to win elections at every single level. Appendix Endnotes 1 Pottie-Sherman, “Rust and Reinvention,” 2. 2 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, 11. 3 Ibid., 54. 4 Cramer and Toff, “The Fact of Experience.” 5 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127. 6 Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 113. 7 Thomas, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 119. 8 Silva, We’re Still Here, 45. 9 Inglehart and Norris, “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties.” 10 Monnat and Brown, “More than a Rural Revolt.” 11 Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens, “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond,” 101. 12 Ibid, 117. 13 Goodwin et al., “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” e180450. 14 Gollust, and Miller, “Framing the Opioid Crisis: Do Racial Frames Shape Beliefs of Whites Losing Ground?” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 45, no. 2 (April 2020): 241-276. 15 Gollust, and Miller, “Framing the Opioid Crisis: Do Racial Frames Shape Beliefs of Whites Losing Ground?” 16 Berlet and Sunshine, “Rural Rage,” 480–82. 17 Ibid, 490. 18 Foster-Molina and Warren, Partisan Voting, County Demographics, and Deaths of Despair Data. 19 Monnat, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” 20 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127-137. 21 Florian Sichart et al., “The Opioid Crisis and Republican Vote Share.” 22 Autor, Katz, and Kearney, “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” 23 Goodwin et al., “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” e180450. 24 Ibid. 25 Imtiaz et al., “Recent Changes in Trends of Opioid Overdose Deaths in North America.” 26 Created with the help of Ella Foster-Molina. 27 Torraco, “The Persistence of Working Poor Families in a Changing U.S. Job Market.” 28 We do not mean to suggest that Democratic voters do not face their own share of struggles, rather that this data on average suggests that counties that voted Democratic were less affected by these specific measures of despair in 2016. 29 Harris, “America Is Divided by Education.” 30 Goetz, Partridge, and Stevens, “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 40, no. 1 (February 16, 2018). 31 Kim Parker et al., “Similarities and Differences between Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities in America.” 32 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127-137. 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Florian Sichart, Jacob Chapman, Brooklyn Han, Hasan Younis, and Hallamund Meena. “The Opioid Crisis and Republican Vote Share.” LSE Undergraduate Political Review , February 13, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ lseupr/2021/02/13/the-opioid-crisis-and-republican-vote-share/. Foster-Molina and Warren. Partisan Voting, County Demographics, and Deaths of De- spair Data , February 2019. Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Goetz, Stephan J, Mark D Partridge, and Heather M Stephens. “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 40, no. 1 (March 2018): 97–118. https://doi. org/10.1093/aepp/ppx061. Goodwin, James S., Yong-Fang Kuo, David Brown, David Juurlink, and Mukaila Raji. “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Pat- terns in US Counties in 2016.” JAMA Network Open 1, no. 2 (June 22, 2018): e180450. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.0450. Harris, Adam. “America Is Divided by Education.” The Atlantic, November 7, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/educa-tion-gap-explains-american- politics/575113/. Imtiaz, Sameer, Kevin D. Shield, Benedikt Fischer, Tara Elton-Marshall, Bundit Sornpaisarn, Charlotte Probst, and Jürgen Rehm. “Recent Changes in Trends of Opioid Overdose Deaths in North America.” Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 15, no. 1 (December 2020): 66. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13011-020-00308-z. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Par- ties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 443–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000111. Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, and Ruth Igielnik. “Similarities and Differences between Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities in America.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Pew Research Center, May 22, 2018. https:// www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-di- vides- urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/. Monnat, Shannon M. “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” 2016. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27976.62728. Monnat, Shannon M., and David L. Brown. “More than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Journal of Rural Studies 55 (October 2017): 227–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrur- stud.2017.08.010. 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Advisory Board The Advisory Board is a group of eminent scholars who participate in the peer review editorial process and provide guidance. Robert Blair Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 2015 Yale University Justin Broackes Professor of Philosophy Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1986 Oxford University David Christensen Professor of Philosophy Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1987 University of California, Los Angeles Mark Cladis Professor of Religious Studies Brown University PhD. Religion, 1988 Princeton University Linda Cook Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 1985 Columbia University Daniel J. D'Amico Professor of Economics Brown University PhD. Economics, 2008 George Mason University Brandon Davis Professor of Law and Society Kansas University PhD. Political Science, 2017 University of Alabama Shawn Fraistat Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 2014 Yale University Kevin Duong Professor of Political Science Bard College PhD. Political Science, 2017 Cornell University Gianna Englert Professor of Political Science Southern Methodist University PhD. Government, 2016 Georgetown University Bradford Gibbs Professor of Economics Brown University Managing Director, 2008-2013 Morgan Stanley (London, Johannesburg) Stephen Kinzer Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs Brown University Sharon Krause Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Theory, 1998 Harvard University Michael Kuelwein Professor of Economics Pomona College PhD. Economics, 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Charles Larmore Professor of Philosophy Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1978 Yale University Glenn Loury Professor of Economics Brown University PhD. Economics, 1976 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rose McDermott Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 1991 Stanford University Kenneth Miller Professor of Biology Brown University PhD. Biology, 1974 University of Colorado Benjamin Powell Professor of Economics Texas Tech University PhD. Economics, 2003 George Mason University Grigorios Siourounis Professor of Economics Brown University PhD. Economics, 2004 London Business School David Skarbeck Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Economics, 2010 George Mason University Emily Skarbeck Professor of Political Theory Brown University PhD. Economics, 2009 George Mason University Nina Tannenwald Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. International Relations, Political Theory, 1996 Cornell University John Tomasi Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1993 Oxford University Michael Vorenberg Professor of History Brown University PhD. American History, 1995 Harvard University

Author Name < Back Against the Mainstream: How Modern Monetary Theory and the Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight Challenge Conventional Wisdom Justin Lee Introduction Changing entrenched beliefs about economics is a difficult task, for it is challenging to distill fragmented facts into prudent judgements. As economic theories rely heavily on assumptions and macroeconomic statistics, a critical divergence exists between ideas most persuasive to the mainstream and those best supported by logic and empirical evidence. In this paper, I will analyze the central tenets of the modern monetary theory (MMT), a recent proposal that governments with sovereign currencies, rather than domestic taxpayers, solely finance all public spending. Furthermore, I will relate the misconceptions about public spending, which MMT rebuts, to the idea of millionaire tax flight, a novel refutation against claims of the severity of debt crises. I will demonstrate parallels in the history of reception and ideological grounds of these two concepts where epistemic and social structures preclude the acceptance of such arguments among “mainstream” economic ideas. Lastly, I will provide an overview of the possible groups that not only have vested interests in blocking these ideas but have also created certain inhibitive barriers to them. This report will use evidence to advocate on the two arguments’ behalf and will identify their shared characteristics that make them distinct from other contemporary policy issues. Background President Ronald Reagan once proclaimed: “We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.” Such conventional wisdom forms when the vast majority of people come to accept a group of ideas as fact. The misconception that the federal government cannot “spend beyond its means” and that millionaires flee high-tax areas by any means necessary has been propagated through numerous channels - most notably, media outlets such as Fox News - over the years by combining both personal experience and “common sense.” What happens, however, when there is new data presented that goes against the stream of ideas already established? What if these novel ideas rely upon an entirely different logical foundation for their support? What if the “common sense” originally used as the basis for prior justifications was incomplete or even flawed? An idea does not become “conventional wisdom” and gain “acceptance into the mainstream” for its proven veracity; rather, it becomes accepted as an absolute truth through its promotion by influential media outlets and politicians. Recent history has taught us that some “plausible ideas” should not deserve their wide acceptance as scientific inquiry demands. Since the 1980s, for example, the concept of a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) has been prominently accepted as an influential theory among most economists. A NAIRU is the unemployment rate of an economy associated with a constant rate of inflation; a rise in unemployment is associated with a decrease in inflation, whereas a decline in unemployment causes an increase. Despite the success of Milton Friedman's explanation for the “natural” rate of unemployment throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, economic data in the years since the mid-1990s have weakened Friedman’s case. The US economy has seen low unemployment and low changes in inflation as well as high unemployment and high changes in inflation. In fact, Robert Gordon pointed out the external supply shocks caused during the early 1970s in an effort to display “inflation initiated not by excess demand but by commodity shortages,” circumstances that are quite noticeable in the fluctuating consumption patterns and supply chain issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. In spite of these recent developments and their implications on Friedman’s original hypothesis, the NAIRU remains “an important building block of business cycle theory.” Figure 1: Unemployment Rate and the Percent Change in the CPI since 1950 Routinely, little efforts have been made to temper an “inflation equals bad” mentality that plagues the public in the United States every few years. Similar futile simplifications are made about raising taxes for the rich as politicians claim that the wealthy will flee in droves, causing large drops in tax revenue – a claim that relies largely on hypothetical posturing rather than definitive evidence in its favor. The resolution of these two policy problems requires the reversal of hardened opinions among the general public and hard-nosed experts alike. Rising prices can be inconvenient for many – businesses may need to change their “sticker” prices while workers may not be able to renegotiate with their employers for higher wages until the end of their current contracts. Likewise, most Americans are neither millionaires nor billionaires and may often have an incomplete perception of what their life decisions would be like if they were not burdened by personal financial pressures. Such misunderstandings include failing to account for one’s close network of friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers that shapes one’s decisions to move. These circumstances are what make it so difficult to propose ideas that run counter to what many have grown to accept as convention. Analysis Perception versus reality Misconceptions about both MMT and millionaire tax flight stem from fundamental differences between public perceptions of the two phenomena and their true implications. The media is partly to blame for this misalignment. From deficit hawks in Congress to political pundits on talk shows, the term “government deficit” is commonly used as a pejorative to counter any argument in favor of increased public spending. While prominent public figures, including billionaire Elon Musk, may perceive the government budget as identical to the personal spending habits of everyday Americans or even small, local businesses, the reality is that the United States federal government – specifically the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve – is the only entity that retains the right to issue dollars. As a nation with a sovereign currency, the United States has complete discretion over its money supply and interest rates; it can also issue intergenerational debt. This could not be further from the truth for a household, which relies upon income to buy goods and services, or a business, which uses profits to fund production, investment in inventories, and innovation. As I will examine in further detail in a later section, the fallacies underlying perceptions of the federal budget reverberate across the political spectrum, ranging from cries for a smaller government during the Reagan/Thatcher era to proclamations of “tightening belts” by President Obama in his 2010 State of the Union Address. “Crowding out,” the idea that economic activity contracts with deficit-financed expenditures, is one of the most common rebuttals to increased public spending. The neoliberal view of the crowding out effect entails the government competing with private entrepreneurs for capital to finance public spending. However, proponents of the idea that private investment will be “crowded out” if a government spends “beyond its means” fail to consider that the United States is an issuer of its own sovereign currency. Any amount of public spending that exceeds tax revenue is merely printed and issued by the US Treasury. The purpose of selling bonds after an increase in government expenditures is not necessarily to finance these payments but rather to “prevent a large infusion of reserves from pushing the overnight interest rate below the Fed’s target level.” When the federal government chooses to increase deficit spending, US Treasuries take the place of the reserve balances and maintain the aggregate quantity of reserves in the financial system. In other words, “Uncle Sam [does not] enter the market in competition with other borrowers,” such as Citigroup or Morgan Stanley. We see a similar divide between perception and reality for the myth of the millionaire tax flight. According to the Global Wealth Report of 2021, only eight percent of Americans are considered millionaires, those presumably most knowledgeable about millionaire migration. However, the perception that millionaires will definitely flee their well-nested homes for lower tax regions lingers in a large segment of the non-millionaire population. In reality, while 47% of millionaire migrations in the United States from 1999 to 2011 were from high-tax to low-tax states, roughly 32% of such migrations occurred in the opposite direction. While this result is not insignificant, there is no discernible causal relationship in which a tax hike will dramatically force millionaires to states that have lower taxes - a prospect state governments may fear will drive down local tax revenues. Figure 2: Percent of US population migrating An interesting case study is seen in the counties that border the states of Oregon and Washington, all of which are located in a region with the highest relative difference in income taxes between bordering states. Logically, one would expect more millionaires to live in the state with relatively low income taxes – Washington – rather than the state with relatively high income taxes – Oregon. However, the data shows that millionaires tend to cluster in Oregon rather than Washington even after considering tax codes that have been in place for many years. While the story of the Oregon-Washington border is unusual – most data indicates that in other border regions, millionaires “tend to cluster on the low-tax side overall” – there is no evidence that outlines a significant causal relationship between areas of greater taxation and areas with higher rates of millionaire migration. Figure 3: Counties bordering Washington and Oregon Doomsday is coming! When new public spending measures are proposed to combat a recession, cries about the “debt ceiling” from fear-mongering politicians usually arise. Other figures, such as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, flirt with the fallacy of cratering tax revenues caused by millionaire migration. If the rift between perception and reality presented earlier can be attributed to a lack of detailed economic expertise among the general public, then the parallels between MMT and the myth of millionaire tax flight presented here demonstrate how reality has been warped into shaping false narratives about the potential for drastic economic reform. Recent data indicating that unemployment and inflation do not perfectly align with the NAIRU theory presented in the background section may signal the dogmatic nature of academics within the field of economics. To illustrate this point, it is worth scrutinizing academic discourse relating to the 2008 financial crisis. For instance, “too big to fail” was a common platitude offered by economic “experts” in the early 2000s as a way to divert public scrutiny from concerning behavior among Wall Street banks, such as the rising number of mergers and increasingly predatory loans. However, once an impending economic disaster loomed and the federal government stepped in to rescue Wall Street, these same experts responded with confusion over where their models had gone severely wrong. As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes, “more important [than economists’ predictive failure] was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.” Meanwhile, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was welcomed with open arms by financial institutions seeking to rid their balance sheets of illiquid assets. Yet when it came to increasing public expenditure to support low- and middle-income Americans affected by the subprime mortgage crisis, academics such as then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers deemed public spending to be excessive and costly. This 180-degree shift in tone lies at the core of the MMT argument; the federal government had the ability to both provide greater fiscal stimulus and purchase Wall Street’s toxic assets because the United States is an issuer of its own sovereign currency. Figure 4: How MMT accounts for market/government interactions on taxation and public spending Likewise, politicians have boldly proclaimed that tax hikes on millionaires will lead to their disastrous departure. Using data from the same study presented earlier on millionaire migrations between 1999 and 2011, we see that overall migration patterns among millionaires tend to be very subtle with only 2.4% of them choosing to migrate. Only a small portion – just 0.3% – of the total millionaire population chose to migrate from a high-tax state to a low-tax state. Beyond ignoring the clear evidence that makes the millionaire tax flight argument dubious, politicians also downplay the importance of location as a crucial form of social capital. Figure 5: Migration Rates by Age, for Different Levels of Education While there are numerous interpersonal factors that contribute to a person’s decision to move, the strongest drivers of migration include the prospect of greater economic opportunity or an immediate danger that threatens personal safety, neither of which are of particular concern for the average superstar athlete or hedge fund manager. For a person who has attained a certain level of “elite income,” interpersonal relationships and connections are “immobile” factors that influence this person’s wellbeing far beyond their marginal tax bracket. Such considerations, which are undoubtedly important to the social interactions of any group of people, are conveniently left out in the propagation of the myth of millionaire tax flight. Like the challenges that proponents of MMT face, these obstacles prevent substantial reforms towards more equitable taxation laws. The bulwarks against change Contemporary discourse on public spending conveniently fails to acknowledge the ability for the Federal Reserve to curb massive inflation through their control of interest rates and untapped potential revenues from higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy. As discussed, deficit-averse politicians use fear-mongering and scare tactics to deter support for these ideas. Their adamance reveals a similarity between those who stand to lose if such policies are enacted. MMT economists view public spending as a way to stimulate a lagging economy and use their novel theory as a means to justify higher expenditures in areas such as social welfare, healthcare benefits, and infrastructure investments. The beneficiaries of such programs include the elderly, the poor, and the sick – more generally the non-millionaire/billionaire class. Since the start of neoliberalism’s grip on Washington in the 1980s, deficit hawks have decried the prospect of increased government spending on social programs. Yet, these same government officials openly endorsed the $8 trillion “War on Terror” as well as the allocation of billions of dollars in discretionary spending to the Pentagon every year. On the flip side of the deficit debate, tax reform has been on the legislative agenda for years, but in recent decades, such reforms have been more regressive than ones made in the past. Any effort to stymie raising taxes on millionaires has brought about a constant propagation of the myth of the millionaire tax flight by politicians and academics alike. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein claims that higher state taxes on the wealthy have little effect on redistributing income and merely lead to greater migration by the wealthy. Such misrepresentations of government finance and migration trends may originate from the entrenched view of such matters within economics. However, it is certain that political lobbying, particularly in the years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, has allowed the interests of the wealthy to be overrepresented in legislative decisions on public spending and tax reform. We often see that these obstacles prevent substantive action for other policy problems as well, such as combating climate change, dismantling the prison industrial complex, or engaging in international trade wars. In all of these instances, the vested interests of the donor class take charge. MMT and the myth of millionaire tax flight occupy unique positions among these challenging policy problems due to their potential for dramatic economic change among the benefiting stakeholders. It is even possible to create a parallel between the two ideas, as MMT views progressive taxation as a means to promote a more equitable society rather than as a hindrance for public programs. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that America’s millionaires use arguments such as the myth of millionaire tax flight to prevent higher taxation on the wealthy and the alarmism over deficits in order to curtail social spending. The rhetoric of politics Appealing to conventional wisdom is often a politically convenient argument to employ. Explaining every minute aspect of government finance takes time and effort and is – more importantly – unrelatable for most voters. The stagnation of real wages since the 1970s has forced middle- and lower-income households to grow accustomed to restricting their spending habits. Listening to rhetoric of their elected officials “wasting away” their hard-earned tax dollars can incite ire among constituents, making ideas such as modern monetary theory appear far-fetched. One study conducted by Kendall, Nannicini, and Trebbi indicates that such rhetoric has a meaningful impact on politicians’ public perceptions. This is perhaps the reason why the politicians mentioned in (Section A) were unanimous in agreement over concerns about the fiscal deficit. While the degree of this agreement varies between politicians, there appears to be a reluctance to take the MMT perspective on this issue. Perhaps the word “deficit” being written in big, red letters on the minds of voters on Election Day is political suicide for anyone who dares to be portrayed as a proponent of reckless spending. The convenience of political arguments against higher taxes on the rich is similar to that of arguments echoed in the debate against higher corporate taxes – that the wealthy and resourceful create jobs for others and therefore require lower tax rates to create opportunities for wealth that “trickle down” to the rest of the population. These long-established views have become entrenched in the common sense of the public and have rendered idiosyncratic ideas incapable of breaking into the mainstream. Conclusions and a Way Forward Both ideas examined in this paper rely upon very basic truths – (1) no one outside of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve can issue US dollars, and (2) millionaires, no matter how much wealthier they may be than the average American, rely upon and seek to maintain their established social networks. Accepting these two statements as facts can drastically alter policy discussions on both public spending and taxation on a federal level. Time is arguably the most critical component to changing public perceptions of social spending and equitable tax reform. Even Stephanie Kelton, one of the leading experts on MMT, admits that she herself was skeptical upon her first encounter with the theory. The benefit of hindsight has revealed the shortcomings of the global economic order, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The crisis presented itself as an opportunity for decisive action in a new direction, but instead, haste and imprudence allowed fiscal austerity to captivate the minds of leaders and economists around the world. While MMT is far from a panacea for all economic uncertainties, even economists who are more supportive of the traditional view on fiscal deficits, such as N. Gregory Mankiw, have recognized that MMT provides some useful insights that the traditional view may have historically overlooked. The COVID-19 pandemic may serve as an inflection point for a more active role of governments in markets as countries around the world have increased their public spending to avoid recessions. It is here, however, that an important limiting rule of MMT must be mentioned - inflation. In the event of large spikes in prices - as is the case at the time of this writing in Spring 2022 - using MMT as a blank check to drive up public spending would not be prudent and would likely make the inflationary crisis worse. During such times, coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities to adjust interest rates and temper expectations of future inflation is vital. Despite these limitations, circumstantial anomalies should not render the entire idea invalid. To truly tackle challenging policy problems, we must look to audacious economic ideas such as Modern Monetary Theory and refute arcane, baseless ones such as the myth of millionaire tax flight. 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Douglas Beal The Financial Case for Nations and Corporations to Put People and the Planet First Douglas Beal We are in a period of increasing societal disruption. Pressure is mounting to ad- dress the climate crisis. Racial equity issues have moved to the forefront. And the COVID-19 pandemic has caused untold suffering and death and upended economies around the globe. In the past, addressing such issues has been seen primarily as the responsibility of government. But increasingly, there are expectations that the private sector must play a leading role in driving progress on major societal challenges. I, along with my colleagues at Boston Consulting Group, have spent the last decade supporting nations and corporations in addressing social and environmental issues—and measuring how their efforts impact country GDP and company financial performance. My work in this area began with economic development, helping nations to advance in a way that improved the living standards of citizens. More recently I refocused on private sector work, helping companies and investors create strategies to deliver both business and societal value. The research and client work I’ve done in both areas reveal a powerful insight: whether one is talking about a country’s economic growth or a company’s prof- its or returns for shareholders, performance is not degraded by focusing on how decisions impact people and the planet. Rather, the evidence is mounting that integrating such factors into strategy enhances financial performance. Putting Well-Being at the Heart of a Nation’s Strategy BCG’s insight on these dynamics started with our work in the area of economic development. As we supported presidents and prime ministers around the world in honing their development strategies, it became clear they were looking for a way to measure their progress beyond the purely financial benchmark of GDP. This reflected their acknowledgement that robust GDP per capita growth in the short term means little if living standards are undermined in the long term (by poor health, underinvestment in education, a degraded environment, and a widening gap between rich and poor). The Sustainable Development Goals had not yet been put in place at this time, meaning a globally-recognized holistic framework for measuring country progress did not exist. We set out to create one. This led to some deep conversations about what really matters for a society. As Robert F. Kennedy said, GDP “measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” We had to ask our- selves: What actually makes life worthwhile? We thought about general measures of happiness, for example, and whether levels of citizen happiness would be a good barometer for a nation’s performance. Ultimately, we decided that happiness would be too subjective for what we wanted to achieve. Instead we decided to focus on well-being , the conditions and quality of life people experience. We then asked ourselves: how do you measure well-being—and how can a government contribute to it? We spoke with numerous experts and dug into the re- search on well-being to determine what factors should comprise our measure. We eventually zeroed in on 10 dimensions: income, economic stability, employment, health, education, infrastructure, equality, civil society, governance, and environment. We identified a series of indicators for each—a total of 40 in all. The result was the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment, a diagnostic tool and measurement framework launched in 2012. SEDA allows us to track how a country’s well-being compares to that of other nations, determine the pace of progress over time, and identify areas in which countries are performing well or need to improve. SEDA revealed valuable insights. First, not surprisingly, countries with higher levels of wealth tended to have higher well-being. Norway, for example, has had the highest level of well-being relative to the rest of the world every year since we launched SEDA. Second, not all countries convert their wealth (GDP per capita) into well-being at equal rates. Some deliver well-being levels that are beyond what one would expect given the country’s wealth—and others deliver well-being far be- low what would be expected. In recent years Vietnam has been among the leading countries in terms of converting wealth into well-being—outpacing countries such as Germany, France, and the US on this metric. Third, inequality—and not just income inequality—has a major impact on well-being. Certainly, income inequality gets significant attention in political and media circles. But SEDA captures a broader view, assessing not only income inequality but also the lack of equity in access to health care and education as well. And our analysis last year found, somewhat surprisingly, that high levels of social inequality are a greater drag on well-being than high levels of income equality. Over the years, as we continued to assess country levels of well-being, public sector clients, journalists, and others often raised a similar question. While it was clear that countries with higher levels of wealth or growth had more resources to advance well-being, we were frequently asked if the reverse was true. So, was there evidence that countries with a better record on well-being ultimately posted more robust GDP growth? In 2018 we decided to take a stab at answering that question. By then we could access ten years’ worth of SEDA data—enough time to give us confidence we could identify a long-term trend if it existed. Drawing on data for all 152 countries in our data set, we looked at a country’s initial well-being performance relative to its wealth in the period leading up to and including the financial crisis (from 2007 through 2009)—and its growth rate in the decade that followed. We found that on average, countries that produced better well-being for their population given their level of wealth did in fact have a higher GDP growth rate in the future. Our analysis also found that countries that had a better record at delivering well-being for citizens were more resilient during the financial crisis, taking fewer months to recover to pre-crisis GDP levels than countries with weaker records on well-being. It turns out that taking care of people and the planet is good economics. Focusing on Total Societal Impact As we worked with nations on development strategies, we urged them to think strategically about integrating the private sector into those efforts. This included understanding where the country’s most pressing needs existed and identifying the industries and companies that could play a role in addressing those needs. Banks, for example, can be key partners in expanding access to capital for entrepreneurs. Food manufacturers that expand their supply chain to include small-holder farmers can help raise incomes for those individuals and reduce poverty rates overall. And biopharmaceutical companies that move to expand access to medicine can play a vital role in improving health outcomes. Time and time again my economic development work in the public sector rein- forced the importance of the private sector in advancing important societal issues. In 2016, I started focusing more on working directly with large multinational corporations to find ways to improve both business returns and their positive impact on society. At that time, academic research had shown that integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance into investment decisions led to better returns from a portfolio perspective. What that meant for individual businesses was not quite as clear. Most of our clients are large corporations—and they had a lot of questions. First, CEOs and CFOs were grappling with whether they should think of good ESG performance as a cost or an opportunity. They also wanted to understand what specific ESG topics were most important for their industry. So, we set out to prove that in fact ESG is an opportunity—not a cost—and to identify those topics that matter for specific industries. In 2017, I joined a group of colleagues in the Social Impact practice to conduct a detailed study of ESG performance in four industries: biopharmaceuticals, oil and gas, consumer packaged goods, and retail and business banking. We assessed company performance in dozens of ESG topics, such as ensuring a responsible environmental footprint or promoting equal opportunity. We looked for any correlation with market valuation multiples and margins. Our goal was to determine whether companies that excelled in those areas, enhancing what we call Total Societal Impact (TSI), saw a difference in financial performance versus companies that lagged in those ESG areas. Now, as members of the Social Impact practice, we were of course hoping we’d find a link. In fact, the results exceeded our expectations. Nonfinancial performance (as captured by the ESG metrics) has a statistically significant positive correlation with the valuation multiples of companies in all the industries we analyzed. In each industry, investors rewarded the top performers in specific ESG topics with valuation multiples 3% to 19% higher, all else being equal, than those of the median performers in those topics. And top performers in certain ESG topics had margins that were up to 12.4 percentage points higher, all else being equal, than those of the median performers in those topics. The bottom line: not only was there no penalty for focusing on ESG, but companies that performed well in critical ESG areas were rewarded in the market. The Moment of Truth Our work in SEDA and TSI were completely different—looking at different players, using different methodologies, and conducted at different times. Yet the results yielded strikingly parallel insights: putting people and the planet at the center of strategy improves financial performance. Those insights have major implications for nations and companies as they navigate the current period of turbulence and disruption. Certainly, it is too early to know which countries around the world will prove more resilient in the face of the pandemic. However, our research does support the view that those nations that design recovery strategies that support citizen well-being are likely to fare best. In particular, governments should design economic re- vitalization programs that don’t just position their nation for economic success in the future, but also ensure the benefits of any gains are equally shared among citizens. And those that created massive stimulus programs must leverage them as an opportunity to accelerate progress in fighting climate change. For companies, the imperative to transform in ways that create positive societal impact is equally strong. Companies should protect employees by ensuring work- place safety, while also reskilling workers and accelerating hiring where feasible. And as they transform their business in the face of the pandemic, they should integrate a societal impact lens into the effort. They can, for example, improve the resiliency of supply chains while also reducing carbon emissions and environmental impact. They can look for new product opportunities that yield real societal benefits. And they can partner with other companies or organizations to maximize impact. There are early indications that companies with a strong focus on their impact on society are faring better right now. Some key MSCI ESG indices, for example, have outperformed non-ESG benchmarks since the start of COVID-19. The challenges facing society today are grave—and daunting. But nations and corporations have massive leverage to move the needle against climate threat, racial inequity, and the devastating pandemic. Without their leadership, it is hard to see how we can make progress in any of these areas. Lucky for us, the evidence shows it is in their economic interest to do so. Previous Next

Ezekiel Vergara Punishment: Human Nature, Order, and Power Ezekiel Vergara Legal punishment has become a pervasive phenomenon in society, affecting millions of individuals worldwide and encompassing police practices, prison systems, and medical professionals. However, the practice of punishment often overshadows its theoretical goals. This paper attempts to highlight the theoretical aims of punishment through a genealogy of punishment as it relates to human nature. The theory of punishment demonstrates the primacy of order as tied to human nature. In addition to order, punishment is shown to have secondary aims, such as moral desert, rehabilitation, and revenge. These primary and secondary goals of punishment are then compared to the modern practice of legal punishment. Unsurprisingly, punishment in theory differs greatly from punishment in praxis. Instead of fulfilling its theoretical aims, punishment functions as a locus of power that strips agency from the offenders. In an attempt to ameliorate this theoretical-practical difference, various solutions are provided to make practical punishment more congruent with the adopted theory. In the analysis and critique of punishment, authors from various fields are cited, ranging from seminal works by Michel Foucault to modern works by William Connolly and Didier Fassin. While the first instance of punishment remains unknown, punishment has permeated all aspects of life — in prisons, schools, and at homes. However, this paper will be limited only to “legal punishment,” or the activities of punishment that are conducted by states, courts, and police (1). To examine punishment, this paper will theoretically examine the institution and nature of punishment. The first section of the paper will seek to answer the question “what is punishment?” A brief genealogy of punishment and human nature will be presented. Proceeding from this analysis, the second portion of this pa- per will juxtapose the theoretical outline of punishment—as derived from human nature—with the actuality of modern punishment. Notably, it will be argued that the presence of asymmetric power relations distinguishes theoretical punishment from actual punishment. In response to the discrepancy between theoretical and practical punishment, a possible improvement to punishment will be proposed: al- lowing offenders to propose their own punishment. Finally, the paper will consider challenges to this proposal. In order to present a thorough and convincing analysis, each section of this paper will refer to a variety of authors, mainly political theorists and jurisprudential scholars, while also referencing some empirical data. Likewise, this paper will operate within the paradigm of the current debate on punishment and focus on punishment in the United States (2). I. Human Nature and Punishment Punishment is related to human nature; it seems impossible to divorce the two. Through a genealogy of punishment, it will be shown that these two concepts are heavily intertwined, with the human desire for order serving as the impetus for punishment. “Punishment,” then, refers to “an attempt to reestablish order through sanction on the offender, in accordance with human nature.” A few clarifying statements should be made before this relation is demonstrated via genealogy and analysis. First, the term “human nature” is an amorphous concept. Among theorists, there is debate on whether a unique “human nature” exists (3). Moreover, even if a human nature does exist, there is no consensus on the nature of this concept (4). Hence, this paper will present a thorough analysis of human nature that draws upon various authors. However, it is recognized that other conceptions of human nature may lead to the same conception of punishment. Second, the fact that punishment is related to human nature does not mean that human nature involves punishing. This paper does not preclude the hypothesis that human nature itself desires punishment, yet the link between punishment and human nature supported by this paper is more derivative, in that punishment arises from the human want of order (5). Presently, this paper will provide a genealogy of punishment that begins with human inequality (6). This inequality, which is natural to man, leads to conflict over similar wants. Namely, some individuals are better suited to achieve their wants, while others are less capable. When two or more individuals want a good that cannot be divided, the most capable is able to acquire the good. Oftentimes, this zero-sum game leads to conflict as the weaker party seeks retribution (7). In the face of this conflict, man desires order, which is the primary impetus for punishment. Because of this conflict, man seeks to establish a type of order, an order that can allow individuals to pursue their ends without the threat of violence (8). Ultimately, this order is established by a superior individual, family, tribe, or group that exerts control and establishes rules in a certain region. Originally, these rules are simply based on custom—or the norms of fair expectations in common-life. Due to their historical underpinnings, these customs are obeyed by the people (9). Over time, though, customs become binding in a certain area or jurisdiction (10). Customs, founded on fair expectations, seek to apply an objective, ordered standard of conduct to human behavior. However, because customs are not universally followed, a mechanism is needed to maintain order and ensure adherence to these expectations. Primarily, to increase the level of norm adherence, sanctions serve to increase the costs of deviance. Eventually, with the creation of the state and morality, punishment began to be exercised by centralized legitimate authorities that monopolize violence (11). Important to the monopolization of violence is the codification of norms or general maxims, allowing the state to determine when punishments, such as monetary and physical punishments, should be applied. For instance, in the early United States, many crimes were accompanied by a fine and those convicted suffered harms from forced labor to capital punishment. Thus, a legal system came into existence. As punishment evolves over time with the expansion of the state, the economy also plays an important role related to order-based punishment. Namely, monetary payment can be used as a sanction on offenders, as a way to reestablish order (12). The creditor-debtor relationship serves as the basis for punishment in the Nietzschean account (13). The Nietzschean account highlights the relationality and inequalities of punishment. Namely, the asymmetry of Nietzsche’s power relations requires two or more parties, illustrating that power is something relational among individuals (14). As such, the penal relationship presents a distinct power dynamic, derived from the creditor-debtor relationship. Plainly, the creditor exercises an asymmetrical amount of power as he has something that the debtor needs or wants. On the other hand, the debtor has little power to resist, especially if he is in need of the creditor’s good. An asymmetry, then, exists between the creditor and debtor. Such inequality is mirrored in the punisher-punished relationship where the former exercises power over the latter, given that a good must be compensated. Given the desire for order—seen through the state and the economy—three points on human nature and punishment should be addressed here. First, the emergence of the state may simply be a “pleasure, delighted in the promised blood,” a mechanism that legitimizes infliction of suffering (15). Thus, instead of producing order, the state may simply serve as a means of exacting revenge on other individuals through a legitimized relationship. For example, police violence is legitimized and allowed to persist by the law (16). Second, the desire for punishment appears as a type of desire satisfaction, which signals that humans desire order. Simply, there is pleasure in order and reestablishing order through suffering. Rather than repaying money in the creditor-debtor relationship, the loan is replaced by suffering. Third, there seems to be a degree of rationality in punishment. For example, adults are sanctioned more severely than children for criminal offenses. Thus, it seems that punishment operates on a scale of rationality, as it is supposed that children have not completely developed such faculties, or what is generally accepted amongst individuals, whereas adults do (17). In short, then, punishment is derived from the desire for order, due to inequality and competing wants. Punishment reestablishes order when a standard—originally custom, presently law—is broken. Through a genealogy of punishment, certain aspects of human nature become readily disclosed. As such, punishment appears multifaceted, but likewise contained within a certain paradigm, that of history and custom. Thence, “punishment” appears to be “an attempt to reestablish order through a sanction on an offender, in accordance with human nature.” II. How to Punish This section of the paper will discuss a theory of how punishment should be practiced, as derived from human nature. Human nature appears to want order through punishment or sanction, but punishment appears to have secondary aims. Nietzsche identifies a list of secondary aims, besides the primary aim of order. For example, punishment also seeks revenge, deterrence, and reformation (18). This pa- per will now explicate the primary and secondary aims of punishment and analyze their current practice. In this way, it will be illustrated how punishment based on human nature would be conducted and how current practices deviate from these theoretical ideals. Order—the primary goal of punishment—is crucial to the practice of punishment. The basis of order is fair expectations, as has already been discussed. The notion of order, when tied to fair expectations, illustrates two aspects about how to punish. First, punishment requires a relationship of two or more individuals, most clearly seen with Nietzsche’s creditor-debtor example (19). A relationship between two individuals allows for a good to be extracted and a sanction to be applied, which releases the offender from his duty or debt. Thus, punishment must establish a relationship between individuals, thereby allowing order and therefore human nature to exist among them. Overall, this phenomenon is both practiced and disregarded in modern punishment. The modern offender engages in various relationships—with the warden, with the judge, with the prison-worker, with the doctor, with the criminologist— that allow for a good to be extracted and a duty absolved (20). However, this is not always the case. Solitary confinement is readily practiced in the modern penal system, undermining punishment’s goal of reestablishing order between individuals. Namely, by isolating an offender, it is impossible for the offender to form and maintain a given relationship, thereby disregarding a fundamental necessity of order (21). Moreover, even if it is the case that solitary confinement is not permanent, the relationships in question are disrupted (22). This not only limits the goods that can be extracted from the offender, but also creates an unequal power dynamic that further forestalls the absolution of the offender’s duty. That is, by confining the offender, he is rendered more unable to adequately engage in the relationships required by order-based punishment. Moreover, this power asymmetry strips the offender of his agency, which is of value, and contributes to disorder. Ultimately, to improve punishment, such an unequal power dynamic must be remedied. Second, in regard to order, is the notion of fair expectation. Fair expectations highlight the proportionality of a claim, as illustrated in the creditor-debtor relationship. The debtor and the creditor have an agreement on how much money should be returned to the creditor. While there exists an asymmetrical power dynamic among the creditor and the debtor, the agreement itself is fair (23). Thus, punishment requires a level of proportionality, due to the fairness of the original agreement. The proportionality of a sanction establishes a reasonable duty that is imposed on the offender, as a means to reestablish order. However, fairness as it relates to order is rarely practiced. Punishment in the United States is far from proportional, affecting minority and low-income individuals at a much higher level. These disparate impacts violate the original agreement of fairness and call into question the validity of the original agreement. Similarly, the modern penal system often places a burden on individuals, aside from the actual punishment. The offender often faces the prospect of losing his job, his family, and his friends (24). Hence, disproportionality is endemic to modern punishment. Aside from order, punishment also aims to exact revenge, deterrence, and reformation. In theory, these secondary aims support the primary goal of order. However, when improperly executed, these secondary goals actually subvert the primary end of order. Through an analysis of all three secondary aims, it will become clear that there are grand discrepancies between the theory and practice regarding punishment. The idea of revenge being an aim of punishment is grounded in Nietzsche’s work, namely the “slave morality” and his creditor-debtor relationship (25). Unable to alter the past, a wronged individual seeks to will the present and the future. To do so, punishment deprives the offender of future possibilities. Simply then, the offender must repay for his actions in sufferings that occur in and possibly over time (26). Revenge, then, desires that the offender suffers, requiring a unique relation- ship between a victim and an offender. However, in practice, revenge deviates from its theoretical framework. First, it is forbidden by modern law; second, it is expressive (27). As for the former, revenge is viewed negatively, seen by many as a type of desire to be suppressed. Only the law can punish, not private individuals. Nevertheless, the law appears to be a façade for this vengeful desire, concealing this vengefulness in its legitimacy (28). Although not always physical retribution, the law legitimizes the unsupervised and unwarranted violence of the few, seen in modern police practices (29). Moreover, punishment as revenge is expressive. Mainly a part of the retributivist framework, revenge is an expressive punishment that allows for the symbolic expression of disapprobation (30). Punishment creates a new social stratum of the delinquent (31). This social stratum unites society by providing a scapegoat that can be examined, questioned, and blamed. Thus, revenge is cathartic, creating a unified relationship between members of society against the delinquent population, as seen in Connolly’s discussion (32). Therefore, practical punishment should inflict warranted suffering on an offender and create an offender-victim relationship. However, in practice, revenge inflicts unwarranted violence that scapegoats the offender to unite large groups, perverting the aforementioned relationship. For instance, unwarranted violence against Black Americans, under the guise of punishment, has long served to unite whites around ethno-national identity. Yet, such unity under the guise of punishment is actually counterintuitive, given that through these means, the primary goal of order is subverted. Indeed, this prevents the creation of a legitimate, properly-ordered system. Deterrence is another aim of punishment, secondary to that of order. The idea of deterring crime suggests that individuals wish to live in an orderly society and have the ability to project into the future. Put simply, individuals can posit future relationships or possibilities where crime affects them. Thus, punishment deters other possible offenders from committing similar crimes in the future. However, deterrence supposes two connected ideas. The first is that individuals act rationally; secondly, it supposes that punishment is the appropriate means to deter crime. Deterrence, in theory, supposes the rationality of possible offenders and their ability to make cost-benefit analyses. The thought goes that by increasing the punishment for a given offense, individuals will be less willing to commit the crime as the benefit of committing an offense is overshadowed by the punishment for that offense. Notwithstanding this consideration, deterrence is very different on a practical level. Didier Fassin notes that the punishment used to deter crime is often aimed at humiliation and shaming, aimed at emotion, instead of rationality and cost-benefit analyses (33). Therefore, the theory behind deterrence, which is based on the conception of rationality among individuals, is overshadowed by irrational practice that subverts the primary goal of order. Deterrence, in practice, supposes not the rationality and dignity of humans, but rather exploits the social relations of individuals. Through such exploitation, the creation of a proper order is forestalled. This may partly answer why punishment aimed at deterrence fails, failing to support the primary goal of order (34). Finally, punishment has the secondary aim of rehabilitation. The idea of re- habilitation is important to maintaining the primary goal of order through punishment. In theory, rehabilitation has two key aspects: temporality and relational existence. Temporality is crucial to human nature and is tied to the goal of rehabilitating an offender. The idea of rehabilitation supposes that an offender remains the same responsible agent over time and likewise that the offender can change and adopt the laws and norms of a society (35). By attempting to reform an offender, the offender is forced to face the past and reflect upon the offense that was committed. During such a reflection, part of human nature is unconcealed, in the sense that the individual can gain understanding about himself (36). With this reflection, the offender is prompted to project into the future, where he will not commit the offense, drawing off the present insight, which is provided by the reflection on the past. As a result, the offender recognizes his own temporality, his possibility aside from crime and the temporality of the penal system. Relationality is also tied to rehabilitation. The notion of rehabilitation requires that an individual is aided by another individual. Usually, this takes the form of an offender and an authority figure, such as a therapist, a teacher, or a doctor. Although the offender-authority relationship is originally based on an asymmetry of power, the rehabilitation process diminishes the asymmetrical power dynamic as the offender reforms. Theoretically, over time, punishment serves to help the offender regain his standing in society, having “paid his debt to society.” Due to this symmetrical relationship of rehabilitation, the offender can understand his human nature and his past, knowing that the future will be based on relationships with other individuals in a given society. In short, rehabilitation awakens an of- fender to his human nature and diminishes the asymmetry between offender and non-offender. However, modern punishment falls short of rehabilitating offenders. Instead of engaging offenders with their temporal and relational being, punishment urges recidivism (37). Those who are punished by the modern system are disempowered and hardened in their ways. Rather than operating on the notion of individual responsibility, offenders are maligned; offenders are made out to be “[monsters]” beyond rehabilitation (38). Likewise, instead of turning offenders to the future and their possibility, the penal system focuses on the past and the asymmetrical power relations created by the past. This is best seen in Fassin’s ethnographic work, as prisoners are punished simply due to their past (39). For example, without the ability to secure adequate jobs or housing, many offenders turn back to crime, leading to high lev- els of recidivism. By limiting the opportunities available to former offenders, and contributing to recidivism, order-based punishment is undermined. Rather than a properly ordered system, offenders are thrust towards further crime and disorder. Offenders are neither rehabilitated nor empowered; offenders are trapped in the past, which forestalls their ability to recognize and to contribute to order. Punishment, namely how to punish, seems complex but grounded in human nature. Focusing on order, the ideas of relationality and fairness are clearly espoused. In regard to the other aims of punishment, the unique ideas of temporality, suffering, and rationality are clearly presented. However, the goals of penal theory are far from the actuality of penal praxis. Instead, the modern penal system perpetuates asymmetric relationships that alienate offenders and highlights the desire to faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire (40). In such practice, human nature is blatantly disregarded, necessitating reform in punishment. III. Improving Punishment Punishment, as has been discussed, is based on a relationship and can thereby be described as just or unjust. As a concept, justice entails what should be given or done to others. Here, justice has a multiplicity of characteristics, yet one characteristic seems crucial to justice and is tied to human nature: relationality. Notably, justice defines the obligations and rights between individuals (41). Since relationality is an aspect of justice—which is paramount to reducing the discrepancy between theory and practice—reformation regarding relationships appears crucial to im- proving punishment. Practical punishment, as based on a power asymmetry, appears unjust. This power asymmetry is unjust because it strips the offender of his agency, which is of value. Therefore, the task of justice, regarding practical punishment, is reducing the power asymmetry between the offender and others. By reducing this asymmetry, offenders will better understand their nature, creating a proper order that is respective of the offender’s agency. Moreover, a more symmetric power dynamic would intuitively reduce the problems created by practical implementations of revenge, deterrence, and rehabilitation. That is, by having a more symmetric power relationship, not only will offenders be more capable to oppose these practical injustices, but punishers will be less likely to commit such injustices. To be more just, the penal systems must reduce the asymmetry of power relations by highlighting the agency of the offender. Instead of passively going through the penal system, the offender must exercise his unique human agency. The root of this aforementioned asymmetry arose from the penal process. Both Connolly and Fassin underscore the asymmetry of the modern penal system in their work. In regard to the former, the rhetoric surrounding the offender dehumanizes him, making the offender equivalent to an animal, one that needs to be tamed (42). In regard to the latter, the individuals are at the mercy of the penal system, unable to exercise their human capacities (43). This is further seen in the strict penal regiments of prisons and the rigid punishments of statutes. To reduce this asymmetry, I argue that offenders should be allowed to propose their punishment for the crimes in cases where a judge or jury has found the offender guilty. To illustrate this proposal, I draw from Plato’s and Xenophon’s renditions of the ancient Athenian penal system during the trial of Socrates (44). Unlike the modern penal system, where the offender plays a passive role, in the trial of Socrates, Socrates is prompted to give his own defense and cross-examine witnesses. Moreover, when Socrates’ is found guilty, he is required to propose a punishment that would serve as recompense for the offense in question. The Athenian jury, in Socrates’ case, then votes to choose between the offender’s proposed punishment and that proposed by the prosecution. By doing so, Socrates is able to exercise his agency, despite the fact that he is sentenced to drink the hemlock. In the modern penal system, the offender is able to defend himself if he wishes, but often defers to an attorney. Most times, the offender defers because he does not have a strong, functional knowledge on the intricacies of the law. Hence, a lawyer—an expert on the law—is brought in to compensate for the offender’s lack of legal knowledge. This process strips the offender of his agency to directly affect the legal proceedings and thereby creates an asymmetric power relationship between the offender and others. I propose that offenders should be allowed to propose their punishment for crimes in cases where a judge or jury has found the offender guilty. To ensure that all offenders can propose their punishments, all citizens should be required to take some course on the law, so that offenders can have more agency during the trial’s proceedings and in sentencing. In the wise words of Plato, “if law is the master [...] then the situation is full of promise and men enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state” (45). By allowing the individual to present a possible punishment, the offender is forced to assume responsibility for his actions. Here, the offender exercises his agency and presents himself as a responsible agent before the court. Hence, the offender will create a more symmetric power relationship with others, including those of authority in the penal system. The result of this symmetric relationship will be a more just penal system, with individuals capable of exercising their unique human capacities. A few brief words should be said on this suggestion. First, the prosecution would also propose a penalty, like in the Athenian system. Penalty proposals would allow for the judge or jury to decide the punishment of a case, while also maintaining the symmetry of the offender-authority relationship (46). Similarly, this method does not sacrifice any of the goals of punishment as it allows order and punishment’s secondary goals to be pursued. Finally, the idea of permitting the offender to have a choice in his punishment is not completely unsupported. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord argues that individuals should choose amongst various punishment plans to repay for an offense (47). Such a penal structure allows individuals to take responsibility and reimburses society with a proportional penalty. However, one may take issue with this potential solution on the grounds that such a solution has two counterintuitive implications: sentencing and asymmetric power relationships (48). As for the former, one might think that offenders will always choose the minimal possible punishment for their crime. Or even worse, drawing from the trial of Socrates, the offender may go as far as to argue that he should be rewarded, not punished. As for the latter, one might contend that an asymmetric power relationship still maintains within this proposal. Namely, it seems to be the case that the judge or jury in question is still more powerful than the offender because the former have the final say on the punishment. To salvage this proposal, it is necessary to assuage these concerns about sentencing and asymmetric power relationships. To each concern, there are two considerations that ought to be considered. With the concern of sentencing, two factors are worth considering. First, the proposal is pragmatically worthwhile because it leaves open the possibility that one chooses a punishment that is unlike a minimum sentence and is actually more beneficial. Here, instead of spending time in prison, an offender may choose to engage in public work programs. The possibility of a punishment that differs from the minimum sentence, but is actually beneficial, is an upshot of this view. Second, extreme sentencing is rejected. For example, take the case where a serial killer proposes the punishment of a $20 fine. In this case, it is reasonable to suppose that either (1) the prosecutor in the given case would propose a much more reasonable punishment for the crime or (2) that the judge and jury would consider the reasonableness of the proposal in question when making their determination (49). As a result, extreme sentencing would rarely occur. Rather, a domain of reasonable alternatives to punishment would become socially acceptable, perhaps including minimum jail time and participation in public work projects. Therefore, regarding sentencing, there are pragmatic benefits and reasonable constraints that bolster this proposal against challenges. A more concerning objection presses on the power dynamics of sentencing, given that the judge or the jury still hold a degree of power over the offender. Here, two considerations are important. First, while it is the case that the judge or jury exercises power over the offender, the degree of asymmetry in the relationship is noteworthy. Notably, according to the proposal herein defended, judges and juries exercise less power over the offender than they currently do. Although the proposal does not completely rid itself of this asymmetry, the proposal should pragmatically be adopted, given its upshot of reducing the current asymmetry. Second, in an ideal world, judges and juries would be benevolent and strive to engage in symmetric relationships. However, in practice, there is a concern that judges and juries would overly exercise this asymmetric power. With this in mind, it is questionable whether the concern over asymmetry solely hinges on the proposal herein defended. Rather, it seems that the quality of judges and juries is important. Thus, it may not be the case that the asymmetric power dynamic completely hinges on the account of punishment that has been offered; rather, in addition to this proposal, it seems that work should be done to reform judgeships and juries, so as to further eliminate the asymmetric power relation. Aside from these concerns regarding details of this proposal, one could argue that the solutions offered to ameliorate punishment are impractical in regard to the modern penal society. Such a claim can be based on concerns with the current structure of the penal system or on larger societal concerns. In regard to the former, it could be argued the modern penal system is incapable of adjusting to the recommended changes. For example, an institution—most likely schools—would be required to teach courses on the law, requiring an overhaul of the current curriculum. Similarly, preparing authorities to engage in discourse with offenders may require training and some type of incentivization. However, both of these challenges are easily refuted. Namely, these solutions could be gradually incorporated into the penal system over time, thereby allowing for individual and institutional adjustment. Rather than implementing a radical change, change over time would ease the economic burden incurred by improving the penal system and also allow for individuals to change their biases towards offenders. Moreover, schools alter their curriculum as they incorporate new requirements, such as physical education. Hence, instituting a minimum requirement for knowledge of the law appears feasible. A greater practical concern is the need for societal change as the penal system reforms. It would seem paradoxical if the penal system reduced the asymmetry of the offender-authority power relationship, but society still stigmatized offenders. The ongoing stigmatization takes on various forms: increased policing, reduced housing opportunities, or reduced employment opportunities (50). While this is indeed a legitimate concern, it misunderstands the aims of this paper. I believe that these changes are without a doubt necessary when addressing the issue of punishment, however, this paper only seeks to examine the legal penal system. These societal concerns—while important to improving punishment—appears outside the bounds of this paper. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the entirety of punishment, beyond the legal penal system, must be examined to create a more just society and to ensure that there is no asymmetry between the offender and society after the former has repaid for his offense. IV. Conclusion According to Michel Foucault, “western man has become a confessing animal” (51). Perhaps, however, it is better said that man has become a “punishing animal.” While this paper has only addressed legal punishment—that conducted by police, judges, and prisons—punishment is a societal phenomenon. From schools, to homes, to prisons, punishment is everywhere in society. The genealogy of legal punishment that was presented at the beginning of this paper illustrates that punishment is a fundamental derivation of man’s nature. While punishment may not be natural to man, it is a result of his nature. As such, a summary on the conclusions of this paper will help delineate the human nature that influences penal practice. The ideal of punishment was shown to have both primary and secondary goals. The most important of these goals is order, yet punishment aimed at order requires relationality. The nature of relationships, in the ideal penal theory, were shown to be fair and symmetric. However, when juxtaposed to the realities of modern punishment, it became evident that practical punishment was heavily based on the creation of asymmetrical relationships between the offender and penal authorities, thereby devaluing the human nature of the offender. A combination of increased agency and increased discourse was proposed as a means to reduce this inherent asymmetry. By empowering the offender, the penal system appears to become more just. These solutions seem promising and feasible, withstanding refutations that challenge the accounts provided. Although this paper has addressed punishment, some changes are needed beyond punishment, regarding the social and economic burden that punishment places on the offender and those associated with the offender. Moreover, work must be done to examine the effects of this paper’s paradigm on innocent individuals that have been convicted of an offense. However, legal punishment has been addressed in these pages. This is only one step towards this more just society. Such reforms are possible, among intellectuals and society-at-large: the ideal is not out of sight. Endnotes 1 The list of those involved in “legal punishment” that is provided above is non-extensive. From here on, “punishment” will refer to “legal punishment,” unless otherwise specified. 2 The United States is used as the case study of this paper for two reasons: the prevalence of punishment in the United States and the author’s familiarity with the American punishment system. 3 See the post-modern and post-structural schools of thought. For the former, see Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . For the latter, see Gilles Deluze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . 4 See the difference between Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. For the former, see Aquinas’ On Law, Morality, and Politics . For the latter, see Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41. 6 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1969), 123; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Discourse and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131. 7 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 75. 8 Augustine, City of God (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1958), 452-453. 9 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 10 Carter, James, Law, Its Origin, Growth and Function (London: Forgotten Books, 2018), lectures 1-5. 11 The idea of “monopolization of the means of violence” comes from sociologist Max Weber. 12 Fassin, Didier, The Will to Punish (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 47-51. 13 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 40. 14 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 93-4. 15 Rabinow, Paul, Truth and Power: The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 85. 16 Fassin, Didier et al., At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (London: Pluto Press, 2015). 17 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 322-323. 18 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 53-54. 19 Ibid, 40. 20 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 256. 21 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 76-77, 83. 22 I thank Sotonye George for the point. 23 The need or want of the debtor creates this asymmetry. The asymmetry can also be produced due to natural inequality or dire circumstances. However, within this dynamic, the agreement is fair as both parties reasonably agree to it within the asymmetric relationship. 24 Feeley, Malcolm, The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1979), xv; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 268. 25 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 20, 40. 26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 232. 27 Revenge on the individual level is prohibited, but modern law does not preclude the idea of institutional vengeance. 28 Rabinow, Truth and Power , 85. 29 Fassin et al., At the Heart of the State . 30 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 69. 31 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 170-184, 266-268. 32 Ibid, 53. 33 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 72-74. While it may be possible that these emotional pathways have or include some rational content, appealing to emotions deviates from the original appeal to strict rationality associated with deterrence. 34 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 261. 35 Fuller, Lon L., The Morality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 162. Modern legal systems seem to suppose human responsibility in punishment. This seems to be a key tenet of rehabilitation. 36 Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland, 1977), 35. 37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 265. 38 Connolly, William E., The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), 45. 39 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 75-77. 40 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 41. 41 See Scanlon, Thomas M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5-6; Miller, David, “Justice” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017). 42 Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization , 45. 43 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 72-77. 44 See Plato, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), and Xenophon, Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). One might argue that the trial of Socrates is the pinnacle of injustice. Yet, not only is such a position disputed, but my proposal solely attempts to schematically draw upon this example. I thank Tianyu Zhou for pushing me on this point. 45 Plato, Plato: Complete Works , 1402. 46 By allowing the judge or jury to decide between the punishments proposed by the prosecution and defense, the convicted offender is still punished if he proposes a reward as his punishment, as was the case in the trial of Socrates. 47 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, “Criminal Justice and Legal Reparations as an Alternative to Punishment,” Philosophical Issues no. 11 (2001), 505-506, 509. 48 I thank Morgan Cutts for pressing me to address this objection. 49 Note that this is an inclusive disjunction. 50 This list is not extensive but attempts to highlight some of the scenarios that affect offenders due to their offender-status. 51 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1990), 59. 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Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination: Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition All Power to the Imagination Radical Student Groups and Coalition Building in France During May 1968 and the United States during the Vietnam War Calder McHugh Bowdoin College Author Alexis Biegen Sophia Carter Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (26 pages) Abstract Student-led social movements in May of 1968 in France and through the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States captured the attention of each nation at the time and have had a profound impact on how Americans and French understand their respective states today. Both movements held the lofty goal of completely reshaping their respective societal structures but the vast differences of the cultures in which they were carried out resulted in distinct end results. In France, student protests sparked mass mobilization of the nation and, at their height, were seen by most of the country in a positive light. The broader movement that involved worker participation as well also won material gains for workers in the nation. Across the Atlantic, on the other hand, student protests were met with mostly ill will from the American working class. This work will particularly focus on the ways in which a history of strikes and a popular Communist Party in France both allowed for mass mobilization and stopped the students from pursuing more radical change. It will also work to challenge dominant narratives in political science around coalition building. I. In mid-May, 1968, as 10 million people marched in demonstration through the streets of every major French city, student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit sat down for a wide-ranging interview with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Bendit cogently articulated his goals for the student movement as well as its potential challenges. “The aim is now the overthrow of the regime,” he said. “But it is not up to us whether or not this is achieved. If the Communist Party, the [general confederation of labor union] CGT and the other union headquarters shared it… the regime would fall within a fortnight.” Six years later and across the Atlantic Ocean, the Weather Underground, a militant leftist organization in its fifth year of operation which was composed of young radicals, published a book entitled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The Weather Underground wrote, “Our intention is to disrupt the empire… to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.” II. Radical social movements aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and capitalist-based governments existed throughout the Western world through the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Italy, West Germany, France, and the United States, these movements were particularly wide ranging and distinctly impacted each society, causing momentous political and cultural upheaval. This work will focus on the latter two nations. The mass mobilization that shook France was confined largely to one month: May, 1968. In the middle of March, France’s leading newspaper Le Monde called France’s citizens too “bored” to protest in the same manner that was occurring in West Germany and the United States. A mere six weeks later, after the occupation of the University of Nanterre on March 22nd sparked conversation about collective action around the country, French students occupied the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, in the Latin Quarter of Paris, sparking nightly clashes with the police. Streets were barricaded, all transportation was shut down, and worker mobilization reached a height of 10 million on strike. Notably, students’ grievances were separate from those of the workers. The students rallied around a popular slogan of the time, “all power to the imagination,” which captured their collective interest in enacting changes to the educational system that would allow for a more free and accepting university structure. Comprised of Trotskyites, Maoists, anarchists, and others on the Left, many also believed in the violent overthrow of the 5th Republic of France and the complete reshaping of society. As Suzanne Borde, who in May, 1968 had recently left her childhood home for Paris, said, “Everything changed [in May, 68], my way of thinking, everything… My favorite expression at the time was “La Vie, Vite” (Life, Quickly)! I wanted to change the usual way of life.” The workers, who made up the lion’s share of the protestors but had fewer public clashes with the police, were concerned less with political ideology or societal restructuring than with material gains that would make their lives better, such as wage increases. Their protests ran in conjunction with the students’, but their union was a tenuous one: the French Communist Party (PCF) and its associated labor union Confédération Général du Travail (CGT) controlled much of the political action amongst the workers and was deeply suspicious of the goals of the student movement from its nascent stages. Ultimately, two central events led to the movement’s demise. Maybe ironically, the first was originally interpreted as a success: the protests led to governmental upheaval and President Charles de Gaulle’s temporary departure from the country. After weeks of uncertainty, representatives of de Gaulle’s government negotiated what came to be termed the Grenelle Agreements with the leadership of the CGT. Resulting in more bargaining power for unions as well as a 35 percent minimum wage increase and a 10 percent increase in average real wages, these concessions pacified many workers, leading them back to the factory floor. Second, upon returning to the country on May 30, Charles de Gaulle organized a significant counter-protest on the Champs-Elysees, dissolved the legislature and called for new legislative elections that took place in late June. De Gaulle’s party, the Union of Democrats for the Republic (UDR) won a massive victory and went back to being firmly in control of the nation, while the PCF lost more than half of their seats. Social protest in the United States was not so neatly circumscribed into a few months. Anti-Vietnam War protests took many shapes over numerous years. For the purposes of this work, analysis will be confined to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization, its offshoot groups, and their respective impacts on the broader movement. Launched with the Port Huron Statement in 1962 before the official beginning of the American War in Vietnam in 1965, the organization purposefully did not couch its goals in traditionally communist or Marxist rhetoric, because unlike in France, there was no appetite for it in the United States. Rather, they argued quite persuasively, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least moderate comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” While fewer than 100 people signed the Port Huron Statement, by 1965, the SDS organized the “March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam,” which 15,000 to 25,000 people from around the country attended. This march both attracted a degree of attention and trained future organizers of better-coordinated marches on Washington, including the November, 1969 Moratorium March on Washington, which had over 250,000 attendees. While SDS remained a strong political force through the late 1960s, by its 1969 convention in Chicago the group had moved significantly to the left ideologically and had developed political differences amongst itself that detached it from the unified spirit of the Port Huron Statement. As SDS gathered in Chicago, by the end of the weekend of June 18-22, three separate factions had emerged. One, calling itself the Progressive Labor Party (PL), argued for Maoist and worker-oriented solutions to what they perceived as the ills of America. Another, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), became the foundation of what was eventually called the Weather Underground—they advocated for a radicalization of SDS to fight American imperialism alongside the Black Panthers and revolutionary groups around the world. Finally, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM II) agreed with RYM on most substantive issues, but believed in a more traditional Marxist approach to solve them. According to sociologist Penny Lewis, none of these groups, including the PL whose entire revolutionary strategy was based on cross-class alliance with workers, enjoyed any significant support from the working class. She writes, “The obvious reason for this was the near-unanimous embrace of Cold War anticommunism in the ranks of labor and the collapse of Communist Party influence within the class.” Left without the possibility of even a tenuous connection between young radicals and the broad working class, the Weather Underground began to participate in militant action to attempt to bring the Vietnam war home. In March of 1970, Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn anonymously recorded a transmission and sent it to a California radio station on behalf of the group. She warned, “The lines are drawn… Revolution is touching all of our lives. Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks… within the next 14 days we will bomb a major U.S. institution.” While her timeline was a bit optimistic, the group bombed the Capitol in March of 1971 and the Pentagon in May of 1972, all the while intending not to injure anyone (these two actions had no deaths associated). Their most famous (and infamous) deed was an accident—also in March of 1970, two members (Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins) accidentally detonated a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse while assembling homemade explosives, killing themselves and a third “Weatherman” who was walking into the house (Ted Gold). The Weather Underground did continue action after the conclusion of American involvement in Vietnam in 1975, but paired down much of its more violent activities. The group, whose members found their way to the FBI’s Most Wanted List, eventually disbanded; many now work as professors, educating and informing new generations of American thought. III. The outgrowth of the fragile connection between student protest and worker protest in France, as well as the lack of any significant worker mobilization in the United States, has a lot to do with the way each nation developed in the wake of World War II. During the altercations in May, 1968 in France, President Charles de Gaulle and the PCF represented two opposing poles of influence. This, in many ways, defined the conflict: de Gaulle’s fairly centrist (by modern standards) regime was forced to contend with a popular Communist Party facing a radical push from student activists combined with a wellspring of support from French workers. Interestingly, both De Gaulle and the Communists found much of their legitimacy from their actions a quarter-century prior, during World War II. De Gaulle and his supporters, along with the PCF, were the two most significant resistance forces to the collaborationist Vichy government. As such, in the first legislative election after the War in 1945, the PCF won a plurality of the vote, with 26.1 percent, and controlled the most seats in the legislature. De Gaulle did not participate in these elections. By 1967, while the PCF’s support had diminished, it remained a powerful force: they held 21.37 percent of the vote, a slight drop, but were able to build a governing coalition with fellow Leftist parties Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left (FGDS) and the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). Together, the three received 53.43 percent of the vote. The revolution in 1968, then, did not come out of nowhere. Not only could the PCF count on at least 20 percent of France’s support throughout the 1950s and 60s, it also organized strikes. Significant agrarian protests led by the PCF occurred in 1959 and 1960, and in 1963 strikes reached a zenith of the era before 1968, as the number of days that workers were on strike was the highest in 10 years. As Kenneth Libbey, who is both a scholar of and an advocate for the PCF, argues, “the belief in the ability of a mass movement to sweep aside obstacles to its success is a dominant theme of the party. Its acceptance makes the arguments about the transition to socialism at least plausible.” By May of 1968, significant differences existed between the often anarchist, Maoist, or Trotskyite student groups and the Stalinist PCF and CGT. However, these disagreements on ideology were not significant enough to halt the cross-coalitional movement—at least at first. In the case of Leftist groups in the United States, whether they marched under the Maoist banner of coalition-building with the working class (in the case of the PL movement) or had more anarchist tendencies as well as interest in engaging with black revolutionary groups such as the Black Panthers (in the case of the Weather Underground), they had very little historical precedent or organizational support upon which to draw. Even at its relative peak in 1944, the Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) only had a confirmed membership of 80,000. In the context of the Cold War, it became impossible to be an avowed Communist in public life. In a period often called the “Second Red Scare” or “McCarthyism,” the United States Congress convened the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in order to attempt to find and punish Communists whom they believed to be working for the Soviet Union. In 1954, the United States government formally outlawed the CPUSA. While in the French case the Communist Party was associated with brave resistance to World War II, politicians in the United States were able to successfully present the CPUSA as a subversive group intent on aiding the Russians in the Cold War. As an ideology, McCarthyism faded through the 1950s and was eventually seen for what it was: a witch-hunt. However, in the Cold War context, a genuine Communist Party in the United States would have been something of an anachronism at best. Thus, radicals in the United States had to both divorce themselves from any extremely weak institutions that did exist and strive to create their own culture and identity. The divergent histories of France and the United States shaped not only the popularity of social movements in the late 1960s, but also the strategies and tactics employed by student radicals in both nations. IV. A shared characteristic of the radical students in France and the United States was their distaste for slow-moving, marginal improvements. In fact, French radical students had been preaching this ideology since the early 1960s. Trotskyite dissidents, many of whom were engaged in the leadership of the 1968 movement, submitted a manifesto to the socialist publication Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1961 outlining many of the same principles as the Weather Underground did eight years later. They argued, “One hundred and fifty years of ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ have proved that no matter what reforms are applied to the capitalist system they will not change the real situation of the worker.” As is typical of the French case, revolutionary politics are more wrapped up in the labor movement than in the United States. The manifesto continues, “The workers will not be free of oppression and exploitation until their struggles have resulted in setting up a really socialistic society, in which workers’ councils will have all the power, and both production and economic planning will be under worker management.” Fredy Perlman, a student who aided in the shutdown of the Censier Annex of the Sorbonne, believed in a direct connection between the actions at the Universities and the larger strikes. He saw the main contribution of the students at the Censier to be the formation of worker-student action committees, in which the two groups coordinated actions together. Perlman, who published a booklet entitled Worker-student Action Committees, France, 1968 in 1970, wrote, “The formation of the worker-student committees coincides with the outbreak of a wildcat strike: ‘In the style of the student demonstrators, the workers of Sud-Aviation have occupied the factory at Nantes.” For Alain Krivine, the founder of one of the most influential activist groups for youth during 1968, Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, increased rights for workers were essential to the success of the movement. However, he did not believe that leaders of the unions or the Communist Party best represented the workers’ interests. He says, “For me [leftwing political leaders Pierre] Mendès-France and [François] Mitterand were shit… Mendès-France and Mitterand could be an alternative, but for us it was a bad one.” Student demonstrator Isabelle Saint-Saëns largely agrees. “When we marched with the workers we felt united with them, but it remained theoretical as well,” she said. Nevertheless, the students did see the workers as the key to their success, because they were willing to mobilize and they held such tremendous political power because of their sheer numbers. As opposed to the situation in France, protest in the United States was based largely around denouncing the imperialism inherent within the conflict in Vietnam. In the shadow of the SDS convention in June of 1969, student radicals who formed the leadership of the splinter group of the Weather Underground sprang into action. Leadership of the organization included many young radicals who had been involved in the demonstrations against the Vietnam War at Columbia University the year before, including Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd, who famously wrote in a letter to Columbia President Grayson Kirk: “You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.’” The Weather Underground’s first major action,termed the “Days of Rage,” was scheduled to take place from October 8-11, 1969 in the streets of Chicago. The action’s specific purpose was to protest the trial of the “Chicago Eight,” a group on trial for antiwar activism during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. While they hoped for the participation of around 50,000 militants they got only a few hundred. The action, which included the looting and burning of downtown Chicago appeared not to have a particularly cogent mission, was panned by the mainstream media, but also by many fellow Leftist organizations, who argued that the organizers were alienating the broader public from their cause. The Weather Underground itself, though, argued that the “Days of Rage” were part of a larger effort to “bring the war home.” At this point in the antiwar fight, the Weather Underground had decided that they could not count on the participation of workers because of their lack of any significant socialist or communist sympathies. As such, they planned demonstrations and militant actions to raise the consciousness of the greater populace to the horrors of the war abroad. Friends and siblings who were drafted, sent to Vietnam, and often killed in action particularly galvanized American youth. Partially to announce the formation of the Weather Underground, the group released a manifesto entitled “You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.” A subsection of this argument, “Anti-Imperialist Revolution and the United Front,” states, “Defeating imperialism within the US couldn’t possibly have the content, which it could in a semi-feudal country, of replacing imperialism with capitalism or new democracy; when imperialism is defeated in the US, it will be replaced by socialism- nothing else. One revolution, one replacement process, one seizure of state power- the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution, one and the same stage.” Student radicals in the United States saw the need to engender violent revolution in order to move to a state willing to accept socialism as a rational political ideology. The stated aims of the two movements, then, were quite similar. Each believed that their government was not truly democratic, and that there was a distinct need to expel the ruling elite from power. The two groups framed the issue using a shared language of the Left that dealt primarily with expressing solidarity with the oppressed. Divergence in the movements appeared in each group’s understanding of their own role in society. In France, while students were suspicious and sometimes downright dismissive of the PCF and the CGT, they believed they needed the participation of the workers (many of whom were members of those organizations) to succeed. The split at the SDS convention in June of 1969, on the other hand, further alienated the Weather Underground even from fellow Leftist organizations. While the Weather Underground hoped to gain more support for its cause amongst the general populace, the group also understood the nature of the political system in the United States and made the conscious decision to exist outside of it. In “You Don’t Need a Weatherman…” they wrote, “How will we accomplish the building of [a Marxist-Leninist Party]- It is clear that we couldn’t somehow form such a party at this time, because the conditions for it do not exist in this country outside the Black Nation.” Much of the reason for both the divergent outcomes as well as the divergent tactics and framing of the student movements in France and the United States have to do with the political opportunity structures that existed in each nation during the late 1960s. These are broadly rooted in the historical differences in the treatment of Communism as an ideology in both nations. V. Many scholars have argued that the character of the revolution of May 1968 was defined by the youth and, to a lesser degree, intellectuals in the nation. Maybe more important for mass mobilization in France, though, was the history of strikes in the nation. According to French historian Stéphane Sirot, while in other nations strikes are often the result of failed negotiations, in France they frequently occur either during or before negotiations with labor bosses. Strikes are such successful tactics of negotiation because they work on two levels. First, they have an offense element through mass demonstrations that attract the attention of the media. Second, they work defensively in that by refusing to work, they put pressure on bosses to find a quick solution. In their paper, “The Shape of Strikes in France, 1830-1960,” published in 1971, scholars Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly argue that French strikes, while fairly prevalent throughout this period, changed fairly significantly in character in this time period. This, according to Shorter and Tilly, has largely to do with the significant expansion of industrial unionism at the end of the 1930s around the European continent. They use measurements of size, duration, and frequency to calculate the shape that these strikes took. Below is an example of their model: Table 1.1 This table shows two distinct strike scenarios. What Shorter and Tilly refer to as “Industry X” represents a scenario in which strikes are long but small and occur fairly infrequently. “Industry Y” has strikes that occur more frequently and with a larger size, but do not last for as long. By the 1960s in France, the model for strikes looked quite a bit more like “Industry Y” than “Industry X.” Below is, once again, Shorter and Tilly’s graphic explanation of this phenomenon, based on the historical cataloguing of strikes: Table 1.2 This is significant in that massive, short demonstrations, while not necessarily more successful than those that are smaller and play out over a longer period of time, are wont to receive more attention from the public and the media due to their dramatic nature. The sheer mass of strikes through the 1960s made it easier for workers to mobilize around issues that ran adjacent to the concerns of the students, such as rights to self-management in any workplace, but were certainly not the same. Conversely, in the United States before 1968 there were few examples of large scale strikes. Other than the steel workers’ strike in 1959, which included around half a million participants, frequent general strikes had not existed in the nation since the 19th Century. Additionally, while union activity was certainly stronger in the 1960s in the United States than it is today, the protests of the 1960s were more focused on the antiwar effort than the rights of workers. VI. Likely due at least partially to their comfort with general strikes and mass mobilization, the French populace largely supported the students and their efforts to protest, expressing ire for the police force when they clashed. On May 10, 1968, in what has since been termed the “night of the barricades” (because of barriers that students constructed to slow down police), French police and students clashed violently in the streets of Paris. 80 percent of Parisians, though, supported the students and believed fault in escalating the violence lay with the police. Nevertheless, cultural differences between the youth and both the ruling class and worker allies persisted in France as well, which manifested themselves in the priorities of the students. Before the revolution of 1968, the French schooling system was extremely restrictive. Students could not voice their own ideas in the classroom and the gender and sexual politics of the university were also extremely conservative—men and women were often divided. Thus, in considering how all of French society should change, the University system was at the front of many students’ minds. As Perlman argued about the revolutionary movement, “What begins [when the Universities are occupied] is a process of collective learning; the "university," perhaps for the first time, becomes a place for learning. People do not only learn the information, the ideas, the projects of others; they also learn from the example of others that they have specific information to contribute, that they are able to express ideas, that they can initiate projects. There are no longer specialists or experts; the division between thinkers and doers, between students and workers, breaks down. At this point all are students.” As might be expected, while many supported the broad protests of the students and their right to do so, concepts like the total change in University structure, for which Perlman argued, were less popular or important to much of French society. Thus, the French students created their own political ideology and culture that was often separate from that of the more institutionalized labor movements. However, while their culture and their priorities often separated them from the workers, the French students also believed the workers to be necessary to their success. When the Grenelle Accords were signed and a majority of the workers agreed to go back to work, students quickly demobilized. As scholar Mitchell Abidor argues in the introduction to his oral history May made me, “For the workers, it was not the qualitative demands of the students that mattered, but their own quantitative, bread-and-butter issues.” Ultimately, French students were incapable of understanding or accepting this. Abidor continues, “The ouvriérisme—the workerism—so strong on the French left led the students to think the workers were the motor of any revolution, which left the vehicle immobile because the engine was dead.” So, after the workers returned to work, the students also quite quickly demobilized. The alliance between the students and the workers in France was further complicated by the students’ tenuous relationship to the PCF and CGT, organizations which were active participants in the society that students were striving to upend. The PCF and CGT, naturally concerned with their parties’ success, framed their arguments and made agreements based on the existing political opportunity structure in France. Many student radicals, on the other hand, saw it as their charge to revise those very structures. The PCF was thus forced to walk a fine line between maintaining its own institutional legitimacy and representing the more revolutionary elements of its own party. According to Libbey, French Professor Georges Lavau thus argues, “[the PCF] has assumed the role of tribune: articulating the grievances of discontented groups as well as defending the gains of the workers against attempts by the bourgeoisie to undermine them. The PCF has thus become a legitimate channel for protest, protecting the system from more destructive outbursts. This protection failed in 1968, of course, but Lavau contends that the party’s role of tribune nonetheless coloured its response to the crisis.” Lavau and Libbey’s contention that the PCF lost the role of tribune in May of 1968 is worth noting because although the CFDT and the CGT were the ones to negotiate with de Gaulle’s government, they had lost control of the situation. They were able, ultimately, to demobilize the workers, but they lost significant support, which showed in the elections of June, 1968 where they lost half of their seats. The Grenelle Accords in many ways crystallized the differences between the gauchiste students and the institutionalized, Stalinist political parties. These differences, which existed throughout the movement, were momentarily put aside as everyone took to the streets. After most workers returned to the factory floor, though, student radicals, as well as radical elements within the Communist Party, discussed their disappointment with the limited scope of the Grenelle Accords. Prisca Bachelet, who was helped to organize the nascent stages of the movement during demonstrations at the University of Nanterre on March 22, 1968, said of the leaders of the CGT, “they were afraid, afraid of responsibility.” Éric Hazan, who was a cardiac surgeon and a radical Party member during 1968, argued the Communists’ actions at the end of May and their negotiations with the government amounted to “Treason. Normal. A normal treason.” Student Jean-Pierre Vernant argued, “The May crisis is not explained and is not analyzed [by the Party]. It is erased.” The students and their allies had good reason for frustration. They believed the Party theoretically meant to represent them betrayed many of the principles for which they were fighting. Members of the Communist Party also quite obviously held distaste for many of the student radicals. In a very obvious reference to the student movement, Communist Party leader Roland Leroy said at the National Assembly on May 21, 1968, “The Communists are not anarchists whose program tends to destroying everything without building anything.” For their part, the students’ significant miscalculation, was that they believed Party leaders like Leroy did not speak for the interests of the workers. Hélène Chatroussat, a Trotskyite, argued at the time, “I said to myself, [the workers] are many, they’re with us… so why don’t they tell the Stalinists [the PCF] to get lost so we could come in and they could join us?” To the contrary, many of the workers who went on strike in the factories were uninterested in broader political change or politics in general. They simple hoped for a positive change to their material conditions. As Colette Danappe, a worker in a factory outside Paris, told Mitchell Abidor, “The students were more interested in fighting, they were interested in politics, and that wasn’t for us.” Danappe continued about the Grenelle Accords, “We got almost everything we wanted and almost everyone voted to return… Maybe we were a little happier, because we had more money. We were able to travel afterwards.” At first glance, it would appear that the situation in the United States and the goals of antiwar demonstrators would have made it easier to mobilize a broader cross-section of the population. By mid-May of 1971, 61% of Americans responded “Yes, a mistake” to the Gallup poll question, “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” However, a larger segment of the older population in the United States was against the war than the younger generation. These older Americans did not support the war, but largely did not support protest movements either. The lasting images of social movements in the United States in the 1960s all include what came to be referred to as “the counterculture.” The counterculture is depicted, stereotypically, as young men and women with flowers in their hair, listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, and holding radical aspirations for the dawn of a new age in America. This group was generally maligned by significant portions of older generations of Americans in particular, who believed the youth movement to be related more to drug use than to any serious concern. While the counterculture’s goals of promoting peace and community were in many ways quite sincere, with the fear of the draft adding to their outrage, an older generation of Americans refused to take their style of protest seriously. Table 1.3 This table explains mobilization. The situation in France in May of 1968 can be found in the bottom-right box: the broad-based grievances of students were largely supported and they found political allies in the labor and Communist parties. In the United States, mass mobilization did not occur on the same scale, because although the popularity of the grievance was high (as support for the American War in Vietnam was low), no significant political allies (who could have been found in the older generation of anti-war Americans) existed. This situation can be found in the top-right box. This disdain for the youth movement was made obvious in the way that Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather covered clashes at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Members of the counterculture movement, calling themselves “Yippies” (included in this group were many members of the SDS), descended onto Chicago to protest the Vietnam War and the lack of democracy inside the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination selection. Cronkite had already argued on air that the Vietnam War had become unwinnable, but when he and Rather covered the 1968 DNC together, their attention was focused on normative politics as a whole—and they quite obviously had very little respect for the protestors. Each argued that it was the Yippies who provoked a bloody confrontation with the police, with Rather stating that, “Mayor Richard Daly vowed to keep it peaceful, even if it took force to keep the peace. He was backed by 12,000 police, 5,000 national guardsmen, and 7,500 regular army troops. But the Yippies succeeded—they got their confrontation.” Through the 1960s, many protest and counter-culture groups (including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Americans for Democratic Action, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, to name a few) created and sustained significant cultural differences from much of American society. Members of the Weather Underground, despite some of their uniquely militant positions, dressed and spoke in a language that was common to the broader counterculture movement. They did so largely because they felt themselves unable to work within the boundaries of a political system that, even on the left, did not come close to representing their political ideology. In forming their own cultural identity, Leftist groups in the United States did manage to catch the attention of the masses, even if that attention was largely negative. In this way, their issues and demands were placed at the center of the conversation, causing a fraught societal debate. VII. The legacies of the social movements of the late 1960s in the United States and France are hotly debated. Historian Tony Judt, holding an unmistakable disdain for the student movement in France, wrote, “It is symptomatic of the fundamentally apolitical mood of May 1968 that the best-selling books on the subject a generation later are not serious works of historical analysis, much less the earnest doctrinal tracts of the time, but collections of contemporary graffiti and slogans. Culled from the walls, noticeboards and streets of the city, these witty one-liners encourage young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good—and change the world almost as a by-product… This was to be a victimless revolution, which in the end meant it was no sort of revolution at all.” On the other hand, scholar Simon Tormey wrote about the events of May of 1968, “1968 represented a freeing up of politics from the congealed, stodgy and unimaginative understandings that had so dogged the emergence of an oppositional politics after the second world war. It unleashed a wave of joyous experimentation, evanescent and spontaneous efforts to challenge the dull routine of the repetitious lives that had been constructed in and through advanced capitalism.” As we can see, this duality of point-of-view about revolutionary movements existed both in France and the United States. While the Weather Underground, without any significant political allies and carrying a negative media portrayal from the press, has mostly been portrayed negatively in the years since, some scholars believe that they altered a broader American consciousness. As Arthur Eckstein writes, “Thousands of New Leftists agreed with the Weathermen’s analysis of what had gone awry in America… the last 50 years have seen remarkable progress in black rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Hispanic and Asian rights… Weatherman’s violence... did not impede that progress.” Although Eckstein certainly does not offer a ringing endorsement of their militant tendencies, he does argue here that the group spawned social progress in a way that they did not expect they would. Interestingly enough, these more positive interpretations from historians and political scientists contradict the feelings of the student radicals themselves. Neither group had an exact moment of demobilization, but it became increasingly clear to young leaders throughout the early 1970s that they had not fomented the change for which they had hoped. In France especially, a growing frustration existed towards the Communist Party and its Labor wing, which points quite obviously to the dangers of coalition building. Students’ purported political allies came to be thought of as traitors by many of the student radicals. These frustrations and divisions that were born in 1968 proceeded, if not directly led, to the French Communist Party’s long slide into irrelevance during the 1970s and 80s, as Abidor argues. He writes, “Once it lost the PCF as the mediating force to represent its grievances, the French working class fulfilled Herbert Marcuse’s 1972 warning that “The immediate expression of the opinion and will of the workers, farmers, neighbors—in brief, the people—is not, per se, progressive and a force of social change: it may be the opposite.” The PCF understood this latent conservatism in the working class of 1968. Not so the New Left student movement.” The coalition was successful very briefly in May and resulted in positive material gains for workers—through pay raises, France became a little bit more equal. The most significant legacies of movements in France and the United States, though, were separate from any coalition. The French and the American students, each galvanized to be part of the revolutionary vanguard and inspired to change their societies, felt a deep sense of disappointment after the events of the late 1960s. Broken alliances and dashed goals led to the perception that they had let themselves and their ideals down. Measured this way, revolution failed, and Judt is right to argue that in this context, “it was no sort of revolution at all.” A middle ground perspective is well-explained by May ’68 protestor Suzanne Borde, who noted, “It made it possible to change the way children were educated, leading many teachers to reflect and to teach differently. Experimental schools opened... But it had no consequences on political life and failed to changed anything real.” Holding a completely different interpretation of the outcome, Maguy Alvarez, an English teacher in France, told New York Times journalist Alissa Rubin, “Everything was enlarged by 1968; it determined all my life.” Rubin titled the article “May 1968: A Month of Revolution Pushed France Into the Modern World.” So, maybe “these witty one-liners [that encouraged] young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good,” did change France as a byproduct. The kicker of Alvarez’s quote is that she told it to Rubin not as she was deeply examining the political consequences of the era, but as she was walking through an exhibition of posters and artworks from the period. During his interview with Borde, Abidor noted towards the end of the discussion, “May ’68 didn’t result in anything concrete, then.” Borde responded, “Sure it did. It completely changed the way I live.” VIII. Much of the existing literature in the field of social movement theory is concerned with the ways in which social groups successfully frame their movements to a broader public in order to increase popular support, political allies, and best take advantage of existing political opportunity structures. This work, although not formatted with a traditional structure of similar systems design, is concerned with the comparison of a social movement that attempts to tap into public support (French student movement) with another that appears to at times actively avoid building coalitions (the Weather Underground). More than anything else, the historical differences in France and the United States led to vastly different political opportunity structures for each social movement in the late 1960s. Yet neither group compromised their idealistic political ideology, and for this reason both groups failed to achieve their ultimate goals. Nevertheless, both did change cultural aspects of the societies in which they operated. The conclusion of these movements’ cultural success, despite their political failure, challenges existing social movement literature that argues that successful social movements should attempt always to build broad support. French student radicals found cultural success not because of their coalition with the working class but often despite it. In the United States, much of the lasting memory of the SDS occurred after it split into the Weather Underground. Certainly, a degree of this remembrance is negative—French student radicals with their “power to the imagination” are remembered in a much rosier light than the Weather Underground, which is often considered a terrorist organization in the United States. However, the Weather Underground and its writings continue to inspire generations of young activists, who do not necessarily ascribe to their militant tactics but are inspired by its political ideology. Coalition building can without a doubt aid in the success of a social movement. However, it can also at times minimize its impact. As we examine these two distinct approaches to creating change, our analysis shows that coalition building might support the historical imagination, but it can hinder change. IX. Since the financial crisis of 2008, questions of the value of coalition building have continued to roil activists, in particular in the United States, which precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis and now exists in a period of unstable economic and political development that scholars have called a “crisis of neoliberalism.” Current social protest movements have faced some of the same issues confronting protestors in the 1960s and early 1970s—the Occupy Wall Street movement presents a worthy case study. In many respects, the Occupy movement is the closest analog in recent history to the May 1968 movement in France. Sparked by young people, the protests were concerned with income inequality and were able to create an entirely new language to talk about money in this country through popular slogans—“we are the 99%.” Branding itself a revolutionary movement, Occupy eschewed traditional leadership structures and declared an “occupation of New York City” on September 29, 2011 which resulted in a series of clashes with the police and ended in the protestors being forced out of their home base of Zuccotti Park on November 15 of the same year. Protests continued for months afterwards around the world, but did not maintain the same sort of zeal as they did in September, October, and November of 2011. While the Occupy movement quickly burned and petered out in a similar way to May 68, its results are of a somewhat different character than those in France and are thus worth examining here. Most significantly, the United States government was never forced to come to the bargaining table with Occupy, and their leaderless movement has been criticized for never laying out concrete demands. Additionally, though, the amorphous nature of the group allowed it to buck trends of significant splintering along ideological lines—post-Occupy activism has simply dispersed to campaigns like #AbolishICE and protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline. Its greatest success has likely been the proliferation of discussion of income inequality in the United States, which has led to campaigns for an increased minimum wage. However, in a similar way to the student protestors in France, questions remain as to whether “we are the 99%” has been honored or coopted. 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Author Name < Back From Sex to Science: The Challenges and Complexity of Consent Matthew Grady I. Abstract Since the beginning of biomedical research on human subjects, the notion of consent has been widely debated and highly contentious. With philosophers and bioethicists focusing on the issue of what constitutes truly informed consent and the proper ethical guidelines for retrieving it, the existing notion of consent in biomedical research fails to fully consider the potentially coercive forces on participants. Consent has also been an issue of import amongst philosophers of sex and feminist scholars. Rallying behind the contemporary idea of a robust version of consent—one that fully encompasses the ways in which agents may be coerced into consenting to a sexual act—these philosophers have argued that societal norms, external pressures, and the nature of consent itself often render consent insufficient to guarantee the moral permissibility of sex. I will argue that these two seemingly distinct concepts of consent in sexual and biomedical spheres face many of the same ethical issues. Borrowing from recent discussions around coercive factors influencing consent in sexual interactions and my own experiences in biomedical research settings, I will draw parallels between these two notions of consent in order to illuminate a more accurate and robust philosophical framework for setting ethical guidelines around obtaining consent in biomedical research settings. II. Introduction As biomedical research has increased exponentially with regard to both enhanced funding for the practice of human-subject experimentation and new research methodologies for promising medical interventions, there is an urgent need for robust ethical guidelines around utilizing human subjects in biomedical research contexts. This paper will focus on the use of human subjects in average biomedical research experiments, which typically recruit and pay individuals to undergo a certain medical procedure, take a specific drug, etc. before approval of the medical intervention for the general population. Across all of the varying perspectives regarding how to best recruit, treat, and compensate human subjects, consent has remained an absolute standard and necessity for conducting ethical biomedical research. While philosophers and bioethicists have contentiously debated over the necessary conditions for obtaining consent, most have widely (if not completely) neglected factors that may wrongfully induce human subjects to consent to biomedical research. Consent has also been a central topic of importance within the philosophy of sex and feminist p hilosophy, yet its development has remained quite distinct from the understanding of consent in the field of biomedical research and subject recruitment. Philosopher and bioethicist Alan Wertheimer has made a connection between the notion of consent in sexual interactions and biomedical research, but my parallels and conclusions will clearly be distinct from his and will primarily focus on developing thoughts inspired by the initial connection made by Quill Kukla in “A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent.” In sexual interactions, most philosophers agree that consent is a necessary, but insufficient, element for ensuring the permissibility of sex between p artners. Consent is something to be given freely, and many forces may serve to coerce or influence an individual into granting their consent, thus potentially curtailing the normative goal of “ideal” consent. Traditional discussions of consent are structured around fulfilling the normative goal of obtaining consent that is free from undue influence on one’s agency, autonomy, ability to make rational decisions, etc. Consent, under this view, is either valid or not—anything constraining an agent’s ability to consent automatically invalidates its moral force. Quill Kukla has introduced a “nonideal theory of sexual consent,” which classifies consent as degreed and emphasizes that genuine consent can still be achieved in the presence of potentially coercive factors. Under this conception, agency and autonomy are present in lesser and greater degrees within different sexual interactions, and agents are continually pressured by coercive forces. Thus, consent is not valid or invalid; instead, genuine consent (or robust consent as I will often refer to it) is built when coercive factors are controlled to such a degree that all sexual partners possess sufficient agency to make a fully rational decision to consent. This does not deny our ability to determine whether a sexual act is morally permissible and establish a standard for morally permissible ways to obtain consent. Rather, it allows us to adopt a nuanced view of consent as a nonideal concept, wherein agents can consent under our oft-constrained and coerced statuses. Philosophical inquiries into coercive factors impacting one’s ability to obtain genuine, robust consent in sexual interactions have focused on external pressures, societal norms, and the implications of consent as the dominant framework itself. Yet, bioethicists have neglected this crucial area in their understanding of consent. Much can be gained for our existing notion of consent in biomedical research settings by embracing the approach taken by philosophers of sex. Consent operates in many different facets of life—agreeing to consent forms, consenting to a sexual interaction, consenting to someone entering your home, and many other forms of implicit and explicit acts of consent . However, the nature of consent within sexual interactions and biomedical research settings is distinct from other forms, making them especially morally-laden. Given violations of these kinds of consent are particularly harmful to one’s bodily autonomy, sexual interactions and biomedical research settings are especially deserving of rigid consent guidelines. The genuine robustness of these two forms of consent is also dependent upon the satisfaction of external conditions not always under the control of the agent granting consent (ex. a non-coercive partner in sexual interactions or a biomedical institutional review board that grants approval for a biomedical experiment), opening up the potential for coercive factors to render a certain act morally impermissible. T hese two distinct forms of consent face many of the same ethical issues and should be engaged in a conversation with one another—a conversation that has been neglected thus far. I hope to build a more accurate, encompassing framework in the biomedical sphere by which we can set ethical guidelines for engaging human research subjects in a truly consensual manner based on the progress made by philosophers of sex, like Kukla and others. To conduct this comparative analysis, I will begin by discussing the existing notion of consent within the biomedical research field and detailing the major issues of importance currently debated. I will then proceed to review the ways in which many philosophers of sex have taken a broader approach to defining consent—one that takes into account the coercive factors that may inhibit an agent’s ability to grant consent with full autonomy and agency. I will then draw comparisons b etween these two distinct notions of consent to reveal several coercive factors in biomedical research settings that may render “informed” consent coerced. Finally, I will suggest how we may build a broader philosophical framework to scaffold the agency of human subjects when consenting to potentially dangerous biomedical research experiments. III. The Existing Notion of Consent in Biomedical Research After many instances of harmful treatments being given to vulnerable, often marginalized populations, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis study, bioethicists began to question what truly constitutes informed consent in biomedical research settings. This question has included exploration into both the b est ways to obtain consent, as well as the proper way to interpret the term, “informed.” The p redominant conclusion on how to best define informed consent has overwhelmingly neglected consideration of coercive factors that impact the ability for human subjects to rationally consent to biomedical trials. As will become clear, there are an abundance of underexplored factors that may constrain one’s ability to rationally consent to participate in a biomedical research trial. This paper aims to fill this lacuna in the current understanding of biomedical research consent. There are many interesting debates around the understanding of biomedical consent that will become relevant to my argument later, the first being the therapeutic misconception. This phenomenon occurs quite often in biomedical research settings, where human subjects possess the incorrect belief that they are receiving life-changing or potentially beneficial treatments, despite being told about the potential of receiving a placebo treatment, or the chance that the experimental drug may be ineffective. The implications of the therapeutic misconception for ensuring the genuine nature of a human subject’s consent are vast. Consent hinges upon an agent’s uncoerced ability to make an informed decision, and philosophers of biology have rightfully debated what constitutes truly meeting the informed standard of consent. Can one really be said to have full decision-making agency and possess the needed information to genuinely consent if they wrongly believe, as subjects with the therapeutic misconception do, that they are guaranteed life-saving treatment? This is not to say that consent is in some way unobtainable in biomedical research settings; however, we ought to properly understand the implications of the therapeutic misconception on a subject’s ability to grant their consent in a knowing, informed fashion. In addition to the therapeutic misconception, there is another important debate around whether informed consent requires comprehension in any way. Some argue that full comprehension of what the study entails is the only way to ensure the participant is aware of all of the risks and does not possess the therapeutic misconception. Participants have also been shown to severely misunderstand the actual p rocedures, treatments, etc. they are consenting to, whether that be due to not reading the consent form or not fully understanding the researcher’s explanation of what will occur during the study . By not comprehending both the purpose of the study and the exact particulars involved in it, research subjects may fail to meet the “informed” requirement of informed consent. Regardless of the exact answers to these concerns, it is clear that the current discourse surrounding biomedical consent has yet to satisfactorily explore the intricacies of the coercive factors impacting consent in medical experiments. Participants may be hindered in their ability to grant genuine, uncoerced consent when, as research shows is often the case, they do not understand the purpose or specifics of the research study to which they are consenting. In a way, participants in many biomedical studies consent to a version of the study that does not carry the significant risks of harm they take on when consenting—is this morally permissible? How can we ensure coercive factors, like the therapeutic misconception, do not wrongly influence a human subject to consent to a potentially dangerous experiment? These ethical issues debated within the philosophy of biology can be b etter answered with a revised, robust version of consent—one which thoroughly examines and addresses the coercive factors that unduly encourage someone to grant consent without b eing truly informed and open to participating. IV. Moving Beyond Mere Consent: Philosophy of Sex While consent works to p reserve the agency of a sexual partner, the vast majority of philosophers agree that consent is necessary for sex to be morally permissible, not sufficient. When consenting to a sexual act, a person is utilizing their agency and autonomy—their capacity to make free and independent decisions to meet their own ends—to make a rational choice, so consent both contributes to and draws from one’s agency. We now recognize the ability of rational agents to utilize their agency to consent to sexual acts that may still be morally problematic, whether that consists of morally dubious sexual actions or acts obtained with a coerced notion of consent. Given the importance of sexual consent, we need an understanding of it that can account for any and all factors that may coerce a sexual partner into granting consent when they otherwise would not have. Philosophers have addressed the issue of consensual sex that may be coerced in a variety of fashions. Some feminist scholars, like Catharine MacKinnon, have taken a radical approach, claiming that no consent is truly valid under heteronormative structures. Their understandings of consent highlight the ways in which external societal conditions may render consent insufficient if they constrain one’s options to the point where consent becomes obligatory, rather than freely given. Nicola Gavey provides a compelling account of how heteronormative , oppressive structures may render one’s consent involuntary or obligatory in sexual situations because of societal conditions pressuring women. Women sometimes feel obligated to consent to unwanted sexual advances because of the heteronormative forces that pressure them to enter a subservient, diminutive role within sexual interactions. Other philosophers take a different approach to consent by illuminating varying ways in which traditional consent is not sufficient to guarantee a good moral standard for sex. Power dynamics, a misunderstanding of what will actually take place during sex, the offer of money, socialized b ehaviors, and societal pressures are all examples of coercive factors that may encourage one to say yes, even when one did not originally intend to. A person may not be able to fully, rationally consent to a sexual act if pressured by these sorts of coercive factors. Philosophers operating with this lens focus less on making a valid versus invalid distinction of consent and instead emphasize the way consent can be constrained or limited by oppressive structures and other coercive forces. The moral permissibility of a sexual act depends on the agency and autonomy possessed by all of the sexual partners consenting, which may be constrained by coercive factors. By emphasizing the coercive factors outside of direct threats from a partner that may constrain one’s genuine consent, feminist philosophers have been able to build a more robust understanding of consent—one that accounts for the coercive factors that may wrongfully influence one to consent to a sexual act. To summarize all of this into a more digestible framework, I find Quill Kukla’s non-ideal theory of consent to be particularly illuminating. Essentially, under Kukla’s perspective, consent is a “nonideal concept,” where virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual if consent requires the full autonomy of its participants. Their framework allows for the permissibility of sex and obtaining consent even when coercive forces are present; all agents are constrained in different ways, by different power relations, as a result of different identities, and that does not fully invalidate our ability to consent. Instead, to ensure one’s consent is genuine in the presence of common coercive factors, Kukla argues we must “scaffold” consent by “[being] sensitive to the limits of and possibilities for agency and consent in a given context and [adjusting] accordingly,” to ensure a partner possesses agency and autonomy. Scaffolding can be accomplished socially or interpersonally, where practices, environments, and relationships can help to enable a sexual partner’s agency. Kukla uses the example of a retirement facility embracing guidelines, policies, and management that allow its patients to have sex in such a way that does not threaten their ability to participate safely or diminish their own agency in pursuing sexual relationships. On the interpersonal level, agents can also aid in scaffolding their sexual partner’s (or partners’) agency and autonomy by ensuring their partner feels the, “ability to exit a situation, trust, [and] safety,” among other crucial practices that build and protect one’s ability to genuinely consent. Policies here scaffold consent by examining potential coercive factors and building social practices which are inclusive and protective of sexual agency. Again, philosophers of sex, like Kukla, have explicated external factors, such as power dynamics, money, the traditional, overriding depiction of a woman “giving” consent to a man’s request, and heteronormative structures, that may coerce someone to consent to a sexual act. In identifying these, philosophers can strategically recommend scaffolding structures to ensure the moral permissibility of sexual interactions and to enhance the agency and autonomy of sexual partners. I argue that the bioethicist ought to take on a similar project of identifying coercive factors and scaffolding their designs to preserve agency, autonomy, and genuine consent in biomedical research experiments. This challenge has been neglected thus far, and the current understanding of informed consent fails to fully account for coercive factors; thus, the biomedical research community is in need of a scaffolding strategy to preserve genuine, robust consent. The following section attempts to embrace the approach taken by Kukla and others in developing a more robust theory of consent within biomedical research settings. V. Can Biomedical Research Achieve Genuine, Robust Consent? To curb coercive factors from playing a role in one’s decision to have sex, Kukla proposes a more robust, nonideal theory of consent, which works to scaffold protections for an individual’s autonomy in the process of granting consent. Kukla’s framework understands that agents are constantly influenced by external, coercive factors. I argue that we should embrace this approach in the b iomedical research field, which requires a thorough understanding of the implicit and explicit factors that encourage participants to grant consent to medical experiments and treatments. I will now begin to detail four p rimary coercive factors that have been underexplored by philosophers of biology, highlighting the direct parallels that can be found with the coercive factors that impact sexual consent. In drawing these parallels and embracing a more robust understanding of consent, this paper will aim to demonstrate the need for greater encompassing ethical guidelines around biomedical research experiments. A. Compensation: Fair or Coercive? The standard practice for most biomedical research trials is to compensate their human subjects for their participation and time spent completing the study (and any additional costs incurred, medical expenses, inter alia). To recruit enough human subjects for a statistically valid biomedical study, researchers must offer compensation as an inducement to p articipate. Many ethical questions have been explored by philosophers and bioethicists, including how much to pay human subjects, whether payment for certain kinds of research is morally acceptable, and if payment can truly compensate for the serious risks involved in participating in experimental research. However, most have neglected to explore the role money plays as a coercive factor to participate in potentially dangerous research and its impact from a scaffolding perspective. Participating in biomedical research can be a valuable way to earn both active and p assive income, yet money is known to influence the rational decision-making of moral agents. Might someone “consent” to engaging in a biomedical research study that crosses their ethical and/or physical level of comfort in desperation for money? Philosophers of sex have rightly acknowledged that money can serve as an influential and potentially coercive force for consenting to certain actions because an agent may, in an attempt to earn crucial income for themselves, consent to sex in which they would not normally be comfortable engaging. A very similar ethical dilemma arises in the case of biomedical research. Consider this fictional example: an extremely poor woman who struggles to pay for her basic necessities agrees to take a highly experimental drug that could have damaging, long-term side effects. She would not normally endanger her own health in this way, but she is so desperate for passive income that this compensation is too important to pass up. Under the existing notion of informed consent in b iomedical research, this kind of participation would still be considered fully consensual when, clearly, money played a coercive role in her decision. This is not to say that all sexual interactions and all biomedical research settings involving the exchange of cash are coercive (e.g. sex work depends on the presence of money, but is not necessarily coerced), but we ought to pay crucial attention to these areas because of the morally problematic force money can have on obtaining consent. Money has the potential of encouraging and even forcing one into doing things they would not normally be comfortable with, so compensation is especially deserving of ethical guidelines. See Largent, et. al. for a further discussion of the concerns here. Imagine a case where someone decides to consent to a risky biomedical research trial with full comprehension of the risks and particulars involved with the medical study. They choose to accept all of the accompanying risks with participation because the potential compensation is worth their involvement according to a rational assessment by the agent in question. I concede here that this person may not be making a coerced decision to consent—this person, depending on the background circumstances and personal costs, may be choosing to utilize their agency to make a rational decision to pursue compensation. But, it is equally important for research designers to ask, ‘If this subject were in a greater position of agency and authority, would they still be comfortable with making the same decision?’ This question concerning the potential for coercive influence is neglected and unaddressed in the vast majority of biomedical research settings. Not all cases will reveal coercive factors influencing a subject’s decision, but bioethicists have neglected to fully accept the incredibly powerful and sometimes coercive influence compensation can have on a person’s ability to rationally consent. Furthermore, many research studies design their compensation schedule in a way to coerce participants into completing the entirety of a biomedical experiment by offering a significant “bonus” at the end of the study. Given that consent hinges on the ability for an agent to say “no” at any time to any part of an experiment, compensation can wrongfully be utilized as a tool of coercion, in that a research subject may feel unduly compelled to complete a study in hopes of receiving the bulk of their compensation at the end of the research. Compensation, in this role, can coerce consent and thus render the consent given as less robust, less agential, and likely to be less morally permissible than a more scaffolded version of biomedical consent. B. Underexplored Power Dynamics Furthermore, there exist underexplored power dynamics that may induce individuals to consent to biomedical research that they might not otherwise. It is not uncommon for physicians to offer (or even suggest) participating in an experimental research trial to their ailing patients. The physician here possesses a status of authority and level of power that may wrongfully induce their patient to agree to participate, despite the overwhelming risks, in benefits to their own research or that of their colleagues. This is not to say that all actions by a doctor wrongfully operate on a power dynamic, but recommending someone to consent to a trial with clear and substantial potential for harm rightfully deserves a more critical lens for moral judgments. Another example worth noting is when professors recruit their students to participate in their own b iomedical research. Might a student consent to participate merely because their p rofessor, who is in a position of power, asked them to do so? I argue that both of these cases illuminate a power dynamic that may render the given consent here as below the standard for moral permissibility and fully robust consent. Just as a boss requesting to have sex with their employee possesses an imbalanced power dynamic, so do certain recommendations of research studies by people of authority. By understanding the coercive influence of underexplored power dynamics in biomedical research recruitment, we can begin to build a more robust theory of consent that accounts for this coercive factor. C. The Misunderstanding of Particulars By Research Participants As previously discussed, it has been well documented that human subjects often misunderstand the particular actions and risks involved with their participation in biomedical research trials. While comprehension is difficult to fully impart on human subjects, might some of these knowledge gaps wrongfully encourage one to consent to a research study? As mentioned earlier, if one is under the guise of the therapeutic misconception, they may be more willing to consent to potentially dangerous research in the hope of receiving free treatment; however, there is no guarantee they will receive any sort of efficacious medical intervention. Research participants are also often unaware of the particular procedures, treatments, etc. they will have to undergo, meaning they cannot grant fully informed consent to them. A similar ethical dilemma arises in the case of sexual consent: one may consent to a sexual interaction without knowing the full breadth of what will occur. Biomedical researchers ought to work (or alternatively, “scaffold”) toward ensuring their research participants have full knowledge and comprehension of any factor of the research that might change their decision to consent. Only a more robust consent framework within biomedical research settings can properly protect the autonomy of human subjects to provide truly informed consent. D. Lack of Knowledge Regarding Research Intentions The final factor that I argue merits greater consideration in our ethical guidelines around b iomedical consent concerns the ability of the patient to understand the intentions of the research. Due to the nature of biomedical research, human subjects are often not informed of every detail of the study in order to maintain scientific objectivity and integrity. So, a human subject may be told what the study consists of, while not fully understanding the intentions of the research. What if a human subject consents to participating in a Phase I biomedical trial without knowing that the intention of the research is to produce a drug that only the extremely wealthy will be able to afford (an unfortunately common occurrence in the US)? Or, what if the aim of the research is to reach a conclusion that goes against one’s own morals, like that racial differences are essential rather than constructed? Just as one possesses a right to know the intentions behind their partner asking for consent to have sex, human subjects have a right here as well because the information presented may actively encourage one to not offer consent in the first place. Our existing definition of consent for human subjects in biomedical research experiments does not properly account for preserving, or scaffolding, the full rational decision-making of human subjects. While understanding the need for a certain level of confidentiality, the intentions behind the research itself may serve as a deterrent for someone to grant consent. So, in order to have genuine, robust consent, we must be able to set ethical guidelines that actively inform the participant of any detail that may render their consent below the bar for moral permissibility if unknown. VI. An Argument for a More Robust Consent in Biomedical Experiments I present these four coercive factors not in an attempt to develop a fully-fledged account of proper consent in biomedical research, but rather to demonstrate that our existing notion does not go far enough to protect the autonomy of human subjects. All four of these concerns do not apply equally in every context, but they do merit a greater, more nuanced understanding of consent and how to ethically scaffold against coercive factors. Philosophers of sex, like Kukla, have begun to p opularize the idea of a robust, nonideal theory of consent as a way to scaffold ethical precautions to engaging in sexual acts with a partner. The field of biomedical research ought to embrace a similar strategy and approach, and these four factors can begin to identify the key elements influencing the autonomy and agency of sexual partners. To scaffold a human subject’s ability to grant their uncoerced consent, we need to maximize their knowledge of anything essential to their rational decision-making. This would involve instituting clear and expansive policies to combat the therapeutic misconception and ensure participants understand the potential harms they may undergo. Researchers should also develop pay schedules and formats that work to ensure that the benefit incurred from compensation does not wrongly coerce one into participating or lacking the ability to revoke their participation at any time. Crucially, though, we ought to concurrently reform the issues of capitalism and systemic wealth inequality that force many people in the US to sell their own bodies for lifesaving income. Finally, we should adopt stricter guidelines for participating in biomedical research experiments to both restrict coercive power dynamics and pursue further scaffolding of subjects’ agency and autonomy. It is important to note, though, that this paper is primarily concerned with the philosophical issues that might constrain one’s genuine consent, and I invite bioethicists to create a more concrete and thorough list of ethical guidelines to scaffold agency in experiments. By conducting a rigorous philosophical analysis of coercive factors that influence human subjects, philosophers of biology will be better equipped to develop their own version of robust consent that can account for coercive factors. This new, reinspired lens from a philosopher of sex into scaffolding consent should help to control the damaging effects of coercive factors and grant the human subject greater autonomy in making rational decisions regarding whether and when to participate in biomedical research. Research study designers can utilize the recognition of these coercive forces, scaffold ethical practices to combat their influence on diminishing an agent’s authority and embrace a more robust understanding of consent in biomedical research experiments. VII. Conclusion My aim in this paper has been to draw parallels between the currently distinct notions of consent within sexual interactions and biomedical research to illuminate the similar ethical issues facing both. Many feminist scholars and philosophers of sex have taken an approach of examining the societal conditions, other external pressures, and nature of consent itself to illuminate the ways consent may be unduly coerced in rational agents. In doing so, they have been able to develop a more robust framework around a nonideal theory of consent that socially and interpersonally scaffolds (but not completely) a person’s agency in order to minimize coercive factors in one’s decision to consent to sex. By detailing parallel coercive factors present in the biomedical research field, I hope further philosophical inquiries will be able to develop a similar robust consent framework for biomedical research involving human subjects. On a more practically conclusive note, biomedical research experiments are luring; research designers purposefully advertise their studies to sound like easy, safe ways to make money, despite their risks. As shown by decades of research studies with devastating effects on communities of color, biomedical research experiments target specific populations…populations that are often BIPOC, low-income, young, and most vulnerable to being coerced into consenting in a biomedical research setting (see NIH for more on the crucially important element of structural medical racism). I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of a biomedical research industry that has consistently used advertising to tempt many young people, like myself, to participate in potentially harmful studies—experiments where we may not be in a fully agential capacity due to coercive factors. Money, power relations, a lack of understanding regarding the experiment, and other coercive factors constantly influence the ability for people, especially those of marginalized or fiscally disadvantaged backgrounds, to make a fully rational choice in consenting to biomedical research. 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No Place Like Home Home Bias Theory to Foreign Portfolio Investment in Emerging Markets Qiyuan Zheng Wesleyan University April 2021 Introduction: Modern technology has allowed investors, especially in developed markets, to gain access to a wealth of information about events that affect equity prices almost instantaneously, ultimately making it more difficult for investors in developed economies to ‘beat the market’. Such markets, where prices fully reflect all available information, are considered to be efficient; according to the efficient market hypothesis, opportunities for arbitrage in efficient markets are scarce, if not impossible. In this context, the typical investor could only generate higher returns by taking on greater risks. If this was the case, inefficient markets would be fundamentally more profitable for the informed investor as arbitrage opportunities are abundant and riskless profit can be made once the investor correctly identifies mispriced assets. This line of reasoning suggests that inefficiency in emerging markets might attract foreign portfolio investment (FPI) inflows, since investors in the developed world would seek to exploit the arbitrage opportunities in those inefficient markets. Market inefficiency in emerging economies is often at least partially due to poor property rights and weak institutional arrangements, such as unstable and corrupt political systems, not fully as a result of economic fundamentals, such as lack of financial development and domestic investor behavior. If inefficiency in an emerging market were to be largely a result of poor property rights and weak institutions, the ability of foreign investors to properly exploit arbitrage opportunities would be low and the institutional risk borne by investing in the market would be high, as unstable political environments foster volatile asset prices. Under such conditions, one might very well expect inefficient markets to drive away FPI. However, if the institutional quality of an investing environment is held constant and market inefficiencies are a result of economic fundamentals, then one should expect such a market to attract FPI. This paper finds evidence that, after accounting for a given level of institutional risk, potential simultaneity, and time of information absorption, there is no significant relationship between market inefficiency and FPI. To explain the inconsistency between theory and empirical evidence, I suggest an extension to the equity home bias theory. Since capital is abundant in wealthy nations where markets are efficient, investors that account for a majority of FPI inflows into emerging economies would be more familiar with and thus more optimistic about efficient markets since they more closely resemble their domestic investing environment. If a large enough number of foreign investors show a clear preference for efficient markets, the magnitude of their actions may very well offset that of unbiased investors looking to exploit arbitrage opportunities in inefficient markets. The paper proposes that, while market inefficiency should theoretically attract FPI, holding institutional risk constant, empirical evidence fails to show this relationship because foreign investors from the developed world exhibit a preference for more efficient markets that they are familiar with. A Survey of Theory and Existing Literature In documenting market efficiency among developing countries, Morck et al. found that the relationship between GDP per capita and price synchronicity can largely be explained by weak institutional arrangements and poor property rights. Their research not only provides a theoretical framework for this paper but also suggests an important measure of market inefficiency. Institutional shortcomings, especially poor property rights, discourages informed trading in the market as volatile political environments make it difficult for investors to price assets and retain their earnings (Morck 15, 16). The lack of informed investors would increase the magnitude of noise trading’s effect on the market. Since noise traders are uninformed and exhibit poor market timing (the buy high-sell low effect), their actions would not only lead to excess volatility in the market, but also push prices of different stocks to move synchronously away from their fundamental values (De Long 705, 715). Morck et al.’s paper presents empirical evidence supporting the above theory, as the observed relationship between GDP per capita and price synchronicity is rendered insignificant once property rights have been accounted for (Morck 22). This conclusion directly implies that, if protection of property rights is the only factor affecting the level of information reflected in prices, one can use price synchronicity as an appropriate proxy for market efficiency (i.e. better property rights lead to more informed traders, less price synchronicity, and a more efficient market). However, there are certainly other factors affecting the level of information reflected in stock prices. I argue that, in the absence of property rights violations, price synchronicity would remain an appropriate proxy as less synchronous prices would indicate that the market captures higher levels of firm-specific information and has a higher concentration of informed traders. Additionally, the lower prevalence and less developed nature of financial institutions in emerging markets would decrease the number of informed traders and thus increase price synchronicity while lowering market efficiency. In the subsequent analysis, I will refer to the following factors as economic fundamentals affecting market efficiency: domestic investor behavior, prevalence of financial institutions, quality of financial institutions, and technological development. This claim is particularly important, as the paper seeks to differentiate between market inefficiency caused by economic fundamentals and that caused by poor political institutions. Markets are efficient if “security prices at any time ‘fully reflect’ all available information” (Fama 383). Since efficient markets already reflect “all obviously publicly available information”, it would be very difficult for investors to obtain higher returns without undertaking greater risk (Fama 414). Rational investors who seek to increase returns while lowering risk would then be drawn to less efficient markets where arbitrage opportunities are more easily available. Thus, upon first glance, it seems that inefficient emerging markets would be more attractive to foreign investors, especially those from developed countries with efficient markets. Since most foreign portfolio investment comes from wealthier nations where capital is abundant, one could expect that less efficient markets, those with higher price synchronicity, would generate higher levels of FPI. However, this conjecture fails to consider the factors that lead to market inefficiency in developing countries and the preferences of foreign investors. The following paragraphs present two potential explanations for why emerging markets that are less efficient might fail to attract FPI. The first explanation comes directly from the work of Morck et al. on price synchronicity in emerging markets. While poor property rights decrease market efficiency, they also increase both the opportunity cost—the time spent gathering information to identify asset mispricing—and risk of arbitrage trading. Political events are also typically much harder to predict in these countries and, given the poor property rights, “risk arbitrageurs who do make correct predictions may not be allowed to keep their earnings, […] especially if the risk arbitrageurs are political outsiders” (Morck 15). Thus, if the observed market inefficiency is largely the result of poor property rights and weak institutional arrangements, the expected relationship between price synchronicity and FPI becomes more complicated. While inefficient markets still present certain arbitrage opportunities for investors, the risk of investing in an environment with poor property rights may very well drive foreign investors away. Another potential explanation comes from an extension of the equity home bias theory. The traditional equity home bias theory states that investors are more inclined to hold domestic stocks despite the potential benefits of international diversification. This phenomenon was first analyzed in 1991, when French and Poterba found that domestic investors expect returns around 300 basis points higher than foreign investors when looking at the identical market (French 4). The optimism in domestic markets would then lead investors to prefer a domestic stock over an international one, even if the economic values of the two stocks do not differ from each other. The equity home bias theory implies that investors prefer assets they feel more familiar with and such preferences can often offset the actual economic differences between any two assets. This paper argues that investors from developed countries with efficient markets would naturally prefer stocks in more efficient markets of the developing world as they more closely resemble their domestic investing environment. Since most FPI comes from wealthier nations in the developed world, even if one observes an inefficient market in a country with strong property rights and therefore higher chances of arbitrage without bearing institutional risk, such a market might not attract FPI as most foreign investors would prefer to hold assets in efficient markets with which they are more familiar. Existing literature shows that a simple analysis of FPI and price synchronicity is not enough to uncover the fundamental relationship between market efficiency and FPI inflows. To properly understand whether investors are truly drawn to inefficient markets due to opportunities of arbitrage, one must first take into account the institutional risk inherent in emerging markets. Only after accounting for the protection of property rights can one expect there to be a positive correlation between price synchronicity, essentially a measure of market efficiency, and FPI inflows. Empirical results that do not align with such expectations would be consistent with the story of equity home bias theory, where foreign investors prefer efficient markets as a result of familiarity and resemblance to their domestic markets. Constructing the Data Set The paper analyzes nine emerging markets: Brazil, Chile, China, Greece, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, and Turkey. The choice of these countries is based on their per capita GDP, the size of their domestic equity market, and data availability. The time period observed ranges roughly between 2000 and 2016. I shall note here that the somewhat arbitrary decision to characterize these countries as emerging markets through per capita GDP and choosing countries with sufficient stock listings may introduce sampling bias. A future extension of this paper may be to include a larger number of developing countries and test the robustness of this study by shifting the per capita GDP cutoff used to define emerging markets. Due to limited resources, this paper uses an approximation for its main variable of interest, price synchronicity. To obtain a price synchronicity index for each country and year, I collected weekly stock returns (between 2000 and 2016) for the companies listed on a popular index of the given country. Table 1 details the exact indexes used to construct the price synchronicity data. Given a country, the price synchronicity of year T is then constructed as follows: SyncT=w∈Tmax⁡(Upw, Downw)Upw+Downw1NT The above equation states that for every week w in year T, I calculated the number of stocks that rose in share price (if closing price was higher than opening price), the number of stocks that dropped in share price (if closing price was lower than opening price), and divided the maximum of the two numbers by the total number of stocks that experienced a change in share price. An arithmetic mean is then computed for the given NT weeks in year T. Note that this calculation is based on Morck et al.’s methods of finding price synchronicity, with the denominator constructed to include only stocks with changed share prices to avoid non-trading bias (Morck 5). Given the method of calculation, a price synchronicity of 0.5 would indicate that prices do not move together at all while high price synchronicity (such as 0.9) would indicate an inefficient market. Data for other variables were obtained through the World Bank, Transparency International, and World Integrated Trade Solutions (WITS). The following section will discuss the methodologies and rationale for including each regressor. Analytical Methodology Given the panel structure of the data, the paper will use a fixed effects model on the country level with robust standard errors to analyze the relationship between market efficiency and foreign portfolio investment. The fixed effects model would allow for the paper to account for unobserved but time-constant differences between countries, therefore yielding a less biased estimate. The fixed effects model was chosen over a random effects model on empirical grounds. The Sargan-difference test of overidentifying restrictions yielded a Sargan-Hansen statistic of 566.9 when applied to a random effects regression with robust standard errors, which indicates a significant level of overidentification in the model. Initially, I estimated a simple fixed effects model with price synchronicity as the only explanatory variable: FPIit=α+βSyncit+i+eit (1) However, the coefficient for the model is difficult to interpret and meaningless to this paper’s purpose. While the paper is primarily interested in exploring the effect of market inefficiency (caused by non-institutional factors) on FPI inflows to emerging markets, the coefficient presented in Equation 1 is theoretically biased downwards as the result of institutional risks present in emerging markets with high price synchronicity. More specifically, one can see that is subject to omitted variable bias because the level of corruption drives up price synchronicity (positive correlation) and discourages foreign investors (negative correlation with FPI). Additionally, could be affected by other confounding variables as a result of selection bias. To properly identify how FPI is affected by market inefficiency caused by economic fundamentals, one must account for the level of political risk the investor must bear to participate in the market and other confounding variables with the following fixed effects model: FPIit=α+1Syncit+2Corruptionit+3Xit+i+eit (2) Note that Corruptionit reflects the Corruption Perception Index of country i in year t, obtained from Transparency International. The author calculated Corruptionit=(100- Corruption Perception Index) so that 0 represents no corruption and 100 is the value for the most corrupt extreme. Ideally, the paper would’ve liked to use the “good government” index from Morck et al.’s work that included factors specific to property rights protection but financial constraints limited the data collection process (Morck 15). Xit is a vector of time-varying country-level characteristics that consists of the following variables: GDP per capita, inflation volatility, market capitalization of domestic companies (in current US dollars), and capital openness. Inflation volatility is calculated by taking the 5-year moving coefficient of variance of each country’s consumer price index (obtained from the World Bank). Capital openness is measured by the standardized version of the Chinn-Ito Index (Chinn). GDP per capita and inflation volatility could both be omitted variables as they both are significant indicators of an economy’s stability and development, in turn affecting confidence levels in foreign investors. Market capitalization indicates both the breadth and depth of the domestic financial markets, as a higher levels of market capitalization would provide more opportunities for foreign investors and increase FPI inflows. Although intuition suggests that capital openness would be a significant factor in affecting foreign investment, empirical evidence from existing literature suggests that capital controls on FDI and FPI have no significant impact on FPI inflows (Li 228, 230). The variable was still included in Equation 2 largely because theory implies that capital controls would increase the opportunity cost for foreign investors to invest in the domestic market and therefore decrease FPI. To test for robustness of the results, I removed the variable from the model and found no significant changes to the parameters of interest. Pre-existing theory and literature suggested that each of the variables included in the vector Xit would be correlated with FPI inflows. Thus, the model should include these variables as controls in the regression to minimize standard errors and account for any sampling bias. To account for potential information absorption time, I re-estimated Equation 1 and 2 with lagged price synchronicity, inflation volatility, and GDP per capita. If these factors were to exhibit greater cross-year variations than within-year shifts, then the incorporation of the lagged independent variables would allow for the possibility of foreign investors “reacting” to changes in their values in the next time period. I chose to not pursue a fully lagged model because market capitalization and capital controls are present constraints on the foreign investor’s choice set. Further, the corruption index remained period t as well since it measures the level of corruption perceived by the public at time t, which is a direct factor in determining the level of FPI in the same time period. Additionally, a fixed effects lagged-distributed model was also estimated as follows: FPIit=α+1Syncit+2Syncit-1+3Corruptit+5Xit+6Yit-1+νi+eit (3) Note that Syncit-1 and Yit-1 are lagged price synchronicity and lagged vector of control variables, hence they are values of country i in year t-1. The paper conducted further robustness tests by removing 2008 from the estimated models. Figure 1 shows that FPI inflows in observed countries dropped dramatically as a result of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Figure 2 shows the average price synchronicity among the observed countries across time and indicates that average price synchronicity varies between 75% and 70% for most of the years with no significant change during the GFC. One can see that the patterns exhibited by the data during the GFC is an aberration caused by an external shock, which could affect both the precision and accuracy of previous estimations. The paper accounts for this by re-estimating all the previous models with a smaller sample size that does not include 2008. Although doing so limits the power of the test, the removal of the outlier (2008) should offer a more accurate estimate of the effect market efficiency has on FPI. Empirical Results Before estimating the models specified in the Methodology section, one must return to examine an earlier claim: “price synchronicity would remain an appropriate proxy under [scenarios in which other factors (besides poor property rights) affect the level of information reflected in stock prices] as well, since less synchronous prices would indicate that the market captures higher levels of firm-specific information”. Table 2 Column 1 shows an estimated fixed effects model that captures the relationship between price synchronicity and institutional risk (represented by the Corruption Perception Index). As expected, the coefficient for the Corruption Index is positive, since higher levels of corruption means more institutional risk and thus higher price synchronicity. The estimated coefficient is statistically significant. Most notably, the R-squared for the estimation is only around 8%, indicating that there are certainly other factors, such as market inefficiency due to economic fundamentals and the quality of financial institutions, that affect price synchronicity. Additionally, Table 2 Column 2 shows a negative correlation between corruption and FPI inflows, as expected. Although the relationship is not statistically significant, theory suggests that it would bias the estimates of Equation 2 downwards. Tables 3, 4, and 5 show the estimated regressions specified in the Methodology section. Table 3 displays the estimates obtained by using the “present” model without any lagged variables while Table 4 shows the results after lagging the appropriate independent variables. Table 5 shows the estimates obtained from the lag distributed model (Equation 3). In Table 3, the first two columns represent Equation 1 and 2 without the lagged independent variables. The first column shows a negative and marginally significant (at the 10% threshold, p=0.054) coefficient for price synchronicity, with the point estimate show approximately $0.605 billion decrease with every 1 percentage point increase of price synchronicity. This is not surprising, as price synchronicity caused by institutional risk would most likely drive foreign investors away. The second column on Table 3 also show a negative and marginally significant coefficient for price synchronicity. Although this coefficient is greater in magnitude ($0.967 billion decrease for every 1 percentage point increase in price synchronicity), it has a larger confidence interval than that of the first model and is less statistically significant (p=0.066). Columns 3 and 4, estimates after removing 2008, exhibits a similar pattern as the coefficient for price synchronicity is negative and statistically significant (at the 5% threshold) when it’s the only regressor in the model but no longer significant once the model accounts for institutional risks and other sources of selection bias (Column 4, Table 3). Table 4 incorporates lagged price synchronicity, inflation volatility, and GDP per capita. Columns 1 and 2 show the results of Equation 1 and 2 when with the lagged independent variables replacing their non-lagged counterparts. Columns 3 and 4 show those same models estimated after removing 2008 from the sample. The results across all columns are consistent in that the coefficient for lagged price synchronicity are all positive but statistically insignificant even after accounting for the downward bias caused by institutional risks. Interpreting the results of Table 3, the paper finds that market inefficiency (proxied by price synchronicity) drives foreign investors away mostly as a result of the poor property rights that created the inefficient market in the first place. This effect is exhibited by the negative and (marginally) significant coefficient for price synchronicity in Column 1 and 3. Once the model accounts for institutional risk and potential selection bias, market inefficiency remains negatively correlated with FPI inflows but at a less significant level in Column 2 and completely insignificant when 2008 is removed from the sample, as shown in Column 4. If the level of institutional risk does not change and the market becomes more inefficient (price synchronicity rises), theory suggests that more investors would be drawn to the market as they seek to exploit arbitrage opportunities. This theory implies that a model which accounts for institutional risk should generate a positive and significant coefficient for price synchronicity. However, empirical evidence does not support this conjecture and instead illustrates that market inefficiency stemming from causes unrelated to institutional risks either does not significantly affect or decreases the level of FPI inflows, depending on whether year 2008 was included in the sample. Results obtained by the lagged models fit the theory slightly better, as the coefficient for lagged price synchronicity is positive, as shown in Table 4. Both Column 2 and 4 of Table 4 exhibit point estimates that indicate a $0.42 billion rise in FPI inflows per percentage point increase in lagged price synchronicity (decrease in market efficiency). However, this estimate is not statistically significant, which could be a result of the small sample size and thus less power / minimal detectable effect. Further, Column 2 and 4 of Table 4 showed a higher point estimate than Column 1 and 3 of the same table, respectively, fitting the theory that not including corruption as a covariate would downwardly bias our estimate. Considering the empirical results on both tables (with and without the lagged component), one can see that, once institutional risks are accounted for, changes in market efficiency does not significantly affect FPI inflows. A potential explanation for this phenomenon is an extension of the equity home bias theory, in which foreign investors from the developed world feel more familiar and are thus more optimistic about efficient markets. Hence, market inefficiency (under the same level of institutional risk) can both attract investors through opportunities of arbitrage and drive away investors through its unfamiliar nature. If those effects offset each other, one would observe no significant relationship between market inefficiency and FPI inflows after accounting for institutional risk. That said, it is more probable that Table 4 is the better model, as it lagged certain independent variables that investors would be “reacting” to in period t based on their information in period t-1. To further test this, a lag distributed model was estimated in Table 5 to show that price synchronicity in period t-1 is indeed positively correlated with FPI inflows in period t, even after account for price synchronicity in period t. However, as before, the estimate is not statistically significant, most likely due to a combination of small sample size and the potentially offsetting effect from the equity home bias theory. Robustness Tests Another potential explanation for the insignificant coefficient for price synchronicity is a reverse causality chain between FPI inflows and market efficiency. The paper argues that increased FPI inflows can lead to higher market efficiency in emerging economies. As established, a majority of FPI in emerging markets come from developed countries where capital is abundant. These developed countries also have better financial institutions, which help “foreign” investors make more informed decisions than their domestic counterparts in the developing country. If one assumes that most foreign investors in emerging markets are more informed than their domestic counterparts, then an increase in FPI inflow would mean more informed investors in the market and therefore an increase in market efficiency. Incorporating this conjecture, one can obtain three distinct factors that affect market efficiency in emerging economies: level of institutional risk, amount of foreign investment (FPI inflows), and other economic fundamentals. Since the paper is only interested in the relationship between market inefficiency caused by economic fundamentals and FPI inflows, it must account for the first two factors. Equation 2 properly accounts for the level of institutional risk but fails to address the joint relationship between market efficiency and FPI inflows. I used a three-stage least squares method to estimate the following simultaneous equations system: FPI=γ+1Sync+2X+3GDP+e2 (4) Sync=α+1FPI+2Corruption+3(HH Index)+4GDP+e1 (5) The variable HH Index, the Hirschman Herfindahl Index for exported products (obtained from WITS), was added to account for the level of economic specialization, since more specialized economies tend to experience greater price synchronicity (Morck 9). Additionally, the fixed-effects approach was replaced with a least-squares dummy variable approach by adding a dummy variable for every panel value except one. The results of this model are shown in Table 6, with the coefficients for the panel dummy variables suppressed from the output. The first two columns show the estimates for both endogenous variables (Equation 4 and 5) when using the entire sample size and the second set of columns shows the results after removing 2008 from the sample. Even after addressing the simultaneity problem in the non-lagged model, the paper fails to find a significant relationship between market efficiency and FPI. Although the coefficients for price synchronicity are positive, as shown by Column 1 and 3 in Table 6, they are statistically insignificant. Additionally, these estimates fail to provide empirical evidence in favor of the claim that FPI leads to more efficient markets in developing countries; both Column 2 and 4 show insignificant positive coefficients for FPI when it’s used as an independent variable in estimating price synchronicity. As stated previously, theory and empirical evidence (from Table 4) suggest that a model with lagged price synchronicity and corruption index would better capture the causal relationship between market efficiency and FPI. If the lagged model is a better fit and the conjecture of reverse causality remains valid, then changes in FPI inflows in time period t-1 would affect market efficiency of time period t-1, which in turn would influence the FPI inflows of time period t. To put it simply, FPI and market efficiency are two endogenous variables that are both sequentially and jointly determined. A precise and accurate estimate of the effect market inefficiency (when caused by economic fundamentals) has on FPI inflows would then require a model that allows for both sequential and simultaneous relationship between market efficiency and FPI. I estimated such relationship with the following equation: FPIit=α+1Syncit-1+2Corruptit+3Xit+4Yit-1+5FPIit-1+νi+eit (6) where FPIit-1 is the lagged FPI variable. This equation would allow us to “parse out” the reverse causality effects on market efficiency caused by changes in FPI inflows. Thus, 1 would be the unbiased estimate if such reverse causality indeed exists. Results in Table 7 show a point estimate of between $0.14 to $0.28 billions of FPI increase per percentage point increase in the lagged price synchronicity (depending on whether or not 2008 is included in the sample). However, this estimate is also not statistically significant, most likely due to the same reasons addressed earlier in the previous section. Conclusion and Avenues for Future Research: Due to the lack of available data and time constraints, there are a number of robustness tests and models I wished to estimate but was unable to do so. As mentioned earlier, the paper used an approximation for price synchronicity. Although the approximated values fall somewhat around those provided by Morck et al.’s research (provided on Table 2 of Morck’s article, for year 1995), using the actual price synchronicity of all stocks, as opposed to that of index stocks, in each given country and year would reduce sampling bias in the estimated models. I also wished to estimate the same fixed effects models but replace the Corruption Perception Index with the “good government” index constructed by Morck et al. that more closely represents the institutional risks foreign investors face in emerging markets. Ultimately, using a fixed effects model and a three-stage least squares estimation of a simultaneous equations system, this paper finds evidence consistent with an extension of the equity home bias theory. Economic theory suggests that, under the same level of institutional risks, inefficient markets should attract foreign investors and therefore increase the level of FPI inflows into an emerging market. Empirical evidence shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between market efficiency and FPI inflows once the protection of property rights has been accounted for. At “best”, empirical evidence suggests a $0.42 billion rise in FPI per percentage point increase in lagged price synchronicity, but the point estimate is statistically insignificant. This paper proposes that one can reconcile the inconsistency between theory and empirical evidence by looking at an extension of the home bias theory, where some foreign investors prefer efficient markets because they more closely represent their domestic investing environment. References Chinn, Menzie D. and Hiro Ito (2006). "What Matters for Financial Development? Capital Controls, Institutions, and Interactions," Journal of Development Economics, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 163-192. De Long, J. Bradford, et al. “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 98, no. 4, 1990, pp. 703–738. Fama, Eugene F. “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work.” The Journal of Finance, vol. 25, no. 2, 1970, pp. 383–417. French, Kenneth R., and James M. Poterba. “Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets.” The American Economic Review, vol. 81, no. 2, 1991, pp. 222–226. Li, Jie, and Rajan, Ramkishen S., “Do capital controls make gross equity flows to emerging markets less volatile?” Journal of International Money and Finance, vol. 59, pp 220-244 Morck, Randall K. and Yu, Wayne and Yeung, Bernard Yin, "The Information Content of Stock Markets: Why Do Emerging Markets Have Synchronous Stock Price Movements?" Journal of Financial Economics (JFE), vol. 58, no. 1-2, 2000 Wooldridge, Jeffrey M., 1960-. Introductory Econometrics : a Modern Approach. Mason, Ohio :South-Western Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.

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*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEW, WALTER SCHEIDEL: Coronavirus and Why Inequality is Only Ever Reduced by Disaster Walter Scheidel (pictured) is a historian at Stanford University as well as the author of eighteen books, including “The Great Leveler”, which presents a history of economic inequality from “the stone age to the twenty-first century”. In the book, which won a number of awards, Scheidel argues that inequality has historically only ever been reduced by “four horsemen”: plague, civil war, mass military mobilization, and government collapse. You can buy “The Great Leveler” here . May 2020 JPPE: The Great Leveler presents this very ambitious thesis that inequality only ever gets reduced by mass military mobilization, plague, civil war, or government collapse. Your previous work dealt with demography, political economy, ancient history, and the classics. Why was a book studying the history of inequality something that you wanted to work on? Scheidel : Well, I should say I’m not much of a classicist. I’ve always considered myself a historian, and even though I specialize in ancient and premodern history, I’ve always been interested in world history and comparative history, more generally. And I guess the short answer is that I wrote this book because nobody had ever tried to write it before, and it would not have been possible even ten or fifteen years earlier because there simply weren’t enough case studies of the pre-modern period to piece together a broad survey of the evolution of income and wealth inequality across hundreds and even thousands of years. And then my more immediate inspiration was Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. I had been familiar with his work already even before this book came out, and when the book actually did come out and was a huge success, I figured that if I didn't sit down now and write the book, then someone else is going to do it. And so, I got going, and I had the thesis already in the back of my mind—Piketty had the same thesis that I did but just for the twentieth century. And what I was trying to do was see if it applied to world history, more generally, and somewhat to my surprise, it turned out this was the case. And because I didn’t run into any obvious counterexamples, I was able to write up a whole book in the course of about two years. JPPE: Do you believe that high levels of inequality might be partially responsible for producing the shocks that ultimately reduce it? Scheidel : What I focused on was the impact of violent shocks on existing levels of inequality. And I think, in that respect, we are on pretty solid ground in that there are long term patterns regardless of what stage of development you are. Whether you are dealing with an agrarian society or an industrial society, the underlying principle and the underlying dynamics assert themselves again and again—it’s this idea that certain types of violent shocks would drive down inequality. Now, it is tempting to think that there could be some sort of homeostatic system where, if inequality goes up and exceeds a certain level, it triggers violent events that then reduce inequality. And then inequality rises again, and you have a never-ending series of cycles. That’s intellectually quite appealing. I don’t think that theory is fully borne out by the evidence that I have been able to put together. I think the evidence is much stronger in terms of a consistent effect of violent shocks on inequality, but not in quite the same way the other way around. JPPE: Are there certain instances in which inequality is responsible for causing the leveling force that ultimately brought it down? One example that seems to speak to this is the case of Germany prior to the Second World War. The high inequality that took place during that time and the decline in German purchasing power seems to have contributed to the socio-political conditions that would ultimately lead to the Second World War and the leveling that took place then. Scheidel : I’m not familiar with that particular case study. I think that it is perfectly plausible and possible to tease out this conclusion by statistical analysis. Yet, if you look at world history more generally, you become very wary of cherry-picking. It’s easy to identify individual cases where you can observe such a connection. There are very powerful counterexamples that should give us pause, however. So, for instance, if you just looked at France in the late eighteenth century, you could say, ‘of course the French Revolution was driven in part by extremely high levels of inequality’, and that makes perfect sense. Yet then you have to bear in mind that France was surrounded by other countries—Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany—that were just as unequal as France and had no revolutions. You also have to bear in mind that the revolution in Russia occurred in a country that was not only not very industrialized, contrary to what Marx expected; it was also not very unequal by the standards of the time. The most unequal countries were the only industrialized ones—Britain, for example. The same is true of China when Mao took over. So, once you put all of these individual cases in context, it’s very difficult to say that a particular level of inequality triggers some kind of societal breakdown, ferments revolution, or leads to other kinds of leveling. JPPE: In your book, you argued that leveling would not have happened without the presence of a violent shock. You conclude, however, by discussing the possibility that we have moved to a point in history where the “four horsemen” are no longer necessary to reduce inequality. What do you think now? Scheidel : I think the evidence supports the belief that violent shocks are necessary to bring about leveling. They may not be sufficient, and they also act as catalysts. So, if you go back a hundred years or over one hundred years, there were already trends on the way in favor of increasing education, unionization of the workforce, the spread of democracy, and certain kinds of progressive taxation. All these things already existed but they got an enormous boost by World War One, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War Two. And the counterfactual is to think about if they would have gotten an equally big boost had these shocks not occurred, and I’m very pessimistic about that. It’s not a black and white picture; it’s not to say nothing ever changes in the absence of such shocks. It’s just to say the changes would be far less dramatic, and I think that this is quite easy to substantiate empirically. Now, as for your other question, when I concluded the book, I had to look forward to the future and I came to the conclusion that the traditional four horsemen were dormant right now. We no longer fight mass military mobilization wars; there are no credible revolutionary movements (at least in high-income countries); states are much more stable in most of the world than they used to be; and pandemics, such as the one that we are encountering right now, are nothing like the pandemics of the past that leveled by reducing the workforce and driving up wages. We’ll see the exact opposite in this case with respect to wages. What I neglected to include is that climate change might become a fifth leveling force. I’m sympathetic to that view. It needn’t be a fifth leveling force, but it could revive some of the others. It could lead to conflict, to state breakdown, to more pandemics, and to all kinds of things along those lines. So that’s something I should have perhaps considered more systematically. Otherwise I never really said that you can’t do anything at all in the absence of such violent shocks. I just wanted to remind people how difficult it is, and I think that’s important to bear in mind when we develop policy programs. We can’t just say ‘let’s go back to the way things were in the fifties’, for a number of reasons. We have to be aware when we develop policy initiatives what the structural impediments are and what very special conditions had to be in place in the past to bring about significant leveling. That’s not a call to defeatism. But I think it’s the historian’s job to put those things in perspective, and in this case, I think our job is to remind people over and over again that it’s really hard work to reduce inequality. JPPE: Are there instances of policy successfully reducing inequality that we can try and mimic in the future? Scheidel : That’s a very good question. I think there are two cases to consider. One is historically Scandinavian countries—not just Denmark, but also Sweden and Norway—, which used to be highly unequal two hundred years ago with extreme inequality in land ownership and so on. And that already started to get a little better in the course of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Those countries were not very heavily touched by the world wars. They were in some sense, however, and we see major contractions of inequality during those periods, but that’s clearly only part of the story. So, there is something going on in those countries, in particular, that put them on a trajectory towards lower inequality, and that was amplified and accelerated by the shocks in the first half of the twentieth century. Now, to what extent you can extrapolate from this is a very difficult question because those countries were—especially then— relatively small, not very populous, and they were extremely homogenous in a great many ways—linguistically, ethnically, socially, culturally, and so on. They were the exact opposite in many ways from the United States, which has historically always been very diverse, and there are studies that show that high levels of diversity can obstruct ambitious redistributive programs because there is simply less widespread popular support for those kinds of policies. So, we are talking about apples and oranges. It’s not quite clear to what extent you can transfer some examples and apply them to different kinds of societies. And I think this is where the case of Latin America comes in. Latin America is very interesting. It’s a major outlier because it never experienced a major reduction in inequality; inequality has always been very high because of its colonial past—slavery, plantation economies, for example. It also never experienced any major leveling shocks. It wasn’t really touched by the World Wars. There were hardly any revolutions outside of Cuba. And so, you had status quo for a really long time and not very many changes. And in terms of diversity, some of those societies are more similar to the United States. What you saw there in the first decade of this century was a quite significant trend towards lower inequality in most Latin American countries—such as Brazil—by peaceful means, and that’s very encouraging. It really depended on the concatenation of circumstances that may be hard to replicate—gains from increased investment in education, political changes, a commodities boom in China that shored up certain sectors of the economy. All kinds of things were coming together in just the right way to reduce historically high levels of inequality. As I was writing this book, I was wondering whether this peaceful trend might be sustainable, and there were already clouds on the horizon. There was a major economic downturn a number of years ago. And the trends seemed to have stopped in many countries. With what’s happening right now and will be happening as a result of the current pandemic, we can be pretty sure that this trend is not going to continue or be sustainable in the long term. We will have to wait for a revival of this trend. JPPE: It strikes me that when you ask scholars what the causes of inequality have been, people who study finance will blame financialization or the democratization of credit. Others will blame trade or technology. And others will blame policy. What do you believe the causes of inequality have been? Scheidel: It’s really like the story of the elephant and the blindfolded men who touch different parts of the elephant, and they try to describe the animal and come up with very different descriptions. In the existing scholarship on the reasons for the increase in inequality from the 1980s onwards, different studies identify different components— as you say, automation, globalization, deregulation, financialization, all kinds of “ations”, the weakening of unions, and the fact that enormous numbers of workers came online with the opening up of China. All of these effects really refashioned the post-war order in ways that revived economic growth, which had been flagging in the 70s, but also led to a higher concentration of income and wealth. And all these many factors have been interacting ever since, and this makes it so much more difficult to address the problem because there are so many different factors that are operational and active now and have been for a generation. So, if you just address globalization, or robots, or tax reform, you would only really touch one part of the elephant, so to speak. And it would be very difficult to implement comprehensive reforms without at the same time transforming the entire economic system that we live in and depend on. It may be possible in theory, but it doesn’t strike me as a very plausible policy goal in the short run. JPPE: You also argue that major economic transitions (e.g. the Industrial Revolution), often increase in inequality in the “short-run”. Do you think that we’re in the middle of something like this as we embrace digital technology? Scheidel: Yes, I’ve seen this argument a number of times and it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, at the beginning of agriculture, if you have a plow and someone else doesn’t have a plow, then you are better off than the other person. Now if you work in Silicon Valley, then you are well off, and if you don’t, then you are in trouble. So, these transitions—regardless of what they were like and what the specifics were like— certainly have disequalizing potential in the sense that they might make society overall richer, but they reward certain groups disproportionately. And frankly, the current pandemic is an excellent example. There are people who can work from home; their jobs are more secure; they have higher incomes on average. And there are people who do more traditional kinds of work, for lack of a better word, and they are much more heavily exposed to the economic downturn. You have students who can participate in online instruction because they have broadband access and laptops and those who can’t. All these inequalities already existed, but they are now actually amplified and made more painful by the existing crisis. And I think ultimately this is a symptom of the effects of a broader transition towards a more digital economy. JPPE: When we consider past plagues, do you think that there is anything fundamentally different about the Coronavirus Pandemic? Scheidel: Well, the most obvious difference is that even in a worst-case scenario, the coronavirus is going to kill a far smaller share of the population than pandemics of the past and even than the Spanish Flu did a hundred years ago. And mortality is, of course, concentrated among people in advanced ages and spares most of the active workforce and people who are about to enter the workforce. So, there won’t be any kind of demographic shock or Malthusian reset. Real wages are not going to go up because there won’t be a shortage of wages. In fact, mass unemployment is going to depress wages, if anything. So, we can mercifully forget about this. Nobody wants that kind of pandemic to ever happen again. And frankly, even if it did happen again in some future year, AI and automation would actually absorb some of those effects. We wouldn’t necessarily have to pay people more; we might just automate more, which aging societies are already doing if you look at Japan. So that’s a fundamental difference. In the short run, I think this pandemic is going to increase inequality for all the reasons we touched on and because unemployment is unevenly distributed. This is maybe not that different from earlier pandemics because, in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic, things tend to be quite chaotic. So, the real question is if the current pandemic has the potential to lead to some kind of equalizing change down the line—not tomorrow, but maybe a couple of years from now. That’s a very good question, and I think it depends ultimately on how severe this crisis is going to be because historically, the worse the crisis was, the harder the shocks and the greater the potential for equalizing change was. So if quantitative easing works and scientists come up with a decent vaccine within a year or so, there is a pretty good chance we will return to some modified version of the status quo, at least with the respect to inequality—i.e. that the existing inequalities will survive and maybe even be reinforced, which is what happened in 2008 after the Great Recession. The alternative is that things really get out of control, that creating new money turns out to be insufficient, that there will be a global depression that lasts for a long time, and that the virus turns out to be intractable—it mutates, and all kinds of horrible things happen. And, as a result of this, we may end up with levels of dislocation, misery, and despair that would drive our policymaking in a certain direction, which would be more like what we had in the 1930s, when conditions were so terrible and the social safety net so rudimentary or nonexistent that all kinds of measures had to be taken that would have been considered too radical just a few years before. So, it is quite possible that we find ourselves on the cusp of this sort of change. The ideas are already out there. There was no Bernie Sanders twenty years ago, and much of this will depend on how this is actually going to play out—just how big and disruptive this shock is going to be. JPPE: Are there specific policies you would like to see implemented? In your NYT op-ed, you called for a new era of progressive policy. Very practically, what are some of your positions? Scheidel : Well, I think outcomes are going to vary quite a lot by country. In the US, we live in a kind of low hanging fruit society, in the sense that inequality is higher than it needs to be and is higher than in other western capitalist countries for a number of reasons specific to the US—the political system, the fiscal structure, the weakness of unions, and so on. So, there are certain things the US could do that would have an effect longer-term on inequality. This includes campaign finance reform; there’s a clear connection between plutocratic influence and certain inequality outcomes. This includes providing better access to health care, improving access to education, protecting and reenabling collective bargaining and unionization. Whether it is tweaking the tax code to make it a bit more progressive and a bit more like what we see in Western Europe. None of these approaches would be radical. It’s not a new deal kind of scenario. It’s not a Green New Deal kind of scenario but it would certainly contribute to a reduction in inequality. It wouldn’t take us back to where we were after World War II, but that’s not to be expected anyways. It would certainly improve the situation. JPPE: Are there areas of the study of inequality that you believe are under covered by researchers and that you would like to see people work on? Scheidel: Well, that’s actually a very good question. Going back to what we talked about initially, it is still an open question to whether inequality can destabilize society in a systematic way. There have been studies on developing countries (low-income countries)—especially in post-colonial settings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—that show high levels of inequality are associated with an increased risk of civil war, for instance, or some kind of societal breakdown. It seems that crossing a certain GDP threshold protects more affluent societies from these kinds of dislocations, but that doesn’t mean that inequality can’t lead to less extreme forms of social unrest and problems. And that’s something that has not been as well researched as maybe it should be. And if it could be shown that there is such an effect, that should galvanize policymakers and make them think twice about propping up the existing structures that enable the very high degree of inequality that we see right now.

The Duty to Use Drones The Duty to Use Drones In Cases of National Self-Defense Lina Dayem University of Chicago Author Ginevra Bulgari Vance Kelley Galen Hall Naima Okami Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (14 pages) Introduction Since the tactic was first implemented, targeted killing by drones has been associated with political secrecy, dubious legality, and unsavory practices, and has thus garnered a negative reputation. In this essay, I endeavor to vindicate the use of drones, if only under the constrained circumstances of national self-defense. I argue the following: If a state can permissibly carry out targeted killings for the purpose of national self-defense, then it ought to do so with drones because of the minimized risks to soldiers and civilians. To argue this position, I first demonstrate that we should think of targeted killing as fitting into the self-defense paradigm, rather than military or law enforcement paradigms. I explain that states may permissibly engage in targeted killing when it is justified in terms of national self-defense. Next I explain how drones minimize risk to both soldiers and civilians. By combining the logic of self-defense with the principle of risk minimization, I arrive at the conclusion that in circumstances where targeted killing is necessary for national self-defense, states have a duty to use drones. Finally, I respond to potential objections about the use of drones, all of which can be addressed by improved drone policy. Military and Law Enforcement Paradigms Provide Inadequate Justification for Targeted Killing Targeted killing is a practice in which many governments engage. To justify targeted killings, theorists and politicians generally invoke one of two paradigms that permit the use of deadly force: the military paradigm and the law enforcement paradigm. These paradigms act to orient government policy—they direct how we may morally and legally behave towards our enemy. Targeted killing remains controversial because it cannot be clearly endorsed by either paradigm. The Military Paradigm The military paradigm activates the laws and conventions of war. Enemy combatants are the only parties liable to death. According to the jus in bello[1] convention, combatants can permissibly be killed during wartime without punishment (with some exceptions). Hostile treatment towards a combatant is permissible simply by virtue of combatant status, rather than any actions taken by the individual in question. In other words, a combatant’s liability to death derives precisely from assumption of the role of a soldier. In this paradigm, identifying an enemy terrorist as a combatant engaged in acts of war could enable the state to justify permissibly killing him without a trial. So, the fact that targeted killings of terrorists occur without trial suggests potential use of the logic of the military paradigm. Furthermore, in the case of the United States’ conflict with Al-Qaeda, we notice that the military paradigm seems to underlies the operative language of both parties, although it does not fully account for the conflict’s operative logic. Declaring a “War on Terror” and Jihad (Holy War)[2], respectively, implies at least nominally that each side considers the other’s fighters to be enemy combatants. The problem, of course, is that under international law a private citizen (such as Osama bin Laden) cannot declare war as that is a right granted only to sovereign states.[3] Conversely, under international law, a state cannot declare war against a non-state actor.[4] We may doubt the applicability of the military paradigm to targeted killings for several other reasons. First, terrorists willingly forgo the conventions that govern combatant status. The convention states that combatants wear the insignia of their country and carry their weapons openly.[5] Terrorists, however, do not wear uniforms, and hide amongst civilians. Of course, the main tactic of terrorists—targeting civilians—violates the jus in bello convention of noncombatant immunity. It is not only the status of the terrorists that is unclear; the status of those who carry out targeted killing is equally blurry, as civilian leaders often order targeted killings. In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a civilian organization, has the authority to command drone strikes.[6] CIA control over drone strikes blurs the line between combatant and civilian, since civilians do actively engage in hostile conduct. This further complicates traditional boundaries of warfare with respect to justice and permissibility. Finally, naming someone in advance to be placed on a hit list runs counter to the very idea of status-based liability. In war, individual soldiers on the battlefield are not identified by the enemy and specifically targeted. Rather, a soldier is attacked by another soldier as part of a relationship of hostility qua soldier.[7] In other words, a soldier is liable to be killed due to his status as a soldier, rather than because of his actions. The practice of naming a target in advance singles him out qua individual. Therefore, the naming practice is fundamentally at odds with the status-based logic of legitimate military hostility. The Law Enforcement Paradigm Political theorists and governments have also justified targeted killing under a law enforcement paradigm. These parties maintain that terrorists should be considered criminals, rather than combatants. However, the goal of law enforcement is to arrest—not kill—the criminal. By the law enforcement paradigm, it is wrong to deprive a suspected criminal of due process by killing him before a trial. Indeed, the instances where law enforcement officers can permissibly kill are restricted to cases wherein a criminal resists arrest by putting the life of officers or others at risk. In this situation, liability to death is action-based rather than status-based. In other words, the criminal has effectively forfeited their right to life by initiating an attack. Liability to death may also come after the trial as retributive justice. So in certain cases, certain crimes may be punishable by death. While the death penalty is controversial, in cases where it is legal, it also represents an instance of action-based liability as punishment for a past action. However, by its very nature, targeted killing skips the fundamental steps of arrest and trial. Placing a name on a hit-list presumes guilt, and the individual listed becomes liable to instantaneous death by drone strike without being afforded due process. Under the law enforcement paradigm, this would be considered an extrajudicial execution, tantamount to murder.[8] Invoking the Principle of Self-Defense to Justify Targeted Killings The Self-Defense Paradigm In this discussion, I will draw from the work of several authors, such as McMahan, Gross, and Finkelstein, who analyze targeted killing as an act of self-defense. The self-defense paradigm better addresses the conceptual lacunae in the military and law enforcement paradigms as they concern targeted killing, and thus maps more clearly onto the practice of targeted killing. The basic premise of the self-defense paradigm is that when there is a threat to national security, a state has a right to protect itself. Self-defense can be considered a special offshoot of the law enforcement paradigm because, as described above, it is sometimes permissible for law enforcement officers to engage in certain self-defensive practices involving lethal force.[9] This paradigm deals with the threats that terrorists pose to national security and so is preemptive in nature. In this way, the killing of a terrorist should not be conceived of as punishment or retributive justice, since the paradigm does not deal with past actions. Instead, under the self-defense paradigm, someone who has never committed an attack could be just as liable as someone who has already committed several, provided that they pose the same current threat. Indeed, under this framework, a terrorist’s past crimes only serve as an epistemic gauge for predicting the likelihood that the individual will strike again.[10] The self-defense paradigm bypasses the military paradigm’s murky combatant-noncombatant distinctions because its liability criterion centers on action rather than status. If someone poses a threat to a state, the actions a state may take against the individual are not constrained by their status. Rather, the individual’s status is irrelevant both to their liability to death as well as our ability to retaliate. The self-defense paradigm also circumvents the law-enforcement paradigm’s crucial steps of arrest and trial because it operates on the logic of preemptive justice rather than retributive justice. Like the law enforcement paradigm, the self-defense paradigm uses the logic of action-based liability to death, but in a less evident manner. A terrorist’s liability to death derives from the notion that in planning an attack, a terrorist wrongs innocent people by increasing their likelihood of harm.[11] Thus, the harm caused by the terrorist’s death would need to be proportional to the harm prevented by protecting innocents from the attack. In other words, if their death would not disrupt realization of that harm, the targeted killing is not justified. Finally, it must also be considered whether or not the targeted killing could result in dangerous unintended consequences.When these criteria are met under the self-defense paradigm, the result would be that targeted killing is permissible as an act of self-defense. In the next sections, I argue that in the cases where targeted killing is permissible, states have a duty to use drones to carry them out because drones reduce risk to both civilians and soldiers. The Duty to Minimize Risk in Cases of Self-Defense: Individual Cases To demonstrate the duty to minimize risk to civilians and soldiers in cases of national self-defense, I will employ an analogy involving individual self-defense. Imagine that an individual is attacked in a way that threatens their life. It is uncontroversial that they have the right to defend themselves against the attack. By initiating the attack, the attacker has forfeited their right not to be harmed. Because the victim’s life is threatened, responding proportionally to the attack means that they may permissibly kill the attacker, if that is the only way to thwart the attack. However, imagine that the attack occurs in a crowded location. While the victim still has the right to defend themselves, they would wrong bystanders by inflicting harm on them, or risking their harm. The bystanders, detached from the conflict, have done nothing to make themselves liable to harm. Consequently, they must minimize the harm to which bystanders are exposed. Therefore, the means by which one may defend themselves in this crowded location are constrained. For instance, while the victim may shoot the attacker in the open, the victim many not shoot indiscriminately into the crowd in order to scare the attacker away. Similarly, if the attacker hides within the crowd, it would be wrong to simply aim at the group of people if there existed high likelihood that a bystander would be harmed. Furthermore, imagine the victim had the choice between two weapons that each afford equal capabilities to thwart or end the attack. One of the weapons is more precise than the other. For example, consider a handgun in comparison to a large vehicle (to be used as a deadly weapon). By aiming a gun at the attacker, they have a lower chance of accidentally hitting a bystander than if they were to drive the vehicle into the crowd. Because the victim has the choice between the two weapons, it would be wrong to choose the car, because it poses higher risk to bystanders. These two examples demonstrate that even in the presence of bystanders the victim retains the right to self-defense, yet has a duty to minimize the risk they pose to the innocent. For the bystanders simply have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and have done nothing to make themselves liable to harm. The duty to minimize risk even when acting in self-defense is not only a consideration which must be undertaken with respect to bystanders, but at the state level also stretches to the defensive capabilities afforded by the state to its soldiers. Consider an analogy offered by Bradley Strawser. He imagines a commander who orders their troops to take off their bullet-proof vests and run at the enemy, and concludes that the commander wrongs the troops by ordering them into a dangerous situation without the normally available protection.[12] In doing so, the commander unjustly increases their risk to harm. While there may exist important moral differences between denying defensive capability to soldiers and aiming a weapon at a crowd of bystanders, Strawser’s analogy highlights the fundamental idea that it would be wrong to increase the possibility of harm to a soldier, or civilian, through deprival of defensive capability. Applying a Duty to Minimize Risk to Cases of Self-Defense: State-Level The duty to minimize harm to bystanders in the individual case can be extended to situations of state-level self-defense as a duty to minimize the risk of harm to civilians and soldiers. If under reliable intelligence a state discovers an imminent threat to its national security, the state has a right to defend itself against that threat. But at the same time, the means available to the state for the purpose of self-defense must be bound by a duty to minimize risk to civilians and to soldiers. If a state can justifiably respond to an imminent threat of a terrorist attack, it does not have a carte blanche to employ any weapon in its arsenal. For instance, a state could launch a nuclear bomb on the city where the attacker is hiding. While this would certainly be an effective method to kill the attacker, it is a grossly disproportionate and as such obviously unjust. Instead, the state might instead choose a “boots on the ground” mission to find the individual, or any number of other more precise strategies. Any kind of armed engagement involves risk to both civilians and to the soldiers involved. As in the case of individual self-defense, it is the state’s duty to employ a strategy that offers the least risk to all parties involved. I will now explain how drone technology seems to be the obvious choice for risk reduction in such a scenario. Risk Reduction Through Use of Drones Undertaking targeted killing with drones reduces the risk of harm to a state’s own soldiers, as well as foreign civilians, in several ways. For pilots, the remote operation of unmanned weapons dramatically reduces chance of harm: drone pilots can operate from a base thousands of miles away from the conflict zone. They personally face no threat of harm, retaliation, or retribution. In contrast, engaging in a “boots on the ground” mission puts the soldiers involved at an increased risk because they are directly exposed to the hazards of a hostile territory, which leaves them open to the possibility of attack. The remote aspect of drone strikes may also reduce harm to civilians in the conflict zone. Journalist Michael Lewis perceptively reasons that because drone pilots feel secure, they are surprisingly less likely to initiate a strike out of fear or anxiety for their personal safety.[13] What Lewis articulates is that the mistakes frequently made by soldiers in the “fog of war” can be minimized by drones.[14] Moreover, drones themselves can act as intelligence-gathering machines. A target may be surveyed for months before an attack is carried out. This has several benefits. First, it confirms that the target is actually involved in terrorist activities, reducing the chance of targeting an innocent person. If the suspect is the right person, then the extensive intelligence allows the pilot to identify a pattern in the subject’s daily life so that the subject may be targeted at times when they are more likely to be alone. Furthermore, when operated with due care, drones are precise, capable of striking only a single person. As journalist Mark Bowden notes, “[A drone’s] extraordinary precision makes it an advance in humanitarian warfare. In theory, when used with principled restraint, it is the perfect counterterrorism weapon. It targets indiscriminate killers with exquisite discrimination.”[15] To ensure that its deployment is as precise as possible, operators have adopted measures to minimize civilian risk. For example, a recent review of drone procedures by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan recommended that strikes occur while the target is in a vehicle, rather than in a compound. This is because it is easier to keep track of those entering and exiting vehicles than those entering and exiting compounds, reducing the likelihood that a target’s family member or close associate will also be hit. In addition, the strike could take place on an isolated road, further reducing the risk to bystanders.[16] Even under unideal operation conditions, drone strikes are generally less deadly to civilians than other available means, such as ground strikes or piloted airstrikes.[17] Finally, the practice of targeted killings itself can reduce a conflict’s escalation and thus its casualties. Targeted killing, when justified as preemptive action as described above, functions to avoid prolonged engagement or full-scale war. Comparing the civilian casualties of war to drone strikes demonstrates clearly that conventional warfare is the deadlier of the two.[18] Thus, for the aforementioned reasons, when states can permissibly carry out targeted killing for the purpose of national self-defense, they have a duty to do so with drones because they minimize risk of harm for civilians and soldiers alike.This duty to employ drones should be understood as prima facie, a strategy that should be adopted unless specific circumstances require the use of other measures. In other words, the duty stands as long as using drone technology will minimize risk to bystanders and soldiers involved in the operation. If in a given operation, certain material limitations, geographical specificities, or procedural carelessness will cause an elevated risk of harm, the duty no longer stands. Objections Many critics object to drones on the grounds that civilians sometimes are killed in drone strikes—because of this unjust risk to civilians, they argue that the use of drones cannot be justified. I will first respond by emphasizing that my argument deals with minimizing risk, not eliminating risk altogether. To eliminate risk completely would be to advocate for pacifism. We need to compare the risk that drones pose to civilians to the risk that other weapons and armed operations pose to civilians. Recent figures indicate that in comparison to conventional measures, drone strikes have ranged from slightly to far less lethal in producing collateral damage.[19] The above objection can take on a more nuanced character, deserving a different response. Perhaps critics feel an intuitive discord between the very precise capability of the drone and the fact that it nevertheless produces civilian collateral, damage which seems to imply carelessness in drone operations. To respond to these critics, I argue that their concern has more to do with mishandling and reckless use of the technology than with a problem with the technology itself. This kind of criticism is not unique to drones; any weapon can be used well or poorly. However, I contend that because drones are known for their precision, concern over rates of collateral damage may be even more relevant than in the case of use of other weapons. As such, elevated numbers of civilian casualties may be an indication of faulty intelligence or careless policy. I reiterate that the duty to use drones is only prima facie: if drones cause or exacerbate harm—either as a result of material factors or policy faults—then the duty to use them is dissolved. Indeed, I would agree with critics that these cases call for rigorous reassessment of policy and procedure. However, I would highlight that by focusing on drone technology in discussing this problem we misplace responsibility by blaming the weapon for the faults of its operators. In his 2006 essay “Terrorism and Just War,” Michael Walzer advocates for targeted killing as a counterterrorism measure. He acknowledges that counterterrorism occurs in the grey area between war and law enforcement, and usually away from active war zones. In his view, to keep the effects of counterterrorism from resembling the effects of terrorism, it is the duty of counterterrorist fighters to take extensive measures to prevent civilian casualties. For it is the care and protection of civilians that distinguishes legitimate counterterrorist activities from the illegitimate engagement of terrorists, as terrorists do not operate with similar notions of “collateral damage.” Walzer believes this care for civilians should be upheld even more so in the case of targeted killings because they are activities outside of wartime. He concludes that “what justice demands is that the army take positive measures, accept risks to its own soldiers, in order to avoid harm to civilians.”[20] While I believe that the motivation for Walzer’s argument is noble, it rests on a false premise. For, when read carefully, we observe that Walzer takes risk as a sort of sliding scale oscillating between the two extremes of risk to soldiers or risk to civilians. Rather, it is possible to work to minimize risk for civilians without this occurring at the expense of soldiers, minimizing risks for both parties. Walzer does not seem to entertain this possibility. However, when used with due care, the drone is the most precise weapon that we have in our arsenal. Its use would minimize risk to civilians while simultaneously eliminating risks to soldiers as well. If this is truly the case, then there does not seem to be a reason that, by his criteria, Walzer would object to their use. It does not seem that acknowledging the duty to avoid harming civilians would necessarily preclude the duty to avoid harm to soldiers. Again, however, my argument for the use of drones is only a prima facie. If it is indeed the case that more civilians would be harmed by the use of drones, either due to material limitations or reckless policy, then they should not be used. Many critics argue that if drones make targeted killing easier and less risky to soldiers, states will undertake more targeted killings than they would otherwise. They worry that the easy, efficient, and asymmetric nature of drone engagement may cause operators to ignore or forget that killing is only permissible when absolutely necessary to prevent greater harm. In turn, criteria for appearing on a hit-list for such targeted killings could become weaker and weaker. Walzer expresses this concern in his essay “Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare.” He writes, “why should we think it different from the sniper’s rifle? The difference is that killing-by-drone is so much easier than other forms of targeted killing. The easiness should make us uneasy. This is a dangerously tempting technology. It makes our enemies more vulnerable than ever before, and we can get at them without any risk to our own soldiers” (italics added).[21] Therefore, he and likeminded observers assume that when there is lower risk to military personnel, the “necessity” threshold for pursuing a targeted killing would be lowered. My immediate response to such an objection is to specify that I do not argue for a blanket duty to use drones. My argument only pertains their use in justified instances of self-defense. Just because drones are tempting to overuse or abuse, it does not follow that they will definitely be misused. In a similar vein to my previous responses, I emphasize that the key is a consistent and honest drone policy, with transparency and accountability. If states consistently hold themselves to a high bar of certainty required to permissibly engage in a targeted killing, then temptation does not have to materialize into a dubious precedent. Similarly, some critics contend that the remote warfare aspect of drones will create a “video game mentality” in its operators, emboldening them to undertake even more risks. This notion, however, is simply untrue. According to a 2011 Department of Defense study, drone operators experience depression, anxiety, and PTSD at rates similar to combat pilots.[22] In the Atlantic article “The Killing Machines,” Mark Bowden, after conducting interviews with drone pilots, describes why these pilots experience such emotional distress. Combat pilots are not responsible for long-term intelligence collection, and are trained to leave the scene as soon as their missions are complete. On the other hand, a drone operator is responsible for collecting intelligence. This operator may observe the same person for months, becoming intimately familiar with the target’s daily life after seeing him with his friends and family. What’s more, the drone’s camera feed continues after a missile is launched. Drone pilots witness “the carnage close-up, in real time—the blood and severed body parts, the arrival of emergency responders, the anguish of friends and family…War by remote control turns out to be intimate and disturbing.”[23] One might also worry that justifying targeted killing with the logic of preemptive self-defense fails to address the combatant-noncombatant ambiguity previously discussed in reference to the military paradigm. For, if someone is killed before he commits a wrongful action, doesn’t that indicate that his killing could have only been status-based? I respond to this objection by reiterating that self-defense operates on the logic of action-based liability. While not immediately obvious, planning a deadly attack is a type of wrongful action severe enough to warrant liability to death, as it increases the likelihood of harm to a innocent people.[24] In this way, the assailant’s status is irrelevant; it is the nature of the threatening action that allows permissible retaliation. However, because of the preemptive nature of the response, there will always remain some uncertainty—indeed, the assailant could have had a change of heart and not followed through with the planned attack. Given this uncertainty, it is necessary to set the epistemic bar rather high when assessing the true likelihood that a suspected assailant will follow through with the threat. Indeed, extended surveillance should be used to ensure—to a degree of near certainty—that the targeted individual’s outward behaviors definitively imply intention to carry out an imminent attack. This would be possible with use of a drone, since it carries intelligence gathering capabilities. Ultimately, we should make quite certain that the assailant is truly preparing an attack for which killing them would be proportional to prevent the harm to innocents. In sum, my responses to these five objections follow a specific trend, emphasizing the need for stringent procedural constraints in use of drones, a high epistemic bar for identifying targets who pose a threat before proceeding to killing, and conducting the strikes with tremendous care for the welfare of civilians. I believe that if the policy for targeted killings was transparent, rigorously regulated, and strictly followed, the objections discussed above would be void. Conclusion In this essay, I have demonstrated that whenever targeted killing is permissible as an act of national self-defense, states have a duty to use drones to carry out the attack. In support of this argument, I have explained that the logic of self-defense is better applicable to targeted killings than either the logic of military conduct or of law enforcement. As the self-defense paradigm requires use of means which reduce risk to all parties involved, drones stand out as the obvious choice—precise, remote weapons which reduce the risk of harm to both soldiers and civilians. Finally, I responded to several objections to drone technology, ultimately concluding that strict and thoughtful procedures with regards to the technology’s use could allay critics’ overarching unease. Endnotes [1] Term of art meaning “just conduct during war.” [2] This is not to conflate the version of jihad that means “holy war” with its broader meaning: that is, a spiritual struggle within oneself against sin. [3] Jeff McMahan, “Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat or Law Enforcement?” in Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World, eds. Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 142. [4] McMahan, “Targeted Killing,”142. [5] This is a long-standing military convention, explicitly defined in by the United States’ “Military Commissions Act of 2006,” to respond to the lack of its explicit codification under the Geneva Convention. [6] Under the Obama administration, this power was transferred to the Pentagon, thereby placing drone strikes under military jurisdiction. However, this policy was reversed in March 2017 by the Trump administration, placing drone strikes in the jurisdiction of civilians again. See Mark Bowden, “Killing Machines,” The Atlantic, and “Trump Gives CIA Authority to Conduct Drone Strikes,” Reuters. [7] Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 15, no. 6 (July 1972): 123-44. [8] Michael L. Gross, “Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution or Self-Defence?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23, no. 3 (August 2006): 325. [9] McMahan, “Targeted Killing,”135; Claire Finkelstein, “Targeted Killing as Preemptive Action,” in Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World, eds. Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 179. [10] McMahan, “Targeted Killing,” 139. [11] McMahan, “Targeted Killing,” 139 [12] Bradley Jay Strawser, “Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 346-7. [13] Michael W. Lewis, “Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of Warfare Ever,” The Atlantic, August 21, 2013, accessed November 20, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/drones-actuallythe-most-humane-form-of-warfare-ever/278746/. [14] Lewis, “Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of Warfare Ever.” [15] Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines,” The Atlantic, September 15, 2013, accessed November 20, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-aboutdrones/309434/. [16] Lewis, “Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of Warfare Ever.” [17] Bowden, “Killing Machines.” [18] Daniel L. Byman, “Why Drones Work: The Case for Washington’s Weapon of Choice,” Brookings (blog), November 30, 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-drones-work-the-case-for-washingtons-weapon-ofchoice. [19] Bowden, “Killing Machines,” The Atlantic. [20] Michael Walzer, “Terrorism and Just War,” Philosophia 34, no. 1 (2006): 9. [21] Michael Walzer, “Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare,” Dissent Magazine, January 11, 2013, accessed November 20, 2018, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/targeted-killing-and-drone-warfare. [22] James Dao, “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do,” The New York Times, February 22, 2013, accessed November 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilotsfound-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html. [23] Bowden, “Killing Machines.” [24] McMahan, “Targeted Killing,” 139. References Bowden, Mark. "The Killing Machines." The Atlantic, September 15, 2013. Accessed November 20, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/ . Byman, Daniel L. “Why Drones Work: The Case for Washington’s Weapon of Choice.” Brookings (blog), November 30, 2001. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-drones-work-the-case-for-washingtons-weapon-of-choice/ . "Charter of the United Nations: Chapter VII." United Nations. Accessed November 20, 2018. http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-vii/ . Dao, James. "Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do." The New York Times, February 22, 2013. Accessed November 20, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html . Finkelstein, Claire. "Targeted Killing as Preemptive Action." In Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World, edited by Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman, 156-82. Oxford University Press, 2012. Gross, Michael L. “Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution or Self-Defence?," Journal of Applied Philosophy 23, no. 3 (August 2006): 323-35. Lewis, Michael W. "Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of Warfare Ever." The Atlantic, August 21, 2013. Accessed November 20, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/drones-actually-the-most-humane-form-of-warfare-ever/278746/ . McMahon, Jeff. “Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat or Law Enforcement?” In Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World, edited by Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman, 135-55. Oxford University Press, 2012. Nagel, Thomas. "War and Massacre." Philosophy and Public Affairs 15, no. 6 (July 1972): 123-44. Strawser, Bradley Jay. "Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles." Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 342-68. Singh, Kanishka. "Trump Gives CIA Authority to Conduct Drone Strikes." Reuters, March 13, 2017. Accessed November 20, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-cia-drones-idUSKBN16K2SE . U.S. Congress, House. Military Commissions Act of 2006. HR - 6166, 109th Congr., 2nd sess. Introduced in Senate September 22, 2006. https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/150084.pdf . Walzer, Michael. "Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare." Dissent Magazine, January 11, 2013. Accessed November 20, 2018. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/targeted-killing-and-drone-warfare . Walzer, Michael. "Terrorism and Just War." Philosophia 34, no. 1 (January 2006): 3-12.