Author Name < Back Editorial Board Foreword Tianyu Zhou & Juno Tantipipatpong “And did we not agree that the excellence or virtue of soul is justice and its defect injustice?" In this issue, we welcomed articles that centered around the theme of “political theory as a vehicle of social change.” We’ll first introduce the thematic logic and then proceed with a brief summary of articles. Can PPE theories serve as a vehicle for social change? Since the Axial Age (8th - 3rd century BCE), Vergeistigung , or spiritu- alization of the human mind, was complete among major world civilizations. Based on “rationality and rationally-clarified expe- riences,” humans began to question the current state of affairs, and political theories thus became a preoccupation for the pro- lific minds, not only as a description of how societies and polities are , but as a prescription of what they should become. The Socra- tic inquiries and Plato’s Republic were remarkable in defining, for the first time in the Western tradition, the role of a philosopher in society and polity–that is, to seek justice. Economics as a sci- entific matter emerged as a normative subject on how society may improve by scientific means. Important studies of how PPE theories may serve as a ve- hicle of social change first emerged in the 1920s. In his book, Crystallizing Public Opinion , Edward Bernays proposed a theory that took the “public opinion” of political economic matters as the problematik . The study demonstrated the effect of news and factual information on society are a function of the channels through which they were transmitted. As Bernays himself put, “[the] public relations counsel must lift startling facts from his whole subject and present them as news. He must isolate ideas and develop them into events so that they can be more readily understood and so that they may claim attention as news.” The tension caused by the question of how the logical and evidential basis of ideas may best correspond to their effects on society has haunted intellectuals ever since. The human rights theorists, Marxists, a number of political economists and the New Leftist intellectuals, and many scholars who began such inquiries in the aftermath of the Vietnam War have proposed various theories. In our current issue, authors have discussed topics of vital import in a wide range of fields, from the study of the ethics of ignorance to gender and sexual consent, from political ideology and public discourse to the politics of secularization and religi- osity, and from economic disruption to the meaning of work. We believe these issues are best examined through the lenses of philosophy, politics, and economics jointly. Through our pieces, we wish to illuminate both the diversity of thoughts and advise reflection on how readers might use this knowledge to improve the social conditions. References [1] Plat. Rep. 1.353e, “ἡ μἡν ἡρα δικαία ψυχἡ καἡ ἡ δίκαιος ἡνἡρ εἡ βιώσεται, κακἡς δἡ ἡ ἡδικος”. [2] Jaspers, K. (2017). Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (K. Salamun, Ed.). Schwabe Verlag. https://doi. org/10.24894/978-3-7965-4059-2.Recommended translation is Jaspers, K. (2021). The Origin and Goal of History (C. Thornhill, Ed.; 1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Origin-and-Goal-of-History/Jaspers/p/book/9780367679859 [3] “[die] Rationalität und [die] rational [geklärte] Erfahrung (der Logos gegen den Mythos)”. [4] Brown, E. (2017). Plato’s Ethics and Politics in The Republic. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/#Rel. [5] Samuels, W. J., Biddle, Jeff., & Davis, J. Bryan. (Eds.). (2003). A Companion to the History of Economic Thought (1st ed.). Blackwell. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/A+Companion+to+the+History+of+Eco- nomic+Thought-p-9780631225737. [6] Bernays, E. L. (1923). Crystallizing Public Opinion . Liveright Publishing. [7] I.e., Vilfredo Pareto and Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Serious scholars of Marxian thought and its history are referred to Kołakowski, Leszek. (1981). Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown (P. S. Falla, Ed.; Revised). W.W. Norton & Co. https:// wwnorton.com/books/Main-Currents-of-Marxism/.On human rights, see Jean Quataert, & Lora Wildenthal (Eds.). (2021). Routledge History of Human Rights (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Human-Rights/Quataert-Wildenthal/p/ book/9781032089669.8 [8] On politics, see T. Ball & R. Bellamy (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521563543 On economic thought, see The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015. (2019). In K. Becker & I. D. Thomson (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy , 1945-2015 (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1017/9781316779651.

The Influencer Issue: The Link between Commodification and Well-being on Social Media Enya Willems Author Xuanyu (Willard) Zhu Koda Li Hansae Lee Editors “Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. – when everything, in short, passed into commerce.” - Karl Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847, ch. 1) I. Introduction The phenomenon of the social media personality, commonly named influencer, has exploded over recent years. This individual has also been called the ‘micro-celebrity’ by academics, coined by Senft as “a new style of online performance that involves people ‘amping up’ their popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs, and social networking sites.” In more recent years, this list of characteristics has expanded to include: increasing political power; performed authenticity and connection to the audience; and self-branding. Marwick has expanded on Senft’s original definition by defining micro-celebrity fame as “a self-presentation technique,” or “a set of practices and a way of thinking about the self, influenced by the infiltration of celebrity and branding rhetoric into day-to-day life, rather than a personal quality.” This definition clearly differentiates the micro-celebrity from other forms of niche fame and stresses the importance of appearance and relatability. Due to its unique conceptualisation, the influencer is the celebrity of the new age; a time in which the use of online platforms can launch an individual into stardom, making this process easier than ever before. The created online personas are not only used for personal gain, but are often exploited by brands for marketing purposes. This technique has shown to be effective, with a study done by Nadanyiova et al. reporting that 56% of respondents said they would buy products that were recommended by influencers, going as far as 42% claiming they would change their entire lifestyle based on influencer endorsement. Accordingly, we can no longer see the influencer as an entertainer only; it has become an entity that blurs the lines between the public and private sphere, in every respect. By effectively selling their personhood to be used as a marketing strategy, the influencer turns into a mere commodity. Capitalism has made the body into a product that can be sold and bought, and social media has accelerated this process. This commodification of the self and the body is closely related to self-branding and the public image, which is the construction of a specific public persona with a fabricated set of values and interests, used to create economic value. The influencer industry is one part of the digital landscape that arguably represents the digital age very well: authenticity, agency and persona online have become concerns that have gotten widespread attention. This article takes on the task of constructing an interdisciplinary framework that combines Marxist normative critique and social analysis, combining relevant theories together to illuminate how the influencer as the commodified-being is the key to understanding negative effects on well-being. After identifying the link between the commodified social media influencer and the philosophical concept ‘well-being,’ this article mainly argues that as a consequence of the endless search for authenticity and relatability, the commodification of the influencer necessarily infringes upon the influencer’s privacy and intimacy; therefore the self of the influencer is commodified, which eventually has a negative impact on well-being. To create a new framework to analyse the issue, this article will take an interdisciplinary approach that combines empirical evidence with a normative approach; first introducing the Marxist analysis and expanding upon the phenomenon of the influencer, then combining the two to be able to explore the influencer-commodity and the questions that arise. II. The Marxist frame: commodification and digital capitalism A. Marx in the contemporary context The classical Marxist concepts of alienation and fetishism have been adjusted and expanded to fit the alternative forms of labour that have arisen over the last century. Due to the shift from the industrial to post-industrial society, Marxism can be contextually adapted as a flexible tool to utilise as opposed to a set of fixed assumptions. In the twenty-first century, the labour market has evolved and therefore diversified significantly. Undoubtedly, the last decades can mostly be defined by the digital age; automation, computers and the internet have led to the disappearance of several traditional jobs, while also creating other new ones. Taking the concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism directly from Marx’ original works allows us to justify our further analysis as it is grounded in theory. Therefore, this section will first briefly explain the core concepts and later adapt and develop it to fit the context of the influencer case. As Marx describes it in his 1867 work Capital Volume 1, the commodity is “first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.” When a good or a service is turned into a commodity, exchange-value is created; and this is the process of commodification. For an object to be considered a commodity, a social use-value has to be created through the process of exchange. Thus commodity fetishism examines how social relations are shaped around this exchange and therefore also the value of the commodity; this idea is essential for the understanding of how the worker and value are connected. As a result, social relations start to shape around the exchange of the commodity; the individuals who exchange their products do not have any relation to each other aside from their mutual interest in the commodity, meaning their interaction is centred only around creating economic value. Thus, the workers’ personhood becomes attached to the commodity, since its value directly expresses their labour, but when it is exchanged for the commodity of money this labour is made invisible. What follows is the process of alienation : the worker becomes estranged from their own labour, as well as from the other workers and their own human essence. This form of alienation therefore has major consequences on our mental state as the human being’s consciousness becomes “the self- consciousness of the commodity, ” in a situation in which every commodity loses their physical character. B. Digital capitalism and emotional labour To further connect the universal critique of labour under capitalism to the particular influencer case, understanding the concept of emotional labour is crucial. In her 1983 work The Managed Heart, Hochschild explores some of the complexities of capitalist labour by introducing emotional labour, in both the private and public life, and how this affects the emotional well-being of workers. Firstly, emotional labour is defined as labour that requires the worker to prompt or repress certain feelings, to be able to give a service that calls for a great amount of care. This type of labour is therefore exceptionally personal, as it calls for the worker to make use of a significant part of their identity. Therefore, there are similarities with heavy physical labour as in both cases this leads to alienation. In this case, the worker is likely to get alienated from their emotions and selfhood, as their job requires them to exploit their own individual personality as a way to perform well. This is evident in the service industry, where a worker is expected to smile at the customers, and their body and behaviour become an extension of the commodity they are trying to sell. Traits that are inherently personal therefore become divorced from their personhood, and a smile would be likened to something outside of the body, like the make-up or outfits worn. According to Hochschild, the effects of alienating emotional labour can be seen both in private and public life. It already starts in the private sphere that human emotions are taught to be repressed or brought out in a certain way. This emotion management is done through feeling rules, which are the ways in which we guide our emotions by setting up specific obligations or requests for ourselves during emotional exchanges; meaning when, where, and how we are ‘allowed’ to feel a certain way. In the case of emotional labour, these personal feeling rules become commercialised; when we are forced to act a certain way in a professional setting, this display of perceived fake emotions eventually becomes conflated with our real emotions. This leads to emotive dissonance, a process in which there is a discrepancy between real identity and forced identity, therefore affecting our mental state. When the worker is unable to maintain the distinction between real and perceived forced feelings, the lines get blurred. Then, since these forced feelings are used during the alienating practice of labour, the worker is more likely to feel estranged from their own personal feelings as well. More specific to the twenty-first century and the information age, Fuchs proposes we live in an era of digital capitalism in which we need to acknowledge the range of ways in which modern capitalism manifests itself and how they cocreate. Commodity fetishism stays relevant in the digital age, as it is displayed in the consumption of ideologies, both political and corporate, through modern mass media. In advertising on digital platforms, the mystification of the commodity is used by alienating the product from its labour, and replacing the void that is left with product propaganda. On social media, the commodity form of the platform is veiled by the social aspect, meaning it works invertedly to regular commodity exchanges where the social interactions are buried due to the obsession with exchange-value that overshadows it. The pleasure that is obtained when receiving a ‘like’ or message from a friend overshadows the distress of being endlessly bombarded with advertisements. Through this process, the social character is used to mask the fact that the website is still a commodity, as it is actively being used to generate income, looking at for example the unequal ratio between advertisements and social content on these platforms. Users are being convinced that the main purpose of social media is communication and social interaction, therefore successfully hiding the fact that many platforms are set up in a way that favours constant product propaganda to increase economic gains for the company over friendly connections. Logically, this will lead to alienation, as the social interaction on the platform becomes shaped by the process of exchange-value being created constantly. Thus, the user's purpose of socialising is forcibly minimised, to make place for the profit maximising-interests of the companies, with constant advertising taking over the platform. This also takes on more sinister forms, with companies making use of consumer data, even going as far as creating a market for the exchange of it, to analyse behavioural patterns to then use this information for personalised targeted advertisement, to eventually impact the consumer’s choices. This is part of a process that Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. III. The rise of the influencer and the mechanism of internet fame A. Explaining the Influencer As made clear by now, the influencer is the symbol of the twenty-first century, which must be examined carefully to understand its role in the digital age. Chasing this form of internet fame has become a full-time job for many aspiring celebrities and was made big by social media websites such as Twitter and YouTube around 10 to 15 years ago. This shift in celebrity culture has made it possible for ordinary people to build a following quickly; a trend that was started by reality television in the early 2000’s. While more traditional celebrities have also used their social media accounts to reach out and build a more intimate interpersonal relationship with their fans, the micro-celebrity is a more unique phenomenon. These social media stars can build a niche audience in a certain subculture or interest group, leading to them amassing millions of followers while still remaining anonymous to the general public. This broad interest in public figures and celebrities stems from the mediatization of culture , the process in which media has become more and more important to society and has affected daily life and therefore culture. Nearly every aspect of life has become permeated by mass media, with engaging in celebrity culture now being a major aspect in regular people’s lives; a process that is called celebritization or celebritification by scholars such as Driessens. However, a more in-depth overview of mediazation must also incorporate how the microcelebrity operates under a unique mechanism of celebrity status, most notably enjoying more mobility from the origin and increasingly persisting relevancy. Modern fame generated on the internet has the advantage that it attracts a loyal niche audience, therefore impacting the degree to which a media personality is seen as easily replaceable. A link can be observed between relevancy of the micro-celebrity and commercialisation. Success can be found when commercial content is combined with personal, non-sponsored content, to the point where the two have become integrated. The influencer has to make sponsored content, while also linking this to a personal story or opinion. Thus, for the influencer to attract and maintain an audience, it must attach itself to a carefully crafted identity and commercial purpose. B. Branding and authenticity: the practice of building an audience The term influencer displays how the sole purpose of the celebrity has become to use stardom to promote a certain lifestyle. Attached to this lifestyle are products, activities, and experiences that they promote; making them a valuable instrument for brands who are looking for marketing opportunities.The role of personas is therefore exceptionally important, to make themselves as marketable as possible. Self-branding is the concept of individuals crafting a public image as a way to gain commercial attention and cultural capital, as Khamis et al. describes it. This is now often associated with celebrities and social media, however this practice dates back to the early twentieth century, and since then it is common for individuals to be marketed just as commercial products: their “unique selling points” that make them attractive to a specific target audience are exaggerated and developed together with the demands of the customers. However, this also illustrates the major issues that are raised when individualising branding. Parallels can be observed between brand loyalty between commercial brands and their customers and between influencers and their audience. The influencer therefore capitalises on the perceived devotion from their fans, as much as mainstream brands do. For big multinationals such as Apple or Starbucks, certain promises can be made regarding the quality and overall experience staying the same, wherever and whenever the product is consumed. Their ability to stay consistent is a major aspect of what makes a brand trustworthy and therefore lucrative in the long term. However, this consistency is extremely difficult to maintain for individuals who do not have large teams of employees to ensure their objectivity. As established earlier, influencer marketing depends greatly on the exposure of the private life, and due to the inherent spontaneity of life the quality cannot be consistent in the same way. Therefore, the influencer who has a certain image to upkeep faces the difficult task of having to be extremely strict to not diverge from the path they are on, as advertisers might withdraw their sponsor deals if the influencer’s brand is abruptly changed. The appeal of the social media influencer, in contrast to the traditional celebrity, is the fact that audiences can effortlessly follow and connect with their favourite influencers. Their personas are close enough to believable ‘real’ personalities, so the audience feels an attachment, although they might still be aware that this is not a completely accurate portrayal. A celebrity with a successful brand, one that has built certain associations and images around their persona, will be able to attract market value that interests advertisers. Due to this economic dependence on its following, the influencer’s persona is essentially tied to their audience; they both mould their audience around their brand and their brand around their audience. Hence, if there is a strong audience that is willing to buy the products endorsed by their favourite online personality, this means there is a lucrative business model behind the influencer marketing. The concept of ‘self-presentation,’ as originally used by Goffman, can be applied to influencer branding. He argues that the individual presents itself with certain goals in mind and therefore takes on a “role;” hereby comparing social interactions to performance, including the individual’s consciousness of the audience and being perceived. This exploration of identity through social interactions is magnified on social media, since on these platforms one’s image is extremely controlled through deliberate posts and engagement with certain content. This image created can change drastically when presented for friends or for strangers; there is no personal connection between strangers, meaning their profiles naturally become the sole determinant of one’s image, making it more likely that the social media user is more conscious of their presentation. This leads to influencers mostly coming across as more refined than the average social media user, as their audience consists mostly out of strangers. This can be recognised in, for example, the prevalence of photo-editing or the use of ‘beauty filters’ under influencers, displaying the importance of keeping up an appearance. This can be connected to character masks in Marxist philosophy; the idea that individuals are dehumanised and forced into a certain (social) role, therefore being “forced to put on a mask,” which then leads to alienation from their personhood. The same is done by the influencer, as they are also forced to only portray themselves in a certain way, to fit the “perfect” image they are supposed to. C. Agency and “meta-capital” Marshall argues that due to the emergency of public personas, everyone, including both public figures and regular people, has become more comfortable with the mediatization of the self. This has led to the normalisation of the celebrity as a form of “meta-capital,” meaning that they are recognised as a part of the structure of the attention economy. Their ability to move between fields, both online and offline, and enact influence on all these different platforms has led to their value increasing significantly. This, once again, has made marketing through the endorsement of big public figures, most notably the influencer, extremely attractive. However, this has impacted agency in a way that the concept has become hyper-individualised; influencers are the personification of agency in the contemporary attention economy. The formation of the celebrity into the commercial meta-capital, has given them power to enact change. They can affect the sales of a product by a simple endorsement, or even have a political or cultural impact, hence it is argued that this gives them agency. According to Papacharissi and Easton the structures in which the actors act are reinforced through agency; by doing the actions they believe they are bound to, they form the exact structures they are bound by. Therefore, while the influencer on one hand has autonomy over their life, it is also completely shaped by their understanding of society and their appointed place in it. IV. Influencers and commodification A. The celebrity-commodity on social media Overall, it is not a new or ground-breaking idea that the celebrity is a commodified being. Scholars before the twenty-first century have already theorised about the celebrity image being used as a tool in the marketing of products. This also means that celebrities have always been extremely careful to maintain their persona due to commercial reasons, as to not tarnish any future endeavours and profits that could be made. Furthermore, there are many political motivations attached to the formation of the persona, due to the close connection between public identity and politics, a classic argument made in Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 work The Image. He uses the example of American politicians engaging in televised debates, who eventually end up showing their ability to perform well when displaying an image to the media, instead of having actual political knowledge. This is what Boorstin calls a “pseudo-event:” an inauthentic, planned and somewhat ambiguous event solely made to be broadcasted. This is then extended to the celebrity himself: “The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. (...) He is the human pseudo-event. ” Hereby, Boorstin effectively critiques how the use of public images in the media has made audiences more likely to be willingly deceived; the image has become more interesting than the ‘original.’ Using Boorstin’s use of ‘the original’ and ‘the image’ to analyse the influencer, it is evident that the image instead of the identity is sold to the audience. When these celebrity personas are being marketed as perfect images of people, they become sellable goods and undergo the process of commodification as described by Marx. Thus, naturally, the alienation both from the audience and themselves is an inescapable result. Following Marx’ explanation, commodity fetishism will be affecting the influencer twofold: they are both the commodity itself and the maker of the commodity, since they are responsible for creating their own image. The biggest difference between this more traditional celebrity and the modern social media influencer is not the amount of influence they have, but the fact that the influencer thrives on their proximity to normality, as stated earlier. They started off as ‘regular people’ and work carefully to maintain the image that they still are. This however also means that it is infinitely more difficult to preserve the boundaries between persona and identity. Hochschild’s theory of emotive dissonance becomes relevant, as the emotions needed to make the social media persona believable become conflated with the true identity of the influencer, both by the audience and the influencer themselves, who can also no longer effectively separate their social-media persona and private personality. Lehto and Kanai have observed this same tendency in how influencers deal with feeling rules on social media, as they are in a difficult situation in which everything they express has to be in line with the persona they want to maintain. Thus, the influencer parallels the worker in the service industry that Hochschild discusses. It can be noted that in the case of the influencer there are also particular social dynamics at play, due to the general anonymity of the audience in contrast to the extremely exposed identity of the influencer. This could even be identified as a case of information asymmetry, in which the audience is able to access more information than the influencer. So, since the influencer is not familiar with who they are talking to, in contrast with how social interactions would typically go, they are unable to correctly handle their emotion management. Therefore, we can point to the influencer’s relationship with their audience as a critical aspect of how commodification affects the individual, through an analysis of emotional labour. B. The person or the product as the commodity As mentioned by Fuchs, social media websites actively try to hide the process of commodification from us, making it harder for us to recognise what we are truly being sold. This opens up an interesting discussion about whether, effectively, the influencer is selling the product or the person, which is herself. Increasingly, brands are less interested in the former, and more in the latter. Considering the influencer-commodity and its relationship to branding, it can be observed that it is more important for the influencer’s persona to fit in with what they are advertising, then for the product to fit the influencer’s persona, as self-branding knows hardly any bounds. Looking at the earlier discussed argument by Rojek that influencers can build certain associations around their personas to receive brand sponsorship deals, this makes it apparent that there is an incentive for the influencer to change their persona when it is more profitable for them. Examples of this have already been found in mainstream celebrity culture, in which it is common among former child stars to suddenly “rebrand” their personalities, to further their careers. Thus, the ease with which influencers are expected to mould their personas around marketing opportunities, essentially treating them as products that are changed based on consumer’s wishes, would logically lead to an increase in the effect of emotive dissonance. Since these humans are treated as malleable commodities, their personas become more and more divorced from their own identity and personhood. C. Digital authenticity: redefining the public and private sphere The now established fabricated nature of the influencer can be connected to the search for authenticity and the resulting carefully crafted relatability as ethical concerns. It is questionable if authenticity can even exist on social media, as Kadirov et al. note that the term itself has become a buzzword in marketing used to increase sales. The major issue that arises is the fact that to even appear somewhat authentic, influencers will have to expose their private lives to the public, which has to be in line with their constructed identity. This makes them more vulnerable for commodification, as every aspect of their life turns into something to sell. In Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour, she concludes that the effects of having to engage in emotional labour will end up affecting the worker’s mental state. She discusses many consequences of this, but it is most evident in the occurrence of emotive dissonance. Using the previously discussed concept of self-branding, it is evident that the influencer is very conscious of the persona they have to maintain and which emotions they have to portray to make it seem convincing. Jansz and Timmers claim that, to relieve oneself of emotive dissonance, quite some cognitive reconstruction of the person’s identity is needed. This would mean fundamentally changing one’s professional identity to correspond to the feeling rules that have to be followed in the profession. However, the inherent characteristic of the influencer as an individual that demands to be ‘authentic,’ leads to an inability to clearly differentiate between public persona and identity. It is therefore exceptionally difficult for the influencer to construct a professional persona that acts in ways that is detached from their own feelings; this would mean that the authenticity they have been striving for has to be compromised. D. Privacy in the digital age To further analyse how the merge of the public and private have led to an increase in the commodified private life, it is firstly important to examine how to define these spheres. Discourse on the boundary between public and private has been initiated long before the internet was even invented. But the rise of social media has made it highly relevant once again. Shifts between what is designated as private and what as public is what Marshall calls the “privlic ” culture. He describes the emergence of “commodity activism,” which is when activism that started with private action is now mostly recognised by how it is used in the public sphere, mostly in branding by commercial corporations. One important way in which this has manifested itself is in the rise in the use of endorsement as a marketing technique. We can regard the influencer as the link between the public corporation and the private individual, becoming essentially a public individual. It can be observed that due to social media bringing private life into the public, this has led to further commodification of the influencer and alienation from themselves. One interesting example is the effect of the reveal of personal relationships to the public. Certain intimate relationships, such as love, can only survive in the private realm. But, for many lifestyle influencers staying authentic will have to include revealing large parts of their love life to their followers. Thus, there is a lack of privacy that should be a necessity. In this “privatised-public sphere” the influencer’s lack of privacy can be observed in many aspects of their personal life. For the average social media user, privacy on the internet becomes a commodity, as personal data is sold to provide relevant advertisements. Similarly for the influencer, they create value by exchanging their privacy for authenticity, which will lead to their brand endorsements being more successful. However, as privacy is the foundation of the personal life, as argued by Arendt, this leads to further commodification of the influencer’s personhood. E. Parasocial relationships and the commodification of intimacy Expanding further on interpersonal relationships and privacy, a remarkable phenomenon that can be observed in the interaction between the influencer and their audience is the formation of the so-called parasocial relationship. Hartmann defines parasocial interaction as “about users’ illusionary feeling of being in a mutual social interaction with another character while actually being in a one-sided non- reciprocal situation.” This means that individual fans are being deluded into thinking they have a personal relationship with the influencer they admire, while for the influencer this individual is just one of many and there is no personal connection attached. The influencer is aware of this effect and therefore deliberately builds their marketing strategy around the concept of parasocial interaction, which once again connects with the authenticity claim, and the subsequent use of ‘relatable’ insights into the influencer’s life. Schmid & Klimmt claim that repeated parasocial interaction will lead to the formation of a parasocial relationship. So, for influencer marketing to continue working, they will have to continue these interactions, as once the fan no longer feels like they have a deeper connection with the influencer, they might end up not supporting them anymore. This includes oversharing about private affairs and overall being overfamiliar with their audience, to be able to feign an intimate relationship between them and their individual followers. Due to the, albeit limited, opportunity of mutual communication between the audience and the influencer, negative side effects of this connection extend from the audience to the influencer. While we can still not speak of the same amount of two-sided interaction as in regular social relationships, as the audience is generally too big for the influencer to converse one-on-one, there is still more perceived reciprocation by the fans. Thus, the parasocial relationship stretches further and further, meaning the influencer will have to continue giving their audience increasingly more privy information; hence also further violating their own privacy, which has already been established as harmful. In analytical terms we can see the parasocial relationship as the commodification of intimacy. Because mostly one-sided social interactions get framed in an intimate manner, the fans perceive these as individualised intimate gestures, while it is in fact a generalised form of communication. It is important to stress that the motivation behind this interaction is to generate more value. Since, as earlier established, the more the influencer is able to build a convincing personal relationship with their audience, the more profits they are able to generate. Logically, following the theory of emotive dissonance, the influencer starts to conflate the fabricated relationships they have with individual fans with actual intimate relationships offline. Forming real life relationships becomes more difficult due to the blurred lines between real and fake connection; if a declaration of love is a sales technique in the digital world, what magnitude does that same word still have in private? Hence, the creation of parasocial relationships further leads to the commodification of the influencer, as more and more parts of their selfhood are used solely for generating economic value and are turned into the commodity-form, in this case intimacy and relationships. This eventually affects the influencer’s actual personal relationships, as they become alienated from intimacy. This largely ties in with how the lack of privacy in the public sphere has made it difficult for the influencer to not suffer from commodification on all aspects of what is traditionally regarded as part of the private life. V. The effect on well-being A. The framework of subjective well-being Most countries strive to achieve good well-being for their citizens, which is defined by UNESCO as “a feeling of satisfaction with life, a state characterised by health, happiness, and prosperity.” Governments calculate subjective well-being by using measures that can be self-reported, which allows individuals to evaluate their personal life satisfaction and other feelings on a scale. If the subjective well-being is considered high, this has positive effects on social relationships, health, income, and it further positively influences society. Shantz et al. found that alienation directly leads to emotional exhaustion and low well-being, along with being a major cause of burn-out. Thus, the earlier identified negative side effects of influencer culture have all shown to go directly against the desired high well-being. The observation can be made that due to the competitive nature of our current capitalist system and the resulting dynamic between the audience and influencer, the way influencer culture functions will always have negative effects on well-being; the influencer is burdened by alienation and commodification caused by how their private life is exposed to the public, hindering them from reaching full subjective well-being. B. Commodification and well-being Now the lines between the private and public have effectively blurred together and due to emotive dissonance these cannot be differentiated. The overwhelming presence of the creation of exchange value bleeding into the influencer’s personal life leads to them no longer choosing to decide in favour of their own well-being, leading to even privacy itself becoming commodified. Following this observation that there are no bounds to the commodification of the influencer’s private life, this analysis clearly supports the argument that this has a negative effect on well-being. Arguably the most unique way the influencer’s well-being is affected is the complete lack of privacy, as they have to use the technique of marketable relatability, that the traditional celebrity does not. This systematic lack of privacy has been linked to increased stress and decreased happiness. Moreover, multiple studies have found that emotional labour is correlated to faster burn out, such as Nam and Kabutey who found that the emotive dissonance that results from this type of labour more likely leads to burn-out than jobs where no use of emotional labour is made. A further finding includes that the risk of burn-out is higher in workers who fabricate their emotions, referred to as ‘surface acting’ by Hochschild, than those who participate in ‘deep acting,’ having trained themselves to experience the required emotions. Due to the fabricated nature of social media, influencers are most likely to participate in surface acting, therefore increasing their risk of burning out quickly. This argument is confirmed by Verduyn et al. who found that social media has negative effects on subjective well-being due to the social pressure attached to it. It is not rare for the negative well-being of influencers to be trivialised due to the fact that many earn significantly more than the average worker, with major influencers earning more than $2000 for an Instagram post. However, the assumption that monetary gain automatically nullifies the aforementioned negative effects of commodification is refutable. The evidence regarding the impact of wealth on well-being is mostly relative; for an impoverished individual receiving a small amount of money would significantly better their situation, while for a multi-millionaire it does not do as much. In the relevant context, it can be noted that due to the rapid nature of internet fame, the influencer often quickly moves from the former to the latter; while in the beginning of their career the rapid increase of income due to the increasing commodification of the self is likely to positively affect them, at a certain point the extra profits will no longer be enough to distract them from the fact that commodification is negatively impacting their personal lives. In conclusion, the poor well-being that is caused by the commodification of privacy and intimacy and the exploitation of emotional labour, overshadows the possible positive effects of the economic profits made. VI. Conclusion In the light of the dramatic increase in popularity in recent years, this article sought to analyse the influencer and how they are affected by commodification, to then establish the consequence of this on their well-being, through an interdisciplinary analysis. To do so, I firstly focused on linking Marxist analysis to the digital age. Hochschild’s emotional labour and the following effect of emotive dissonance, were repeatedly important during the analysis, as they linked together Marxist commodification and the influencer. Next, it was found that commodification is visible in all aspects of the influencer’s life, due to how authenticity, branding and agency are influenced by the marketability of the influencer. This has multiple consequences, but most noteworthy are the transformation from the person into the product as the commodity, the effect this has on the blurring of the public and private sphere, the following commodification of privacy, and lastly the parasocial relationship and the commodifying effect this has on intimate relationships. Thus, we are now able to answer the question asked in the beginning of this research: how does the commodification of the self on social media affect social media influencers’ well-being? This research can conclude that the influencer’s well-being suffers due to the negative effect of commodification, mostly due to the alienating impact of emotional labour and the inability to separate the public and the private. Well-being and alienation cannot co-exist, as they are essentially opposites: in the Marxist tradition, commodity fetishism leads to the alienation from the individual’s personhood, and would therefore never be able to live a satisfying life as required for well-being. Further empirical proof that shows the correlation between the emotional labour done by the commodified influencer and burn-out and unhappiness, exemplifies this theoretical finding. These findings can contribute to the existing literature, since the analysis gives a unique interdisciplinary overview into an under-researched phenomenon that is grounded both in the normative theory and the empirical evidence. 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Author Name < Back The Relationship Between Education and Welfare Dependency Aiden Cliff Abstract Several studies have described the correlation between welfare dependency and factors such as welfare conditionality, gender, and high school or college graduation rates. Using Annual Social and Economics Supplement Data (ASEC) from 2009 through 2019, downloaded from sources such as IPUMS CPS, this paper crafts an OLS regression model to find the relationship that years of completed education have on welfare dependency status. This paper concludes that there is a negative correlation between higher education levels and lower participation in the welfare system, with the completion of one additional year of schooling suggesting a decrease in the probability of needing welfare by 0.1%. While this correlation is small, it is still statistically significant in the linear probability model due to a large sample size (n = 145,431). After adding other explanatory variables, such as measures for race, biological sex, and employment status to control for endogeneity, further regressions confirm that there is still a statistically significant negative relationship between education and welfare dependency. These results suggest that policymakers should focus on educational subsidies over welfare subsidies to increase social mobility. I. Introduction Education is often referred to as an essential mechanism in promoting social mobility (Haveman, 2006). However, the rising costs of education in America have forced many individuals to require more income to pay off student loans. As a result, families who are enrolled in welfare programs are spending a larger portion of their income on student debt, correlated with an increased reliance on such welfare programs and a positive feedback loop that makes it more difficult to climb out of welfare dependency (Johnson, 2019). In addition, most welfare programs have substantial requirements that, rather than helping recipients to get out of poverty, restrain recipients from escaping the welfare system (Rupp et al, 2020). This, and other societal pressures, have forced lots of students to put a pause on their education and work at low-skilled jobs with minimal pay, keeping them reliant on welfare programs (Johnson, 2019). This vicious cycle will only cause more people to remain trapped within welfare programs, preventing them from escaping poverty and improving their livelihoods. Previous studies have shown that education levels are correlated with the probability of a welfare recipient returning to welfare in the future (London, 2008). Other studies have also shown how changes in the welfare system have improved welfare recipients' education qualifications and subsequently their employment opportunities (Hernaes, 2017). London’s (2008) study focused on how attaining a higher educational degree allows welfare recipients to improve their employment opportunities, reduce their welfare dependency, and reduce their overall family poverty levels by 63%. Meanwhile, Hernaes et.al (2017) found that more conditionality in welfare programs helped Norwegian teenagers from welfare-recipient families reduce their reliance on welfare programs; and lower the country’s high school dropout rate by 21%. In addition, Pacheo & Maloney (2003) found that intergenerational welfare participation differs between genders due to family characteristics such as household size and parents’ welfare dependency. As a result, young females tend to have lower educational attainment and are nearly two times as probable of relying on welfare in the future when compared to their male counterparts (Pacheo et al, 2003). Based on the insights offered by the studies above, this paper aims to contribute to this field by investigating the hypothesis that years of schooling completed reducing the probability of receiving welfare in the future. Factors of endogeneity will also be analyzed through the implementation of explanatory variables such as race (Courtney, 1996), sex (Bakas, 2014), number of children (Arulampalam, 2000), marital status (Hoffman, 1997), hours worked (Bick et al, 2018) and employment status (Arranz, 2004) into the regression model. These variables were chosen due to past publications finding possible links between this psychographics and demographics to welfare benefits. Preliminary hypotheses predict that there will be a negative relationship between the education level attained and the probability that an individual will receive future welfare. Using simple and multi-linear OLS regression analysis and the IPUMS-CPS annual data from 2009-2019, it has been observed that individuals with more years of schooling completed are less likely to be on welfare in the future. Data was chosen from this period because the American economy was beginning to recover from the 2008 Financial Crisis during this time. This allows us to observe correlations between education levels attained by individuals and whether they ended up in welfare programs more clearly. This paper will be presented as follows: Section II will cover previous research on how welfare conditionality, gender, and education levels affect welfare dependency. Section III will present information on how this data was obtained and explain the data-cleaning process along with the types of variables used throughout this paper. This section ends with explanations of how the data is verified through the four OLS assumptions. Section IV will cover econometric methodology which includes alternate functional forms explored and additional X-Variables tested through multiple regression along with methodologies we’ve used to control the endogeneity of independent and explanatory variables to ensure the fairness of the regression model. Section V highlights the results, the sample regression line, and statistically significant information regarding the regression analysis. Section VI contains the paper's conclusions where the results are evaluated and put into context within the field. The paper concludes with section VII, the appendix, where all tables, figures, diagrams, and supporting calculations are represented for reference. II. Literature Review The literature works that are presented here serve as important foundations in the field and provide extensive insight into the relationship between welfare dependency and education levels, along with how other variables might affect this relationship. The study conducted by Hernaes et al. (2017) found that the strict welfare conditionality, linking welfare to certain characteristics or traits in Norwegian welfare programs, has reduced welfare dependency while increasing the high school graduation rate among Norwegian welfare recipients. In the process, they used a logarithmic regression model (LRM) and regressed a dependent dummy variable that identifies welfare recipients who are 21 years old onto an independent variable that consists of family characteristics such as parent’s education background and cumulative income, to control for endogeneity. The study resembles this approach because the dependent variable that they’ve used is also a dummy variable that indicates welfare recipients. In addition, the study used other explanatory variables, in particular the recipient’s parental background, to control for the endogeneity of those variables on the probability of returning to welfare. However, Hernaes et al. (2017) emphasizes how family background affects teens’ probability of returning to welfare in the future through explanatory variables that focus on family characteristics. Whereas this study focuses more on how other individual characteristics such as education level, labor condition, and family status of the welfare recipient have affected the welfare recipient’s probability of returning to welfare programs in the future. Notably, a previous study indicated that there is a correlation between welfare recipients who have obtained a higher education degree with reducing their reliance on welfare programs, but only if they receive additional financial aid to support their college expenses. London (2006) uses data such as college attendance, college graduation rate, and personal characteristics, such as extraversion and race demographics, to predict the welfare recipient’s three outcomes: employment, return to aid, and poverty status. By controlling influencing factors that change over time – such as the rate of college enrollment – and making sure all omitted variables, – such as familial culture and personal motivation – are factored into the result, the study employs instrumental variable econometric models to calculate predictions. The study found that “college attendance, more than graduation, is an important predictor of future employment. At the same time, college graduation better predicts the probability of returning to aid or being poor within five years of leaving welfare” (London, 2006, p. 491). Specifically, the study quoted “college graduation rather than enrollment without graduation has an effect on recidivism, and only in the five-year interval” (London, 2006, p. 489). Their findings support this hypothesis that the education level a welfare recipient attains is crucial to the probability of returning to welfare in the future. Despite the similarities in the use of variables to investigate the issue, predicting the probability of return to welfare using college graduation and attendance is only a part of this study’s objectives. The study also conducts an investigation into how college graduation and attendance affect employment opportunities and family poverty levels. Another earlier study showed that genders might have different levels of welfare participation and education attainment. Pacheco & Maloney (2003) learned that females “have an estimated intergenerational correlation coefficient that is more than double that for males.” (Pacheco & Maloney, 2003, p. 371). The study uses simple regression models and inputs such as the number of years in formal education completed by age 21, family background characteristics (parent’s education qualifications and the number of children in the household), and the proportion of years where parents obtain welfare benefits to produce their findings. In addition, Pacheco & Maloney (2003) found that female welfare recipients whose families have a history of welfare dependency tend to remain in welfare programs. The study uses the same regression model to offer insight into how familial and cultural forces affect male and female probabilities of returning to welfare in the future. Nevertheless, Pacheco & Maloney (2003) offered insight into how gender might have altered the relationship between education levels and probability in return to welfare. III. Descriptive Statistics All of the raw data was downloaded directly from the CPS portion of the IPUMS website, which is a reputable federal source for time series and cross-sectional data. Annual Social and Economic Supplement Data (ASEC) from 2009 to 2019 was downloaded. These years were selected to obtain the most up-to-date data while also analyzing enough observations to create the best regression analysis possible. Twenty-one variables were analyzed within these years, the most important of which were EDUC and INCWELFR, the two variables that were altered and then used for the regression analysis. These variables were raw and included nearly 150,000 observations over the 11 years. The data was meticulously cleaned before running any regressions to test the hypothesis. The first variable cleaned was EDUC. The raw EDUC variable could hold any coded value from 1 to 125. These coded values did not reflect the true years of schooling any individual had, so a new variable was created: EDUC_REV, to accurately reflect the true years of schooling each individual has completed. The values for this new variable were generated using the observations for the EDUC variable alongside the specific numeric code utilized by CPS. For example, an individual who has obtained a high school diploma through 12 years of completed education would receive a value of EDUC=73 within the CPS data set. The data was cleaned so this specific value would now be EDUC_REV=12. This cleaning procedure was used for all possible levels of education within the data set. Individuals who were too young to receive any education at all were also removed from the data set (they were identified through EDUC=1 in the original data set). The focus then shifted toward the INCWELFR variable from CPS. This variable measures the dollar value of the income an individual receives from any source of government welfare benefits. In this study, the focus is on the effect that education has on the reception of welfare at all, not the amount of welfare that was received. This means the analysis is valid if an individual receives any form of welfare payments, and not focusing on the actual dollar value of said payments. So, for this reason, another new variable was created: WELFARE. This variable is a dummy variable that gets its values from the information in the INCWLFR variable. If the individual receives no form of welfare they will be assigned INCWLFR=0 in the data set. This same individual would be assigned a value of zero for the newly created variable (WELFARE=0 when INCWLFR=0). However, if an individual receives welfare in any form, regardless of the amount, they will be assigned a value of one for the new variable (WELFARE=1 when INCWLFR>0). Any individual who was not eligible to receive welfare in any form was denoted by INCWELFR=999999. These observations, many of which were individuals under 18, were removed from the data set to generate a less skewed, and more accurate, sample. Additional variables were also analyzed for the multiple regression analysis. These variables tested the effects of not only education, but also employment status, income, hours worked, marital status, gender, and number of children on the reception of welfare. These variables were used to try and control for endogeneity within the model and are further described in Table 1 of the appendix . Before the new variables could be put through a proper regression analysis, the four assumptions of an Ordinary Least Squares Regression Line had to be tested. If all of these assumptions hold true then the estimators of b1 and b2 would be BLUE (Best Linear Unbiased Estimators) and all of the calculations done through STATA would be completely accurate. The first OLS assumption is that the expected error within a sample will be zero. This is noted as E[WELFARE_RES/EDUC_REV]=0 and this does hold true in this sample. The 95% confidence interval for WELFARE_RES does include zero so it is likely that the expected value of the error is zero and therefore the first OLS assumption is met. The second OLS assumption is that the data is homoscedastic. This is noted as Var(WELFARE_RES/EDUC_REV)=Sigma^2. However, since the dependent variable is a dummy variable, this regression takes the form of a linear probability model (LPM). By definition, every linear probability model has heteroscedastic data. Therefore, the second OLS assumption is not met. The third OLS assumption is that the data is free of clustering. This is noted as Cov(WELFARE_RES_i,WELFARE_RES_j)=0, meaning that the value of WELFARE for one value does not directly influence the value of any other observation within the data set. This influence usually occurs when two observations are within the same geographical unit. While there is no way to test if any observations are within the same geographical unit (such as the same household) due to confidentiality, the sample size is large enough and pulls from each region almost equally, so it would be extremely unlikely for any two observations to come from the same household. Therefore, for the sake of the regression, the third OLS assumption will be met. The fourth and final OLS assumption is that Y is normally distributed. This was tested by creating a histogram for WELFARE and seeing if it roughly resembled a bell curve. When this was done, it was obvious that the data was not normal. This is apparent through a multitude of factors but is most clearly shown by the high skewness, a value of over 16. Therefore, it was concluded that welfare was not normally distributed. However, since the sample size consists of 145,431 observations, the central limit theorem (CLT) is met. So, while the fourth OLS assumption failed to be met for this particular regression, it will not have a significant impact on the regression since the sampling distribution for WELFARE will still be normally distributed. In conclusion, the regression met two of the four OLS assumptions. Therefore, while the regression analysis will not be BLUE, it will still be significant since it is free of serious sampling errors. IV. Econometric Methodology While this paper mainly focuses on the linear probability model and the effect that education has on welfare dependency, other functional forms that could better fit the regression analysis were also considered to develop a more thorough analysis. This was done through the experimentation of the functional forms that the independent variable took. While the previous section discussed the linear form of EDUC_REV, exponential and logarithmic forms of this variable were also considered. The independent variable was only altered since the dependent variable is a dummy variable. Altering the value of the variable will not generate any different results since its domain is limited to {0,1}. Other explanatory variables, and the results they produced, are summarized in Table 5 of the appendix. While all of the functional forms tested would have produced statistically significant interpretations that support the hypothesis, although their interpretations would have been different, the original regression was still the most accurate for this particular data set. Other functional forms included EDUC_REV in quadratic, cubic, and log forms. These functional forms are used to emphasize the effects of EDUC_REV in order to match the data points. The original is the most accurate because it has the highest R-Squared value, a measure of how well the data points fit the linear regression line. These R-Squared values can be found in Table 5 but the linear model has the highest value of .0014. Since the linear regression between WELFARE and EDUC_REV has the most accurate regression line relative to the data set, this regression model was the basis from which all conclusions were drawn. Interaction terms were also analyzed by creating the term EDUC_UNEMP which was EDUC_REV multiplied by UNEMPLOYED. By using this interaction term, the possible effect of EDUCATION on WELFARE varying with UNEMPLOYED can be studied. The regression showed that when UNEMPLOYED is 0, the likelihood of WELFARE is constant plus b2. When UNEMPLOYED is 1 then the likelihood of being on WELFARE increases. This means that individuals who are unemployed are more likely to be receiving benefits from welfare. The motive that drives this is individuals who are unemployed do not receive any form of compensation or income outside of their welfare payments. Slope and Intercept dummy variables are additional variables added to this study. In this situation, the intercept dummy variable is UNEMPLOYED. The presence of UNEMPLOYED is represented with a 1 and causes an increase in the intercept, which translates to an increase in the probability of welfare. When describing this relationship on a graph there are two parallel lines and the difference between them is caused by the slope dummy variable. Both lines have the same slope and the probability gap of being on WELFARE remains the same at all levels. This is not the main difference between someone who is unemployed and someone who is employed. This supports the claims made through interaction term analysis in the previous paragraph. However, while the simple regression analysis supports the hypothesis, there could be other confounding variables that underlay such correlation seen between WELFARE and EDUC_REV. If these possible confounding variables are correlated with both WELFARE (controlling for EDUC_REV) and EDUC_REV, then it could make EDUC_REV an endogenous variable, indicating that EDUC_REV does not necessarily cause the decrease in the probability of an individual on welfare. To test this claim, a multiple regression analysis was run, including both EDUC_REV and a variety of other possibly confounding variables, for their possible effects on WELFARE. The results showed that the three variables with the largest effect on WELFARE were BLACK, MALE, and UNEMPLOYED. These are variables created within the data set describing an individual's race, gender, and employment status, respectively. All of these are strong contenders for possible confounding variables and the true reason the regression effect on welfare was observed, and therefore put EDUC_REV at risk of being an endogenous variable (Courtney, 1996; Bakas, 2014; Arranz, 2004). A full list of the additional X-Variables tested along with the multiple regression output can be found in Table 10 . That being said, this is not enough evidence to conclude that education levels are definitely an endogenous variable when describing the probability of receiving welfare. These possible confounding variables could be further analyzed if a more in-depth regression analysis was performed in future studies. V. Results After the data had been completely cleaned and verified for OLS assumptions, the regression of EDUC_REV on WELFARE was run. This regression showed the noncausal effect that years of completed education have on the probability of receiving welfare. If the hypothesis holds true, the Least-Squares Regression Line should have a negative slope, denoting that the more years of education an individual completes, the less likely it is that the individual receives welfare. The output for the regression analysis, as well as the full, scatter plot showing the Least Squares Regression Line for EDUC_REV against WELFARE, can be seen in Table 8 and Table 9 of the appendix. However, these figures can be summarized by the equation for the sample regression: WELFARE_hat = b1 + b2 EDUC_REV t-statistic = -14.27 WELFARE_hat = .015 - .001 EDUC_REV n = 145,431 (SE) (8.08e-4) (5.68e-5) p-value = 0 *** The most important value within the sample regression line for the hypothesis is -.001, or the slope of the regression line denoted as b2. Since b2 is a negative value, there is a negative correlation between the number of years of completed schooling (EDUC_REV) and the reception of welfare (WELFARE). While this value seems too small to have any real effect, it is still statistically significant. This is because the 99% confidence interval for b2 does not include zero because the standard deviation is extremely close to zero based on the large sample size. A hypothesis test at the critical level of .01 was also run to see if the value generated for b2 could be equal to zero. This test gave a critical value for b2 of -14.27 and a probability of B2 being equal to zero of zero. These results lead to the conclusion that it is statistically significant that as EDUC_REV increases, WELFARE decreases within the regression. In conclusion, while increases in education could have a small effect on the probability of relying on welfare, it is still a statistically significant effect. However, this does not prove that increases in education will decrease the probability of relying on welfare since ceteris-paribus does not hold true for this collected data set and a causal relationship is not established. This regression analysis supports the hypothesis that as an individual's education increases, the probability that said individual will rely on welfare as a source of income decreases (since b2 is a statistically significant negative number). By applying these findings, it was determined that as an individual’s years of completed schooling (EDUC_REV) increases by 1 year, the probability that the individual will receive welfare (WELFARE as a dummy variable) decreases by .001 or 0.1%. This is because the slope of the linear regression model, with a dependent dummy variable, is -.001 and the functional form analyzed is a linear probability model. While this relation is not inherently strong, and years of completed schooling do not have a large impact on the probability of receiving welfare, it is still statistically significant. Within the regression, b1 is also statistically significant. The value of b1 in this sample regression line is .015, or an applied .15%. By applying this value to the context of the study, it was found that the probability of an individual receiving welfare given that they have completed zero years of schooling is .15%. This number is positive so it is technically feasible and within the domain of the study. However, it is extremely unlikely that an individual has received zero years of schooling and is also eligible to receive welfare (Stephens, 2014). For this reason, the value of b1 was not a focus within these results. VI. Conclusion As stated above, this study shows a minor, yet the statistically significant, effect of EDUC_REV on WELFARE. These results indicate that there is evidence to support a possible relationship between higher levels of completed education and lower chances of an individual receiving welfare in the future. The thought process behind this regression is that individuals with higher education are more likely to land better jobs and therefore make more money, thus decreasing their need for welfare. While focusing on the simple regression model for the majority of the paper, important results when controlling for endogeneity through a multiple regression model were also found. This multiple regression analysis was performed while controlling for multicollinearity. Since none of these variables share a strong correlation (r > .8) with each other, it is okay to run a regression model with all of these X-Variables. The full correlation results can be seen in Table 11 of the appendix. AIC, BIC/SC, and R_Squared were also analyzed and are summarized in Table 12. Since the multiple regression model has more X-Variables, it has a larger potential to explain any variation in Y and is likely to be a better fit for the data. Even with the introduction of these additional X-Variables, the initial variable tested in the multiple regression analysis, EDUC_REV, was still statistically significant, as seen in Table 10 . Thus, even with controls for endogeneity, there is still a statistically significant negative correlation between the highest level of completed education and the probability of receiving welfare, only strengthening this paper’s claims. In relation to previous studies in part II, this study aligns with London’s (2006) conclusion that welfare recipients who have received a higher education degree have a lower probability of receiving welfare in the future, with the assumption that both genders fit into the conclusion. However, to what extent education attainment is beneficial to both genders and race remains questionable since the data lacked suitable information to investigate how omitted variables might have affected the relationship between the education level attained and the probability of receiving welfare. This paper has also failed to reproduce the findings that Pacheco & Maloney (2003) found. This paper did not control the age and time of welfare received by the recipient, whereas Pacheco & Maloney (2003) did. In addition, Pacheco & Maloney (2003) factors in the background of the welfare recipient’s parents, such as their income received from welfare, educational background, and race. This study, on the other hand, did not factor family characteristics into the regression model. This paper also failed to reproduce the results that Hernaes et. al (2017) produced because the nature of the data is different from Hernaes et. al (2017). First, Hernaes et. al’s (2017) dataset had the location of each welfare recipient’s municipality. The location variable allows Hernaes et. al (2017) to determine whether the welfare recipient was in a municipality that has stricter welfare policies or not. Second, Hernaes et. al (2017) was able to capture each municipality’s level of conditionality through survey responses collected in a report by a research institute. These are some of the features that the data, unfortunately, do not possess. This paper supports the theory that there is a correlation between the highest level of education completed and the probability of receiving welfare. Thus, more educated individuals are less likely to be dependent on welfare. In a broader context, policymakers could use this information to find more effective means for increasing social mobility, rather than investing heavily in welfare payments. Since there is possibly an inverse relationship between education and welfare, the federal government could create a new program to subsidize education rather than simply making payments to disadvantaged citizens. This would provide an economic incentive for individuals who were previously on welfare to attend school, making the entire nation more educated and more productively efficient as a result (Brown et al, 1991). However, while this paper could be used from a policy perspective, there are some drawbacks. The relationship between education and the probability of welfare is not proven to be causal after this analysis. This is because the ceteris-paribus condition does not hold true throughout the data and regression. In addition, this dataset has a limited scope regarding population characteristics. The dataset indicates the highest education level attained by the individual but does not indicate when they achieved that education. For example, some individuals might have dropped out of high school during their youth and returned to complete their high school degree after a long period of time. If that information is also provided in the dataset, that would open new frontiers on how education-level attainment influences the probability of receiving welfare. Before any change is enacted, especially on a governmental level, first proving a causal relationship would be recommended. This paper merely lays the framework for possible studies regarding welfare analysis in the future. This paper did support the hypothesis that as education levels rise, the probability that an individual becomes dependent on welfare decreases. Through the regression analysis, it was determined that there is a small, yet statistically significant, difference that education has on the probability of receiving welfare in the future. This trend could be utilized by policymakers to stimulate education as a means of reducing welfare dependency, creating a population that is not only less dependent on welfare payments, but more educated, and more productive as a result. Note: see "Full Editions," Volume IV Issue I for appendix. VIII. References Arranz, Jose Ma, and Muro, Juan. "Recurrent Unemployment, Welfare Benefits and Heterogeneity." International Review of Applied Economics . 18, no. 4 (2004): 423-41. Arulampalam, W. "Unemployment Persistence." Oxford Economic Papers . 52, no. 1 (2000): 24-50. Bakas, Dimitrios, and Papapetrou, Evangelia. "Unemployment by Gender: Evidence from EU Countries." International Advances in Economic Research. 20, no. 1 (2014): 103-11. Bick, Alexander, Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola, and Lagakos, David. "How Do Hours Worked Vary with Income? Cross-Country Evidence and Implications." The American Economic Review. 108, no. 1 (2018): 170-99. Brown, Phillip, and Lauder, Hugh. "Education, Economy and Social Change." International Studies in Sociology of Education. 1, no. 1-2 (1991): 3-23. Cliff, Aiden, Rupp, Matthew, Lieng, Owen. “ A Study on the Relationship Between Education and Probability to Receive Welfare Assistance.” Boston University (2020): 204 Courtney, ME. "Race and Child Welfare Services: Past Research and Future Directions." Child Welfare. 75 (1996): 99. Gooden, S. (2000). Race and Welfare. Journal Of Poverty , 4 (3), 21-24. https://doi.org/10.1300/J134v04n03_02 Haveman, Robert, and Timothy Smeeding. "The Role of Higher Education in Social Mobility." The Future of Children 16, no. 2 (2006): 125-50. Accessed April 28, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844794 . Hernæs, Ø., Markussen, S., & Røed, K. (2017). Can welfare conditionality combat high school dropout. Labour Economics , 48 , 144-156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2017 . 08.003 Hoffman, Saul. "Marital Instability and the Economic Status of Women." Demography 14, no. 1 (1977): 67-76. Johnson, D. (2019). What Will It Take to Solve the Student Loan Crisis. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 29 April 2020, from https://hbr.org/2019/09/what-will-it-take-to-solve-the-student-loan-crisis . Kim, Hwanjoon. "Anti‐Poverty Effectiveness of Taxes and Income Transfers in Welfare States." International Social Security Review. 53, no. 4 (2000): 105-29. London, R. (2005). Welfare Recipients' College Attendance and Consequences for Time-Limited Aid. Social Science Quarterly , 86 , 1104-1122. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0038-4941.2005.00338 . London, R. (2006). The Role of Postsecondary Education in Welfare Recipients' Paths to Self-Sufficiency. The Journal Of Higher Education , 77 (3), 472-496. Retrieved 28 April 2020, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3838698 Pacheco, G., & Maloney, T. (2003). Are the Determinants of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency Gender-specific. Australian Journal Of Labour Economics , 6 (3), 371-382. Retrieved 28 April 2020, from https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/46557521_Are_the_Determinants_of_Intergeneration al_Welfare_Dependency_Gender-specific Stephens, Melvin, and Yang, Dou-Yan. "Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling." The American Economic Review. 104, no. 6 (2014): 1777-792.

Author Name < Back Interview with Geoff Mulgan Catherine Nelli JPPE: Great. So, we'll start off speaking about your new book, Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination . Could you explain what political imagination and radical political imagination are before speaking about what the book is about, your argument, and your process researching and writing it? Mulgan: So I became more and more concerned in the last few years that we might have a worsening problem of political imagination. And there were various signs of this, there was a kind of obvious one which the many activists, the many people who are politically enthusiastic can very easily see into the future, how things could go horribly wrong, could see ecological disaster, climate catastrophe, and so on. Which in many ways is a good thing, but very much harder to imagine or describe almost any kind of social progress, what would be a significantly better way of organizing welfare, or democracy, or health, or education. I observed that we have a huge capacity now for technological imagination. Vast sums of money spent on think tanks and conferences, looking at smart homes or smart cities or AI and so on, but almost nothing comparable in terms of serious work thinking about how our future society or economy could be run, rather than just the hardware. Politics—it's very striking. On the one hand, how many leaders now talk about going back to make America great again, or France or Britain or China or India. The last US election was a contest between two old men who haven’t really said very much about where they would want the world to be in a generation or two from now. I have increasingly felt that this sort of failure of imagination was fueling in a very subtle way a sort of fatalism—a sense that actually the world won't get better. Just as in our own individual lives, if we can't see something good on the horizon, something which might be better for us a year, five years down the line, it's quite hard to be happy and thriving. I think there's something equivalent for societies and the whole world. What I did in the book is partly researching the past of social and political imagination. And there'll be many ways in which people tried to look ahead; they did it through writing utopias, and there are hundreds, if not 1000s, of utopian writings from feminist utopias of the 15th century through to the great 19th century ones, like Bella , which was, I think, at the time the second best selling author ever in the US. There were attempts to create model communities, model towns, model organizations. There's the role of generative ideas. And one of the things I point out in the book is that often quite generic ideas like human rights or a circular economy may be a bit vague at first, but they then spawn lots of other ideas which become useful and change the world. And a large part of the book is about methods: what are the methods we could be using now to get better at thoughtful, rigorous imagination of the future a generation or two from now? How do you use methods, often from creativity and design, to expand your menu of options, you can then interrogate each of those, many of them might not be attractive, but at least to cultivate the habit towards the muscle of thinking creatively ahead. I look at the role of universities in that, I look at the role of political parties, which at times in history have played a big role in imagination, but have largely vacated it in much of the world. And also the role of places—how to create museums, galleries, physical places where people can come together to imagine into the future. And if nothing else, I hope the book will spark at least a bit of a debate on the question: Do we have a problem? Maybe some people will say we don't have a problem. Some people may say, well, actually, imagination is always bad, it leads to terrible results, and many of the blueprints in the last century, and many of the utopias did have horrible results. And one of the arguments I make is that now, we need to combine imagination with experiments. So you don't impose a fully formed blueprint on a city or a society; you try it out in a much more organic, experimental way. And others may say actually, technology is the answer to everything and we don't have social imagination because we don't need it. We can fix everything with a new anti-aging drug or some fantastic ecology, which will sequester carbon and so on. As I say, I think all of those will be wrong, but at least hopefully that will get a debate going. JPPE Do you look at a sort of comparative analysis of case studies from different countries? Or is the structure of the book more idea based? Mulgan It’s ideas. Basically, there were lots of references to real examples, either from history or from the present. And one of the parts of the book which is a bit more like comparative political analysis is trying to compare the dominant political imaginaries of the next 20 or 30 years globally. What are they? And I argue probably the most powerful ones or the strongest ones are nationalist techno authoritarian ones, particularly China, Xi Jinping thought, but in a different way the BJP’s to visions of the future in India. Putin doesn't really have one in Russia. But he and Erdoğan are other examples. And I argue that this is a very powerful semi-imaginary which actually is rather vague about the future but tries to tie together, in some ways, quite traditional authoritarian nationalism with high technologies. It's very 19th century Prussian militarism. I look at different imaginaries of the Green Movement and some of the frictions and issues in deep and less deep ecological thought. I look at what might happen to liberalism, a revived neoliberalism, and different strands of conservatism. But essentially, that is an attempt at a comparative analysis of both current and future imaginaries. JPPE Do you think digital technologies detract from or contribute to radical political imaginations? What are the different ways that they could contribute or detract? And in what way should they be conceptualized and used to the benefit of imagination? Mulgan So I've got quite a background in digital technology—my PhD is in telecoms and I've probably been immersed in all these things. And my answer is essentially “both and.” So sometimes thinking about things digitally can be very useful because as happened to retailing, or banking, or relationships, all sorts of things, if you look at it through a digital lens, you often deconstruct what's going on. And then you can remake it in a completely different way. So you end up with Amazon, not with, you know, high street shops or with match.com rather than people meeting in bars. And in that sense, actually, digital technology is quite useful for social imagination. And any imagination of where democracy might be in 50 years time has to have a substantial digital element. And those places like Taiwan and Iceland are reinventing democracy. The US still seems to be stuck in an 18th century model of democracy. We don't quite understand why, but that's another story. Digital is part of that, but if you only think in a digital way, as so much of the movement around smart cities, smart data, and smart homes did, you usually end up with results which are not very pleasant for humans to live in or which lose all sorts of dimensions of the present. And I think this was a big failure of the internet, where there was some incredibly naive techno optimism about how on its own the internet would spread democracy, equality, removal, corporations, etc. And often the exact opposite happened. And that tells us there was a major intellectual failure amongst the sort of Silicon Valley thinkers who simply didn't understand what they were part of. And that's why thinking simultaneously with a social lens and a technological lens is vital for the next 50 or 100 years. JPPE What’s the difference between social and political imagination? How do they coincide and interact? Mulgan I think they overlap with each other. There isn't a straightforward boundary line. By politics we tend to mean the things which politicians end up talking about put into their programs, maybe pass laws about in Congress or Parliament or the Bundestag. And that is the world of politics, which often does include or has at times included powerful visions of where society might head. There are many examples of where that happens outside politics much more through social movements and daily life. And people are getting on with social innovation and were ignoring the political realm. And often things start off social and then become political, so many ecological ideas, like the idea of a circular economy and radical recycling or veganism, you know, these tended to begin very much with social movements, and much, much later, became politicized, became an issue for laws and elections and programs and carbon taxes and so on. So one of the things I try to look at in the book is this dynamic between the social and the political, and then back into the social. For example, when you pass new laws on equality they in turn then affect the norms within every organization, ultimately, maybe back to the household and the family too. JPPE You speak about the tapering off of visions of the future. There seems to be a desire for change within the social world but very few productive outlets to channel this desire. How do you foresee this changing over time and how would you wish it to change to spark future action? Mulgan I think one answer to that lies with institutions and what role they play, especially powerful institutions can either encourage this sort of work or discourage it. So take universities. I've been doing a parallel strand of work, looking at why it is that in universities, and particularly in social science, the sort of exploratory design work, thinking ahead work, has largely disappeared from most universities all over the world. It's disappeared partly for good reasons, as people have become more data driven and more empirical, and partly because a lot of the radicals moved into a safe space of critique, rather than proposal. That was one of the weird things which happened to Marxism in universities in the last 20 or 40 years. It moved out of real active politics into academic critique. And founders haven't rewarded it because they've tended to reward deepening work within disciplines, whereas exploratory creative work has spread across multiple disciplines. And in a paper I published last year in Germany, I tried to set out in more detail what a probe of exploratory social sciences would be; what it would look like for the universities to have significant interdisciplinary teams working on the design options of a zero carbon economy or a radically transformed mental health system. And that's what I hope universities could do. At the moment they have almost no role in this and it’s incredible in a way. There's so much brain power in universities, and they don't play an active role. JPPE What would it take for them to do that? Mulgan Leadership. Money. You have to have a debate, you have to believe there's a problem. People at universities acknowledge there is a problem needing to be solved. So one of my purposes is at least a debate about that. And then political parties. I mean, the political parties in much the world have rather atrophied, hollowed out, hardened. And often it's the new political parties who are more creative than the old ones, which dominate your country and my country and some others. But if you were inventing a political party now, it would probably have much more of its core purpose being to organize a dialogue with the public about options for the future, about ideas. Instead, they tend to be captured by interest groups. They just work on winning elections or their money goes into election fighting rather than thinking. They’ve lost the capability of having broad open dialogues as opposed to campaigning, and so on. And it's interesting. Some of the newer parties have experimented with much more interesting methods of social dialogue like the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain, and there are quite a few others. I wouldn't say they've got there. But a political party which aspires to run a country should be owning part of this conversation about the options for the future. I think cities can do it. Good mayors often do have the resources to bring the whole of a city into a discussion about its physical future. So for example, just now we've just finished a really interesting session with a group of cities. A project I coordinate looks at what can be done over the next five or 10 years for cities to really prioritize population level mental health. And that's something which, you know, much of the public thinks is kind of obvious, that they should be doing that. And yet, politics lags far behind and nearly all the money is still in physical health, and hospitals and things like that. And very few political parties would feel comfortable actually even talking about mental health as a priority. They’re stuck in an anachronistic way of seeing the world. JPPE When did you first become invested in the power of political imagination and creative imagination? And how did you first identify the lack of the imagination that you see now? Mulgan I don't know, I suppose in different ways I’d probably be part of this. I've had a career which has partly been working in governments top-down, and I was part of some quite good exercises of political leaders trying to spark this. So Tony Blair, who has both strengths and weaknesses, but did at various times try to encourage big public conversations about the future and future priorities. I worked for an Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who did a huge exercise, getting the whole country thinking 15, 20 years ahead on climate change and pensions and water, and then bringing 1000 people into parliament to talk about the results. So I have seen how good leaders can do this from the top down. And from the bottom up, lots of grassroots organizations, social innovation projects, I've automatically tried to think radically about the future. But I guess since the financial crisis in particular, I think horizons have shrunk right in amongst leaders, but also amongst NGOs, social movement organizations, they'd be more in case of trying to survive. And that's happened alongside this growing sense of imminent ecological catastrophe. And these have all contributed to squeezing out the capacity to imagine radically. JPPE So does it require different methods of funding so they can move past survival mode? Mulgan I think there's certainly a big role for philanthropy. Your country has enormous amounts of spare money in philanthropy, but almost none of it goes into this. There are some good reasons for that, obviously, philanthropy tends to come from the beneficiaries of the old system, so they're never likely to be very radical in challenging it. I still think a little bit more effort on the part of the Fords and Rockefellers and Hewletts would have paid off because this isn't very expensive. But who else is going to create the space for people to think, to look ahead, to range a bit more widely? And I’ve spent most of my life on much more short term practical, pragmatic problem solving. But we all need some sense of the bigger picture, what that's leading towards, to help make sense of the actions in the present. And that's what's missing. And I would say in the US, politics, philanthropy, and higher education have all essentially failed their societal role in that respect. JPPE So as you said, it requires opening the debate so that people know that there's a problem. What are the steps after that? Mulgan Well then I think it's about organizing and funding and orchestrating the more detailed work, which needs to be done. And I do use the analogy with art or film or writing. Everyone can take part in it a little bit. We can all make our movies on Tiktok and so on. But actually, if you want really good films, it's actually quite hard, it's quite skilled, it's quite professional. It requires quite a lot of people. Or for a good Netflix TV series. And it’s the same for social imagination. You can start off with sparks and some of it can be very open and participatory. But if you are going to do a detailed thinking through how to regulate or organize a netzero economy that requires a highly specialized knowledge, interrogation, and argument, and so on. That's what universities should be doing. I work with a lot of governments around the world, you know, 10 to 15 at any one point. And if they're looking at a new policy area, you sort of assume there must be off the shelf, lots of lots of options, which they could consider. Let's say a new kind of universal basic income is one, which I've been a bit involved in, and is much talked about in much of the world. And there are quite a lot of pilots now of UBIs, but the quality of the work of it is still very thin. And if you are a government wanting to introduce one, actually, you will have to do most of the work designing it, thinking through its impact. There is not a menu of options you can draw down. And the same is true with almost any field. Let's say bringing the circular economy principles to fashion or whatever, the legwork and hard labor has not been done to prepare the options for others to draw on. And this is also true at a global level. The UN was set up in the 1940s, benefitting from lots of hard work, which had been done imagining what a UN could be in the dark years of the 30s. I've been doing work recently on what could be new global governance arrangements, if conditions became more favorable. There's nothing out there in terms of well thought through options. There's lots of good description, lots of good analysis, lots of good critique of all that's wrong with the UN. But it's as if the people who are the experts feel too nervous to ever put their names to a proposal, which someone else might shoot down. So we have this sort of bizarre deficit of looking ahead, whereas in other fields, like in sciences, or the life sciences or AI, lots of people are paid to think speculatively to design possible new genomic treatments or new algorithms. And the imbalance between a world of science and tech, which was too good looking ahead, and the world of the social and the political, which has given up on it, I think it's really become a serious problem.

The Captain and the Doctor: On the Enchantment of Modern Men George LeMieux Author Alexander Gerasimchuk Fatima Avila Editors Though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England. Introduction Modern man is lost. He is not home to himself. He lacks the longings that great men once had. While Nietzsche, Rousseau, or Burke might better articulate or explore this problem, I intend to explore how it might be remedied, a possible antidote to our modern poison. From the Western canon, I have identified three such antidotes or rather three figures who might re-enchant the modern man, the man of the democratic age. They are the vanguard of Marx, the conqueror of Nietzsche, and the disciple, which is first constituted Biblically but later in Toqueville among others. I shall conduct this search through the metaphor of a ship’s captain, in this case, Captain Jack Aubrey as depicted in the celebrated series and film Master and Commander , which I will briefly outline. Before that outline is given, I will first justify this metaphor by the virtue of captaincy itself (despite the fact I would shoehorn this favorite film of mine into anything). Then in the aftermath, I will examine these three figures as our “captains.” In this examination, I hope to reveal that modern man may only be enchanted, or at least enchanted to humanity’s benefit, by a disciple. For our captain, only the disciple offers a path that does not self-destruct and looks beyond worldly motivation. A Metaphor Since there is a long and storied history of philosophers making use of the ship and other nautical nomenclature as metaphor for their sophisticated views on man, government, and what other nonsense comes to their minds, I see no reason to deviate from the tradition. For what is better than a ship with captain and crew? She, like her nation, must suffer through trial and tribulation, storm and battle. She must adjust her sails so that she catches the wind but not let loose so much as to rip her masts apart. She must have a rigid hull built to withstand cannon and carronade, but she must also have flexibility, lest the changing temperatures and humidity crack her hull. She must be led by a captain, strong and decisive in his command. Yet he must not be a tyrant. He must court the hearts of his men so that he may win their will. If not, his men will mutiny. The uninspired crew would have no other reason to entertain the otherwise insufferable conditions of life at sea. Indeed, I do think this will be a fitting metaphor. The Captain Captain Jack Aubrey of His Majesty's Royal Navy is a man caught between two worlds, between two times. Behind him is the aristocracy of old: kings, queens, lords, ladies, and government by the few for the many, at least ideally. In front of him stands modernity: merchants, naturalists, revolutions, counter-revolutions, Napoleon, the new world, America, and democracy. Such is the world of Captain Aubrey as depicted in Patrick O'Brian's novel and Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Jack is a man of tradition. He respects the Crown. He reads his scripture. He loves his country. Jack’s hero is none other than Duke and Admiral Horatio Nelson, a brave and sturdy man who dies defending his love of king and country. And yet Jack sees his idols, his pillars crumbling. He has witnessed the chaos of the revolutions in France. He holds the Burkean sentiment that it is the modern radicals that “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; [...] they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’” It is this modern threat with its rights and revolutionaries that is epitomized by the two foils of the film. The first foil is the Acheron —the ship of the modern age. She is at the forefront of naval technological advancement. Her hull is braced by three layers of live oak and white oak, making her near impenetrable for any ship of her class. She is the largest of any frigate built, able to carry more guns, yet also more aerodynamic, “heavier, but faster spite it” (Weir, Collee). In every way, she outclasses the H.M.S Surprise , Jack’s nimble but aging frigate. And where is the Acheron built? Boston. While Peter Weir had the financial sensibility to make the antagonist of the film French, i.e. Acheron , Patrick O’Brian’s ship was called U.S.S Norfolk . It is with this name that the dichotomy O’Brian intended is much clearer. It is the new world and the old world, His Majesty and Mr. President. And the new world is winning. The second foil is not a figure of oak and iron but of flesh and bone. Doctor Stephen Maturin is the ship’s surgeon and a savant of a surgeon he is. He is also a naturist, collecting, diagraming, and recording the various species he encounters on the ship’s voyages. Upon the ship’s travel to the Galapagos Islands, the parallels to the young Darwin are evident. More important, however, than any of this, he is Jack’s best friend. Despite sharing little common interest, much less a common worldview, Jack confides in Stephen what he confides in no one else. Stephen, in turn, voices his dissent to Jack, when no crew member nor officer would otherwise dare. He is both his greatest ally and greatest challenger. He is the check to Jack’s ambition and the prosecutor of his reason. He is the liberal to Jack’s conservatism. He echoes the voices of democracy, of the social contract, and the danger of tyrants. His respect for Jack comes not from his title or station but from how he leads, how he governs. It is Stephen who most quickly becomes the radical, the revolutionary, when Jack steps out of line. The Jack we see at the film’s beginning is willing to die on the hill of order and naval tradition. He is unable to see anything but the objective of his mission. Stephen and even the other officers are unable to go as far. To Jack’s credit, it is his daring and force of will, despite insurmountable odds, that makes him a great captain. In his pursuit of the Acheron , Jack takes risks that make his moves unpredictable and effective; his crew calls him Lucky Jack for a reason. But those risks do not come without their costs, even if Jack is lucky more often than he is not. Eventually, Jack carelessly pursues the Acheron into a storm and loses a man and a mast in the process. Still, Jack does not turn tail, despite Stephen’s pleas. He refits and refocuses. Only by the film's end does Jack reform and he does so not through reasoning but out of his friendship with Stephen. When Stephen is injured in an accident on board (a marine shoots him while aiming for a bird), Jack sends his ship ashore to one of the Galapagos islands instead of continuing his pursuit, likely to his detriment. This act of compassion, as it turns out, is the saving grace of the Surprise. Not only is the Acheron spotted on the far side of the island, but Stephen inspires Jack on how to capture her. While Jack's act of compassion does not separate him from his ideology, it reveals a complexity in his nature. In not letting his warrior-like nature subjugate the other parts of his conscience, Jack demonstrates his command of self, making him a good captain in more ways than one. His compassion for Stephen, despite their differences, allows him to occupy a middle ground between old and the new, between those of high and low station, between those conservative and radical. Despite their differences, Jack and Stephen end their days together with music, with a duet, playing the cello and violin as the Surprise sails into the sunset. Looking at this time and this day, in this new world, one must wonder if such bonding, such good feeling, such balance between the conservative and the liberal is possible. Every day the position of the radical, of the accelerationist, becomes more compelling even to the conservative. In America, the rigging and line that once held hull and sail together have frayed and torn, not in the harshest winds but in their daily use. The physical lines that once held men together are now virtual, connections in the cloud and the internet. These lines between men were once tangible things; now, there are few of these left. The conservative now must ask himself what he intends to conserve and if he is capable of such conservation. With conservatives far to the right, liberals far to the left, and a confused chasm in between, can those old ropes hold society together any longer? Perhaps, it is time to cut the rope. Perhaps, it is time for both right and left to become radical. Or, perhaps, there is faith to be had in those old ropes. Perhaps, there could be a man to renew their strength, reorganize them, and apply a fresh coat of tar to protect them. Perhaps, there might be a man who could tie new ropes without cutting away the old. Is there such a captain for this ship of modernity? Is there a Jack who can reason with the moderns, take heed of their desires but not be dragged off course? What does such a captain look like? The Captain’s Virtue Before one can talk of any mystical quality a good captain must have, one must first talk about his primary obligation, his duty, his vocation. For if this station is not sound in virtue, the metaphor is not fit for its goal. A captain, such as Jack, is the leader of a warship and of its crew. He would not be a good captain if he could not sail, navigate, or command the ship in battle. He must understand every part of his command and responsibility. It was for such reasons that those men who became captains most often started their time at sea from their early teens as Midshipmen, who were responsible for commanding gun crews of sailors twice their age. It is this good practice, of physical strain and tangible purpose, that makes the vocation virtuous. Virtue is not found in sophistry or the professing of morality but in good works and deeds. Both Rousseau and Marx recognized that the “sensible” men of the world are not the magistrates but the “workers” and the “people.” In this way, the captain is a unique station. It is a position that reaches downward to the grit and servitude that is required but reaches up toward order and inspiration. On one hand, a captain must stand amongst his sailors and with his marines facing the enemy, taking with them every shot fired, equally as likely to be impaled by shrapnel and splinter, equally as likely to take grapeshot from a swivel gun, equally as likely to take a cannonball straight through his gut. On the other hand, a captain must reach upward. He must engage in strategy, diplomacy, and negotiation. He takes his orders from admirals, parliament, and the King. He must, with his officers, stand apart and govern the crew, making sure he does not fraternize with them or become too social. He must whip those who are insubordinate. And it is he who gives the parting sermon after his men die in battle. The captain is both above and below, a man who mediates between king and country, between God and his men. Vanguard For Marx, the nature of our captain is clear. He must be a vanguard, a man who can reach from the high to the low, from bourgeois to proletariat, a man who has the means to lead the proletariat to “acquire political supremacy” and “ constitute itself the nation” (Marx 488). The vanguard can not be of the lower classes as they do not hold the means of production or own sufficient property. The vanguard will not be the bourgeois socialist who wants “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them.” That man would not lead nor fight in the “impending bloody conflicts” that the revolution requires. But the captain might. He, by virtue of his practice, gains access to the epistemic standpoint of the working man. He can call his men into battle because he will be in that battle himself, because he will stand in front, with pistol and cutlass in hand, because he knows their plight and their struggle. Yes, the captain might be the perfect vanguard, if he had the disposition and the courage required to lead the revolution. But no vanguard will heal or reinspire the whole nation. He will take the radicals he agrees with and burn the rest. The ideal vanguard may be the captain, the general, or some other man of higher but not so noble station, that comes down to act on behalf of the proletariat. But the unifying captain is, in the root of his position, opposed to such a severing. More fit, would be the treasonous first officer who leads a mutiny against the captain and the remaining loyal officers. To be a vanguard is to be a “slash and burn” farmer who wreaks devastation on the present vegetation so that the soil may be made fertile again. There will be no healing, under the vanguard. Conqueror Then perhaps the captain, who must fight to re-enchant our new world, must be a conqueror. The conqueror does not require a revolution, or at least not an ideological one, for the conqueror has no need for the traditional radical who operates on moral principles. He is not the vanguard who cries out to the poor that they must liberate themselves. The conqueror only asks for good men, inspired to fight for their home and fatherland, inspired to make something more of what they have been given. The conqueror rises in rank and comes to lead a nation because of his proven success on the battlefield. This captain inspires not because of his pleasant sailing or wise words but because he sinks ships. Nietzsche asks “[m]ust the ancient fire not some day flare up [...] More: must one not desire it with all its might.” Is it not blood that would surely wake the modern man from his slumber, wake the animal instinct inside of him? Perhaps the true conservative can only believe that “antiquity incarnate” arises through a conqueror, a superman, a Napoleon. And yet one must ask of Nietzsche, what is to happen after the conquest? What is to happen after one has conquered all he can or has been defeated? What was Napoleon to do, having failed in Russia? What was Alexander to do when he lay sick and dying in his bed? What is left to hold a nation together when the expansion has stopped and the wars have come to an end? How is a conqueror to at last govern his people? If the measure of man’s vitality is only to be strength and victory, then there will be no man who finds purpose in times of peace. When the soldier again becomes the carpenter after his service is done, he must now aspire to be the superman of carpentry. He must strike down all other table builders and door makers in his path if he is to achieve vitality. He will feel not for his fellow man, now that he does not need him to protect his flank or cover his advance. He will be a frustrated and lonely man, who, in his attempted rationalization to maximize his will and vitality, will frantically look around every corner to become the carpenter of all carpenters, betraying every man who gets in his path. Nietzsche might retort that one should not care for the carpenter, for all carpenters are weak men who failed to rise to a higher station. But if one is to build a society, does one not need the carpenter? Would it not be better to be his friend so that he may more willingly and caringly craft one’s furniture? Perhaps Nietzsche thinks that forcing the carpenter to build a chair would be better to maximize the will than to engage in normal transaction or to politely ask him. Society needs carpenters; a ship needs sailors. Neither will run well if every request is made out of threat or a difference in power. Sure power may be unequally distributed among men, and men will surely wield that power to their advantage, but every interaction need not be a Melian Dialogue . No unification of society, no mending of wounds, could ever take place in such a one-dimensional existence. Even if, for but a fleeting moment, conservative and liberal may be united by the fires of war, such a state is only temporary. While the ancient fires may rise again, they may just as quickly die. For all Napoleon was, how many more revolutions and fragile republics followed? There was no remnant of antiquity to build upon. Instead, it was democratic man who, upon the rubble of Europe, raised his new throne. In his time, Tocqueville correctly surmised that democracy would be here to stay: “I think that in the long run, government by democracy shall increase the real strength of society.” While “slave” in its morality, democracy is dominant in its presence. Its practitioners are no longer just the carpenters or even the priests; they are the captains, the generals, the senators themselves. While European antiquity lay unaware, the strength and size of America, of democratic power, grew. “Something that passed unnoticed a century ago now strikes the attention of all.” Now, antiquity not only lacks the popular momentum to overcome the democratic age, but it lacks the strength. If there is to be a man who rekindles the flame of the West, he will not be a conqueror who slays democratic man. He will be a democratic man himself. And What for God? Purposely absent from the mind of Marx’s vanguard and Nietzsche’s superman is the Kingdom of God. Nietzsche and Marx are the archetypes of, as John Courtney Murray would categorize them, “the postmodern atheist”. The post-moderns not only leave God out of their government, philosophy, and science as the moderns do; they actively strike Him out, act against Him, and demonstrate how He cannot exist. The postmodern is offended that a God could exist and (in Marx’s case) allow for so much scarcity, so much evil, or (in Nietzsche’s case) deprive man of his freedom, the will, that makes man human. God, if he exists, is either a tormenter, imprisoner, or both. Nietzsche further declares that the morality man claims to have derived from God, the morality of the Christian and the Jew is the greatest perversion of the natural order: strength and weakness. Good and evil, concepts of vengeful weaklings, invert the true “morality” by which man once lived and should live again. Of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s cases, Nietzsche’s is the stronger. When one eliminates God from the worldly equation, one must also eliminate the morality that came with Him. Marx may claim scarcity is the great evil, but this concept of evil only comes through sympathy for the suffering of others. What is the evil of inequality or greed or a dominant bourgeois class if there is no concern for fellow man? From where does the humanist goodness, ascribed by Marx to the elimination of suffering, originate? Without an order, ordained above and outside by divine authority, there can be no objective good. No worldly cosmodicy is sufficient to prove an objective good. If one’s ultimate goal is “good” for the nation, one cannot look to Nietzsche for a cure; the concept of good is, in fact, part of the disease. But if one looks to Marx, one cannot find a source of good. Therein, the postmoderns are fruitless. And democratic man seems to agree. The true moral plague is that democratic man is not looking for goodness but instead assumes it. The modern atheist does not kill God but walks away from Him. In His absence, he does not search for truth or morality but merely replicates the idea of good that was passed down to him. He imitates, but his imitations, as they are not rooted in the source, are imperfect: bastardized (Murray and Nietzsche agree). He might even hold some personal religious sentiment but will not act on religious conviction. He does not mix the personal with the external world. He will work, govern, and wage war but will never do so in the name of God. He lives as if God does not exist. This … breed says in effect that, since he cannot know what God is, he will refuse to affirm that God is. But this stupidity, one may well think, surpasses that of the idolater. It is not merely an implicit refusal of God; it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. It is this modern man—the man who does not deny God but shoves him aside—that has become commonplace. This modern man feels neither the warm light of heaven nor the scorching hellfire below. He wanders in a cold fog, blind, deaf and dumb. He lingers in the cave only seeing shadows of the truth. Because he does not see the source of the light, he assumes there is no source and does not search for it. It is this modern man who must be re-enchanted. Disciple So how is our captain to deal with the moderns, with the Dr. Maturins that now sail aboard every ship? What is he to do with those who synthesize values of democracy and the equality of man but do not acknowledge the creator who created them equally? Thankfully, the modern agnostic, despite his lack of reason in comparison to the Nietzschean, has not yet thrown off his moral yoke. In some ways, he still feels a connection to the world beyond the material. There are yet some embers left to kindle. There are yet men left to kindle them. There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and the duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates. If man is to truly be re-enchanted—to be inspired and given lasting direction—he must look to that only thing which is transcendent, that is not merely of time and matter. If there is ever again to be unity amongst men, there must be unity with their creator. There must be disciples to show us the way. When man has been enchanted, even democratic man, it has been with and through religious spirit, fostered by disciples and prophets. These men once walked among us. These were the men in between God and humanity, Heaven and Earth, men who heard His voice and acted on His will. They were Moses and Abraham and David and Paul and Peter. God even revealed Himself to man in mortal form, in and through man’s pain and flesh. And yet, despite all of these, man’s faith remains weak. The disciples' task is never finished. He may never stop, for if he does, man is quick to forget and quick to lose his way. He will lose himself in the desert, and never find the promised land, his true home, his self. The disciple must be an ever-present and ever-constant reminder of God. The captain, disciple in his most righteous form, has some divine spark, some glint in his eye, some Promethean fire in his bosom that animates bravery and fortitude. The captain calls his men to voyage into the unknown, across the far side of the world. He calls his men to fight for a home that long disappeared behind a horizon last seen thousands of miles ago. He brings together those born across the empire, those who share little, and those who resent much. The duty the captain must call his men to cannot be incentivized with the stuff of the earth. He can promise them no amount of riches or glory among men to keep them steadfast. There is something the captain must awaken in his men that moves their spirits, their souls, guiding them toward something not here attainable. Only manna sent down from upon high can quell a spiritual hunger. And so the Captain must be like Moses, the interlocutor between man and God—newly the interlocular between conservative and liberal. He does not make the manna nor the law in the heavens, but he does transmit them. He walks down from Sinai to deliver to those below. He understands the plight of his crew, the doctor, and the common man, but he does not let them build golden calves. He has ambition but he does not raise towers of Babble; he does not push onward without cause. Where have these disciples gone? Where is Moses to be seen? Who upholds the commandments given from on high? Might it not be the lack of disciples but man who is the problem? Have there been one too many golden calves built in town squares, one too many towers of Babylon raised to the mockery of Heaven? Are there enough ears today willing to hear a sermon, enough lips willing to say a prayer? I contend there are. While the world may not be presently enchanted, there have been moments, glimpses, of enchantment. There was Reagan who stood in the way of the communist threat with his quick wit but mild manner. There was Dr. King who appealed to the heavens, preached to the masses, and marched hand in hand with the persecuted. There was Churchill who looked the devil right in the eye and spat back at him. There was Lincoln who looked over a battlefield and made a promise those men would not die in vain. There was Washington who led his soldiers, served his time, and ceded his throne. It was these disciples that reminded man of himself, of his nature, of his longings. They called upon God, evoked a higher duty, and bound men to each other. They knew that “[r]eligion [...] imposes on each man [...] obligations toward mankind, to be performed in common [...] and so draws him away from thinking about himself.” Like a captain, those disciples, who were fit to suffer, suffered in common with their men when they could have stood afar. Dr. King marched with his men, was imprisoned for them, and died for them. Reagan too took a bullet for his nation, although he fortunately survived. Lincoln, in his service and his stress, aged himself twenty years in the span of four and was assassinated shortly thereafter, giving the last full measure of his devotion. Washington lost battles for months on end in the bitter cold until he found success in a Christmas night attack. Oh, the joy nations will feel when leaders acquire such courage again when they call upon the heavens as they did not so long ago. Oh, they will know that feeling that gathered hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, that mustered the men who crossed the Delaware, that had black and white Union soldiers singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as they marched surely to their deaths at Fort Wagner. Only then can man come home to himself. Conclusion Who is our captain to be? What direction would we have him take our ship? Must he not be both a man of the people and a man of the elite, a democratic man who still has a touch, a memory in him, of that antiquity, that nobility, that honor of old? Still, he is not the vanguard of the proletariat, for the vanguard is a mutineer hellbent on revolution, not a captain. Neither is he the conqueror, for the captain must govern his ship beyond the rush of battle. He must lead his crew through those many times at sea which are dull and mundane. He must care for his men beyond their use in warfare. He must be selfless because that is what God calls him to be in times of struggle, a disciple who looks upward before he looks onward. But if those fires are ever to rise again, if the trumpet must once again cry its song of battle, the captain must be ready. He must again be simply a man of his trade, a good seaman and a good officer. He must dexterously maneuver his ship, out-sail, and outsmart his opponents. And when he must call for cannon fire, he must know what to cry to his men. He must have their best, not just for him, but for their God, their nation, and their fellow man. JACK - Want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? CREW- No! JACK- Do you want to call Napoleon your king? CREW- No! JACK- Want your children to sing The Marseillaise? CREW- No! JACK- Mr. Mowett, Mr. Pullings, starboard battery! References Burke, Edmund, et al. Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition. Liberty Fund, 1999. Marx, Karl, et al. The Marx-Engels Reader. Norton, 1978. Murray, John Courtney. “The Problem of God Yesterday and Today.” Georgetown University Library, 1963, library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1964c. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Discourses and the Social Contract. Translated by John T. Scott, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Tocqueville, Alexis De, et al. Democracy in America. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Weir, Peter, and John Collee. Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. Twentieth Century Fox, Aug. 2001.

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

Vance Kelley Civil Disobedience and Desert Theory of Punishment Vance Kelley I. Introduction In this paper, I discuss how the state ought to punish civil disobedience given a desert theory of punishment. By “desert theory of punishment,” I mean the view that lawbreakers ought to be punished according to what they deserve. Other considerations, such as what would best deter or incapacitate lawbreakers, are to be ignored according to desert theory. Since there are many distinct notions of “civil disobedience,” I will also clarify my use of this phrase. I use “civil disobedience” to mean “breaking the law in order to communicate to the public and the state that a policy violates the lawbreaker’s moral convictions.” My definition leaves aside whether civil disobedience is nonviolent or a last resort (as John Rawls supposes), although these features could marginally affect how civil disobedience ought to be punished (1). Ultimately, I conclude that states ought to punish all civil disobedience less harshly than typical offenses. I arrive at this “mercy for all” view in a roundabout way. In fact, I initially point out a shortcoming with this view in Section III. In Section IV, I examine an alternative view that advocates lesser punishment only for civil disobedience done from correct moral convictions. I argue that this “mercy for correct moral convictions” view is impractical, since the state cannot identify who disobeyed from correct moral convictions and who disobeyed from incorrect ones. This leads me to argue in Section V that the state must punish all civil disobedience uniformly, without regard to the correctness of civil disobedients’ moral convictions. I then conclude that the best uniform punishment is indeed to treat all civil disobedience with mercy, since this avoids over-punishing those who act from correct moral convictions. II. Why Desert Theory? As I have said above, my central claim is that given desert theory of punishment, the state ought to punish all civil disobedience mercifully. Some may find it perplexing that my central claim accepts desert theory as the correct theory of punishment, and indeed this needs to be justified. Simply put, I accept desert theory because it best captures our intuitions about disciplining lawbreakers. Most of us share the intuition that it is wrong to punish innocent people as well as the intuition that it is wrong to over-punish the guilty. Desert theory offers an explanation of these intuitions; it is wrong to punish the innocent and to over-punish the guilty because these conflict with what people deserve . Innocent people do not deserve to be punished at all, and guilty people deserve to be punished in proportion to the severity of their crimes. Yet alternatives to desert theory—such as theories that recommend punishments based on their incapacitation or deterrence value—have a difficult time explaining why we hold the above intuitions (2). In fact, these “consequentialist” theories of punishment would suggest punishing the innocent or over-punishing the guilty if doing so deterred or incapacitated lawbreakers. For example, suppose that by executing a petty thief the state could deter all would-be thieves from stealing others’ property in addition to incapacitating the executed criminal. Consequentialist theories of punishment would recommend executing the petty thief even though this conflicts with our intuition that over-punishing him with death is wrong. Therefore, the problem with consequentialist theories of punishment runs even deeper than what Walen suggests. Not only do consequentialist theories fail to explain our intuitions about punishment; they also render verdicts that directly conflict with these intuitions. Of course, one could write volumes on the merits of different theories of punishment, and what I have written above merely scratches the surface. But I hope to have at least made the argument that desert theory is compelling, and my do- ing so should assuage concerns that I am unduly neglecting what consequentialist theories would say about punishing civil disobedience. Desert theory is the most plausible account of how we ought to punish lawbreakers, and I will now move on to my central concern: how should the state punish civil disobedience? III. The Shortcoming of “Mercy for All” One initially plausible view is that given desert theory, all civil disobedience ought to be punished less harshly than typical offenses. Kimberly Brownlee discusses this “mercy for all” view in her Stanford Encyclopedia entry, writing that civil disobedients deserve mercy because they are motivated by moral convictions. The idea is that lawbreakers generally deserve mercy if obeying the law would have been very difficult for them, and civil disobedients’ moral convictions indeed make obeying the law quite difficult (3). Additionally, perhaps civil disobedients deserve mercy because their motives are less reprehensible than those of typical offenders. Breaking the law because of one’s moral convictions seems far less shameful than doing so out of self-interest, and this has long been held by legal scholars (4). The view that all civil disobedients deserve mercy because they act from moral convictions may therefore seem plausible, but it is not quite right. Surely, granting mercy even to civil disobedients who have incorrect moral convictions is too broad. These misguided disobedients do not deserve lesser punishments than typical offenders, and an example shall make this clear. Suppose a man publicly refuses to obey a law that protects gay citizens from discrimination. Believing that homosexuality is immoral and that the law unjustly protects wrongdoers, the man refuses to serve same-sex couples at his restaurant as a way of protesting the law. Clearly, the fact that his disobedience is done from a moral conviction does not make the man deserve lesser punishment than normal offenders (5). His moral conviction is severely misguided, detestable, and undeserving of mercy. Therefore, it seems that only civil disobedients who act from correct moral convictions deserve reduced punishments. IV. The Impracticality of “Mercy for Correct Moral Convictions” I have just shown that only civil disobedients who act from correct moral convictions deserve mercy. Disobedience done from incorrect moral convictions, on the other hand, deserves no lesser punishment than normal. On desert theory, then, it seems rather straightforward that states ought to punish civil disobedients who hold correct moral convictions less harshly than normal offenders, while those with incorrect moral convictions ought to be punished at the standard level. However, this “mercy for correct moral convictions” view faces a significant problem. In practice, the state cannot administer the different levels of punish- ment that the view calls for. During sentencing, judges would need to discern who disobeys from correct moral convictions and who disobeys from incorrect ones. Yet typically judges will not be able to discern this, and instead they will view both types of civil disobedients as having incorrect moral convictions. This is because all civil disobedience expresses moral convictions contrary to those of lawmakers—that is the entire point of civil disobedience—and typically lawmakers’ convictions will also be held by judges. After all, in most democratic systems, lawmakers choose judges whose views accord with their own. Given that judges’ own moral convictions will agree with those of lawmakers and conflict with those of civil disobedients, judges will regard all civil disobedients as having incorrect moral convictions, for it will not matter that some civil disobedients’ convictions actually are correct and some are not. Admittedly, there may be cases where acts of civil disobedience convince judges that their moral convictions are wrong and that the disobedients’ convictions are correct. In such cases, judges could perceive that civil disobedience is being done from correct moral convictions, since here they do not allow their own moral convictions to cloud their judgment. That said, these cases are rare. Civil disobedients often fail many times before persuading the state that their moral convictions are correct. For example, the civil rights period in the United States lasted many years and required numerous instances of civil disobedience before judges and lawmakers were persuaded to end Jim Crow segregation. Generally, judges will view civil disobedients as having incorrect moral convictions even if some actually are correct; consequently, the state cannot give the different types of civil disobedients the disparate punishments that they deserve. V. “Mercy for All” Revisited So, how can the state punish civil disobedience? It cannot discriminate between disobedients who have correct moral convictions and those who lack them. In- stead, the state must punish all civil disobedience uniformly, without regard to the truth of disobedients’ moral convictions. This may cause us to conclude that desert theory is false if “ought implies can.” If states only have moral obligations to do what is possible, then it is not the case that they ought to give different punishments to civil disobedients depending on the truth of their moral convictions. As I have shown in the previous section, it is generally impossible for the state to assess the truth of these convictions and give out different punishments for them. Yet “different punishments depending on the truth of civil disobedients’ moral convictions” seems to be exactly what desert theory entails. The view claims that states ought to punish lawbreakers according to what they deserve, and civil disobedients deserve different punishments depending on the truth of their moral convictions. Since desert theory seems to entail a false conclusion, it appears to be false. However, there is a way around this problem for the view. We can add a proviso to desert theory that handles cases where the state is unable to give lawbreakers the different levels of punishment that they deserve. According to this proviso, if a state cannot identify and administer these different levels of punishment, then it no longer ought to give lawbreakers these different levels. Instead, the state ought to choose a uniform level of punishment that gives no one harsher punishment than she deserves, even if this lets some lawbreakers receive undeserved mercy (6). One may wonder why this proviso places so much emphasis on treating no one worse than she deserves. But in fact, many people agree with the spirit of the proviso. We often say that it is better to let guilty people go free than to imprison someone who is innocent; this idea was formalized by British jurist William Blackstone and has remained a part of jurisprudence ever since (7). With this proviso added to desert theory, it no longer imposes a moral obligation that violates “ought implies can.” Now, states are simply obligated to impose a uniform level of punishment on civil disobedients, and this should pose no practical difficulties. Given this proviso, what uniform level of punishment does desert theory recommend for civil disobedience? This could take one of two forms (8). First, the state could show no mercy to any civil disobedients and punish all of them at the lev- el appropriate for normal offenders. But this would over-punish those who have correct moral convictions and deserve mercy, so it is ruled out by the proviso. Alternatively, the state could show mercy to all civil disobedients and punish them at the reduced level appropriate for those with correct moral convictions. This under-punishes civil disobedients with incorrect moral convictions (who deserve full punishments), but it avoids over-punishing those with correct moral convictions. Since this second option avoids over-punishment, it is favored by the proviso. Therefore, states ought to show mercy to all civil disobedients and punish them at the reduced level appropriate for those with correct moral convictions. VI. Conclusion I have shown that given desert theory, we ought to punish all civil disobedience mercifully. I began in Section II by justifying and accepting desert theory, which claims that people ought to be punished according only to what they deserve. Then, in Section III, I examined my preferred view that all civil disobedients ought to be punished less harshly than typical offenders. I initially argued that this “mercy for all” view has a shortcoming: civil disobedients with incorrect moral convictions do not deserve mercy. Nonetheless, I returned to this view after recognizing in Section IV that it is impractical to give mercy only to disobedients with correct moral convictions. As I then explain in Section V, punishment of civil disobedience must therefore be uniform with respect to the truth of lawbreakers’ moral convictions. After adding a proviso to desert theory which accounts for this fact as well as our intuition that under-punishing is preferable to over-punishing, I return to the “mercy for all” view and accept it as the only one compatible with justice. Endnotes 1 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Harvard Belknap Press, 1971. 320, 327. 135 2 Alec Walen, “Retributive Justice”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2020 Edition. https://plato.stanford. edu/entries/justice-retributive/. Section 1. 3 Kimberlee Brownlee, “Civil Disobedience”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2017 Edition. https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/. Section 4.2. 4 Harrop A. Freeman, “The Right of Civil Disobedience”. Indiana Law Journal, Vol 4 Iss 2, 1966. https://www. repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3628&context=ilj. 228-254. 5 It might be hard to imagine the “normal offender” for this case. Here, it would be someone who refuses to serve gay citizens but does not do so to protest the antidiscrimination law. Perhaps this person thinks that serving gay citizens will cause him to lose the business of homophobic customers. 6 One might question why the new level of punishment must be uniform. For example, perhaps different levels of punishment could be administered on a random or arbitrary basis. But surely, such punishments would be unjust. 7 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1893. 358. 8 It could also take a third form, at a level somewhere between what the two groups of disobedients deserve. But this would obviously over-punish those who have correct moral convictions and be thrown out by the proviso. Previous Next

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEWS, PAUL KRUGMAN: Inequality, Artificial Intelligence, Technological Disruption, and Assortative Mating Paul Krugman is an economist and writer, who currently serves as professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Prior to his appointment at Princeton, Krugman served on the faculty of MIT; his last post was Ford International Professor of Economics. He has also taught at Yale and Stanford Universities, and prior to that he was the senior international economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers, under Ronald Reagan. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Group of Thirty. He has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, as well as to a number of countries including Portugal and the Philippines. In December 2008, Mr. Krugman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2008, honoring his work in international trade patterns. Fall 2019 JPPE : With US income and wealth inequality at a historical high, economists like Daron Acemoglu and David Autor have discussed the issue of job polarization and the idea that artificial intelligence and other modern labor-saving innovations might contribute to the widening of that skills gap and the further privileging of high skill work. Are you concerned that modern technology will make inequality worse? Krugman : I’m concerned but I’m not convinced. The belief that we’re living in an era of radical technological change has a problem, which is, if we were in such a period, we should see rapidly rising productivity. What we’re actually seeing is rather sluggish productivity. Rising productivity is just not being shown in the data. And then once you adopt that attitude you can ask yourself how—thinking about the kind of tangible technological innovations of our time—are we really seeing radical progress? The rise of the original smartphone or the iPhone was a really big deal. How excited are people about this year’s latest smartphone? You really can convince yourself that we’re starting to plateau. And that may not last, but it’s not clear that this is a time of very radical technological change. Aside from the fact that rapid technological change isn’t so obvious, the argument that technology is driving income polarization runs up against several problems. I think Autor does great stuff, and that “U shape” he finds is really interesting. But there is a problem if wage developments don’t seem to be following the kinds of labor that he says are being devalued—i.e. if middle-skill work isn’t experiencing worse wage gains than lower-skill work, which is the part that's growing. So if we’re seeing an economy that is polarizing with a greater number of low skill jobs, why are home health aids not getting better paid? Those are service sector jobs, so that makes you question whether there is some statistical artifact about the whole thing. It’s not for sure, but I’m unconvinced. And then there’s the general point that if we have technology that’s biased against labor, it needs to be biased towards something, which would be capital. This means returns to investments would be high, but the corporate sector is behaving as if returns on investment are low. They are not investing heavily despite extremely low interest rates. So I just think the whole thing is a story you can tell, and it might be true in the future but there really is no slam dunk evidence that it’s what is happening now. JPPE : Research by Robert Allen on the “Engels’ Pause” shows that because technological disruption tends to improve productivity, it also temporarily increases inequality as wages stagnate and returns to capital rise. Then eventually some leveling force brings it down. Do you think that that’s a fair way of looking at how theoretical technological disruption causes inequality? Krugman : It can happen. To the extent that we have a theoretical analysis of what technology does, that analysis says that it depends on the technology and it depends on the bias of the technology. Technology that replaces a worker with lots of extra capital should have a negative impact on wages and increase inequality. That’s not a particularly new insight. David Ricardo had it in 1821, and the reason he had it is because there’s a pretty good case that that’s what happened during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. There’s an endless debate about what happened to real wages between 1800 and 1840, but the fact that we’re even having that debate tells you that there isn’t sufficiently convincing evidence of rising real wages to override the counterarguments. So stagnating wages due to technology is possible. It’s not clear that it has happened again since the Industrial Revolution. There is an argument that there was a kind of technological bias towards highly educated workers, which was driving the rise in income inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s more debatable, but it’s also a story that doesn’t help much in developments since 2000. So technology can have an effect, and it’s very easy to write down a model in which technological change is, for some period—and maybe even an extended period—, bad for substantial groups of workers. But it depends on the story you tell. JPPE : There was economic research that found assortative mating was responsible for twenty percent of the rise in inequality since the 1980s. Is there anything college students can do about this, or are they just the vehicles of widening inequality? Krugman : It's not just assortative mating; it’s assortative lots-of-stuff. At the highest levels, everyone was roommates at Harvard. But I think a lot of those assortative mating things are mostly relying on inequality as measured by survey data, which doesn’t capture the really huge incomes at the top. Those incomes are measured by other things, and that’s a large part of the inequality. But, look, if we can restore adequate funding for high-quality public education so that we can have more great students at a wider variety of places, then maybe the mating won’t be so assortative. I’m not big on the notion that any intervention in people’s lives is evil socialism, but telling people who fall in love with is beyond even what I would consider. JPPE : Fair enough. Walter Scheidel came out with The Great Leveler where he wrote a history of inequality. His thesis was that periods of high inequality only ever get remedied by mass military mobilization, plague, civil war, or government collapse. In a time of historically high inequality, are you worried about that? Or do you think that effective policy and effective politics can actually play a role in reducing inequality? Krugman : The middle-class society that I grew up in—now gone— was the creation of policy. It was not the result of the invisible hand of the market, but a dramatic increase in unionization, the squeezing of wages, wage differentials, the establishment of norms, and changes in taxation, all of which were associated with World War II. So massive total war was the background for the Great Compression. Do we know that this is the only way that reducing inequality can happen? No. It’s the only way we’ve seen it happen in the past, but we don’t have a whole lot of samples, and you have to hope that we can do it differently. And I would say that there were significant equalizing reforms during the Progressive Era, and it’s true that some of the stuff took place after World War I, but some of it took place before. So I don't think history should give you total pessimism about our ability to enact change. And I'd like to see more equality and not total war.

Author Name < Back Unwitting Wrongdoing: The Case of Moral Ignorance Madeline Monge Should we blame and praise people for actions which they are ignorant of performing or which they take to be morally neutral? There are two competing theories for the moral assessment of ignorant agents. Capacitarianism focuses on whether an agent could have to have done something to not be ignorant but instead acquire moral knowledge. Valuationism determines an ignorant agent’s blameworthiness by looking at their values. Someone is blameworthy if they act within their values and still commit the harmful act. My paper makes three points. First, I examine how thought experiments revolving around moral issues are either written in support of, or as counterexamples to, the two theories of moral responsibilities. The description of these thought experiments causes the reader to lean in favor of what the theorist is trying to argue. In other words, these thought experiments function as intuition pumps. Second, reflection on the thought experiments used in support of the two theories of moral responsibility reveals that these theories, rather than being rivals, are two sides of the same coin. In this paper, I presuppose ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Knowledge I take to be a composite state that consists at the very least of three necessary conditions: truth, belief, and justification. This view, which can be traced back to Plato’s Theaetetus , claims that what distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief and lucky guessing is that it is based on some form of justification, evidence, or supporting reasons. The truth condition of the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge states that if you know that p, the p is true. The truth condition need not be known; it merely must be obtained. The belief condition claims that knowing that p implies believing that p. Finally, the justification condition demands that a known proposition is evidentially supported. he justification condition prevents lucky guesses from counting as knowledge when the guesser is sufficiently confident to believe their own guess. Given that ignorance is the lack of knowledge and given that knowledge has at least three necessary conditions, there are many different sources of ignorance: lack of belief, lack of truth, and lack of justification. There are numerous psychological factors that can give rise to each of these three conditions. Among these psychological factors are forgetting, cognitive biases, miseducation, or lack of exposure. I presuppose this ignorance to be lacking knowledge. There is not only one type of ignorance, rather, there are two main classes of such: factual ignorance, and moral ignorance (Rosen, 64). There are various sources of ignorance from where factual and moral ignorance arise. When someone does not know, forgets, is lacking exposure to, is miseducated, does not retain, or misunderstands a given fact that cannot be disputed under any circumstance, they can become either factually or morally ignorant. These sources can be relieved with conscious effort, or by external involvement (Rosen, 302). Ultimately it is up to the agent to recognize errors that result from their ignorance. A debate surrounding the exculpating factors of moral or factual ignorance is important to understand. It is generally thought that immoral actions can only be exculpated by factual ignorance, but not moral ignorance. Factual ignorance hinges around objects of descriptive facts. I will be using an example of slavery in ancient slave-times to illustrate this concept. Let’s suppose someone lives next door to someone who has slaves but also does not know they are living next door to slaves. This would be a situation of factual ignorance because the neighbor does not know the fact that there are slaves living next door (Rosen, 72). It could be because they are unobservant, or because the slaveholder does a good job of keeping the slaves quiet; there is also the chance that the neighbor doesn’t care, is distracted by their own life, or denies their worry of believing that there are slaves. The slaveholder hiding slaves is an objective/descriptive fact that cannot be disputed. Even if they deny it, the slaveholder would still have slaves, and the descriptive fact would not change. On the other hand, moral ignorance arises when someone is ignorant of a moral fact. Moral facts are normative, and they prescribe courses of actions that are true simpliciter (Rosen, 64) . If the neighbor to the slaveholder knows that they are living next door to slaves, but does not know the slaveholder is harming them, this wouldbe moral ignorance. It is morally impermissible for the slaveholder to have and harm slaves. The neighbor should know the slaveholder is acting immorally by keeping and harming the slaves. Moral ignorance does not stop at the fact that the neighbor does not know it is morally wrong to harm people, but they may also not know they should do something about the harm. This ignorance of harm can be defined as, not knowing that an action may cause pain (harm) when one should know it does so. They also ought to know that, without good reason, harming people should be avoided at all costs because it is morally impermissible (Biebel, 302). Should the neighbor be exculpated because of factual or moral ignorance? If the neighbor does not know that having and harming slaves is morally impermissible, this could not be factually exculpated. This is a case of moral ignorance. The neighbor would be morally exculpated for their ignorance in this scenario because they are unaware that having and harming slaves is impermissible by moral standards (Rosen, 66). There is no opportunity for the neighbor to be factually ignorant. What prompts this type of ignorance? Perhaps the neighbor does not care that the slaves are being harmed, is distracted by other events, or is afraid of the repercussions that will incur because of speaking out against the moral injustice. The most important aspect of moral ignorance is to remember that it is prescriptive, and not descriptive. The argument of moral ignorance and blame revolves around what should or shouldn’t be done because of lacking knowledge. This is largely in part to the distinction between factual and moral ignorance. Factual ignorance may sometimes exculpate an immoral action, but it is ultimately moral ignorance that will exculpate an individual (Sliwa, 6). I. Capacitarian and Valuationist Assessments of Moral Responsibility: There are now several theories that concern moral ignorance: volitionist, attributivist, capacitarian, valuational, parity, and pragmatic. While all differ from one another in how they attribute blame to cases of moral ignorance, capacitarian, parity/pragmatic, and volitionism share a disposition of blame that focuses on someone’s capacity of knowledge (Biebel). Valuationalism and attributivism respond to blameworthy actions as being dependent on the personal volition of the agent. I’d like to classify these two categories as capacitarian and valuational. I will occasionally refer to specific points that individual theories make, but with the example of the slaveholder, I will continue the conversation with the two main theories. The capacitarian theories revolve around the counterfactual capacity that an individual has when deciding which action to take in a morally relevant situation that could’ve been prevented. They look at situations where someone is blameworthy. They want to know if it was in the agent’s capacity to correct or avoid being ignorant, and if this would have prevented them from performing the immoral action. Capacitarians consider people responsible for their actions if they are responsible for their capacity of behavior. People who lack the capacity for knowing what is morally permissible, say children, or people who are mentally incapable of retaining information relevant to moral standards, are not culpable for their immoral actions. They can be corrected, and may learn afterwards, but they are not blameworthy. They lack the ability to retain vital moral considerations. Capacitarians do not skip over the fact that people’s ignorance may be the reason they are acting immorally. If someone believes from their ignorance that what they did was the most rational and correct method of handling a situation of moral relevance, then they may be exculpated. However, this justification is only one part of the knowledge needed to have an accurate and knowledgeable conclusion. How a morally significant situation should be handled depends on someone’s capacity to know whether they had the opportunity to do something differently. This difference in choice may have changed someone’s ignorance into knowledge and prevented the immoral action. When someone is not aware why they are ignorant, they are also unaware of how they can resolve their lack of knowledge. This is the way capacitarian’s view moral ignorance to be exculpable, and encapsulates much of capacitarians’ concern. How can someone be blamed for not knowing a moral standard if they have never been socially conditioned or taught what the moral standard is? When I go over the varying vignettes that hone in on how the capacitarian theory can be utilized I will be able to further demonstrate the degrees of internal and external factors that influence moral ignorance, conveying how someone might come into the position to remedy their ignorance but lack the awareness or determination to do so. Arguing against the capacitarian theory is the valuationist theory. Valuationism responds to capacitarianism with a specific criticism. Capacitariansim uses immoral ignoramus as a clear reason to excuse someone from an immoral action, but valuationists believe that the capacitarian theory is too easily applied to every case of immorality. They do not think it is wise to exculpate someone who has forgotten or is unknowledgeable about morality. Valuationism approaches the topic of blame and exculpation surrounding immoral actions by looking at omission and forgetfulness. The theory considers omission and forgetfulness to lead to potentially harmful instances of ignorance. Harmful ignorance is when someone consistently shows blameworthy immoral actions. Valuationists trace the value systems and the past actions of agents to see what led them astray towards immoral actions. They look at recidivism rates, as well as values and virtues. Valuationalism investigates how people are held accountable for their actions and believe someone is only deserving of moral praise if they have reason to act morally. Moral responsibility is the condition of whether someone is praiseworthy, blameworthy, or excused from the former two because of their involvement in a moral act. Someone could also fail to act or omit an action. This is potentially why someone deserves a moral reward or punishment. Valuationists agree that psychological states may affect someone’s behavior to act accordingly during a moral situation. They see this as one component in the person’s link to act or neglect to act. Therefore, valuationists think it can only serve as a partial excuse for someone and is not a strong enough argument to exculpate them from a morally relevant situation. Psychological states in a valuationist framework does not make someone incapable of moral knowledge, nor does someone’s emotional attachment serve as a reason for someone to act immorally. Whether someone cares about an action does not render them more or less blameworthy. It may affect how much or little they will react, but it should not affect their moral assessment. Therefore, valuationalist’s believe that most people are, more often than not, blameworthy for their moral ignorance. If they have not responded in a morally kind manner to a situation, it’s because their values align with preconceived notions of their background. These preconceived notions are often the fundamental reasons for why someone acts immorally. Capacitarians avoid looking at an agent’s value system because they want to know if the immoral act could have been avoided, and if the agent could have prevented themselves from being ignorant in the first place. When we look at somebody's capacity to act, we are tracing their past actions and whether or not they had the ability to change their moral knowledge. Capacitarians rely on a history of someone’s actions. The values that arise from somebody's capacity to act are decided through the person's past actions from the moment they are born. Capacitarians look at past actions carefully because the culmination of them sets up the targeted subject that a valuationist uses to counter their argument. Values are deeply seated through someone’s past actions. The more they are reinforced through choice of action and external influences, the more established they become. The deeply seated beliefs that someone has grown into values are important for evaluating the response a person has to a morally loaded situation. We saw examples of this in the altered versions of the vignettes. Without the added context, a reader wouldn’t have been able to tell what the characters valued, nor what their guiding principles were. When we manifest actions as guiding principles, we are acting from a result of our values. These have been established by our capacities to act in the past. The values we are focusing on in this paper are intrinsic. For example, valuing education leads to being more productive in helping your children with their schoolwork and helping them improve when they need it. Valuing health means you likely eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly. These specific examples of intrinsic values provide a foundation for readers to rest on when making their own evaluative judgments. These intrinsic values lead to other good things, like, your children getting into a good school, and you living a life with bountiful opportunities because of your health. The Valuationist Theory focuses on such intrinsic values, and are meant for the valuationist to rationally conclude whether the characters in the vignettes are blameworthy or not. Values directly shape what people do and say. Their actions are subsets of behavior, and their behavior is a combination of capacities for potential action and values. Action is intentional behavior. Guiding principles of values will manifest as actions. The way we act is a subset of our values and that action is intentional. Each subset, whether planned or an unconscious reaction, is a value in disguise.Our actions are mostly intentional and based on our values, but sometimes they can be accidents due to forgetting. They may also be from a lack of capacity to change behaviors in the past and potentially due to a lack of values. II. Perspectives on the Assessment of Moral Responsibility with Respect to Capacitarian and Valuationist Approaches: In this next section, I will review various vignettes that scholars have introduced into the conversation of moral ignorance, discussing how our theory of moral responsibility will change depending on how the stories are described. I will be using a vignette from Alexander A. Guerrero’s 2007 article, “Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution”, which discusses the moral ramifications of poisoning someone with cyanide. I will also incorporate a recent, original vignette about the moral culpability of leaving a dog in a hot car. Both cases convey how the same set of events may be narrated in a way that supports the C or the V theory. . The support from these different theories is not derived from the event themselves but in how their contexts are described. Omitting and highlighting certain features will change which theory best explains whether someone should be blamed or praised. It is impossible to give a complete account of these theories in these vignettes, but we will be careful in fully describing each theory and embellishing. This will show which theory best explains each vignette. Both what could have happened and what is described will show whether one is morally blameworthy in the capacitarian sense. If a vignette lends itself to the capacitarian theory, it will focus on possible actions that could have changed depending on the capacity of the protagonist’s acknowledgement to do something differently. If the vignette falls towards the valuationist perspective, it is because of the protagonist’s present character traits and values. A. Case One: Guerrero’s Poison Let’s consider the case of Anne, who poisons Bill by spooning cyanide into his coffee. Anne believes she is spooning sugar, and she is blameless for her false belief. Is Anne blameless for poisoning Bill? Rosen concludes that an action done from ignorance is not a locus of original responsibility. This means Anne is only responsible for poisoning Bill if she is responsible for her ignorance about the fact that she is poisoning Bill. Guerrero has constructed a vignette that partially supports a theory where ignorance can be morally exculpated. What happens when details of the character’s capacities and values are introduced? I’m going to reintroduce Guerrero’s story with these details added to demonstrate the effectiveness of manipulating the story so the capacitarian or the valuationist theory provides a better explanation and justification of our natural inclination to blame the protagonist. B. Case Two: Guerrero’s Poison (modified) Let’s consider again the case of Anne, a single mother who is Bill’s girlfriend. Bill regularly comes over in the morning to share a cup of coffee because he has been dating Anne for a few months. After a long night of helping her children prepare for an important exam, Anne believes she is spooning sugar into Bill’s morning coffee and is unaware that she is poisoning him with cyanide. Anne does not know that last night after she went to bed exhausted from tutoring her children, she had a sleepwalking incident where she mistakenly poured out the sugar in the sugar dish and replaced it with cyanide. Afterwards, Anne went back to bed and did not remember what she did in the middle of the night. That morning while Anne was spooning poison into Bill’s coffee, he innocently read the morning news on his phone and did not give the sugar a second thought. Was it in Anne’s capacity to make sure she was spooning sugar and not cyanide into Bill’s coffee? If Anne does not regularly sleepwalk then we cannot expect it to be within her capacity to know that she ought to check the sugar dish just in case she had tampered with it the previous night. What about Anne’s values? We know that Anne values relationships and caring for others, as well as education. This is why she stayed up to help her children prepare for an exam, and also why she regularly invites her boyfriend over for coffee. Here Anne is not blameworthy for her ignorance, nor has she acted within a set of immoral values that would prompt her to poison Bill. This has never happened before to Anne. Anne has never sleepwalked a day in her life and has a consistent record of showing Bill hospitality and care. Under a valuationist’s account of moral blame, Anne would not be considered blameworthy because her actions do not align with her values, and after the incident, she continued to grieve and disapprove of her ignorance. She did not intend to cause suffering, nor does she value suffering. Anne unfortunately is the cause of Bill's death because she had a momentary lapse in her sleep routine which caused her to act involuntarily on account of ignorance. In this case, Anne would not be blameworthy by capacitarian standards, nor by valuationist standards. Anne is not originally responsible for poisoning Bill, and she would be considered morally exculpated. Based on what the story tells us about Anne’s character traits and values, one can see that she did not act with malicious intent. It was an honest mistake, and a serious accident. Even though Anne has never sleepwalked before, would it be reasonable to expect her to check her sugar before she gives it to Bill? I think it would be considered unreasonable for anyone to expect Anne to check her sugar because Anne does not have a past history of swapping out her sugar with other substances. If it were the case that Anne has sleepwalked before, and she has a past history of replacing her sugar with other substances, like salt, powder bleach, or baby powder, then it would be reasonable to expect her to check. If Anne had a history of swapping substances, then her negligence to check on the sugar dish would be an involuntary act in ignorance. In this vignette, how a capacitarian and a valuationist consider someone to be morally blameworthy or exculpated is revealed through the protagonist’s capacity and character traits. This example shows us that the capacity of memory to prevent a potentially harmfully ignorant situation is a mitigating factor in someone’s judgment of immoral behavior. Anne did not willfully act immorally and is not blameworthy for her involuntary action done out of ignorance (Alvarez & Littlejohn, 8). Both theories attribute a small degree of responsibility to the harm Anne has done, but not enough to judge her as being willfully ignorant nor morally culpable. Capacitarian and valuationist theories agree with each other in how they assess this vignette due to Anne’s isolated incident. Let us take another vignette to compare capacitarian and valuationist theories. In this next scenario we have the unfortunate event of a dog dying after being left in a hot car unattended for some time. C. Case Three: Hot Dog Imagine Mrs. Crawford is out running errands with her medium sized cocker-spaniel in the back seat. The dog is in good health, well-groomed and fed, and Mrs. Crawford sees to it that he is well taken care of. Today of all days Mrs. Crawford pulls into a parking lot with no shade to block out the sun from her car. There is no breeze, and it is ridiculously hot outside. Instead of bringing her dog into the store with her, Mrs. Crawford decides to leave her dog in the car with the windows rolled up. She reasons that the air-conditioner was on during the drive to the store, so the car is not muggy or hot. She also reasons that she will not be in the store for a long time because she has a list of things she wants to purchase. At this point in her decision, Mrs. Crawford locks the car and leaves for the store. Suppose Mrs. Crawford is making good time in the store. She is almost done picking out everything on her list and is careful not to get sidetracked. However, Mrs. Bailey sees Mrs. Crawford in the aisle over and makes her way to talk to her about some important matters. Mrs. Crawford is delighted to see and talk to Mrs. Bailey, and easily becomes swept up in her conversation. She remembers her dog is in the car but does not remember how hot it is outside because the store is well air-conditioned, aiding to Mrs. Crawford’s choice to talk to Mrs. Bailey for longer than expected. Now the dog is still outside in the hot car, and because it is not properly ventilated or shaded, the car quickly becomes extremely hot inside. The dog is soon unable to withstand the heat and becomes sick and passes out in the back seat before Mrs. Crawford returns from the store. Mrs. Crawford is mortified. She had no idea that leaving her dog unattended for as long as she did would result in its sickness. She quickly takes her dog to the vet. Here we have a vignette that sets up Mrs. Crawford to be morally exculpated by her ignorance if we are not considering her values or capacity to have made changes in favor of the dog’s life. We are now going to see another representation of this vignette with both capacity and values of Mrs. Crawford included. Within this next vignette, I will provide more background information that will show how someone's capacity can prevent ignorance from occurring or may cause someone's ignorance to flourish. I will also be including Mrs. Crawford's values, which will show whether-or-not by the valuation as to perspective that Mrs. Crawford is in fact acting in line with her values. D. Case Four: Hot Dog (modified) Imagine Mrs. Crawford is a steady workaholic. Mrs. Crawford decides to skip her dog’s walk and bring them to the store with her. She is alert, and well aware that bringing her dog with her might be a hinderance, but she does it anyway. Today of all days Mrs. Crawford pulls into a parking lot with no shade to block out the sun from her car. There is no breeze, and it is ridiculously hot outside. Instead of bringing her dog into the store with her, Mrs. Crawford decides to leave her dog in the car with the windows rolled up. She thinks she is doing the right thing by leaving her dog behind in the car and reasons that the air-conditioner was on during the drive to the store, so the car is not muggy or hot. At this point in her decision Mrs. Crawford locks the car and leaves for the store, confident that her decision was the right one. Suppose Mrs. Crawford is making good time in the store. She is almost done picking out everything on her list and is careful not to get sidetracked. However, Mrs. Bailey sees Mrs. Crawford in the aisle over and makes her way to talk to her about some important matters. Mrs. Crawford suddenly forgets about her need to complete her shopping trip in a timely manner. She forgets her dog is in the car, nor does she remember how hot it is outside because the store is well air-conditioned. Now Mrs. Crawford’s dog is still outside in the hot car, and because it is not properly ventilated or shaded the car quickly becomes extremely hot inside. The dog is soon unable to withstand the heat and becomes sick and passes out in the back seat before Mrs. Crawford returns from the store. When she returns, Mrs. Crawford is mortified. She had no idea that she had been talking to Mrs. Bailey for so long. She did not even think about her dog, or the possibility that leaving her dog unattended for as long as she did would result in its death. She quickly takes her dog to the vet. What can we understand about this scenario that is different from the original? With this new perspective, we can see that Mrs. Crawford was completely forgetful in the care of her dog. While she is a workaholic with a one-track mindset, her decision to bring her dog along seems out of the ordinary and not in line with her normal character traits. We can tell by this story that Mrs. Crawford values social relationships, which is why she stopped to talk to Mrs. Bailey, independence, which is why she went out to the store in the first place, and the well-being of others, hence her decision to leave her dog in the car. Did Mrs. Crawford have the capacity to change her course and make sure she took measures that would secure the safety of her dog? I believe so. She was not tired; she was not overcome with thoughts of work that would normally cause her to forget other obligations. She was distracted, but by something that she had the capacity to say no to. Here I would like to point out that Mrs. Crawford was in her right mind and within the right capacity to know that talking to Mrs. Bailey would disrupt her schedule of running errands. This change of schedule had the potential to possibly upset or cause extreme distress to her dog that she left in her car. Mrs. Crawford ought to have known that the dog in the car was the most precedent of her concerns. She knows that by moral standards her dog has moral worth and is a moral responsibility that she has tasked herself with. Mrs. Crawford is someone that knows the difference between morality and immorality, and she is fully aware that her dog has a right to life. By placing her own dog within harm's way, Mrs. Crawford showed not only ignorance of fact but moral ignorance as well. Since she did not know that she was possibly harming her dog by talking to Mrs. Bailey and staying within the store for an extra length of time. Mrs. Crawford would be considered morally blameworthy. She knew that her dog was in the car. Even though she may not have known that by leaving them in the car she was potentially endangering her animal, this shows moral ignorance because she did not consider her dog’s life to be worthy enough to take extended measures that would have ensured survival. From the capacitarian theory she is considered blameworthy, but considered innocent from the valuationist perspective. III. Capacitarianism and Valuationism are Two-Sides of the Same Coin: Before we start to cut deeper into each of the theories independently, I would like to point out that these vignettes show us how different theories about moral ignorance are more accurate attributions of blame, depending on how the story is told. The way an author prescribes a vignette will directly affect the way a reader chooses to apply a theory. The author’s choice to write objectively or subjectively will also affect whether a reader will approach the ignorant action with a mind of blame or exculpation. This mode of thinking is something we see in moral realism. There are two positions in moral realism that we might be able to categorize the capacitarian and valuationsist theories under. First, normative realism posits that ethical sentences describe positions that are grounded in objective features. Some of the objective features may only be true in that they report the descriptions accurately, such as “killing someone is bad”. These descriptions do not contain subjective opinions, which aids in their accuracy and helps to establish moral truths. Second, the version of metaethical realism that can be used to look at these theories states that, in principle, it is possible to know about the facts of actions that are right and wrong, and about which things are good and bad (Copp, 2007). This position depends on the subjective opinions of others to determine these aforementioned facts. Metaethical realism takes a more common-sense approach to ask questions like “should we reasonably expect someone to check the sugar dish before serving sugar?” The reason why we need to keep moral realism in mind while assessing capacitarianism and valuationism is because it directly affects our assessment of them. We can see that assessments about moral responsibility are sensitive to additions and omissions of information regarding capacities and values of the agents. With the incorporation of certain details about an agent’s past actions and value systems, a reader can be swayed to agree or disagree with certain theories of moral assessment. Certain details require someone to be objective or subjective in their interpretation of the events (Baumann, 2019). This can greatly affect how a story is understood by various readers. However the story is told, whether narrow or elaborate, the rationale behind omitting and adding detail will always have a direct effect on the reader’s intuition of the story. Depending on how the vignette is written, the reader can be manipulated to believe that certain events will result in one theory being more conclusive than another. What this shows us is that the philosophers who wrote the vignettes wrote them in a way to prove the point of their own theories. These vignettes function as intuition pumps. Anything the philosopher wants to say activates a reader’s intuitive approach to assessing a situation. While the capacitarian and valuationist theorists may focus on different characteristics of someone’s motivation, their approaches to assessments of moral responsibility are similar. Both look at the contexts in which the act was performed; however, they differ in which part of the context they think to be relevant in their assessments. Capacitarians consider the most relevant point of context of behavior and compare it to be the behavior leading up to the harmful act. The capacity of the agent is also dependent on their knowledge of their wrongdoing. Capacitarians ask whether or not agents could’ve done something differently in the past to prevent their immoral act from taking place. If they engage in a harmful immoral act, then it is a result of their ignorance. Whether to attribute blame to the agent who acted out of ignorance would depend on their capacity to know that there was some way they could have prevented themselves from doing so. If they did not have the capacity to know they were acting immorally, or that they could’ve prevented themselves from acting as such, then they would not be considered blameworthy. Thus, an agent acting out of ignorance without the capacity to know they are doing so would be morally exculpated. Valuationists choose not to look at the behaviors preceding the events and instead examine the value system of the agent. They do this because they think the value system of a person should be considered the relevant context of the moral assessment of an act (Arpaly, 2004). The community of moral theorists has situated these two theories in contexts of past actions or value systems. Up until this point, we have discussed these two theories independently, however, I would like to show how they are closely related. If a vignette focuses on the capacity or the value system of a person, then readers will be persuaded to agree with the theory that provides a better explanation of moral judgements concerning actions. For instance, the more detailed the information regarding the context of the agent, the easier it will be for us to apply a theory that best suits the framework. The information needs to highlight either the agent’s value system or the agent’s past actions. If the information in the vignette does not include any context for the reader, then it is natural for them to assume and fill it in themselves. The various assumptions that arise from different readers’ perspectives have the ability to lead to a deep disagreement about the moral assessments of actions. An under-described thought experiment gives you inconclusive information to fill in gaps that a narrow story leaves out. Without enough information, a reader must add their own information. When a reader substitutes the information missing in the vignette, it can pull people into a deep disagreement about the moral assessment of the agent. This makes it easy for a reader to feed into their own thoughts. A reader is then foolish for reading into the story what they hope to get out of it. This creates circular reasoning on the reader’s part. In all cases, different people will have different assumptions while reading the under-described thought experiment, which will inevitably lead to problems applying certain theories to each one. Unfortunately, there is no way to halt varying interpretations because it is unreasonable to expect anyone to be able to provide every possible angle that a situation can have. In other words, there is no way for the author to close the room for interpretation entirely. If a deep disagreement arises, then this must be a result of an author’s manipulation of the vignette. For a deep disagreement to form, the vignettes would need to have an unclear description of an agent’s past actions and capacity or an unclear description of their value system because this would pin the capacitarian and the valuationist standpoints against each other. When the contexts of the past actions and value systems are clear and detailed in a vignette, it is unlikely that a deep disagreement will occur. Rather than finding a clash of theories, the verdicts would be expected to converge due to their connection. Throughout this paper I have been providing a route to view the literature of moral assessment to show how the valuationist and the capacitarian approaches are in competition with each other. However, I think this view wrongly pins the two theories against each other. The values that a person has will manifest itself in their actions, likewise, their actions are guided by their values, whether consciously or unconsciously. When we lay out this connection, we can see how someone’s past actions and value system are actually connected. With that said, I think it would be in our best interest not to play the two against each other, and instead show they are dependent on one another. This holistic/detached perspective demonstrates how these two theories are two sides of the same coin. IV. Conclusion: The more a vignette spells out a history, the more we get a sense of the value system of the person involved. Any value system shapes how people perceive information and influences their decisions. This means it also influences their intuitions and builds peoples’ overall foundations for actions. How a person has acted up to the point of the scenario usually tells us the story of the person's value system. Here we get a better sense of how they would act in future situations based on how they have acted prior. If a vignette is written in detail, spelling out a person’s capacities, values, or both, then the competing theories proposed by valuationists and capacitarians will likely converge. However, if it's sparse with little to no information, then the two rival theories may clash. They will seemingly work against each other because the readers are left to fill in the details. Without an established history or value system described, readers do not have anything prescribing their thoughts. Clashing is due to the under-description of the vignette and not used to interpret theories. I think this is where a lot of the deep disagreement stems. In this conversation about the moral assessment of blame, we have two theories that are seemingly different but work in tandem. They have a great opportunity to change the way that we, as philosophers, attribute blame, especially since wishful thinking does not give moral valence. If readers can speculate the history and the potential for a person based on their capacity to potentially act out their value systems, then they will not need to speculate on what the author meant. After all, it is not the job of a reader to fill in the blanks, it is up to the author/philosopher to explain a thought experiment in full to establish their theory (Baumann, 2019). Any description that influences a perspective is an important factor, but we need to decide whether someone is or is not morally culpable in a particular situation. To do this, it is necessary to know all the past relevant information. Swapping things around, omitting necessary information, and changing the context to fit someone else’s narrative of events is not an effective way to correctively assess the morality of an agent, nor is it conducive to figuring out whether they are morally exculpable. Withholding information is one way to prevent knowledge, and if we are concerned with knowing whether someone has performed an immoral action, then the truth is of utmost importance (Baumann, 2019). This is the way things become known. When looking back at the argument between the valuationist and capacitarian, knowledge of the subject’s past is necessary for determining if someone should be considered morally blameworthy. For determining both a person’s capacities and values in the present, it is vital to investigate their past. A person’s past determines their values just as much as it determines their capacities. A person’s past values can be written off due to their present capacities; likewise, a person’s past capacities can be written off because of their present values. The present moment is a culmination of all the previous values an agent has upheld. Valuationists point out how a person’s values are a result of what they did or didn’t do in the past. These values are determined on the agent’s capacity to understand and act on those values. Similarly, capacitarians see capacities as manifestations of value systems. The key to finding out someone’s capacities and values is buried in their past. What is the difference between these two theories if they both require knowledge of the person’s past behavior? Are they distinct theories that have similar foundations, or are they two sides to the same theoretical coin? Since both theories require the past to determine their present conditions, it’s possible that proposing these two ideas as distinctly different theories does not hold up to scrutiny. This is because values are conditions that people think should be upheld and reinforced, while capacities are behaviors of what people are capable of doing. Values are conditions that people strive for, give people numerous filters for actions, and are considered valuable in the social world. Once someone has a set of values, their subsequent actions are determined. When capacitarians look at capacities of individuals, they are looking at what actions would have been expected to perform given their capabilities. These actions are expected to be performed because of individual values. This is where we see the two theories speaking a similar language. If we need to know as much information about an individual’s past to form a coherent judgment of blame, then it’s possible these two theories are derived from the same theoretical foundation grounded in the past. The past is important to these two theories as a person’s past actions are suggestive of their values, and the person’s past values are suggestive of what actions someone can do based on their capacities. At this point, to look further into this topic I think it is indispensable to ask, how do we know what someone’s past values or capacities are, and how can we tell if they have led to present conditions? References Aristotle. 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arpaly, N. 2004. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Moral Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumann, M. 2019. "Consequentializing and Underdetermination" Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 511-527. Bernecker, S. 2011. The Epistemology of Fake News. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biebel, N. 2017, October 12. Epistemic justification and the ignorance excuse. Retrieved from Springer Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11098-017-0992-4 Copp, D. 2007. "Introduction: Metaethics and Normative Ethics" The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory . Harmen, E. 2011. "Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?" Ratio, XXIV , 443-468. M. Alvarez, &. C. 2017. "When Ignorance is No Excuse" Responsibility: The Epistemic Condition , 1-24. Rosen, G. 2003. "Culpability and Ignorance" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103 , 61-84. Rosen, G. 2004. "Skepticism About Moral Responsibility" Philosophical Perspectives, 18 , 295-313. Sliwa, P. 2020. "Excuse without Exculpation: The Case of Moral Ignorance" Oxford Studies in Metaethics , 72-95.

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. Bibliography Autor, David H, Lawrence F Katz, and Melissa S Kearney. “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 189–94. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282806777212620. Berlet, Chip, and Spencer Sunshine. “Rural Rage: The Roots of Right-Wing Populism in the United States.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 46, no. 3 (April 16, 2019): 480–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1572603. Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker . Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Cramer, Katherine J., and Benjamin Toff. “The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (September 2017): 754–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000949. 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. Pottie-Sherman, Yolande. “Rust and Reinvention: Im/migration and Urban Change in the American Rust Belt.” Geography Compass 14, no. 3 (December 7, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12482. Silva, Jennifer M. We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Torraco, Richard J. “The Persistence of Working Poor Families in a Changing U.S. Job Market: An Integrative Review of the Literature.” Human Re- source Development Review 15, no. 1 (March 2016): 55–76. https://doi. org/10.1177/1534484316630459. Previous Next

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John Taylor and Ben Bernanke on the Great Recession Who Was Right About What Went Wrong? Mikael Hemlin University of Gothenburg University of Oxford London School of Economics Author Hans Lei Leonardo Moraveg Neil Sehgal Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (8 pages) In the autumn of 2007, the United States’ housing market collapsed, pushing the world economy to the brink of disaster. In the US, unemployment rates soared, trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared, and millions of Americans lost their homes in what is generally considered the most severe recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In the aftermath, economists have diligently discussed the properties of the crisis, asking if it could have been prevented and if policymakers could have responded more prudently. The American economist John Taylor has accused US policymakers of paving the way for the housing bubble by conducting an excessively loose monetary policy in the years leading up to the crash, and of prolonging the crisis by responding with measures based on premises that were essentially misguided. Conversely, Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve and one of the main targets of Taylor’s critique, offers an opposing view. According to Bernanke, the low federal funds rates during the years 2002–2006 were sound, and did not contribute to the inflation of the housing market to the extent that Taylor describes. Rather, Bernanke claims, it was mainly regulatory flaws that caused the financial collapse, and the actions taken by policymakers prevented the financial system from imploding completely. This essay makes the argument that although monetary policy played a part in the build-up to the crash, it was by no means a defining factor. What sets the Great Recession apart from other economic downturns is the regulatory setting in which the housing bubble developed and the crisis unfolded. As such, the governors of the Federal Reserve are not culpable for the crisis’ occurrence. They, along with the US Treasury, are nevertheless culpable for the misguided policies that were enacted to resolve the situation. Much like Taylor suggests, the measures that were undertaken by the authorities rested on the false presumption that it was lack of liquidity rather than the persistence of counterparty risk that protracted the crisis. The situation could have been dealt with much more efficiently were it not for these misconceptions. Neither Taylor’s nor Bernanke’s argument is convincing on all counts. Rather, it is a combination of the two that offers the most accurate account of what happened. One of the main points of disagreement between Taylor and Bernanke is the role of the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy during the years 2002–2006 in inflating the housing market. While Taylor is right in claiming that excessively low interest rates generally accommodate the creation of bubbles, he wrongly alleges that his rule for monetary policy, the Taylor Rule, is detailed enough to work as a reference point for how monetary policy should be conducted, regardless of context. Indeed, as Bernanke argues, the monetary situation in the US in the period 2002–2006 was complex in ways that are unaccounted for in the Taylor Rule. For example, the recovery after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 was rapid, but did not push down unemployment to the extent that conventional wisdom would suggest. The Taylor Rule does not explicitly account for unemployment, but instead expects it to follow inflation and output as described by Okun’s law and the Phillips curve. Taking into consideration the low inflation rates of the years in question, Bernanke’s argument that raising the FFR at that time would have been deflationary is hardly unfounded. Indeed, while mainstream economic theory would have predicted unemployment to diminish as the economy recovered after 2001, it would also have predicted inflation to fall to very low levels had the Federal Reserve raised the FFR over the period that Taylor suggests. Additionally, as Bernanke points out, the sharp increases in housing prices started in 1998, well before the period of the allegedly too loose monetary policy. Taken together, the evidence above indicates that while the low interest rates before the crisis played a role in inflating the housing market, it was not a major factor. The economic indicators of the time were ambiguous, and the Federal Reserve chose a policy path associated with avoiding the deflationary trap that had suppressed the Japanese economy over the past decades. Nevertheless, the Fed could have better appreciated the instability of the housing market and started raising interest rates in time to prevent the crash from turning into a worldwide financial disaster. If the FFR had been raised a couple of years earlier, the concealed risk in the securities markets could have been exposed without risking a system collapse. In such a scenario, it is plausible that the average creditworthiness of borrowers would have been higher, as lenders would not have had enough time to work their way down to the absolute bottom of the income/asset brackets. In Hyman Minsky’s words, financial practice would not yet have degenerated from “speculative finance” to “Ponzi finance.” As such, the mortgage default rates and banks’ leverage ratios would have been lower, and the recession more manageable. While monetary policy leading up to the crisis did contribute to its onset, the circumstances that magnified the crisis to a global collapse emerged as a result of the government’s exceedingly poor regulatory oversight. Taylor finds that the countries where housing prices rose the steepest were also the ones that deviated the most from his monetary policy rule. He argues that this serves as evidence that the Federal Reserve’s lax monetary policy played a significant role in setting the stage for the crisis. While this statement likely has some truth to it, it suffers from several shortcomings. As mentioned earlier, Bernanke underscores that the housing boom started in 1998 when the FFR was well over 5 percent. Against this background, it is more likely that the regulatory situation both in the US and elsewhere is to blame for the housing boom and subsequent crisis. In 1999, around the same time that Bernanke alleges the boom started, the Clinton administration partially repealed the Banking Act of 1933 (or the Glass-Steagall Act). The act was adopted after the Great Depression to improve financial stability, and essentially separated investment banks and hedge funds from commercial banks. After the repeal, it became legal for financial institutions of all types to merge, thereby making them “too big to fail” and allowing them to engage in larger-scale speculation. This paved the way for a moral hazard and exposed depositors to speculative risk in the process. In addition, the partial repeal failed to give the Securities and Exchange Commission authority to regulate and scrutinise financial institutions, thus allowing for the creation of riskier and ever-more opaque derivatives. As such, the abolishment of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act drastically increased the scale of speculative operations and weakened regulatory oversight, thus shrouding the securities markets in ignorance. Taylor elegantly compares the ensuing situation to a game of hearts, but with many queens of spades instead of just one. Everybody knew that most financial institutions’ balance sheets were riddled with queens of spades, i.e. toxic assets. The problem was that when the crisis hit, nobody could distinguish the toxic assets from the non-toxic ones, and thus, all assets of a kind sharply diminished in value. The indistinguishability of safe mortgage-backed securities from risky ones was in part due to the complexity of the financial instruments in question, and in part due to the failure of the rating agencies to accurately evaluate the risk of the constituent mortgages (Crotty, 2009). This is an issue of poor oversight as well; the rating agencies evaluated the riskiness of loans under the pressure of competition, and therefore consistently gave customers (e.g. banks) the ratings they required to sell off the loans as quickly as possible. Since there were no regulatory mechanisms in place to prevent this from becoming standard practice, it became hugely profitable for banks to grant loans to more or less anyone. The expansive access to credit led the housing market to boom. It is also worth mentioning that the expected future values of the homes that the mortgages financed were included as collateral in the risk evaluations. As such, the stability of the financial system was built on the premise that the US housing market could continue to boom indefinitely. This indicates that it was poor oversight, not lax monetary policy, that paved the way for the housing bubble and the subsequent crisis once the bubble burst. In the wake of the crisis, when the flow of financial transactions had frozen and market interest rates had skyrocketed due to the increased uncertainty and risk, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury set out to stimulate the economy to prevent it from collapsing altogether. Based on what measures the policymakers chose to enact, it seems they diagnosed the problem to be insufficient liquidity. Taylor correctly claims that they were mistaken—it was excessive counterparty risk, not liquidity, that petrified the financial markets. Among other things, policymakers tried to stimulate aggregate demand by giving out over 100 billion USD in cash to US households. The effects of these cash infusions quickly subsided and had little to no effect in terms of economic recovery. Next, they tried to reduce the financial friction in the system by adopting the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Programme of around 700 billion USD. As the name suggests, the programme sought to relieve troubled financial institutions of bad assets. However, the legislative text lacked a predictable framework as to what kinds of assets would be bought up, at what prices, and what the targeted institutions should do with the money. The consequences were that uncertainty and counterparty risk persisted, and that most of the money was used to buy US Treasury bonds and other safe assets that did not reduce the financial friction in the system (Taylor, 2009). Essentially, the mistake that the policymakers made was to conceive of the crisis as one of liquidity rather than counterparty risk. If counterparty risk in the system is high, then financial friction is high, and if financial friction is high, then neither monetary policy nor fiscal stimulus can restart the economy. This is because the increased risk offsets the effects of any lowering of the FFR or an increase in aggregate demand. Had the problem been diagnosed as excessive counterparty risk from the outset, then predictable and targeted quantitative easing could have been used immediately to remove the toxic assets from the system, thereby decreasing risk and uncertainty. Eventually, quantitative easing was used, but it could have been done much earlier (Taylor, 2009). Neither Taylor nor Bernanke provides a satisfactory account of what went wrong before and during the Great Recession. Taylor is mistaken in claiming that the Federal Reserve’s lax monetary policy in the years leading up to the housing bust is to blame for the crisis. While this might have played a minor role, the fact that the boom began under rather strict monetary conditions and that the Federal Reserve had a strong rationale for its chosen policy path suggests that Bernanke is right that it was inadequate regulation that paved the way for the crash. Nevertheless, Taylor’s critique of the interventions that Bernanke’s Federal Reserve undertook to resolve the crisis is justified. Had it not been for Bernanke’s and other policymakers’ misconception of the crisis as a liquidity shortage rather than an issue of counterparty risk, the recession would have been much less painful. Thus, on a concluding note, future policymakers should enhance the discretion of regulatory authorities to prevent a similar situation from emerging again, and improve the targeting of interventions in the event of a crisis to ensure that they are potent enough to produce the desired effect. Works Cited Bernanke, Ben S. “Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble.” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, January 03, 2010. www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100103a.htm. 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