The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics *FEATURES * FROM Nicola Sturgeon, MSP First Minister of Scotland Gen. John R. Allen President of the Brookings Institution Editorial board forward Volume I Issue II Introducing the second issue of JPPE Click to flip through the journal and see previous JPPE issues Philosophy Moral Manipulation Politics Transparency and Compliance A Kantian Take on Advertising and Campaigning The Strength of EU Lobbying Regulations By Sylvia Gunn By Abigail Borges Philosophy Health/Disease Distinction And Its Normative Uses Economics Vermont Act 46 Implications for School Choice By Margot S. Witte By Quinn Bornstein Politics Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict Philosophy Statelessness Is Secession a Viable Solution? A Contradiction in International Law with Asymmetrical Regional Solutions By Tathyana Mello Amaral By Samantha Altschuler Politics Imagined Isle Economics Public Funds, Private Interest The Role of Private Companies in Shaping US Cybersecurity Policy Irish Catholic Identity in the Restoration Era By Nathan Mainster By Justin Katz

Public Funds, Private Interest The Role of Private Companies in Shaping US Cybersecurity Policy Justin Katz Yale University Author Danai Benopoulou Graham Gonzales Hans Lei Marko Winedt Editors Fall 2018 This paper compares current cybersecurity policy with the Cold War military industrial complex to understand how links between the private cybersecurity industry and government impact federal policy. I. Introduction Collectively driven by increased awareness of cyber threats, fear of snooping by government agencies, and growth in intelligence budgets, the private cybersecurity industry has recently exploded. Global cybersecurity spending is predicted to hit $90 billion in 2018[1] and grow at an annual rate of above 20% to $232 billion by 2022.[2] Along with industry expansion, connections between private cybersecurity firms and the government have multiplied. Government intelligence agencies have enlisted the services of private companies for everything ranging from espionage operations[3] to the development of offensive capacities.[4] However, as government and industry deepen their ties, it becomes increasingly possible for misalignment between public and private interests to drive policy in the wrong direction. Given that US cybersecurity strategy is currently ill-defined and malleable, missteps could have impacts for decades. Nevertheless, collaboration between government and industry is also in its infancy, so the nature of public-private relations has yet to solidify. This means that is still time for the government to change course. This paper will analyze the evolving relationship between government agencies and private sector cybersecurity firms in four parts. The first will explore the forms of government contact with the broader cybersecurity marketplace. The second will consider historical connections between the defense establishment and private companies – the Cold War military-industrial complex and the use of private military contractors (PMCs) since the late-90s – as a template for potential policy risks associated with a modern alliance between defense and industry. The third will examine how that public-private cybersecurity connections are distinct from previous military-industrial linkages and analyze the policy implications of those distinctions. The last section will offer some ways to leverage the advantages of the private sector while minimizing harm. II. Government Contact with the Cybersecurity Industry Government agencies have developed ties with the cybersecurity industry in two main ways. First, agencies have spurred demand for information security technology both directly, through government contracts, and indirectly, by encouraging investment by the private sector. Second, a revolving door between government and the private sector has packed corporate boardrooms and staff ranks alike with former intelligence and defense personnel. With growing national security threats and opportunities in cyberspace, members of the defense and intelligence communities have emphasized the need to both secure US critical infrastructure and develop offensive cyber capacities. In response, Congress has approved growing budgets for cyber defense, allowing millions of dollars to go to contractors.[5] More recently, the Pentagon requested $8.5 billion for “cybersecurity-related activities,” while in the FY 2019 budget President Trump called for $15 billion in total cybersecurity spending, a 4% increase over fiscal year 2018 requests.[6] Growth in government demand for private cybersecurity services has directly fueled the industry’s expansion by causing the government to outsource a sizable share of its spending to private contractors.[7] Indeed, in DC, where most contractors are located, almost 24,000 new cybersecurity job openings were posted in 2015, about double that of the next highest region.[8] Government investment in cybersecurity has also indirectly led to market expansion. First, the shifting composition of federal budgets during the 8-year Obama administration in favor of cyber, encouraged large defense contractors to invest more in information security. Despite the overall shrinking of military spending, investment in cybersecurity significantly grew. In response, big tech-centered defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and even consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton have created cybersecurity branches.[9] Seeking to win contracts with innovative new tools, these larger companies have continued to acquire boutique firms offering custom software with narrow applications.[10] Although the Trump administration won a substantial increase in defense spending as part of a February 2018 budget deal, those increases may be temporary, given that ten-year spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act remain in place and could force steep cuts at the end of the decade.[11] Therefore, cybersecurity offers a more stable source of demand for contractors than traditional spending. Second, greater government interest in network defense suggests to private firms that cyber threats are widespread, meaning they should invest in their own cybersecurity capacities. While increasing their own cyber spending, federal agencies have published recommendations on how firms should bolster their defenses. For example, Obama’s 2013 executive order commissioning a framework for critical infrastructure protection stated that the government should “provide guidance” on which commercially-available cybersecurity services companies should buy.[12] The Trump administration has pursued continuity with Obama-era policies,[13] and in its 2017 National Security Strategy urged coordinated responses to major threats in both the private and public sectors.[14] Additionally, the intelligence community has invited private firms to attend classified briefings informing them about emerging cybersecurity threats. According to one NSA official, the meetings aim to “scare the bejeezus out of them.”[15] Frightened CEOs then turn to cybersecurity companies for help. The Chief Security Officer of Mandiant, a private security outfit, alleged that executives often buy the firm’s products after attending classified NSA briefings.[16] Federal policy decisions guide the industry’s scale and composition, so firms within the market have a clear profit interest in the government’s cyber strategy. That is not to say, however, that government officials are distorting the scale of cyber threats for private sector benefit. Scare tactics are often necessary to convince recalcitrant executives to make necessary upgrades. However, the outsized effect of federal policies on this industry risks creating real or perceived conflicts of interest. Many top cybersecurity firms are led by experts who once held high-level posts within law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Endgame, for example, sells zero day vulnerabilities and global maps of network weaknesses almost exclusively to government agencies.[17] Its board includes former NSA chief Kenneth Minihan and is chaired by Christopher Darby, the current CEO of the CIA’s venture capital arm.[18] CrowdStrike, a cyber forensics firm, boasts two former FBI officials as top executives – CEO Shawn Henry, former chief of worldwide cyber investigations, and the company’s general counsel, who served as the deputy head of cyber for the Bureau.[19] Many other senior administrators with experience in intelligence and defense sit on corporate boards or serve as executives at major cybersecurity firms.[20] The revolving door between government and the private sector exists for lower level employees as well. Some ex-hackers found their own companies. For example, Brendan Conlon, a Naval Academy graduate who worked as a hacker for both the NSA and CIA, recently founded Vahna, a firm that publicizes its employees’ time working for government agencies.[21] One former NSA official suggests that the best private security companies are founded by members of the “SIGINT” community, who apply the hacking skills they acquired during their time in government to assess system vulnerabilities and respond to breaches.[22] Large defense firms are especially interested in acquiring startups founded by former intelligence community members to secure contacts within the CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon. Knowing that big companies will scramble to buy their startup, government employees become more likely to move to the private sector. Lastly, even if government employees do not start their own company, they frequently move to the private sector with their training in hacking techniques. Though government agencies have taken pains to recruit technically skilled employees to work in their security and hacking divisions, the government lacks the resources to pay competitive salaries compared to the private sector. As a result, many military and intelligence personnel transition to industry work after receiving government training. The cycle has become so predictable that agencies now only plan to keep new hires for a few years.[23] Thus, almost all sectors of the cybersecurity industry have at least some form of contact with government. Private firms have an interest in shaping government cybersecurity policy for their benefit, and these firms may have a unique ability to do so based on these widespread connections. Of course, the revolving door between government and the private sector is not limited to the cybersecurity industry. However, this dynamic presents unique risks in the cyber sphere, given the differences between public and private interests in the cybersecurity industry and several unique characteristics of public-private relations on cybersecurity issues. The next two sections explore those concerns. III. The Cyber-Industrial Complex – Lessons from the Cold War and Private Military Contractors Relationships between the defense establishment and industries that seek government influence are hardly a new phenomenon. Throughout the Cold War, policymakers faced a military-industrial complex, where government demand for military goods and services propped up a lucrative defense contracting industry. In turn, this industry lobbied Congress and the Pentagon for ever-increasing levels of spending. More recently, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon hired PMCs for operational support. Common challenges between those two episodes demonstrate how ties between the cybersecurity industry and government could negatively impact policymaking. A. Increasing Costs and Threat Inflation From the beginning of the Cold War, connections between private contractors and government encouraged policymakers to overstate Soviet threats and waste money on unnecessary military buildup. A classic example is Eisenhower’s attempt to downsize the B-70 bomber program during his first term. The bomber program involved contracts with thousands of private firms, with production so dispersed that a majority of congressmen had at least one important supplier in their districts.[24] Immediately after announcing the cuts, Eisenhower met fierce opposition from Congress, which accused him of jeopardizing American national security by letting the Soviets outpace American airpower. Eventually, Eisenhower caved and reinstated the program. Air Force officials later testified that claims of a “bomber gap” were invalid, since US capabilities far exceeded those of the USSR.[25] Private contracting had introduced new benefactors of military spending with considerable leverage over policymakers. To justify higher expenditures that kept contractors’ factories running, lawmakers manufactured exaggerated threats. The use of PMCs has also created the potential for overstating threats. Over 60 firms serviced contracts worth billions of dollars during the Iraq War, carrying out many crucial combat operations.[26] However, much of the stated pretense for the Iraqi invasion was unfounded – the Bush administration’s claims that Hussein helped plan 9/11 and that the Iraqi government was nearing the acquisition of nuclear weapons ultimately proved incorrect.[27] It is beyond the scope of this article to speculate on whether the connections between top officials and private beneficiaries of the war – most notably Dick Cheney and Halliburton – motivated the administration to distort the Iraqi threat for financial gain. However, the perception that those ties influenced the invasion undermined the administration’s credibility and damaged Bush’s Iraq policy.[28] These incidents suggest two related concerns for cybersecurity policy: cybersecurity industry players may encourage government officials to overstate the risk of cyber-attacks for private gain, or the public will perceive that they are doing so. There is already evidence that industry interests have outsized influence in national conversations. Former intelligence personnel with a financial stake in private contractors use their credentials as ex-government officials to support extensive cyber operations. After the Snowden disclosures, some of the most stalwart defenders of NSA snooping had both impressive government credentials and deep financial stakes in the agency’s contractors. Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel who testified before Congress claiming that cutting back PATRIOT Act surveillance programs would help terrorists, now lobbies for NSA contractors including SAIC and the Computer Sciences Corporation.[29] Jack Keane, a former four-star general who defended the NSA’s programs on cable news, is also a board member of the NSA contractor General Dynamics. Retired General Wesley Clark emphasized the need for the PRISM program while simultaneously taking payments from a private equity firm with substantial financial stake in NSA contractors.[30] Of course, there is nothing wrong with former top brass opining about what they consider important defense issues. However, given that officials enjoy a privileged place in national security conversations, conflicts of interest potentially open up avenues for abuse and may cause speculation about corruption. Relationships between local governments and private firms may prevent elected officials from checking threat inflation. From Maryland to Texas, local and state governments have designed tax incentives and run advertising campaigns seeking to create a “cyber Silicon Valley.” Some have even used tax dollars for direct investment in startups.[31] If tech firms set up shop in regions desperate to keep the jobs they provide, then the congressional representatives from those areas will likely lobby extensively for greater government funds devoted to cybersecurity. Representatives of cybersecurity districts may warn of a B-70 bomber-style “cyber gap” as an excuse to spend more on firms with local power. The notion that the cybersecurity industry can influence public threat perception through multiple channels is worrying. Given current trends and cybersecurity’s rapid growth, there is a risk of creating even more problematic relationships in a poorly-understood industry. Besides leading to wasteful and unnecessary spending, an overemphasis on threats could prevent policymakers from properly assessing tradeoffs between security and other interests such as Internet freedom and governance. Even if private actors do not put pressure on policymakers to distort threats for personal gain, the appearance of close ties between industry and government can create perceived conflicts of interest. This might in turn lower trust in government and limit officials’ ability to craft constructive policy. However, despite similarities, the risks of malignant cyber threat inflation and massive government waste are lower than during the Cold War or the invasion of Iraq. First, apparent overstatement of cyber threats is at least partially due to the fact that many do not take threats seriously enough. Therefore, apparent threat inflation may be more indicative of attempts to increase stakeholder attention on an important issue than private sector manipulation of government policy. Second, powerful private interests have an incentive to counter the cybersecurity industry’s threat narrative. Large tech companies recognize that overstating the cyber threats may encourage Congress to mandate that companies meet certain cybersecurity baselines. Since those firms want to avoid burdensome regulation,[32] they have an incentive to lobby lawmakers and make cyber threats seem less severe. B. Inefficiency Even if public-private ties do not drive unnecessary spending, they can drive up costs and make it more difficult for governments to provide necessary services. Theoretically, private contracting lowers government costs by leveraging the competitive forces of the market. Federal agencies can allow firms to bid against each other and award the contract to the company that makes the best offer. However, when firms have government ties, it becomes easier to spend money by lobbying to win more lucrative contracts rather than offering the best one. During the Cold War, private contracts were the products of political negotiation, not competitive bidding, so the firms with the best lobbyists secured the most lucrative contracts. The Pentagon sometimes passed over firms offering the lowest price to grant awards to the firm whose “turn was next.”[33] That process both increased costs by granting contractors monopoly power and privileged firms that already had connections in the system.[34] The use of PMCs increased costs in other ways. By offering salaries that exceeded military pay, contractors lured talented soldiers into the private sector. Then, the contractors sold their services to the government at a higher per-soldier cost to cover their overhead.[35] It is possible that links between the cybersecurity industry and government could create similar inefficiencies. First, former government workers now working as contractors can leverage connections to negotiate deals, even if they do not offer the best package. Second, as traditional defense contractors pivot towards the cybersecurity market, they may use their status as trusted collaborators to win awards over more competitive firms. The fact that many of the biggest cybersecurity contractors are companies with longstanding connections to the intelligence community could raise suspicions that the most entrenched firms, and not necessarily the best, receive government funds. Also, cybersecurity contracts may require that companies have security clearance, limiting the pool of competitors to insiders.[36] Third, cybersecurity firms poach the best technical personnel from government. If federal agencies contract government-trained hackers at a higher cost, then the government ends up paying more for an identical service. Already, some agencies, unable to keep sufficiently skilled technicians away from the private sector, plan on contracting with cybersecurity firms who hire government-trained personnel.[37] Although the government should leverage its own monopoly power to bring down prices and maximize efficiency, current trends suggest that the influence of private firms will serve to increase their margins and waste federal funds. C. Differing Roles and Constraints Even when the government and the private sector carry out similar functions, they occupy different roles and face different constraints. Those distinctions become clear when examining the PMC industry. Private contractors are just that: private. This means they can perform tasks that governments are either legally or politically constrained from doing. Relying on PMCs to carry out combat operations reduces the danger faced by US service members, thereby lowering the political barriers to conflict. Additionally, PMCs are not subject to congressional constraints – for example, the Bush administration used PMCs to circumvent limitations on US military involvement in the Colombian civil war.[38] While the US has used PMCs to expand its operational flexibility, contractors are in no way beholden to American interests. PMCs have worked with dictatorships, drug smugglers, and al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organizations.[39] By increasing demand for PMCs, US operations in Iraq encouraged investment in startups and the expansion of existing firms. As operations in Iraq wind down, those firms need new customers – and there is no guarantee that Washington will like them. US demand for privately-produced cyber weapons and security products raises similar concerns. First, private tools can provide ways for governments to evade legal prohibitions on certain cyber techniques. For example, while CrowdStrike CEO Shawn Henry worked at the FBI, he developed technology to remotely monitor a target’s computer undetected. However, the FBI needed a court order to use the technology. At CrowdStrike, he uses a similar tool, but, as a private entity, he can deploy it without going to court.[40] In an attempt to indict WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, the Justice Department organized a group of small cybersecurity firms, mostly tied to the public-sector security community, to dig up dirt. The group planned to launch an intimidation campaign against WikiLeaks’ followers and discredit the organization by tricking it into publishing fake documents.[41] If performed directly by part of the federal intelligence community, such tactics would spark outrage. While that operation failed, it suggests that, by unloading dirty work onto private companies, the government could skirt political and legal barriers. That may seem like an attractive option in the short run, but in the long run it risks eroding public trust and landing intelligence agencies in even greater legal trouble once laws catch up with technological innovation. Second, the US government has no guarantee that cyber weapons firms will not peddle their wares to countries that threaten American interests. For example, the Mubarak regime and the Bahraini government cracked down on political dissidents allegedly using software purchased from Gamma, a UK firm.[42] US-based Blue Coat has sold Deep Packet Inspection, a technology used to censor journalists and track down dissidents, to Syria, Myanmar, Egypt, Qatar, China, and Venezuela, all countries with spotty human rights records.[43] At first blush, given that the US government does not deal with these companies, it seems that US connections to the cybersecurity industry have no bearing on the development of a worldwide network of cyber mercenaries. While demand from authoritarian regimes for surveillance products would exist regardless, US reliance on private firms to build cyber weapons compounds the problem in two ways. First, demand from the US government increases the size of the market. This is an issue in the market for zero-day exploits, cyber-attacks that exploit previously-unknown technical vulnerabilities. When the US pays millions in government contracts for zero-day exploits, it encourages more companies to enter the business, some of which will inevitably sell to whoever wants to buy.[44] Second, by buying exploits from private companies, the US legitimizes an international cyber arms market. That makes adversaries more likely to brazenly seek out private firms to meet their intelligence needs. An unregulated international trade in cyber vulnerabilities leads to the proliferation of offensive capabilities, multiplying the threats that the US will face in the future. IV. Unique Characteristics While many challenges look similar to those arising from past public-private relationships, several unique characteristics of the cybersecurity industry create new dynamics. First, government dealings with the cybersecurity industry are subject to higher levels of secrecy than most other public-private relationships. The intelligence community hides its contracts behind a shroud of hyper secrecy. One of the documents in the Snowden dump emphasizes the importance of preventing any association between the NSA and one of its contractors, the Computer Sciences Corporation.[45] Similarly, in 2010, Endgame’s modus operandi relied on avoiding any mention in media at all, let alone in relation to the NSA.[46] In this context, intelligence contractors often have better knowledge of the government’s projects than lawmakers, meaning they can use their inside scoop to lobby Congress and win even more contracts.[47] As a result, it is difficult to conduct an appropriate cost-benefit analysis of the tradeoffs associated with existing ties. Second, the cybersecurity industry has other customers besides the government. While PMCs and defense contractors can only sell their services to government agencies, most cybersecurity firms can market and develop products for the private sector as well. Therefore, the size, scope, and composition of the cybersecurity industry is largely determined by factors outside the government’s control. On the one hand, that means the government may have trouble reversing any negative effects of the industry on policy. If a strong cybersecurity industry causes poor government policy, rather than the other way around, then improvements in protocol surrounding agencies’ relationships with industry will not have much of an effect. On the other hand, if firms are participants in a broader private cybersecurity industry, then they will have to adjust their behavior to market realities. For example, if firms encourage government to adopt policies that lead to artificial demand for cybersecurity products, then they risk creating a bubble[48] that would hurt them financially if it bursts. Therefore, firms either avoid extensive lobbying for unnecessarily favorable policies, reducing their distortionary effect, or they engage in such lobbying and weaken their influence in government in the long run once the bubble bursts. Additionally, companies may have less of an incentive to engage in the sorts of problematic rent-seeking behavior explored earlier. If they cannot win government contracts, instead of spending millions on lobbying campaigns, firms might just look for customers in the private sector.[49] Finally, contracting may stymie vital information sharing. During the Cold War and the Iraq invasion, the Department of Defense could hire a single contractor (or group of contractors) to complete a single product or mission. The intelligence and defense establishment have largely replicated this model – single firms produce discrete software tools that the agencies subsequently integrate into their operational doctrine. However, in doing so, agencies lose the ability to work collaboratively and share information to solve important security problems.[50] In fact, with most contractors in direct competition with one another, firms are likely to guard their methods as proprietary secrets. In the current system, the only way contractors can integrate their teams to work on a single project is if one firm buys out another. But that, in turn, reduces competition in the industry as a whole, which can also stifle innovation. While certain characteristics of the cybersecurity industry allow it to self-correct for some of the negative policy effects of public-private ties, the government must take additional steps to be able to eliminate them all. V. Ways to Mitigate the Threat The government benefits from contact with the private cybersecurity sector – contractors allow the intelligence community to tap into the industry’s innovative power and give agencies the flexibility to temporarily increase the size of its workforce for time-sensitive projects. Therefore, policymakers should make changes that retain those benefits while minimizing the costs. First, government agencies should rely less on contractors and more on public-private partnerships to develop new technologies. For example, after Google told the NSA that hackers in China breached their networks, the NSA drafted a “cooperative research and development agreement” where the government and a firm collaborate to develop a new product. The government fronts the R&D costs, while the company participates in the development phase and has the right to patent and build the product designed. In addition, the government can “use any information gained from the collaboration.”[51] This sort of agreement allows the government to access the productive capacities of the private sector, but reduces superfluous spending. While under a traditional contract, a firm gets paid so long as it produces a desired product, under a public-private partnership such as the one formed between the NSA and Google, the firm only profits if they produce a useful tool that someone is willing to buy. Therefore, under this less traditional agreement, firms have no incentive to engage in completely spurious projects without any commercial value. Additionally, all tax dollars go directly towards research and development, eliminating the increased costs resulting from the markup rate that firms would charge the government under a traditional contract. Lastly, a less reliable stream of payments reduces the incentives for big contractors to acquire smaller ones and develop monopoly power in the industry, increasing the number of competitors in the industry and encouraging innovation. Second, the government should try to bolster its in-house cybersecurity capacity. If it can provide more of the services it needs on its own, then it can limit the prevalence and influence of cybersecurity contractors on policy. To do so, all agencies should include a non-compete clause in their employment contracts that prevents former employees from being hired back in a contracting role for a certain period of time.[52] Moreover, agencies should consider adding incentives to stay in government. Additional compensation would be a start, but government needs to find an incentive that is unique from the private sector, such as the intangible benefits of public service or additional prestige. Third, when the US does need to use contractors, it should improve its protocol for awarding contracts. Agencies should implement mechanisms to fast track approval of security clearances to allow more firms to compete in the bidding process, allowing the government to drive down the cost of securing contracts. Fourth, the government should negotiate multilateral agreements to prevent the export of cyber weapons systems to countries on the arms export blacklist for NATO, the US, and the EU. The EU and the US have already banned the export of surveillance technology to Iran and Syria, but efforts should go further. However, such an initiative faces two challenges. First, “cyber weapons” are difficult to define, given the overlap between offense and defense in the cyber sphere. Second, it seems almost impossible to control the cross-border flow of software over the Internet. Despite these challenges, a ban would at least discourage large firms in Western countries from selling to rogue regimes. Since those companies likely offer the best products, a ban would succeed in limiting the proliferation of advanced cyber technologies to adversarial actors. Finally, public and private actors alike should make efforts to increase transparency. Expanding in-house capacity and reducing reliance on contracts should make intelligence and defense agencies more accountable to the public. However, the best way to hold agencies accountable is to subject them to greater scrutiny. When former government officials make statements, media outlets and lawmakers should investigate and report their financial conflicts of interest. Then, policymakers can evaluate whether the speaker’s testimony is biased, enabling nuanced debate on US cyber threats. When intelligence agencies or the Pentagon request more money for cybersecurity, they should disclose, at least to Congress, specific details about how that money will be spent. That disclosure should make it easier to identify unnecessary spending, parse out corporate interests, and prevent agency officials from awarding contracts based on connections instead of merit, making bidding processes more competitive. Of course, some aspects of intelligence ought to be kept secret. But it is impossible to make informed policy judgments without some understanding of where money goes. Endnotes [2] "Cybersecurity Market by Solution (IAM, Encryption, DLP, UTM, Antivirus/Anti-Malware, Firewall, IDS/IPS, Disaster Recovery, DDOS Mitigation, SIEM), Service, Security Type, Deployment Mode, Organization Size, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2022." Markets and Markets Research. July 2017. Accessed April 18, 2018. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cyber-security-market-505.html. CAGR from author’s calculations. [3] Talbot, Daniel. "The Cyber Security Industrial Complex." MIT Technology Review. December 06, 2011. Accessed May 09, 2016. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/426285/the-cyber-security-industrial-complex/. [4] Robertson, Jordan, and Michael Riley. "US Contractors Scale Up Search for Heartbleed-Like Flaws." Bloomberg. May 2, 2014. Accessed May 08, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-02/us-contractors-scale-up-search-for-heartbleed-like-flaws. [5] Bamford, James. "NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar." Wired Magazine. June 13, 13. Accessed May 09, 2016. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/. [6] United States. White House. Office of Management and Budget. Analytical Perspectives, Section 21: Cybersecurity Funding. Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, 2018. 273-87. [7] Fox-Brewster, Thomas. "Embracing The Awful Irony At A Huge Counter-Terrorism Fair In Paris Days After ISIS Attacks." Forbes. November 22, 2015. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/11/22/paris-hosts-milipol-homeland-defense-expo-after-isis-attacks/#7fc15fc97da6. [8] Sorcher, Sara. "The Race to Build the Silicon Valley of Cybersecurity." The Christian Science Monitor. December 2015. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://passcode.csmonitor.com/goldrush. [9] Bamford, “NSA Snooping.” [10] Byrt, Frank. "U.S. Defense Contractors Are Scrambling To Fill Massive Cyber Security Contracts." Business Insider. November 19, 2010. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-is-spending-a-ton-on-defense-spending-in-cyber-security-2010-11. [11] O'Brien, Connor. "Military Hawks Win Big in Budget Deal — for Now." Politico, February 9, 2018. Accessed April 18, 2018. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/09/budget-deal-military-hawks-333128. [12] Exec. Order No. 13636, 3 C.F.R. (2013). [13] Fazzini, Kate. "Under Trump, Some Subtle Cybersecurity Changes." The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2017. Accessed April 18, 2018. https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/12/13/under-trump-some-subtle-cybersecurity-changes/. [14] United States. The White House. National Security Strategy of the United States of America. 2017. [15] Harris, Shane. War the Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 180. [16] Ibid, 180. [17] Harris, @War, 104. [18] Greenberg, Andy. "Inside Endgame: A Second Act For The Blackwater Of Hacking." Forbes. February 12, 2014. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/12/inside-endgame-a-new-direction-for-the-blackwater-of-hacking/#5da8ea7a52d9. [19] Harris, @War, 109. [20] Benner, Katie. "Cybersecurity's Money Men." The Information. January 21, 2014. Accessed May 9, 2016. https://www.theinformation.com/cybersecuritys-money-men. [21] Harris, @War, 121. [22] Ibid, 120. [23] Ibid, 223. [24] York, Herbert. Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race. Simon and Schuster, 1971. Accessed May 11, 2016, 53. http://www.learnworld.com/ZNW/LWText.York.Race.Ch03.html. [25] Brito, Jerry, and Tate Watkins. "Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy." Harvard National Security Journal 3 (2011): 39-84. Accessed May 11, 2016. HeinOnline. 66. [26] Singer, Peter. "Outsourcing War." Foreign Affairs 84, no. 2 (March/April 2005): 119-32. 122. [27] Brito and Watkins, "Loving the Cyber Bomb?,” 43. [28] Martha Minow, Outsourcing Power: How Privatizing Military Efforts Challenges Accountability, Professionalism, and Democracy, 46 B.C.L. Rev. 989 (2005), http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr/ vol46/iss5/2. [29] Fang, Lee. "Many of the NSA's Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors." The Intercept. May 12, 2015. Accessed May 11, 2016. https://theintercept.com/2015/05/12/intelligence-industry-cash-flows-media-echo-chamber-defending-nsa-surveillance/. [30] Ibid. [31] Sorcher, “The Race to Build the Silicon Valley of Cybersecurity.” [32] Etzioni, Amitai. "The Private Sector: A Reluctant Partner in Cybersecurity." Institute for Communitarian Studies, December 19, 2014. https://icps.gwu.edu/private-sector-reluctant-partner-cybersecurity. [33] Markusen, Ann. "Defense Spending: A Successful Industrial Policy?" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10, no. 1 (1986): 105-22. Accessed May 11, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1986.tb00007.x. [34] Adams, Walter. "The Military-Industrial Complex and the New Industrial State." The American Economic Review 58, no. 2 (May 1968): 652-65. 658. [35] Singer, “Outsourcing War,” 129. [36] Chesterman, Simon. "‘We Can't Spy …If We Can't Buy!’" European Journal of International Law 19, no. 5 (November 2008): 1055-071. [37] Harris, @War, 223. [38] Singer, “Outsourcing War,” 126. [39] Ibid, 125. [40] Seabrook, John. "Network Insecurity." The New Yorker. May 20, 2013. Accessed May 11, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/20/network-insecurity. [41] Ibid, 115. The collaboration dissolved in 2011 when Anonymous hacked into one of the coordinators’ emails and released correspondences about the group’s plans. [42] Keating, Lucy. "Surveillance: A Thriving British Industry." The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. December 01, 2011. Accessed May 11, 2016. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/01/surveillance-a-thriving-british-industry/. [43] Reporters without Borders. Enemies of the Internet. Publication. 2013. 7. [44] Bamford, “NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar.” [45] Shorrock, "How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA." [46] Greenberg, “Inside Endgame.” [47] Chesterman, "‘We Can't Spy …If We Can't Buy!’" [48] Some commentators think government policies might create a bubble. See Harris, @War, 122; for evidence that the value of cybersecurity firms has declined in the last year, see King, “Under Pressure, Cybersecurity Ripe for M&A This Year.” [49] Naturally, none of those principles strictly hold – look no further than the success of IT lobbyists in recent years to win government money. See Brito and Watkins, "Loving the Cyber Bomb?,” 69. [50] Chesterman, “We Can’t Spy…If We Can’t Buy!” [51] Harris, @War, 175. [52] The CIA already does this: see Chesterman, “We Can’t Spy…If We Can’t Buy!” References Adams, Walter. "The Military-Industrial Complex and the New Industrial State." The American Economic Review 58, no. 2 (May 1968): 652-65. Bamford, James. "NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar." Wired Magazine. June 13, 13. Accessed May 09, 2016. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/ . Benner, Katie. "Cybersecurity's Money Men." The Information. January 21, 2014. Accessed May 9, 2016. https://www.theinformation.com/cybersecuritys-money-men . Byrt, Frank. "U.S. Defense Contractors Are Scrambling To Fill Massive Cyber Security Contracts." Business Insider. November 19, 2010. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-is-spending-a-ton-on-defense-spending-in-cyber-security-2010-11 . Chesterman, Simon. "‘We Can't Spy …If We Can't Buy!’: The Privatization of Intelligence and the Limits of Outsourcing ‘Inherently Governmental Functions’." European Journal of International Law 19, no. 5 (November 2008): 1055-071. Chief Financial Officer, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller). Defense Budget Overview: US Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2017 Budget Request. Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2016. "Cybersecurity Market by Solution (IAM, Encryption, DLP, UTM, Antivirus/Anti-Malware, Firewall, IDS/IPS, Disaster Recovery, DDOS Mitigation, SIEM), Service, Security Type, Deployment Mode, Organization Size, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2022." Markets and Markets Research. July 2017. Accessed April 18, 2018. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cyber-security-market-505.html. Etzioni, Amitai. "The Private Sector: A Reluctant Partner in Cybersecurity." Institute for Communitarian Studies, December 19, 2014. https://icps.gwu.edu/private-sector-reluctant-partner-cybersecurity . Exec. Order No. 13636, 3 C.F.R. (2013). Fang, Lee. "Many of the NSA's Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors." The Intercept. May 12, 2015. Accessed May 11, 2016. https://theintercept.com/2015/05/12/intelligence-industry-cash-flows-media-echo-chamber-defending-nsa-surveillance/ . Fazzini, Kate. "Under Trump, Some Subtle Cybersecurity Changes." The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2017. Accessed April 18, 2018. https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/12/13/under-trump-some-subtle-cybersecurity-changes/. Fox-Brewster, Thomas. "Embracing The Awful Irony At A Huge Counter-Terrorism Fair In Paris Days After ISIS Attacks." Forbes. November 22, 2015. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/11/22/paris-hosts-milipol-homeland-defense-expo-after-isis-attacks/#7fc15fc97da6 . Greenberg, Andy. "Inside Endgame: A Second Act For The Blackwater Of Hacking." Forbes. February 12, 2014. Accessed May 09, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/12/inside-endgame-a-new-direction-for-the-blackwater-of-hacking/#5da8ea7a52d9 . Harris, Shane. War the Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Keating, Lucy. "Surveillance: A Thriving British Industry." The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. December 01, 2011. Accessed May 11, 2016. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/01/surveillance-a-thriving-british-industry/ . King, Rachel. "Under Pressure, Cybersecurity Market Is Ripe for M&A in 2016." The Wall Street Journal. February 29, 2016. Accessed May 08, 2016. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/02/29/under-pressure-cybersecurity-market-is-ripe-for-ma-in-2016/ . Markusen, Ann. "Defense Spending: A Successful Industrial Policy?" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10, no. 1 (1986): 105-22. Accessed May 11, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1986.tb00007.x . Martha Minow, Outsourcing Power: How Privatizing Military Efforts Challenges Accountability, Professionalism, and Democracy, 46 B.C.L. Rev. 989 (2005), http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr/ vol46/iss5/2. O'Brien, Connor. "Military Hawks Win Big in Budget Deal — for Now." Politico, February 9, 2018. Accessed April 18, 2018. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/09/budget-deal-military-hawks-333128. 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Energy Embracing Renewable Energy for Sustainable Job Growth in West Virginia Jingpeng Shao Brown University Author Anna Corradi Phillip Squires Elizabeth Yeh Editors Spring 2018 Examining the intersection of climate change and rise of populism in West Virginia, this essay evaluates policies and represents recommendations to address the demand for quality jobs and long-term transition towards sustainable energy. Introduction The dependency on coal for energy generation lies at the intersection of two crucial issues that have come to define international political economy in the 21st Century–climate change and the rise of populism–thus illustrating the deep dissatisfaction with economic liberalization and globalization. In the US, coal lost its position as the dominant source of electricity generation for the first time in 2016 (30.4%) when it was surpassed by natural gas (33.8%) (EIA, 2017). This has contributed to a long-term trend of decline in coal employment, which began after the end of the Second World War and created a substantial source of economic, social, and political woes for the mid-Appalachian region known as the ‘Coal Country’. While campaigning for the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump proclaimed, “We’re going to put the miners back to work,” to a cheering crowd waving “Trump Digs Coal” signs in Charleston, West Virginia (C-Span - Trump, 2016). His landslide success in the state, beating Hillary Clinton’s 26.2% with 67.9% of the popular vote in November 2016, in part reflects the appeal of his vow to end the liberals’ “War on Coal,” which has allegedly destroyed jobs and with them the prosperity of the region. On the same day, West Virginians elected Democrat Jim Justice, who had promised to embrace coal and echoed Trump’s “jobs, jobs, jobs,” as governor. Such rhetoric has two main implications: that West Virginia’s fortunes are tied to coal, and that the decline of coal can be reversed. However, these are only myths and carry no fact-based weight. West Virginia’s economic woes are complex and must be addressed with a multitude of approaches. Instead of viewing renewable energy in a negative light and trying to dismiss it, the state should consider it as a viable source of job creation for the region. Dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency and related regulations such as the Clean Power Plan, all of which are meant to be combating climate change, is not the panacea when addressing the long-neglected demand for jobs in the region. In fact, it will lead to greater long-term woes with marginal short-term benefits. Instead, policymakers must embrace the shift in energy that is essential for climate change mitigation by transitioning to the sustainable energy sector and by investing in job creation to help people adapt to the movement towards a low-carbon economy. More specifically, instead of resuscitating coal mines and opening coal power plants, West Virginian legislators should first remove regulations that discourage renewable energy, then stimulate the demand for renewable energy and related jobs (such as energy efficiency) (GPO, 2011), and finally invest in (re)training programs to help unemployed (coal) workers. For any policy to be successfully executed, it must respect and understand the values and hardships of the region, as it confronts the two aforementioned myths. Therefore, this paper will begin by examining the two relevant problems in the international political economy: climate change and the rise of populism in the heart of the “Coal Country,” namely West Virginia. Such contextualization will provide the objectives and the evaluation criteria for the policies that will be compared. From those assessments, a set of policies recommendation will be constructed for legislators, with the goal of simultaneously addressing the demand for quality jobs and the long-term need to transition towards sustainable energy. Climate Change and the Clean Power Plan Climate change is an inherently global problem, one caused by greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and nitrogen trifluoride etc.) emitted across the world. Thus, this phenomenon has global repercussions, such as rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events (Tanner and Allouche, 2011). The transition to low-carbon energy, which focuses on limiting greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere (Frankfurt, 2017), is crucial to climate change mitigation. The 2015 Paris Agreement, with the overall objective of restricting the global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, is an important milestone in the international cooperation that is crucial in combating climate change. A successful execution, however, depends entirely on the ability of member nations to stay committed to their reduction promises. Under President Obama, the US committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. The energy sector, accounting for 31% of emissions, is the most influential sector in terms of US greenhouse gas emissions. The Clean Power Plan (CPP) of the Environmental Protection Agency (under section 111(b) of the Clean Air Act) is a key component of this effort, one that encourages the shift towards less polluting sources of energy. However, it is also portrayed as driving the “War on Coal.” To reach the overall goal of 32% reduction (compared to 2005 levels) in carbon dioxide pollution from American power plants, the act stipulates state-specific targets for carbon emission reduction. West Virginia’s target is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from 72,319 thousand short tons in 2012 to 51,325 thousand short tons (only considering existing sources) or to 51,857 thousand short tons (considering both existing and new sources). That translates into a significant challenge: either a 37% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt-hour (“rate-based” target), or a 29% reduction in total emissions from existing sources (a “mass-based” target, which is recommended by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Feasibility Report) (Van Nostrand, Hansen, and James, 2016). Under the CPP, each state chooses the combination of compliance measures necessary to achieve the goal, such as improving efficiency of existing power plants (“heat rate improvements” in the case of coal power plants), increasing the use of natural gas, increasing the use of renewable sources (hydropower, wind, solar), and reducing the demand for electricity. Thus, it is essential to focus on how increasing renewable sources of energy can be a possible source of sustainable job creation in West Virginia. In addition to legal challenges that immediately attempted to halt the enforcement of the Clean Power Plan, the executive order issued by President Trump on March 28, 2017 rolled back on the Obama-era climate change policies, including the CPP. The country was told such action was being taken in the name of energy independence, and the miners were told: “You’re going back to work.”(Davenport and Rubin, 2017) Absolving the US, the second largest carbon dioxide polluter in the world, from their commitment to climate change mitigation threatens to unravel the multilateral agreements in the global fight against climate change. Other countries also had to face a tradeoff between short-term economic development, and finding sustainable climate change solutions. This is particularly true for China and India (the first and third largest polluters), which have been dependent on coal as an inexpensive source of energy for moving their massive populations out of poverty. West Virginia is an example of the challenges faced in transitioning away from coal as a source of energy once the industry and infrastructures are established. Coal Country and Populism West Virginia’s coal has helped power the country since the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting period of prosperity bound coal to the regional identity. The dual myth – that the decline of coal is reversible and that coal still determines the prospects of West Virginia – continues to prevail at the heart of the Coal Country. These pervasive notions must be considered when designing and implementing policy that emphasizes a shift away from coal. Patrick Hickey, a political science professor at West Virginia University, reflects on the appealing rhetoric of the War on Coal: “It is political suicide to tell citizens the truth about coal.” (Dlouhy and Natter, 2017) Since World War II, the coal industry has experienced dramatic transformations that have led to a decreasing demand for labor. For instance, modern extraction techniques, such as “mountaintop-removal mining” and new machinery, have replaced the traditional pickaxes and shovels. Furthermore, coal operators and contractors have decreased from 250,266 in 1979 to 98,505 in 2015 despite steady output of coal (MSHA, 2015). In the past decade, the rise of cheap natural gas due to hydraulic fracturing (commonly known as “fracking”) has further decreased demand for coal miners. The changing relative prices of coal and natural gas have contributed to this market-driven shift from coal to natural gas. Between 2000 and 2008, natural gas was significantly more expensive than coal. However, with the onslaught of natural gas extracted from shale formations, the gap in prices has narrowed significantly since 2009 (EIA, 2016). Coal was the largest source for electricity generation until 2016, when natural gas (33.8% of US generation share or 1,380,295 gigawatt hours) surpassed coal (30.4% or 1,240,108 gigawatt hours) (EIA, 2017). By contrast, in 2011 natural gas accounted for 24.7% (or 1,013,689 gigawatt hours) and coal accounted for 42.3% (or 1,733,430 gigawatt hours). Because of the long time horizons of power plant construction and retirement (beyond the four year term of one president), these results illustrate the long-term trends in the energy generation industry. The US Energy Information Administration reported that American power companies have retired and converted 13,000 megawatts of coal-power plants, and plan to retire or convert 8,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plants by the end of 2017 (many without regards for recent changes in regulation) (EIA, 2017). This demonstrates how the Clean Power Plan is not, as Trump has argued, the sole or even the biggest culprit for the decline of coal. In fact, the CPP was never meaningfully enacted due to the Supreme Court’s decision to block implementation during the litigation of West Virginia v. EPA (Tsand and Wyatt, 2017). In the absence of real implementation, there is little basis for the argument that CPP has had any direct impact on the decline of coal. In other words, the CPP has been wrongly framed as the culprit of the socioeconomic problems associated with the decline of coal by certain politicians resorting to demagogic rhetoric. The realities of cheap natural gas with decreasing market demand for coal and increasing international support for clean energy cannot be easily reversed. Furthermore, the demand for coal outside of West Virginia also influences the West Virginian coal industry because it exports a significant amount of the coal it produces; in 2014, around half (50 million short tons) were shipped to other states and around one-third (34 million short tons) were exported internationally (EIA, 2017). Coal has long been the largest commodity the state exports by value: 25.3% (or $1.278 billion) in 2016, despite a 25.8% decrease since 2015 (which is consistent with past years) (US Census, 2017). The decrease can be partially attributed to the weaker international demand, especially from China, where the government is prioritizing and heavily investing in sustainable energy development in addition to cutting back on coal (Frankfurt, 2017). These industry-wide trends contradict the narrative of some politicians blaming job loss primarily on environmental regulations such as the Clean Power Plan. The second persisting myth is how West Virginia is tied to coal. For the last 25 years, coal has accounted for less than 5% of the state’s workforce (Cohen, 2016). Nevertheless, the cultural symbolism of coal remains incredibly influential and poignant for the community where, “even if you’re not directly connected to the industry, you may know family members or relatives or ancestors who were.” (Dlouhy and Natter, 2017) To West Virginians, the job of a coal miner once signified, and continues to evoke, a stable middle-class yearly income of $85,000 with many benefits. Being a unionized salary, this was the norm for the coal miners of previous generations, under the United Mine Workers of America (Tabuchi, 2017). The widening income inequality within the industry between the executives and the coal workers has also contributed to the sense of loss and nostalgia for the blue-collar workers of ‘Coal Country,’ which is exacerbated by the replacement of unionized long-term contracts with low pay short-term contracts (Tabuchi, 2017). When the middle-class loses the hope and security that accompanies a well-paying long-term job, populism branded with “jobs” swells quickly. Coal miners and their communities are proud of their heritage and identity, embracing their status as the soldiers powering America. Even an infamous Hillary Clinton quote promoting her $30 billion program for coal workers incorporated praise for coal miners: “Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.” (C-Span – Clinton, 2016) Her failed effort to reconcile the declining coal industry with opportunities in the renewable energy sector shows the importance of effectively communicating and convincing not only the coal community, but also blue-collar America, that the coal industry will be supported. Policy Objectives and Criteria For long-term prosperity in West Virginia, policymakers should consider renewable energy as a possible solution in order to simultaneously address the need for climate change mitigation and the demand for sustainable jobs as highlighted by the rise of populism. Without sufficient job creation, climate change efforts could fail to address the (potentially negative) impact on the greater economy, as pointed out by Dr. David Montgomery’s critique of a PERI study on EPA regulations, during the Senate Committee Hearing on Green Jobs and Trade: “the critical error, epitomized by PERI, and common to all the studies in the genre, is their failure to balance the jobs lost in the rest of the economy against those that may be gained as a result of the specific mandated investments… It ignores the increase in the cost of electricity caused by this policy and the effect of that higher cost on household real incomes, wages, productivity, investment in other sectors and economic growth.” (GPO, 2011) Environmental regulations could force policymakers to choose climate change mitigation over economic needs, which would put additional stress on an already sensitive economic situation. West Virginia will likely face the same challenge of dependency on a declining fossil-fuel industry (coal today) again in the future if steps towards renewable energy are not taken. Complying with environmental regulations such as the CPP is only the first step towards long term sustainability, as these policies may continue to perpetuate the dependence on relatively cleaner but non-renewable energy sources such as natural gas or “clean coal.” (Van Nostrand, Hansen, and James, 2016) Natural gas has already begun replacing coal across the nation and within West Virginia, as the state’s existing energy infrastructure and geographic location help make natural gas development significantly cheaper than renewable energy development. Still, the fundamental issue of long-term sustainability in energy generation can only be resolved by a shift (however gradual) towards renewable energy by shifting both market dynamics and state policy. Kate Gordon, the Vice President for Energy Policy at The Center for American Progress Action Fund, presents a strong long-term view: “‘green jobs’ stands for much more than just the jobs themselves. It stands for a whole new set of industries and investments that will make us as a country more competitive and our economy more sustainable in the long term.” (GPO, 2011) Without addressing the constituents’ economic and job demands in West Virginia, which have already contributed to the hopelessness and frustration of the community, populism will continue to rise and undermine the political will to participate in international cooperation for climate change mitigation. Success in creating desirable and sustainable jobs for the disenfranchised blue-collar workers can demonstrate the viability of a low-carbon economy and increase the appeal of combating climate change mitigation. Policy Evaluation and Recommendation Given West Virginia’s status as the fourth largest energy producing state (producing 4.6% of US electricity in 2013), its dependency on coal for generating 94% of that power in 2015, and the greater shift away from coal, there is significant space and potential for sustainable job creation in the renewable energy industry. In neighboring Ohio, which also has a history rooted in coal, there has already been significant progress made in the energy transition. The city of Toledo transformed itself into a center for solar innovation and production, thereby creating over 6,000 jobs (GPO, 2011). In order for there to be an increase in renewable energy investment, the demand for clean energy must be stimulated. The initial steps can be taken by removing the limits placed on net metering, and by allowing more distributed generation that would incentivize installations for renewable energy generation by individuals. The net metering system for solar energy systems’ owners calculates and charges their net usage of electricity, allowing for the excess electricity that these owners contribute to the grid to partially cancel out the electricity that they consume from the grid in the form of issued credits. Policymakers can work towards re-instituting its renewable portfolio standards by requiring investor-owned electric utilities and large retail suppliers to acquire 25% of electricity from alternative and renewable sources by 2025 (for which it became the first state to repeal in 2015) (EIA, 2017). Tax cuts, subsidies, and even loans and investment (perhaps with a combination of private and public funds) for larger utility-scale renewable energy projects can also be considered. However, measures must be taken to ensure long-term viability and responsible use of taxpayer money, and to confirm that incentives are not distorted. This first component of directly stimulating development in the renewable energy sector was missing in Hillary Clinton’s $30 billion “Plan for Revitalizing Coal Communities,” though it does share a similar recommendation for the following retraining program (Clinton, 2015). Secondly, West Virginian workers must be empowered to capitalize on job opportunities in growing renewable energy industries. Investing in retraining initiatives will bridge the gap between employers and employees by improving the skills of the overall labor pool. The success of such action is hopeful: on a smaller scale, the Coalfield Development Corporation’s programs have already demonstrated measurable success. They provide retraining to unemployed coal miners in different sectors: for instance, its “ReWire Appalachia” program uses the 33-6-3 model (33 hours of paid labor, 6 hours of higher education class time, and 3 hours of life-skills mentorship), and focuses on community-based solar projects, and could triple the amount of solar power in West Virginia (Coalfield, 2017). The impact of such program on boosting the solar industry and on empowering unemployed coal miners is indicative of a great initiative that should be scaled up with the support of West Virginia legislators. Regarding the criticism of the costliness of job training programs, cost projections can significantly differ depending on implementation (Louie and Pearce, 2016). Collaboration with potential employers in developing training programs with in-demand skills would also boost the effectiveness of the retraining program. This would not necessarily mean that taxpayers are funding training for certain companies, as long as there is a sufficiently large and diverse number of employers. As West Virginia faces economic challenges and transitional pressures, legislators should consider renewable energy as a potential source of job creation and economic growth. West Virginia has historically been one of the nation’s leaders in energy production. Therefore, rather than relinquish this position as a result of the decline in the coal industry, state officials should understand that fossil fuel sources, such as coal and natural gas, despite their low cost, do not represent the future of energy production and will likely be displaced by renewable energy sources. Thus, investing in clean energy development and retraining programs for present and future unemployed coal workers will allow West Virginia to maintain its status as a key energy producer for the US. However, state leaders must first push back against the dual myths, i.e. that West Virginia’s fortunes are tied to coal and the decline of coal can be reversed, which continually create resistance against alternative sources of energy. Once the myths are properly understood as such, climate change mitigation and the need for sustainable jobs can be transformed into two complementary pieces working together for West Virginia’s benefit. Together, they can create both long-term prosperity and a positive impact on climate change mitigation. Endnotes 3 The other important is adaptation, which focuses on adjusting to the adverse effects of climate change – especially important given how climate change impacts different regions unequally, often exacerbating preexisting poverty. 4 Granted, the poverty and need for electricity cannot be overlooked. 5 This uses controlled explosions on mountains to expose coal seams. 6 I do not agree with the entirety of his statement and was not able to evaluate the economic models. 7 Multiple variations of “Clean Coal” exist, including the aforementioned “heat rate improvements,” the more recent carbon capture and storage technologies that have pushed some coal companies to support the Paris Agreement. 8 The only source of industry investment funding is private, which could limit the scale at which demand for renewable energy can be stimulated. References United States Energy Information Administration. "Electricity Monthly Update", 2017. 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Transcendental Self Reconceptualizing the Idea of the Self within Western Philosophy: The Existence-Reason Binary and the Nonrational Transcendental Self Jennifer Kim Pomona College Author Ebba Brunnstrom Grace Engelman Alan Garcia-Ramos Fengyi Wan Editors Spring 2018 In order to overcome the existence-reason binary present in philosophy, I propose the notion of nonrational transcendental self. In philosophy, the ontological question asks, “How might a self understand its own being?” Views on the self were initially dominated by the rationalists, who argue that reason, rather than sense experience, reveals the true nature of things. In response, a subsequent movement called existentialism critiques rationalism for mistaking the human being as a stagnant thinker. Existentialists argue that human beings are not merely rational beings, but also dynamic subjects who experience and change. From the existentialist viewpoint, reason by itself is wholly incapable of capturing the subject’s lived experience. In my observation, the rationalist-existentialist debate gave rise to a conceptual binary, where existence and reason are mutually exclusive. It is my view that this binary hinders the revolutionary potential of existentialist philosophy. The binary is problematic because it disallows an alternative understanding of the self outside of reason and existence. There are complexities in our nature that occur outside the binary, such as our nonrational selves. If we continue to approach ontology without breaking the binary, we can never accurately or sufficiently answer the basic question of how to understand our own being. My answer to resolving the binary is to propose a rethinking of the self as nonrational and transcendental. First, I will induct nonrationality as an alternative to the binary that neither rejects nor is wholly subsumed under reason or its counterpart, existence. I begin by exploring examples of the transcendental self as exemplified in the Kantian subjects of moral and aesthetic judgments. I then introduce the notion of a nonrational transcendental self, which is the self that experiences and knows, but does not judge. Finally, I show that the nonrational transcendental self truly exists within us and reveals itself most clearly when we experience life alongside the question of suicide and when we experience a moment of beauty. The need to convey the nonrational transcendental self transpires from the restrictions of the binary. Therefore, I shall first identify the emergence of the reason-existence binary by tracing the use of reason and existence in historical ontological debates. The rationalist view of the self begins with Descartes, who articulates that rational self-reflection reveals the true nature of the human being as the thinking self, the eternal mind (Descartes – Translation: Haldane, 1991). Hegel, likewise, perceives reason as the proper lenses through which to discover the human being’s true nature and place in the world. In Hegelian philosophy, history is the linear unfolding of reason and all of our individual subjectivities are merely subsumed under this hyper-rational unfolding (Hegel – Translation: Hartman, 1953). Such extreme rationalism is challenged by the Kantian philosophy of transcendental idealism, which curtails the overreach of pure reason by designating it to a regulatory rule (Kant – Translation: Guyer and Wood, 1998). According to transcendental idealism, we are limited to knowing and perceiving phenomena (i.e. things as they appear in time and space). We do not have access to noumena (“things-as-they-are-in-themselves”) (Kant – Translation: Guyer and Wood, 1998). Reason, as our structural framework, can help us decide upon the truth of phenomena, but it cannot conclude anything substantial about noumena. As we are incapable of perceiving our noumenal selves, it is an illegitimate use of reason to attempt to rationally discover our true selves (Kant – Translation: Guyer and Wood, 1998). Consequently, Kant reintroduces the question of the self-understanding its own being, allowing existentialists to arrive on the scene and offer a viewpoint opposing the rationalists. Existentialism emerges with Kierkegaard’s publication of Either/Or in 1843. Kierkegaard points out that our singular viewpoint to life is our existing and subjective self. Objective truth only has meaning in relation to a knower, who is subjective and dynamic. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes Descartes for mistakenly substituting the human being as an “infinitely indifferent” knower and explicitly rejects Cartesian rationalism as “a mirage [where] everything is and nothing becomes” (Kierkegaard – Translation: Hong and Hong, 1978). For Kierkegaard, reason, either as some ultimate methodology towards truth or as a priori structures of cognition and understanding, fails to account for our fundamental nature as those who experience. After Kierkegaard, existentialist thinker Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927. Being and Time reorients the ontological approach by introducing the concept dasein, which translates to being-in-the-world (Heidegger – Translation: Macquarrie and Robinson, 1962). In contrast to the rationalists who believe that true human nature can only be understood when abstracted away from experience, Heidegger argues that human beings are dasein and can know themselves only as they exist in the world. All philosophical inquiry on human nature must acknowledge our essential condition as dasein if it is to be accurate and effective. By contrast, ontology, which claims to understand human nature independent of its being-in-the-world, is illegitimate. Then, in 1943, another existentialist named Sartre published Being and Nothingness. Echoing Kantian thought, Sartre argues that we cannot ask what the nature of the human being in itself is. When we try to answer ontologically about our noumenal selves, we immediately establish a duality (between “I” as the subject and “I” as the referred-to object) that is essentially at odds with the oneness of self that we associate with the ‘true self’ (Sartre – Translation: Barnes, 1956). Instead of asking what being is, Sartre recommends that we ask how being is. In other words, what are our modes of being? Sartre states that the human being is a factical self, which refers to our physical being grounded in concrete circumstances (Sartre – Translation: Barnes, 1956). The human being is also a transcendent self, which means that we are not only our factical self, but also all of our negations and possibilities. For example, the seemingly insignificant waiter at a restaurant is not merely a waiter. That is, as a human being, the waiter’s existence does not depend on his or her being waiter. The waiter may be countless other things apart from a waiter and is still yet to be many things in the future. Sartre’s point is that our existence as human beings cannot be fully captured by the roles our factical selves play. For Sartre, the human being is essentially fluid and full of possibility (Sartre – Translation: Barnes, 1956). Therefore, Sartre considers that reason as logical form, which accepts negation and exclusion as definitive, cannot sufficiently account for the human being. My purpose in explicating the ontological debate between rationalists and existentialists is to show that within the philosophical tradition, there is a shift from understanding the human being as a stagnant thinker to an experiencing subject. I argue that the debate which motivated this shift in thinking also unintentionally produced a conceptual binary between reason and existence. Existentialism presents itself as a purposeful critique of rationalism. The language of the existentialists is intentionally contrasted to the language of the rationalists. The existentialists describe the true nature of the human being as subjective, dynamic, temporal, fluid, and grounded; rationalists, as objective, unchanging, eternal, and abstract. In reading existentialists’ work, the reader would think that the human being is essentially a dynamic subject in place of a stagnant thinker, but never both. Similarly, truth for the human being is seen as either subjective or objective, but not both. With such emphasized contrast, ‘existence’ becomes a concept that stands as a symbolic counterpoint to reason. This is the reason-existence binary. The reason-existence binary is undesirable and stunts the progress existentialism might make in answering the basic ontological question. The existentialists intended to reclaim the dynamic aspect of the human being in an effort to balance out the extreme rationalism preceding them. However, by presenting existence in contrast to, rather than alongside, reason, existentialism merely designated the human being to another extreme. The existentialists’ failure of a balancing act reveals itself as an issue within their own systems of thought. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre all grapple with tensions resulting from the binary within their own philosophies. Part I: Limitations of the Binary Manifested as Existentialist Tensions Kierkegaard’s Unintended Inverse Hegelianism When Kierkegaard states that “subjectivity is truth”, he effectively turns Hegel (who saw objectivity as the one legitimate truth) on his head (Kierkegaard – Translation: Hong and Hong 1978). Kierkegaard rejects the hyper-objective, linear, rational, and systematic nature of Hegelianism and purposefully aims to be anti-systematic and anti-rationalist. However, Kierkegaard himself proposes that an individual must go through three stages (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious) in order to encounter a true self (Kierkegaard – Translation: Hong and Hong, 1978). These are the stages that an individual encounters when turning inward in his or her own subjectivity. The final stage climaxes in paradox and culminates in a person of faith. So then, it seems that Kierkegaard’s philosophy does entail a system that we must acknowledge in order to understand our own being. The irony is that by protesting objectivity with subjectivity, Kierkegaard unwittingly creates his own dialectical system and becomes the mirror image of the systematic and idealistic Hegelianism that he intended to counter. Theodor W. Adorno calls Kierkegaard’s philosophy “inverse Hegelianism” since the historical dialectic of objective ‘Reason’ in Hegelian philosophy is parallel to Kierkegaard’s inward dialectic of the subject’s subjectivity. Whereas the Hegelian subject must look further and further outwards to discover truth and the authentic self, the Kierkegaardian subject must turn deeper and deeper inwards to discover truth and the faithful self (Adorno – Translation: Hullot-Kentor, 1989). Thus, whereas Hegel’s setting and subject is all of history, Kierkegaard’s “objective inwardness strictly excludes objective history”, so that “history vanishes” in Kierkegaard (Adorno – Translation: Hullot-Kentor, 1989). However, without any sense of history, what is left in Kierkegaard’s philosophy is the abstract self posed against the abstract universal, interacting in a subject-object dialectic that Adorno calls “Hegel [inverted and interiorized]” (Adorno – Translation: Hullot-Kentor, 1989). That is, Kierkegaard neither avoids systematizing the process of the self understanding its own being nor refrains from abstracting (i.e. a self without a concrete history is an abstract self). In short, Kierkegaard fails to fully account for the existing subject and only manages to postulate it against the thinking subject. Heidegger’s Absurd Waiting Heidegger’s dasein is both being-in-the-world and being-not-of-this-world. That is, we cannot seek to understand our being as existing separate from the world we exist in and yet, there is the curious truth that we are born into and pass away from the world. We “come from” and “go away to” someplace not of this world. From this, Heidegger concludes that the significance and uniqueness of our time in this world are due to our temporality. As finite beings, every moment in time is unique. Our specific time also defines each of us as a unique being traveling different paths and encountering different ontological possibilities which become available to us by virtue of our specific past and present (Heidegger – Translation: Macquarrie and Robinson, 1962). Time is therefore responsible for determining the significance of all the opportunities we might have in this world. But since the importance of time itself is that it represents our sudden arrival and departure from this world from who knows where, then meaning itself also comes from who knows where. Heidegger wrote Being and Time in the 1920s and 1930s, directly after the First World War. Like the famous Lost Generation, Heidegger also addresses an era when the traditional ideologies and frameworks that gave us social identities and gave our actions meaning were quickly fading out. (Preceding Heidegger, Nietzsche defines that era as an era in which “God is dead” in contrast to previous generations which offered “God” and by extension, Christian morals, tradition, etc (Nietzsche – Translation: Nauckhoff, 2001). God and the institution of religion and tradition provided frameworks of significance which dasein could attach itself to find significance.) The era bore a sense of decay. The hollowness of a hollow man was no longer an individual problem, but an indicator of a lack of possibilities in the world of that generation. If the world shines through an authentic dasein (being-in-the-world), but the world itself is decaying, then an authentic dasein would decay instead of thrive. Heidegger recognizes this issue and offers the solution of reorienting dasein in order to increase its receptivity of meaning. Essentially, Heidegger states that if there is less meaning in the world, then we should be more receptive to it so that we can get more of it. If dasein is taken solely as a being in time, an increase in receptivity simply means a more anxious waiting for meaning to come. This is because meaning only comes from that “other world” where we came from to be born and where we go once we die. But Heidegger does not give any deadline for how long dasein must wait for meaning to appear. Indeed, he cannot even guarantee that meaning will ever come back. But if we are headed towards a meaningless world, we would be waiting forever. In Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, two individuals “actively” wait in a wasteland for “Godot”, an unknown figure who promises meaning, but cannot promise when, where, or how. This uncertain, but hopeful waiting depicts the issue that Heidegger’s solution runs into. In terms of time, Heidegger’s solution becomes a rather paradoxical (and apparently, parody-able) form of “active” waiting. Heidegger tries to reclaim our being from abstraction by positing dasein, but his philosophy is affected by the binary which separates existing from knowing. Ultimately, he ends up in a strange position of hopeful absurdism. In this position, he relies on a vague abstraction that renders even the being-in-the-world altogether hazy and opaque. Thus, despite Heidegger’s intent to have dasein reconquer itself as a grounded being, we arrive at a point where the absence of a metaphysical quality of dasein results, once again, in abstraction Sartre’s Difficulty with Dualism When Sartre introduces the factical self and the transcendent self to the reader, he explicitly states that this division exists only because they are necessary to parse out the modes of being. Sartre does not intend to propose a metaphysical dualism, where the factical and transcendent self are truly two different selves or beings. Although Sartre posits a disclaimer of his dualism, there is still ultimately a tension in saying that being-in-itself and being-for-itself are mutually exclusive and yet every human being is somehow both. Sartre’s preoccupation with being as always more than it appears in a given situation sits in direct contrast to reason, which only applies to appearances. This contrast motivates Sartre to depict human beings as half factual knowers and half fluid, illogical beings. This is an uncomfortable division both because our rational and existing selves do not exist unequivocally separate from each other and because we also have a nonrational self. Sartre himself identifies this issue as the “identity nihilation” or “internal negation” issue, stating that his view renders the self in a perpetually unstable equability where identity as absolute cohesion rejects diversity and unity can only be a synthesis of multiplicity (Sartre – Translation: Barnes, 1956). The self, as both whole and diverse, is never quite captured due to the oppositional nature between existence and reason that Sartre assumes. *** The binary itself is not easily grasped, but its effects are discernible. The tensions that emerge from the binary reveal that if the assumptions which underlie the argument are extreme and unfounded, the content itself is affected and distorted. To understand this in a more general sense, it is often what we consider possible, rather than the reality of the situation, which dictates the outcome. If we never venture down certain pathways because we never consider their existence, then those avenues of thought will never open to us, not because they cannot exist, but because we consider them unable to exist. The philosopher Derrida speaks to the violence of writing, of naming things, and of defining spectrums and hierarchies through names (Derrida, 1976). Writing separates, and it is within those separations that battles are fought. Writers always write in the context of previous thought, and so even though their intentions are to break cycles of thought, the methodology of writing itself binds them to reiterate the same structural violence that previous writers have also engaged in. In short, modern philosophers often end up writing within the dialogue set up by previous philosophers and find it difficult, if not impossible, to break out of that dialogue and introduce new possibilities. If the possibilities of the conversation are predetermined by restrictions on expression, the historical limitations will stunt the conversation and block the creation of new pathways of thought. While Kierkegaard provides an illuminating analysis of how Hegelianism neglected essential considerations for how the existing subject should come to understand itself, at the same time, Kierkegaard’s reactionary philosophy proves detrimental to the originality of his own philosophy. The content is simply turned on its head, but the ultimate goal of understanding remains out of reach. Heidegger’s concept of dasein reorients ontology into a humbler form, reminding us that we do not experience Being except as being-in-the-world and as being-towards-death. He criticizes the philosophical tradition of forgetting that our existence is wholly about being present-in-the-world. However, Heidegger falls prey to his own criticism when he separates human existence from whatever truth or meaning there was to be found in our existence. To Sartre’s credit, Sartre identifies and denounces the binary from the very beginning. Yet, despite this awareness, his own philosophy ends up depending on conceptual divisions born from the binary. What all of these philosophers point out but struggle to prove within their own philosophies is that the human being is always the meeting ground for both reason and existence. By imposing this binary, we become stuck with a mentality that cannot imagine outside of you are either this or that. There is no space for a new beginning because violence has already been done unto the space of possibility. While one side can point out the defects of the other, unfortunately, the inverse of a structure does not overturn the system nor introduce anything new, and so it cannot successfully escape the faults or solve the problems of the original structure. Inversion and rejection are still confined to the original sphere of thought and that influence is impossible to hide, even though the rest of the content may be revolutionary and inspiring. That is why the existence-reason binary limits existentialists’ answer to the ontological question of the self knowing its own being. Part II: Rethinking the Transcendental Self In light of the existence-reason binary, I offer an interpretation of a self that is transcendental and nonrational. The nonrational transcendental self is a transcendental self because it allows for a shift in perspective without loss of identity. It is nonrational because the shift is unconcerned with justifications. There is no categorizing or narrating the experience for a greater purpose. There is no expectation of ‘what ought to happen’. There is no need to prioritize anything within the experience. The nonrational transcendental self is the self that experiences its own being without having to focus or impose on it. It is the self that exists alongside the constant question of suicide and it is the self that arises when we experience moments of beauty. *** Section A: The Question of Suicide Camus famously said, “There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy” (Camus – Translation: O’Brien, 1991). Camus’ infamous line was already preceded by a long line of thinkers grappling with the morality and rationality of suicide. St. Augustine, inspired by Plato and followed by Aquinas, states the Christian prohibition on suicide. When intolerable evils descend upon us, the truly pious withstand the onslaught and prove their virtue, whereas those who escape by suicide have sullied God’s gift of life to us (Saint Augustine – Translation: Paolucci, 1962). Suicide was seen as the ultimate unrepentable sin. St. Augustine also considers suicide irrational, pointing out that if suicide is meant to preserve happiness or escape unhappiness by avoiding pain, then that is foolishness for there is no happiness to be found in either giving up in the midst of fighting evil or in knowing that you can commit suicide (Saint Augustine – Translation: Paolucci, 1962). Then, David Hume famously wrote a defense of suicide as a rational act, stating, “suicide is no transgression of our duty to God” (Hume, 1783). God granted all beings and things with their proper functions and powers (Hume, 1783). A river has the power to stop man because God willed it. Yet, if man is able to create machinery that utilizes energy from a river or can divert a river from its course, this interaction causes no discord in the creation and would not be a crime in the eyes of God (Hume, 1783). God has given us the ability to judge and enact such behavior. Likewise, Hume asserts that there is no crime of “turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channels” (Hume, 1783). In this case, God has given us the ability to judge and enact suicide. Furthermore, just as the river turns according to the laws of matter and motion, so does the human body react according to the laws of nature as set by God (Hume, 1783). Hume offers several situations in which suicide might be consistent with our self-interest (e.g. age, sickness, and misfortune), but is also quick to state, “no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping… for such is our natural horror of death” (Hume, 1783). Thus, if someone ultimately judges that he or she is in a situation so haunted by suffering that it cannot be relieved except through death, then not only is committing suicide not a moral transgression, but it is also a perfectly rational act. Richard Brandt furthers Hume’s argument that suicide can be rational by way of a utilitarian argument. Brandt argues that a rational agent can make a sufficiently informed comparison about the likely utility between the two possible futures of survival and suicide and make an intelligible and rational choice from there. However, in response to Brandt, Christopher Cowley suggests that the concept of rationality does not apply to suicide. Judgements about suicide, such as those espoused by Brandt, are certainly intelligible (Cowley, 2006). However, these judgments are “third-person descriptions… implicitly assuming rationality” and “[maintaining] a clinical detachment” so that we end up “talking about the victim rather than to or with the victim” (Cowley, 2006). Cowley thus points out that asking the rational question of “what would anyone do in this situation” is more an abstract hypothesis and less about the agent and the agent’s act of suicide (Cowley, 2006). Furthermore, debating the rationality of suicide misses a major point, that rationality is essentially future-oriented. We call an act rational or irrational by presupposing a future in which we will have to face the consequences of that act (Cowley, 2006). Therefore, while we might consider someone’s reason for suicide rational or irrational, suicide itself cannot be properly judged by rationality because it is the erasure of the future that is a precondition of judging an act as rational or irrational. Thus, Cowley “rejects the exhaustive dichotomy between rational and irrational” because both concepts “run out” and fail to provide a language that sufficiently accounts for a discussion on suicide (Cowley, 2006). Rationality presumes justification, which not only assumes a future but also abstracts from the subject’s experience. However, if Cowley’s point stands, then how are we to approach the question of suicide? Who is the agent in question, if not a rational agent? Insofar as suicide is a human question, the answer relies heavily on how we understand the human being. Here, I hope that my notion of the nonrational transcendental self will help articulate our experience with the issue of suicide. Notice this: Although Camus and others have posed the question of suicide intellectually, we actually experience this question at every moment of our conscious lives. We do not necessarily confront the question (in that we do not feel compelled to justify our existences to ourselves every passing second), but simply by virtue of living, we exist alongside it. The rational self often resists; justifications often mean “this despite that.” But the nonrational self simply exists, without justification, and therefore, without resistance. It does not strive to endure because it is not about life, it is simply living. When a wind passes through the grass, we do not think the grass “resists.” Instead, it simply exists in its swaying along with the wind. Afterwards, we reason that the wind made the grass sway, and while this is very much true, this is a justification after the initial experience, where reason serves as a convenient framework with which to understand and recognize our experiences. Thus, the nonrational transcendental self settles the anxiety of needing a reason to live in an arbitrary world by accepting that it simply is, outside of want and reason. As the question of suicide is reborn every moment, so this self co-exists alongside that question. Returning to Camus’ question, I realize that suicide is not simply a grand philosophical issue, but an ever-present question. Of course, as Cowley admits, suicide can be discussed in terms of rationality. I think that this makes sense. After all, suicide has a widespread effect, and it is only natural that we abstract from the agent and act itself in an attempt to more deeply understand why such tragic events happen. However, the question of suicide also exists separate from our reasons to live or die. We know this because we have all witnessed that the reality of suicide exists beyond rationality. Sadly, many people who have every reason to live also die. We, as survivors, turn to religion and philosophy and literature, searching for reasons that might explain why they had to go when clearly, they had so much to live for. But regardless of the many arguments we might construct to justify a longer life, the insurmountable fact is that they have passed out of this shared world. As such, suicide is neither rational nor irrational. It is nonrational, which means that although existence can be rationalized, existence is or is not despite the rationalization. Suicide, not as an act to be judged, but as a constant question hand-in-hand with living, illuminates this aspect of the self. The nonrational self is also transcendental. The common understanding of transcendental is “a noumenal realm above”, but the nonrational transcendental self in this situation is a “settling.” The self that transcends life-or-death is not a self that rises above existence, but a self that is simply situated in one’s own being. Even facing the question of suicide, the nonrational transcendental self does not reach towards immorality nor does it turn within itself. There is no extortion and no resistance. It simply exists as it is. It is the mind before the mind is filled with thoughts. It is the state of existence that occupies the middle ground between wanting to live and wanting to die. This middle ground is what often allows people to survive depression, which sometimes manifests as an indifference to life and inability to hope. Think about the reverse situation. Many people who feel they have no reason to live continue to live. Whether it is because we are depressed or uncertain or have simply never seriously entertained the question, we can exist without a reason to live. While Hume and Brandt rightfully argue that we can make value judgments about what sort of life is worth living, the rational argument does not account for the actual state of our existence. Why not? This is because for human beings, the absence of reason to live is not a reason to die. Therefore, to discuss suicide as though it aligns with a linear spectrum of rationality is to collapse this inequality and equate the absence of reason to live with a reason to die. This discounts the struggle that many depressed and/or suicidal people struggle through. But intuitively, we all understand this inequality and we recognize the significance of the inequality. It is why we feel that there is no reason sufficient enough to justify suicide. However, for this intuitive truth to be true, we must grant that the human being exists and sees itself capable of existing outside the reason-existence binary and occupying the middle ground of the nonrational transcendental self. Section B: The Moral and Aesthetic Judgment Before I further explain the notion of a nonrational transcendental self, I wish to reference other types of judgments that are nonrational. Since the kinds of judgments we make portray the kind of being we are, I think this will help us to imagine concepts of the self outside the existence-reason binary. *** After his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant pursued other capacities of self-representation and self-understanding in the Second and Third Critiques, respectively. The Critique of Practical Reason contains Kant’s moral philosophy, which is premised on the principle that we must understand ourselves as we appear to ourselves. In other words, even if reason postulates a phenomenal determinism in the physical world, since we appear to ourselves as moral beings and morality implies agency, we must also take ourselves to be agents capable of affect. The reasoning here is practical: Given how we appear to ourselves, we must believe the necessary condition which allows for this appearance. Specifically, given that we appear to ourselves as moral agents, we must necessarily take ourselves to be free agents (Kant – Translation: Beck, 1956). This differs from the pure reason of Kant’s First Critique, which was discussed as a cognitive capacity functioning largely to structure our experience through concepts and categories. However, the Kantian self that engages in practical reason and which makes the moral judgment is inequivalent to a nonrational transcendental self. The nonrational transcendental self is not concerned with its own appearance or with self-justifications. Kant’s moral judgment is nonetheless a rational judgment, only it has to do with practical reasoning, which is bottom-top because it reasons from appearance whereas pure reasoning, which structures based on a priori conditions of cognition and pure categories of laws and structures, works top-down. To translate this back into our discussion of suicide, saying that the nonrational transcendental self exists alongside the ever-present question of suicide is inequivalent to saying that a person has a moral incentive to live. The moral incentive often appears as a justification, supplying a ‘despite’ in an intellectual, but not necessarily existential problem. Kant’s Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment conveys the aesthetic judgment (i.e. a judgment of beauty). The aesthetic judgment employs the individual’s capacities of imagination and understanding to enter into the mental state of freeplay (Kant – Translation: Walkter, 1963). While both imagination and understanding draw inspiration from the manifold of intuition, they are pure faculties or free faculties. Imagination is the synthesis of a manifold of intuition, and the synthesis is not totally predetermined by the content of the manifold. For example, in imagination, the intuitions of a horse and a horn can be freely synthesized into a unicorn. Understanding is the realm of pure categories (in contrast to concepts which require and apply to specific objects). In understanding, there are unifying laws (e.g. causation) that shape our experience of phenomena without discriminating between empirical details. Then, for freeplay to be the interaction of two pure mental capacities means that the aesthetic judgment is “merely subjective” (Kant – Translation: Walkter, 1963). That is, freeplay occurs only when the subject has removed him/herself from the world (i.e. become a disinterested subject) and re-presented an object that is no longer in front of him/her to him/herself. The aesthetic judgment deals only with this re-presentation. So, an aesthetic judgment does not apply to the object itself the way concepts do. The aesthetic judgment is thus another judgment different from a purely rational judgment. However, there is a quirk in the aesthetic judgment: Despite being completely subjective, our aesthetic judgment necessitates an ought; that is, everyone else ought to agree with our judgment of what is beautiful. Although an aesthetic judgment cannot claim logical universal validity (since it does not refer to a concept), we present our judgments of beauty with a universal voice (Kant – Translation: Walkter, 1963). Thus, the aesthetic judgment “must involve a claim to subjective universality” (Kant – Translation: Walkter, 1963). For Kant, the aesthetic judgment, in bringing together subjectivity and universality, allows us to re-imagine or re-present the human as a being whose sociability and individuality are seamless. In this way, the aesthetic judgment offers an alternative to the existence-reason binary because freeplay, the pure categories of reason, is communicable. However, it is worth noting that there is something a bit sinister about the ‘ought.’ Imagine that in your encounter with the question of suicide, someone comes up to you and tells you that you ought to live. It is a patronizing remark on behalf of the speaker. Hence, this ‘ought’ which is essential in rendering a statement into a judgment and initially seems to prove the human capacity for freeplay and sociability, actually betrays that the aesthetic judgment is not only about subjective appreciation and value, but also assumes an objective universal validity. While the Kantian subject of the aesthetic judgment offers an alternative to the self shuttling back and forth within the reason-existence binary, it is also not quite equivalent to the nonrational transcendental self. The nonrational transcendental self has no reason to prescribe an “ought” to anyone else. Since it is free from reason or desire, it has no need to prove itself or to display its faculties by way of judgments. As we shall see, the nonrational transcendental self appears less in a judgment of beauty and more in a moment of beauty. Section C: From a Judgment of Beauty to a Moment of Beauty The meeting ground of reason and existence and the full-fledged appearance of the nonrational transcendental self occur in a moment of beauty. The novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog illustrates the reveal of the nonrational transcendental self in a moment of beauty. In the story, we meet a young girl named Paloma who very rationally comes to the conclusion that life is not worth staying for and that suicide is the best option (Barbery, 2006). At the end of the novel, Paloma rescinds this decision of suicide, not because she finds some rational reason that justifies her life or tells her that things are bound to get better, but because Paloma discovers for herself that what makes life worthwhile is the inexplicable and nonrational moments of beauty that one encounters amidst, alongside, and even within the suffering that seems to be most of life. Paloma’s life seems to take a turn for the better when she meets Madame Michel, the concierge, and Kakuro Ozu, a new occupant of one of the luxury apartments. But then, without any particular cause and certainly without a satisfying rational justification (i.e. a mad man’s dance is no reason for someone to die), Madame Michel is hit by an automobile and dies. Paloma feels then what it might mean to die, what it really means to face a “never again” (Barbery, 2006). In essence, she suddenly acquires a newfound awareness of her own experiencing. Then, Paloma experiences a moment of beauty. As she and Kakuro Ozu pass through a courtyard, both of them solemn with grief at Madame Michel’s passing, they hear music drifting down from above. Paloma “stopped short… took a deep breath and let the sun warm [her face while she] listened to the music drifting down from above” and she felt that: “There’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty… It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never… Beauty, in this world.” (Barbery, 2006) To explain why Paloma’s moment of beauty was transcendent, first we must consider how human beings are frequently obsessed with playing the heroes and heroines of our own lives, sometimes to the point of playing our own villains. We impose ourselves onto events and other people to try to fit them into our narratives, which we use to self-justify and to explain ourselves to other people. Recognition is important to us. We often have this deep-rooted fear that we will not exist unless we define ourselves, but these definitions do not seem to be authentic unless others acknowledge them. So, we attempt to paste certain labels onto ourselves to garner attention from others. In this way, rationalism (as justification of narratives and labels) is our long-valued method of proving to ourselves and others that we exist at all. Reason has suddenly gained the illusive quality of being necessary to exist. But whether it is the rationalists attaching existence to what is considered “objective” and “immortal” or the existentialists equating the self with subjectivity, the one thing that remains when all else is stripped away from us is a response to the same fear. The question of how the self might understand its being has long been motivated by the anxiety that our existence may not truly be an opportunity for narrative or significance. Thus, philosophy has a natural habit of referring the human being to things they consider visible and indispensable in the hopes that we, too, must be so. However, when Paloma experiences the beauty of music, residing in one ephemeral but suspended moment, her newfound awareness allows for a shift in perspective. With her mind settled from a deeper understanding of life, the beauty of the music enters and shifts her perspective so that in that moment, she is no longer concerned with proving, justifying, or defining her own existence. In that moment, she is no longer obsessed with playing the hero. Paloma assumes the role of passerby, allowing and enjoying the music that is taking center stage in her experience. Thus, our encounter with a moment of beauty allows us to relinquish our need to prove our own existences without threatening our identities and we re-situate ourselves into the existence of a passerby or watcher without considering it a degradation or loss of self, but as the self taking a deep breath and for a moment, just settling into itself. To step away from the need to justify ourselves and re-affirm ourselves is to experience our own being as transcendent and our energy as nonrational (i.e. directionless and not aiming to be applied to anything). In more casual terms, you just are and you are enough to appreciate the moment for what it is. This is why Kant’s moral self is not the nonrational transcendental self. Kant’s moral self arises from a need to understand ourselves given how we appear to ourselves, but the nonrational transcendental self, which is what we are when we encounter moments of beauty or when we live alongside suicide, is not concerned with how we appear to ourselves. Paloma describes the moment of beauty as a moment of “time suspension.” It is the “always within never.” This is interesting because time is one of the Kantian transcendental conditions. So, if we are in a realm of suspended time when we encounter a moment of beauty, then experiencing beauty is not a type of ‘knowing.’ Time and space are simultaneously extended and absorbed and the vanity of the self connected with these determinations fades away. To describe Paloma as “standing where the music is” is normally a confusion of terms that fails to define her, but it is the realm of the nonrational and transcendental, which is the same realm as the middle ground between the absence of a reason to live and a reason to die. Pure experience, which involves both existence and reason but is not confined by either, is an open realm where all things that ground us may shift with no threat to our existence. Furthermore, if Paloma’s experience happens in time suspension, then we cannot expect it to happen or try to prolong it. With time suspension, possibility and actuality exist only insofar as they exist in each other. But without expectation, there can be no prescription. Thus, the nonrational transcendental self which appears in a moment of beauty differs from the Kantian subject making an aesthetic judgment in that the former is not considered with universal recommendations. The nonrational transcendental self is the middle ground devoid of the three cornerstones that inevitably create binaries: expectation, justification, and definition. Another character in The Elegance of the Hedgehog is Jean Arthens, who is the son of the previous resident of Monsieur Ozu’s apartment. When we first encounter Jean Arthens, Renee describes him as “a drug addict, a sad wreck, … no more than a tortured body staggering through life on a razor’s edge” (Barbery, 2006). Through her encounter with him, Renee sadly recognizes that as human beings “we all must fall” at some point and that even before the fall, nobody quite knows “what [this war is that] we are waging, when defeat is so certain… Step by step we clear the path toward our mournful doom” (Barbery, 2006). But then, weeks later, Jean reappears as a far healthier person, somebody who, “once so very close to the abyss, has visibly opted for rebirth” (Barbery, 2006). Renee wonders at his transformation, asking herself, “How is one reborn after a fall?” (Barbery, 2006). Jean tells Renee that what “practically saved his life” was none other than the “pretty little red and white flowers” that Renee had planted (Barbery, 2006). He explains that although “[he did not] know why”, he “used to think about those flowers all the time… and it did [him] good” (Barbery, 2006). Renee is amazed that a “camellia can change fate” (Barbery, 2006). Renee could not have reasonably known that Jean would have viewed her flowers in such a miraculous manner. Jean himself could not have reasonably anticipated his reaction. But the why was unimportant. The flowers were beautiful to him and in that moment of beauty, the nonrational transcendental self came forth. After her encounter with Jean, Renee asks herself those unanswerable questions of life: “Did he see [the pathways of hell]? How is one reborn after a fall? What new pupils restore sight to scorched eyes? Where does war begin, where does combat end?” Her answer is: “Thus, a camellia” (Barbery, 2006). Renee’s answer does not make any rational sense. It is nonrational, and in a beautiful way, it is transcendental. Paloma’s music in the sunlight despite Madame Michel’s death and Jean Arthens’ camellias after a close shave with the abyss… For both Paloma and Jean, it was a moment of beauty that allowed them, not to somehow overcome their grief once and for all or even to be inspired to grit their teeth and endure, but to let go and excuse themselves from always having to save somebody else or save themselves. They no longer had to grapple with “why.” When the self sees its own transcendental non-rational being, it realizes that it is all things already. Conclusion I do not think that my reimagining of the self would escape Derrida’s wrath. As he rightly predicts, my attempt at explaining a nonrational transcendental self also succumbs to the same binary of worldly existence and reason that I critique in the first part of this thesis. In explaining why things are not some way, I find myself relying on the traits of that one way to explain my counterpoint. As Derrida points out, each new term we create in response to previous binaries is yet another appeasement for our constant need to commit violence against ourselves in the form of new justifications and differentiations, in service of so-called systematic thought. However, I believe that there are still important takeaways from my proposition of a nonrational transcendental self. First, while the nonrational transcendental self can express the binary, it is not merely the binary. It is whatever was before the binary existed. The importance of this first point is that we can open our minds to the fact that the binary did not always exist and is therefore not a necessary or restraining metaphysical truth of philosophy. In fact, I think we can come to see that up until the very point prior to the existence-reason binary, either existence or reason could have theoretically functioned like nonrationality. This binary was an arbitrary creation, which took its meaning from the circumstances it arose from (in this case, the existentialist push-back against rationalism). It is a useful binary in that it gives us a language in which to express our thoughts about two important aspects of the human being, but the danger of its arbitrariness is that we may slip into confusing its applicability into a metaphysical and necessary truth. So long as we can understand things existing beyond the binary, we shift ever closer to creating a theory which speaks true to both our experience and knowledge and are better able to step away from the temptation of fitting experience into theory. Likewise, the nonrational transcendental self, as revealed in its experience of a moment of beauty, challenges the strict distinction between the abstract and actual. Return for a moment to Kantian aesthetics. The Kantian subject of the aesthetic judgment is not identical with the nonrational transcendental self that experiences a moment of beauty for the former is defined by its capacities while the latter is unconcerned with its capacities and more engaged with the experience of beauty in that very moment. However, the Kantian notion of aesthetics is highly relevant because it illustrates the subject as able to merge abstraction and experience in the process of “freeplay.” This is significant because it illustrates that we do not have to sacrifice abstraction and conceptualization in order to experience actuality. In their efforts to reject rationalism, the existentialists try to do away with abstraction and conceptualization. However, anti-conceptualization only reinvents, rather than resolves, fundamental tensions. We see this clearly in Kierkegaard’s inverse Hegelianism. Even on the everyday level, it is plain that abandoning the abstract does not lead to freedom. Taking away all methods of conceptualizing and imagining possibilities forces a person to submit to his circumstances. His existence, in becoming only ‘actual’, is no longer connected to what is possible. In contrast, the experience of the nonrational transcendental self embraces abstraction so that a person’s subjectivity can extend beyond actuality into a more moving experience, where unrealized possibilities support the actuality of the present moment. The nonrational transcendental self is the grounds upon which object and subject experience each other as existentially inseparable (e.g. Paloma stands where the music is) as possibility and actuality shift into one another. When we experience the question of life and death (at every moment) or a moment of beauty, all conditions of an existing self are fulfilled without having to give a strict definition of its existence and capabilities. The nonrational transcendent self shows that the human being does not depend on rejecting rationality or proving its own subjectivity in order to exist as it is. Without asking for definition, the nonrational transcendental self appears to us in moments of life and beauty, demanding nothing of us except to pass through with an open mind. This is the aspect of the self that I believe became lost amidst the tensions of the existence-rationalism binary and is now reclaimed through the reimagining of the self. Footnotes 19 The "hollowness of a hollow man" is in reference to T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951). 20 This summary of Richard Brandt’s argument was quoted from: Christopher Cowley, “Suicide is Neither Rational nor Irrational” in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Vol. 9, No.5 (2006): p. 495. 21 I realize that transcendence is a highly loaded term. However, I specifically chose a term with a lot of baggage from the existence-reason binary in order to show that the word can be used outside of the binary. The more obvious term that I might use is “reorientational” or “resituational”. But I used transcendence to show that transcendence and reaching that freedom of shifting a position do not arise only from turning deeper within yourself or by abstracting further and further away, but simply by settling into yourself, as you are. 22 Self-justification in this context is reminiscent of the Kantian subject of the moral judgment and explaining ourselves to others is similar to the ‘ought’ that the Kantian subject of the aesthetic judgment imposes onto others. References Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy (Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane). Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Reason in History (Translated by Robert S. Hartman). Reprint, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1953. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript in The Essential Kierkegaard (Edited by Howard Hong and Edna Hong). Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). Reprint, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1962. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (Translated by Hazel Barnes). Reprint, New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956. Kierkegaard, Søren. Stages on Life’s Way in The Essential Kierkegaard (Edited by Howard Hong and Edna Hong). Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Adorno, Theodor. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor). Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science (Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff). Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Camus, Albert. The Myth Of Sisyphus, And Other Essays (Translated By Justin O'brien). Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Augustine, Saint. The Political Writings Of Saint Augustine (Edited By Henry Paolucci). Reprint, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1962. David, Hume. Two Essays: Of Suicide And Of The Immorality Of The Soul. Reprint, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Library, 2008. Cowley, Christopher. "Suicide Is Neither Rational Nor Irrational". Ethical Theory And Moral Practice 9, no. 5 (2006): 495-504. doi:10.1007/s10677-006-9031-9. Kant, Immanuel. Critique Of Practical Reason (Translated By Lewis White Beck). Reprint, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., 1956. Kant, Immanuel. The Analytic Of The Beautiful In Critique Of Judgment (Translated By Walkter Cerf). Reprint, New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., 1963. Barbery, Muriel. The Elegance Of The Hedgehog. Reprint, New York: Europa Editions, 2006. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems Of Phenomenology. Reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is A Humanism (Translated By Carol Macomber). Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945.

Racial Capitalism Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Challenging the Fallacy of Black Entitlement under Service Delivery Protests. Olerato Mogomotsi University of Cape Town Author Miles Campbell Allie Dolido Sydney Munro Editors Spring 2018 This essay focuses on racial capitalism in post apartheid South Africa, with reference to service delivery protests. I. Introduction There is a domineering narrative within South African white liberal spaces that black people who have failed to escape the shackling cycle of poverty are lazy, incompetent, and sit on their verandas the whole day waiting for a job to fall in their hands (Biko, 2017). This narrative is conventionally understood as ‘black entitlement.’ White liberals erroneously believe that black poor people, who are in fact dispossessed and agentless, do not want to seize the opportunities South Africa has. With reference to the trend and nature of South African service delivery protests in post-Apartheid South Africa, I argue that South Africa has been and still is plagued by systemic racial capitalism that has persisted through South Africa’s transition into democracy. I argue that racial capitalism has manifested through the adoption of a neo-liberal economy, initiated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission compromise. Consequently, the pre- and post-apartheid impact of a racially segregated and unilaterally white-benefiting capitalist economy is a rash on the black mind which has not seen adequate redress. I will first show how Marxist and Liberal authors have attempted to merge the concepts of race and capitalism. I will then highlight the Marxist and Liberal shortcomings in validating racial capitalism as a comprehensible and historically visible concept. I will then call for a holistic re-conceptualization of racial capitalism that makes up for the Marxist and Liberal shortcomings. This new conceptualization will inform the rest of my argument around the fallacy of black entitlement in South Africa. I will show that even a black majoritarian government has not been enough to correct the historic economic disadvantage that presently plagues the black poor majority. II. Conceptualising Racial Capitalism In this paper, I will make use of the micro and macro levels of political analysis to understand South Africa’s racial capitalism. This analysis will observe the condition of black South African lives over time in order to explain the persistence of racial capitalism from Apartheid until today. Additionally, by addressing inconsistencies in the Marxist and Liberal conceptions of race and capitalism, I will argue that the effects of colonialism and South African oppression politics have integrated racial capitalism into South African society. Liberal scholarship on racial capitalism in the Apartheid era focuses disproportionately on the socio-legal systematic framework of Apartheid to explain the relationship between race and capitalism. This literature almost regards race in South Africa as inherently anti-capitalistic and claims capitalism was incompatible with Apartheid, primarily because “free-market” capitalism requires equality of opportunity and agency (Schneider, 2003). In truth, liberal scholarship on the intersection of capitalism and racism in South Africa is incomplete because it fails to fully account for institutionalized racism, dispossession and the displacement of black people in South Africa. Liberal scholarship has completely ignored provisions made for white monopolized capitalism, so much so that an Apartheid-like economy could persevere constructively for 46 years. The writing of Merle Lipton exemplifies the liberal perception of an intersection between race and capitalism under the Apartheid regime which I critique. Lipton took no issue in disapproving of Apartheid on a moral basis. He argues that the legalized systematic exclusion of black people in South Africa was unwarranted and unsustainable (Hirsch, 1987). Lipton argued that South Africa, if it were to revive any sign of liberties or democracy and have a sustainable capitalist economy, needed to end Apartheid and replace it with multi-racialism (Hirsch, 1987). While admitting that the South African economy relied on the coerced, cheap labor of black people, it seems surprising and somewhat contradictory that Lipton also states that capitalism never required or supported Apartheid (Hirsch, 1987). This point by Lipton, that capitalism never required Apartheid, is incomplete because it fails to recognize the role that racism and white supremacy has had in the distribution of socio-economic resources, as well as with regard to the historical discrepancies of intergenerational endowments for Blacks relative to Whites. Lipton’s form of liberalism does not account for disproportionate endowments of historical value, such as education, property, wealth and capital that has enabled the legalization of a systematic exclusion and deskilling of black people. In particular, Liberal writing about South Africa tends to minimize the impact of the Bantustans. Liberal writers downplay the role of black people’s economic contribution (Murray, 1987). It is undeniable, as Colin Murray says, that the Bantustans excluded 'blacks from rights of access to jobs and housing in white South Africa;' thereby making blacks economic foreigners in their own country (Murray, 1987). There is a strong indication that due to a lack of education and skills, black migrant cheap labor was the backbone of the agricultural and mining sectors of the South African economy. This produced a “whites as owners” and “blacks as laborers” framework of traditional capitalism being practiced in South Africa between the 1960s and 1970s (Schneider, 2003). Thus, it is clear that we cannot discount the impact of systematic exclusion from economic activity in the form of adequate welfare provision, labor mobility and deskilling, which incites consistent wealth creation disproportionately along racial lines. It is the discounting of the abovementioned systematic exclusion that accounts for the incompleteness of the liberal attempt to conceptualize racial capitalism. Alternatively, Marxist scholarship places disproportionate emphasis on capitalism’s need for class creation and reproduction, thus ignoring the role of racial subjugation (SACP, 1987). In historicizing class creation through racial lines, Marxist conceptions completely sidelined the historical impact, nature, and intent of settler colonialism in changing the psychology of South African blackness. While I admit that cheap black labor is a manifestation of racial capitalism, racial capitalism cannot be removed from the narrative of settler colonialism in South Africa. The experience of continual dispossession of blacks from their social and economic endowments is informed by the institutionalization of settler colonialism as bedrock of racial capitalism. Marxist conceptions of racial capitalism in South Africa focused primarily on the issue of Black cheap labor. The economy of South Africa was sustained by black unskilled workers, who were forced to migrate from the Bantustans to South African economic hubs such as Johannesburg to find work (SACP, 1987). The views of neo-Marxist writers, such as Nancy Leong, provide a revisionist yet historically deficient view of racial capitalism, stating that racial capitalism is the “process of deriving social or economic value from the racial identity of another person” (Leong 2013). Leong comments on how liberalism has made blackness a desirable entity, which is to be captured, possessed and used (Leong 2013). While this type of Marxist conception focuses on the importance of race relations in driving capitalism, it still lacks an adequate explanation of why Black people are disadvantaged in a capitalist system. It is arguable that more can be done in the literature to hone in on the extent to which settler colonialism was the fundamental determinant the native’s structural economic exploitation. This may further inform how the subjugation of natives in South Africa became a structurally inherited and sustained method of fostering a type of capitalism which is drawn along racial lines. The South African Communist Party’s “Colonialism of a Special Type Document” fittingly substantiates my argument about this point, as it too claims that South Africa’s capitalism maintained the norm of colonial dominance, where the colonial ruling class (White people) and the oppressed black majority live in one country (SACP, 1987). The structural reinforcement of capitalism by the white owning class has not changed with the changed South African Political climate, which should be seen as a factor solidifying racial capitalism in post-Apartheid South Africa. While racial capitalism occurred in the Apartheid system, it is not reliant on that particular regime. Rather, we must understand that racial capitalism exists today because of the intersection of settler colonialism intent, historical dispossession and the deskilling of black people. Thus, by merging Liberal and Marxists concepts of race and capitalism, I conclude that racial capitalism is best defined as follows: Racial capitalism is a malleable term that defines the conditions under which racial identities are used to reinforce coercive power relations, which are seen in the racialization of socio-economic resources. It is informed by the domination of a particular racial group in order to extract economic gain for the benefit of the dominant class (Leong, 2013). Racial capitalism at its core makes use of racial prejudice as an instrument of maintaining unequal participation in the market resource allocation process by reinforcing systematic dispossession and deskilling of the oppressed race under a typically liberal economy ideological set. III. Racial Capitalism in the New South Africa This above-mentioned definition of racial capitalism recognizes that the birth and persistence of the capitalist economy in South Africa is inseparable from the unjust system of domination encapsulated by settler colonialism and the maintenance of black dispossession. This definition indicates that the black body is considered valuable so long as it can provide labor and be remunerated with subsistence wages. This leads to its commodification. I anticipate that liberal critics of my working definition might find that this conception of racial capitalism is incompatible with the current condition of South Africa post-1994, a country that adopted what is argued as the best constitution in the world, and maintains a predominantly black-ruled democratic state. However, I counter the supposed positive effects attributed to the process of democratization and liberal constitutionalism, by arguing that there was very little redress, which has resulted in the transferal of racial capitalism into the democratic state, even after 1994. I argue this because the South African government, at a pivotal time of regime change, chose to focus on a creating a globalized neoliberal economy rather than leveling the intergenerational effects of distorted socio-economic endowments along racial lines. To assert this argument, I will refer particularly to the period of transition and ten years post-transition into democracy. Additionally, I will address the way in which uncertainty and neoliberal compromises informed economic policy in the period of democratic transition in South Africa. There is a vivid indication of how compromise politics, which played out through the African National Congress (ANC) primary and National Party negotiating agents, is coupled with the consolidation of neo-liberalism and the protection of racial capitalism in South Africa. The ANC initially had hoped to enact radical economic transformation in South Africa. This is evident from the drafting of the Freedom Charter by the ANC and its allies in 1955 to the introduction of the radical “Reconstruction and Development Programme” policy in 1996. In particular, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was an ANC document that stated the intent to use the resources of the country to explicitly eradicate Apartheid, moving towards building a non-racialized society (RDP, 1994). The RDP Policy document recognized the effects of “repressive labor policies” under colonialist domination (RDP, 1994). Furthermore, the document also admitted that the economy was built through systemic racial division, and finally recognized that a political democracy could not flourish with the mass of South Africans remaining impoverished, landless and having no tangible prospects for an increasing standard of living (RDP, 1994). Therefore, the ambitions aimed at addressing these observations and conditions around the past and future of South Africa necessarily are ambitions aimed at the eradication of racial capitalism in South Africa. I claim that it is highly probable that if the ANC, in assuming power, had religiously followed the Freedom Charter and the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), racial capitalism would be well on its way to eradication in the foreseeable future. Upon receiving much negative feedback on the RDP plan by organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, the ANC was pressured to put the interests of economic liberalization over racial justice in redressing the impact of historical racialization of wealth creation. This compromise is evident in the 1996 adoption of the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) neoliberal policy, which favored the deregulation of markets and opposed state intervention in the economy (Schneider, 2003). Such privatization clearly ignored the fact that the poor black majority would be made unable to participate, considering there is no substantial effort in GEAR that aims to equitize and equalize the starting positions of black and whites in economic participation (Reddy, 2011). The adoption of neoliberal policy, despite unconvincing theories on neoliberalism and the perfecting nature of capitalism, was a compromise that allowed continued white monopolization with only one or two elements of emancipation for the black poor (Schneider, 2003). In short, the adoption of neoliberal policies after Apartheid protected and consolidated white economic interests. The adoption of an unregulated capitalist market with limited government intervention meant that white people could retain the wealth and endowments they accumulated over 200 years of settler colonialism and Apartheid in South Africa (Schneider, 2003). While it is true that negotiation and compromises during the regime transition made provisions for political emancipation, they did very little in reality to provide sizeable and immediate economic emancipation, leaving South Africa in a crisis of racial capitalism. Despite an attempt at political negotiation and economic compromises, white people still earn five times more than blacks in South Africa, despite the country being majority black (Stats SA, 2017). There is a systemic economic problem, which cannot be removed from the clawing effects of a historically racially discriminating economy; endowments and privileged market access still remain largely skewed to the white minority in South Africa. It is unlikely today that South Africa will be able to get rid of racial capitalism - especially if the government fails to account for the influence of racialized intergenerational endowments. IV. Racial Capitalism as Material Life: Service Delivery Protest and Black Entitlement Service delivery protests in post-Apartheid South disprove the idea that racial capitalism is incompatible with the new black majoritarian democracy. As I have discussed, moderate economic policy approaches to poor black people can, to some extent, be held responsible for the lack of improvement of the material life of black people post-Apartheid. The service delivery protests display the anger in the black living memory of Apartheid, characterized by a feeling of imprisonment under racial capitalism. These protests can be used to explain that the traditional notion of black entitlement must be replaced by a new understanding, which normatively asserts poor black people’s entitlement to decent service delivery from the government. Black entitlement should not imply the unwillingness of black people to be active participants in the free market economy, but rather, black people fighting back the dispossession faced at the hands of their government. The concept of black entitlement is barely developed in existing literature. It is a concept discussed in the early 2000s when the ANC government first attempted to create a welfare state by providing free housing to the poor in the township communities. There were frequent claims that black people were waiting for the government to do everything for them while remaining idle and free riding on taxpayers’ money. Thus, black entitlement has been used to describe a negative character trait which I believe has been fallaciously attributed to the black poor class. I believe that this concept remembers the past with amnesia by ignoring the economic effects of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. By implying that we are all equals today, it wrongly attributes the continuing economic inferiority of black people to their choice to rely on the government rather than uplift themselves. To date, it is clear that neoliberal policies have not benefited those who need economic reform the most in South Africa: The black poor. In 2016, Aljazeera reporter Sophia Hyatt wrote about the living conditions of a 28-year-old woman from the township of Langa in Cape Town. This woman slept on the floor of a small hostel room with her parents, two sisters, and son, and had to use unhygienic and damaged communal toilets a long distance away from the safety of home (Hyatt 2016). This reality is not just hers, but that of over half of South Africa’s population. This low standard of living is common in most townships and slums all over South Africa, which perversely find themselves cheek to cheek with South African economic hubs - for instance, Alexander township borders Sandton, “Africa’s richest square mile”. Despite the government’s mildly socialist attempt to provide basic services, many poor black South Africans still find themselves living the memory and legacy of Apartheid. It is due to these poor living conditions and the constant reminder of the opulence of white monopoly capital that we have seen a large surge in protest action all over South Africa over the last fifteen years. A service delivery protest is essentially public unrest caused by citizens in response to the government’s failure to address their key welfare concerns. The unrest comes in the form of rioting, marching and the general destruction of normalcy in government operations. In the government’s RDP plan, the ANC promised to provide free water, electricity, housing, and education to the South African poor and to create jobs to decrease the 23% unemployment rate (ISS, 2009). However, the government has proven to be highly inefficient in delivering on these promises, resulting in a disgruntled and disillusioned civil society which seeks to express their grievances the only way they believe they will be heard: through the very language of protest that brought black people political freedom under the ANC. Therefore, there is a certain frustration-aggression as put by Ted Gurr, which arises and brings about behavior that has the propensity to be violent (ISS, 2009). As they did during Apartheid, black poor people still have to find employment in urban areas, thus leaving their families in horrendous conditions in slum townships. These people wake up in the early hours of the morning to commute to city centers where they work predominantly in low skilled labor positions, such as cleaning and gardening. Given that their elected government’s policies have done little to improve their living conditions since the end of apartheid, black poor people are increasingly disillusioned with their political emancipation. It is due to these discouraging conditions that poor black South Africans are angry and protest violently all over the country, with what Carl Death terms the return of the imagination of rolling mass action, as seen in the height of civil disobedience in South Africa in the 1980s (Death, 2010). Poor black people have turned to angered demand and mass mobilization to advance their struggle for economic emancipation, replicating the tactics that secured the victory of political emancipation and the end of Apartheid (Death, 2010). This explains the rioting and protesting around dissatisfaction with democratic South Africa, as seen in the service delivery protests. V. A Small Step Towards Conceptualising Black Entitlement as a Response to Racial Capitalism in South Africa It is worth asserting that black people must be entitled to an equal footing in South African economic life. It is also erroneous to believe that the government has adequately addressed the impact of a historically racially segregated economy, law, and society on black opportunities to participate in economic life. The continued underrepresentation and dispossession of black people validate my claim that it is unfair to use black laziness and incompetence to explain black economic inferiority. Rather, racial capitalism must be identified as the cause. However, it is unlikely that racial capitalism will disappear if we do not start viewing black entitlement as a normative prescription - that black people should be entitled to radical economic redress. Black people should continue to feel entitled to adequate services and economic emancipation, as this is the only remaining fuel to the fire of resistance against racial capitalism. To legitimize the concept of racial capitalism as an explanation for South Africa’s present political economy, I recognize that there is one crucial question that needs to be tackled: Will racial capitalism persist over time or was it an isolated historical occurrence? I believe that racial capitalism can explain how historical disparities in endowments necessary for social mobility have generated economic inequality along racial lines. Since white superiority still remains at the core of resource allocation in our society, it is highly unlikely that race-based inequality will dissipate anytime soon, and thus racial capitalism will remain a relevant and powerful explanatory concept. VI. Conclusion By analyzing the intersection of race and capitalism in South Africa, I have shown that both Marxist and Liberal literature fails to account for the historical commodification of black people through racial inequality. While Liberal scholars state that racism is incompatible with capitalism, Marxist scholars erase black suffering at the hands of settler colonialism. The depiction of racial capitalism offered in this paper better represents the complexities of race relations in neo-liberal South Africa. Furthermore, my paper has challenged fallacies around black entitlement by highlighting that racial disparities in socioeconomic endowments have not been redressed. Thus, I have shown that irrespective of regime type in South Africa, racial capitalism has, and still does, dispossess and disempower the black poor, leaving them to feel that demanding economic emancipation through protest is the only way to make their voices heard. References Biko, Hlumelo. "Racist Stereotyping Threatens SA". The M&G Online, 2017. https://mg.co.za/article/2017-04-18-racist-stereotyping-threatens-sa/. Schneider, Geoffrey. "Neoliberalism And Economic Justice In South Africa: Revisiting The Debate On Economic Apartheid". Review Of Social Economy 61, no. 1, 2003: 23-50. doi:10.1080/0034676032000050257. Hirsch, Alan. "Capitalism And Apartheid Capitalism And Apartheid: South Africa, 1910–1986. By Merle Lipton. Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1986.". The Journal Of African History 28, no. 03 (1987): 450. doi:10.1017/s0021853700030243. MURRAY, COLIN. "DISPLACED URBANIZATION: SOUTH AFRICA's RURAL SLUMS*". African Affairs 86, no. 344 (1987): 311-329. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097916. "The Path To Power -- Colonialism Of A Special Type". SACP, 1989. http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2638#3.1. Leong, Nancy. "Racial Capitalism". Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8, 2018: 2151-2226. History, SA. The Reconstruction And Development Programme (RDP). Ebook. Reprint, SA History, 1994. http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/the_reconstruction_and_development_programm _1994.pdf. Reddy, E.S. "Freedom Charter And The United Nations". South African History Online, 2018. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/freedom-charter-and-%20united-nations-es-reddy. Writer, Staff. "Whites Earn 5 Times More Than Blacks In South Africa: Stats SA". Business Tech, 2017. https://businesstech.co.za/news/wealth/153485/whites-earn-5-times-more-than-blacks-in-south-af rica-stats-sa/. Hyatt, Sophia. "South Africa's Housing Crisis: A Remnant Of Apartheid". Aljazeera.Com, 2016. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/09/south-africa-housing-crisis-remnant-aparth eid-160929094237631.html. "The Reasons Behind Service Delivery Protests In South Africa". Polity.Org.Za, 2009. http://www.polity.org.za/article/the-reasons-behind-service-delivery-protests-in-south-africa-200 9-08-05. Death, C. "Troubles At The Top: South African Protests And The 2002 Johannesburg Summit". African Affairs 109, no. 437 (2010): 555-574. doi:10.1093/afraf/adq039. Osterhammel, Jurgen. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Translated By Shelley L. Frisch). Reprint, Princeton: Markus Wiener Pub., 2010.

The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Volume III, Issue I scroll to view articles Current Issue Philosophy A Gravity Model of Civic Deviance: Justice, Natural Duties, and Reparative Responsibilities Woojin Lim Can You Rationally Disagree with a Prediction Market? Nick Whitaker The Panacea Problem: Indifference, Servility, and Kantian Beneficence Benjamin Eneman Read More Politics We the Prisoners: Considering the Anti Drug Act of 1986, the War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration in the United States Sophia Scaglion Read More Economics Read More State-Owned Banks and the Promise of an Equitable Financial Sector Elias van Emmerick No Place Like Home: Extending the Equity Home Bias Theory to Foreign Portfolio Investment in Emerging Markets Qiyuan Zheng Applications for JPPE Now open! See Available Positions

State-Owned Banks and the Promise of an Equitable Financial Sector Elias van Emmerick Pomona College April 2021 This paper will propose that state-owned banks resolve many of the issues facing commercial banks today. To substantiate this claim, it will investigate specific areas where a state-owned bank would produce more favorable outcomes than a commercial bank, trace the steps required to establish such a bank, and evaluate a contemporary example of a state-owned bank, the Sparkassen 1. Introduction The financial sector increasingly takes up space in our economy. What originated as a means to an end (a middleman to collect and distribute funds) has for many become an end unto itself. Top students from prestigious universities across the globe desperately pursue jobs at investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. For example, more than a third of Harvard’s class of 2017 pursued finance or consulting upon graduating. In fact, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries make up one fifth of domestic GDP, more than any other sector. At the same time, this industry has often brought us close to financial collapse. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz describes the financial sector’s work as being at least partly “rent-seeking”: an economic activity that redistributes wealth (often from the poor to the rich), but does not actually generate meaningful increases in overall economic growth. As an economist would put it, they do not grow the pie, they simply take a larger slice of it. This paper will aim to investigate to what extent state-owned commercial banks could alleviate some of the major issues related to the financial sector we see today, and how they could do so. Subsequently, the paper will detail how the creation of a public bank could happen, as well as evaluate two existing state-owned banks, the Bank of North Dakota and the German Sparkassen. Finally, it will summarize contemporary efforts to establish government-owned commercial banks in the United States. Throughout this paper, I use a number of terms in a particular way. Specifically, I will make frequent use of the terms “liquidity,” “public,” and “bank.” I will take “liquidity” to mean the M2 money supply: the amount of cash, checkings and savings deposits, and time deposits available in the economy at a given time. “Public” will refer to ownership of an entity by the government, rather than an entity being publicly traded on the stock market. Finally, “bank” will refer to the commercial kind unless otherwise noted. This last distinction is important to draw, as many of the conclusions reached in this paper would not transfer to investment or merchant banks. 2. The Rationale Behind a Public Bank America has had a tumultuous relationship with private financial institutions, and a number of historical figures struggled with determining the role a finance sector should play. Andrew Jackson wrote that “if Congress has the right under the constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.” Jackson referred to what many contemporary economists consider to be a significant flaw of the private banking system: control over the money supply. Economists traditionally assume that the federal government regulates the money supply. The Federal Reserve (the Fed) can control the money supply by trading Treasury notes with commercial banks, or the Treasury itself can physically print more bills in order to increase the money supply. It is inherently desirable to have a government without a profit motive perform this function—unchecked increases in the money supply would lead to devastating inflation and a loss of faith in our currency. Furthermore, this also means that the government is able to control the amount of money in the economy during times of crisis, and to some extent prevent liquidity from drying up. Control over the money supply is a useful policy tool that is best wielded by the state, with the interest of its constituents in mind. The reality is that, by and large, the money supply is heavily influenced by the decisions of commercial banks. Economists have reached a consensus on what is known as the “fractional reserve theory of money creation.” This theory states that banks must lend out a percentage of each deposit they receive, equal to the total deposit minus the “reserve requirement”⁠—an amount set by the Federal Reserve that banks are required to retain of each deposit— as an insurance against bank runs. After the bank lends out this percentage of a deposit, the person who receives the loan theoretically deposits that money in another account, where a part of it is loaned out, and so on. Every person in this chain now has additional money in their account, and their spending decisions will be made accordingly. The original deposit was multiplied; thus, money was “created.” Conversely, banks may also decide to call back their loans or refuse to issue new ones. In effect, this results in a removal of money from the money supply. The diagram below illustrates how liquidity in the system increases through this process. Image 1: Illustration of the fractional reserve theory of money creation given a 10% reserve requirement The unfortunate truth is that this method of money creation works to exacerbate any swings in the wider economic environment. When the economy is heating up (and thus is experiencing inflationary pressures), banks will be more eager to lend money, which in turn will increase the money supply, thereby further increasing inflation. When the economy is in a rut, fewer loans will be extended, contracting the money supply and further pushing down spending and aggravating potential deflation. When banks follow “rational incentives,” meaning that they become less risk averse during periods of growth and more risk averse during economic slowdowns, the economy does not always benefit. One could argue that the Fed is tasked with preventing these swings. During economic booms they raise interest rates, which curbs lending, and during busts they lower them, which in turn boosts spending. The problem is that the government is now acting as a middleman, when this is a system they are supposed to have complete control over. Commercial banks’ role as distributor of liquidity has other downsides. Since these banks are asked to maximize shareholder value, they are incentivized to extend capital only to those who are likely to repay it. Individuals or businesses that are deemed high-risk are penalized with high interest rates and other unfavorable loan terms. This is not incompatible with prevalent economic theories. The bank is assuming the risk, and for taking on higher risk should be eligible to receive a larger reward. However, a closer examination reveals the perversity behind this idea. Access to capital is essential for a number of activities that can lead to prosperity. Home ownership, starting a business, or going to college all typically require some form of lending. Low-income individuals are thus required to pay a higher price, both in absolute and relative terms, for these opportunities. It is morally bankrupt, as well as socially undesirable, to make loans more expensive for those who already have very little, and there is substantial evidence that this system contributes to the “poverty trap.” Studies have shown that low-income individuals on average do pay more for any kind of loan. The Federal Reserve also found a positive correlation between income and credit score, and a number of other studies have further shown that minorities typically have lower credit scores, even when the data is controlled for disparities in income. There is a strong negative correlation between credit scores and interest rates payable on loans—the lower your score, the more you are asked to pay. It is understandable that banks employ this system, but that does not mean that it is beneficial to society as a whole. In essence, the credit score system is a regressive tax—the poorer you are, the more you pay. The graph below shows the average credit score of each income group on a bar chart and superimposes the median mortgage rate for each credit score. There is a clear positive correlation between credit score and income level, and a negative correlation between credit score and median mortgage rate. This data shows that income is in turn negatively correlated with mortgage rates; that is, the lower one’s income, the higher their mortgage rate is likely to be. Image 2: Median credit score and mortgage rate versus income. A public bank could step in and resolve this issue. It could extend loans not with the intent of making a profit, but rather with the intent of stimulating the economy. This might mean providing loans to low-income communities at break-even interest rates, as they are likely to spend that money in a way that benefits the wider economy. A public bank could further act as a tool for policymakers. If politicians want to stimulate homeownership and reduce emissions, mortgages could become cheaper and car financing more expensive. A public bank would provide a direct way of injecting money into desirable areas of the economy. Banks’ focus on generating returns for their shareholders costs the general public in a number of other ways as well. Most Americans have their checking and saving accounts with one of the major banks—37.6% of all deposits were placed with one of the five largest banks, and 30.82% were placed with one of the three largest. In fact, the five largest American banks control 56.9% of all assets held by U.S. banks. Today’s financial sector can be (and has been) accurately described as an oligopoly—a few key players control such a significant share of the market that they are able to work together and set rates in a way that is favorable to them. In this case, savings rates are artificially held down. As mentioned before, banks make money from each dollar they receive in deposits. Unfortunately, almost none of that money returns to their clients. Savings accounts at most commercial banks generate negligible interest, and checking accounts frequently cost money for those who deposit under a certain amount. Interest rates offered on savings accounts remain low, even as the Fed has increased its discount rate. The below graph shows the federal funds rate as compared to the average interest rate Americans received on savings below $100,000. Both were lowered after the 2008 financial crisis in an effort to discourage saving and encourage spending, but the federal funds rate has since increased significantly. In contrast, the interest rate on savings accounts has remained mostly stagnant. The profits banks make on deposits can be approximated by the difference between these two rates—the less they pay to depositors and the more they charge for loans, the more profitable lending becomes. Image 3: Average interest rate on savings accounts versus the federal funds rate A public bank would primarily aim to further public interest rather than make a profit, and is therefore more likely to offer a savings rate that closely mirrors the discount rate. Not only would this provide customers with a better alternative to the rates offered by commercial banks, it might also force banks to match that rate if they want to retain their clients. In effect, this would constitute a redistribution of wealth from the banks and their shareholders to the general public. Although online banks currently offer higher interest rates on savings accounts, they are rather niche and lack the visibility to threaten larger banks. An accessible, well-known public bank could succeed where these online banks have failed and significantly drive up the average interest rate on savings accounts. A lack of profit incentive would also reduce a public bank’s exposure to risk. In the years leading up to the Great Recession, nearly every bank filled their balance sheet with subprime mortgages and risky derivatives, even though they were aware of the risks associated with these products. Banks simply could not explain to their shareholders that they were going to hold off on products that were generating sizeable returns for their competitors. Commercial banks’ profit incentive has at times generated genuine financial innovation, but more often than not has caused them to cut corners and harm communities. Wells Fargo, for example, was convicted of engaging in predatory lending throughout the US in the years leading up to 2008. The bank knowingly extended credit to those who were unlikely to pay it back, charging high upfront fees and then passing the actual debt on to other firms. Wells Fargo knew the risks involved, but ultimately decided short-term profits were more important. Unlike traditional banks, a public bank would not answer to shareholders, but rather to elected officials who represent the public’s best interest. Research has already shown that banks who answer to a large number of shareholders are more risk-averse than those who answer only to a select group of the corporate elite. These findings could be extrapolated to infer that a bank that answers to the general population would be significantly more risk-averse than current financial institutions. Public banks clearly offer a solution to many of the issues our financial system struggles with today. A wholly different incentive structure would allow these banks to deploy capital where it would stimulate the economy, rather than where it would only generate profits for the bank. The absence of a responsibility to shareholders would lead to higher interest rates on savings accounts and the adoption of a more sustainable risk profile. As a competitor to commercial banks, a public bank would realign the industry to be more concerned with the needs of its customers. Regardless of a public bank’s merits, the US is currently home to just one public bank, whose assets total $7 billion–about 0.004% of total commercial bank assets. The next section will investigate the steps required to create a public bank and discuss potential pitfalls in the process. 3. Creating a Public Bank During the 2008 recession, the government could have created a national public bank simply by taking over an existing commercial bank. The value of most commercial banks’ balance sheets had dropped drastically following the collapse of mortgage-backed securities, making them an easy target for takeovers. Although this solution may have ultimately generated more returns for taxpayers and fewer for wealthy shareholders than bank bail-outs did, it would have created a set of unique and difficult-to-solve challenges. Balance sheets would have to be cleaned of toxic and risky assets, and the bank would have to gradually reduce its exposure to financial products that are not in line with the mission statement of a public bank. Entire divisions that handled these products would have had to be laid off, and many clients might find that services they used would no longer be on offer. Luckily, our current economic outlook is a lot rosier than it was a decade ago, and few banks (perhaps with the exception of the ever-troubled Wells Fargo) seem in danger of failing any time soon. A public bank would thus need to be created from scratch—something that would allow for greater control over the bank’s structure and design. A number of states and cities (Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.) have conducted or are in the process of conducting feasibility studies for the creation of regional public banks, and as such, there is a substantial range of literature available with detailed descriptions of the steps required to start such a bank. Although many studies have focused on public banks as providers of capital for infrastructure investment and providers of solutions for state financing needs, the basic principle behind their construction remains the same. The technicalities behind a bank’s creation are simple. The bank needs to have sufficient assets to begin lending, a few employees, and physical branches. Typically, feasibility studies assume the city or state responsible for creating the bank would move its current cash reserves to the new bank, thereby providing capital without the need for loans or other costly financing techniques. The only existing American public bank—the Bank of North Dakota—was initially financed by a $2 million bond offering in 1919, which would amount to about $29 million today. Research suggests that, due to the increased complexity of the contemporary economy, the required capitalization would be closer to $325 million. Since most states hold a multiple of that amount in commercial banks currently, it is unlikely that a bond offering would be necessary today. California, for example, holds nearly $15 billion in its “rainy day” fund alone. A public bank would have the local government as its sole shareholder, and any returns it made would be returned to the state or city in which it is located. As such, public banks would prevent capital drain to out-of-state bondholders and keep profits within the local economy. The creation of a public bank would be relatively uncomplicated, and a variety of feasibility studies have cited high potential upsides. For example, a public bank in New Jersey would generate about $16-21 million in additional state output, and raise state income by about $3.8-5.2 million, for every $10 million lent out. Furthermore, for every $10 million lent out the bank would add roughly 60-93 new jobs. Yet, strong opposition to the idea exists. In Maine, a bill to commission a study on the effects of a public bank failed to pass the state legislature, even though 72% of small businesses and farmers in the state supported the creation of a state-owned bank. Opponents often cite currently adequate availability of credit through commercial channels and increased risk to state assets as arguments against a government-controlled bank. Internationally, the idea has also fallen out of favor with economists, who claim that public banks are often inefficient and influenced by political pressures. The next section of this paper will investigate a current example of a state-owned banking system to determine the merits of these arguments. 4. Public Banks Today a. The Bank of North Dakota The Bank of North Dakota (BND) is the United States’ only existing example of a government-owned bank, and it is often cited as an example of the potential benefits of such an institution. The bank certainly has reported impressive figures since its founding in 1919. As shown in the graph below, it has made a net profit every year since its founding, even during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Image 4: Yearly profits of the Bank of North Dakota Additionally, the bank has managed to return much of that profit to the state government, keeping North Dakota from running a budget deficit when other revenue sources have fallen short. The historical context surrounding the bank’s founding is oddly reminiscent of our contemporary situation—around the start of the 20th century, a populist movement in North Dakota renounced the high fees farmers were being charged by out-of-state financiers and pushed for a local bank that would be tasked with “promoting agriculture, commerce and industry.” Local commercial banks were concerned that a public bank would drive them out of business and managed to convince the legislature to impose strict limits on what would become the BND. Initially, the bank was “prohibited from opening branches, engaging in retail banking, and providing commercial lending other than farm real estate loans.” A number of these restrictions were later loosened, but the bank still is not a real substitute for a commercial bank. The BND operates conservatively, shows itself to be risk averse, and sees “maintaining a strong and stable balance sheet” as a key priority. In this sense, it has been hard to use the success of the BND as an argument for public banks in the broader United States. The bank does provide affordable loans for small businesses (albeit not for individual consumers), but “roughly 50 percent of the bank’s loan portfolio consists of loan participations and loan purchases from community banks,” rather than regular loans. During financial crises, the bank helps to maintain liquidity in the markets, but it does so by purchasing loans from smaller banks rather than by actively extending loans. The BND is a successful experiment in state-ownership of banks, but the restrictions imposed on it by the legislature prevent it from being a truly transformative force. Its lack of access to consumers and emphasis on cooperation with commercial banks mean that most North Dakotans are still forced to obtain the majority of their financial services from for-profit companies. Furthermore, the legislature’s eagerness to use profits from the BND for state expenditures means that the bank is still required to make a profit—the only difference is that this money goes back into the local community, rather than towards mostly wealthy shareholders. The bank’s conservative approach to investments may also not produce socially optimal outcomes seeing as many investments with significant potential upsides, such as small business loans or mortgages for low-income families, have a fairly high risk profile. Instead of maintaining a low-risk balance sheet, the BND could focus on providing loans that “serve a social purpose but that the private sector would find too risky.” It is also important to note that the BND has operated independently of political forces. Rick Clayburgh, president of the North Dakota Bankers Association and former state tax commissioner and state legislator, has said: “Our legislature... has kept their politics out of the governance of the Bank of North Dakota”. The supposed interdependence between public banks and the legislature is an oft-cited criticism against public banks, and this paper will explore the veracity of this claim further in the following chapters. In the case of the BND, concerns of the legislature influencing the bank’s decisions appear to be unfounded. The Bank of North Dakota is a successful institution, but it has hardly lived up to the disruptive potential of a public bank. More than anything else, the BND shows that merely having a state-owned bank is not enough to achieve the goals set out at the start of this paper—a bank has to provide a viable alternative to the commercial banking sector, as well as have a set goal of promoting investments that serve a social purpose, if it is to meaningfully change the way the finance sector operates today. b. Germany’s Public Banks: The Sparkassen Germany’s commercial financial sector consists of three “pillars”: commercial banks, cooperative banks (owned by their customers), and public banks. Examples of the last include the aforementioned Sparkassen and Landesbanken, which engage in wholesale banking, as well as the LBS Bayerische Landesbausparkasse, a public sector loan and building association. Sparkassen are a unique example of state-owned, easily accessible banks that offer basic commercial banking services to consumers and small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The Sparkassen have been operating since 1778 and were originally founded by merchants hoping to support local communities. Today, the Sparkassen have over fifteen thousand branches and control over €2 trillion in assets. The banks operate in a decentralized manner with strong geographic boundaries, meaning that each city or region has its own Sparkasse that serves local clients and provides loans for local investments. The banks are owned by the cities or regions in which they operate but are also are backed by a national organization that maintains a “rainy day fund” which Sparkassen can tap into, so that a region of Germany experiencing financial distress can obtain support from Sparkassen in prospering regions. Image 5: Representative structure of the Sparkassen system Germany’s Sparkassen are mandated by law to serve the public interest and promote regional development. In fact, their success is measured not by returns generated for shareholders or profit, but by their impact on the communities they serve. Stakeholder value, rather than shareholder value, is the key metric by which these banks are judged. Instead of generating profits for those who invested in the bank, the Sparkassen are required to deliver returns for local stakeholders. Such stakeholders include local residents, small businesses, and municipal governments. The banks are highly popular with their audience, with about 70% of all SMEs obtaining their financing from a Sparkasse. About 60% of all Germans interact with these banks in some way, with low-income families specifically making up the largest part of the Sparkassen’s customers. This broad reach is partly because of their indiscriminate approach to banking—they are mandated to not deny anyone a savings account, and they must provide the same rate of return for each customer. Furthermore, the legislature explicitly states that Sparkassen are supposed to “satisfy the credit demands of local businesses.” Besides serving customers and enterprises, Sparkassen fund socially desirable projects with the express intent of promoting the public interest. The banks together provided €488 million (about $550 million) to social projects in 2018 alone, and a 2015 report estimated that the banks added about €20 billion in value to local communities that year, equal to about 0.66% of Germany’s 2015 GDP. They also provide significant funding for start-ups, infrastructure repairs, and other socially desirable activities. Notwithstanding the several benefits associated with the Sparkassen system, the banks have been regularly criticized by European and American economists alike. Many of these critics primarily take issue with the concept of a state-owned bank rather than with a specific issue present in the system, but others have identified some salient flaws in the way the Sparkassen are run. Political involvement in the day-to-day operations of the banks has been and remains an area of concern. A study by the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel notes that, in the eight states they surveyed, 83% of the Sparkassen’s board chairs were current county heads or municipality heads. In five out of eight states, every single board chair was a current politician. More broadly, 18% of board members were politicians. Moreover, in the only state where politicians publicly declare their income, board chair fees made up an average of 12% of a politician’s income. The mayor of Regensburg, the fourth-largest city of Bavaria, is currently standing trial for accepting significant campaign donations from a real estate developer, allegedly in exchange for a favorable loan from the Sparkasse where the mayor held a board seat. Such cases are rare, but the degree of entwinement between politicians and the public banks is certainly cause for concern. Little research has been done on inefficiencies in the Sparkassen system caused by political entanglement, so the severity of these findings remains unclear. An American public bank could certainly model itself after the Sparkassen, but it might benefit from an explicit separation between currently serving politicians and the bank itself, if only to maintain public trust in the system. 5. Looking Forward: Public Banking Initiatives in the United States The public banking movement has seen a resurgence of sorts in the last decade, and a number of states and cities have introduced legislation to either establish a public bank or to conduct feasibility studies. Most notably, current New Jersey governor Phil Murphy ran his campaign partly on the promise of establishing a public bank, and he sponsored a bill on his first day in office to achieve that goal. Maine, Vermont, and New York have also voted on bills to establish state banks. Image 6: Public banking efforts by state Feasibility studies have generally predicted positive results. For example, a 2011 feasibility study predicted that a public bank would generate 3,500 new jobs in Maine, a 2013 study found that a public bank would create about 2,500 new jobs and $200 million in value added to the economy in Vermont, and a study for the city of Santa Fe found that every $1 million in lending from a public bank would generate an additional ten jobs in the local economy. Exceptions are the feasibility studies for California and DC. Both studies found that establishing a public bank would be legally difficult and capital intensive. The DC study is interesting in that it heavily relied on advice from the Federal Reserve, which stated that the income a city or state can gain by having a public bank is "relatively minor" and that the risk of losses is "real.” It is important to note that the Federal Reserve might have an inherent aversion to public banks, as these are not placed under the Fed’s supervision. Aside from this criticism, the DC study also found that public banks would spur local economic development and infrastructure investment, as well as reduce risk exposure of the financial system. The final version of the DC report is still being edited and is due to be released sometime later this year. Feasibility studies may have produced mixed results, but there has been nothing mixed about the legislative response to the idea of public banks. Maine’s bill was sent back from committee with a majority saying it should not pass. Vermont’s bill to establish a public bank did not pass either (although the legislature did approve $350 million in local investment instead), and New Jersey seems to have put its plans for a public bank on hold. As of today, North Dakota remains the only state with a public bank. The idea is seen as overly socialist by many, and as overly complex and costly by others. The DC feasibility study claimed that direct government spending towards socially beneficial programs would be far less complex and costly than establishing a public bank, which seems to be an argument that many lawmakers have bought into. Legal challenges also cause many legislators to view public banks unfavorably. Specifically, many state constitutions have provisions against “lending the credit of the state.” However, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Craig v. Missouri holds that such provisions “[do] not interfere with the power of a state to authorize banks to issue bank notes in the form of due-bills or of similar character, intended to pass as currency on the faith and credit of the bank itself, and not of the state which authorizes their issuance.” As such, banks (public or commercial) are able to provide credit that passes as currency. In Briscoe v. Bank of Commonwealth of Kentucky (1837), the Court held that Kentucky’s state bank did not violate the Constitution, as its loans contained “no pledge of the faith of the state for the notes issued by the institution.” The issue at hand is whether activities that are at the core of the bank’s operations (lending, investing, etc.) are explicitly backed by a government guarantee. If so, public banks would have an unfair advantage over private banks. So far, no proposal for a state bank has indicated that the bank would rely on such a state-sanctioned “pledge of faith,” and as such, it is unlikely that the constitutionality of a public bank could be challenged on these grounds. Furthermore, the Bank of North Dakota is proof that it is constitutionally permissible to operate a public bank. 6. Conclusion: An Uncertain Future There is a strong case to be made for the establishment of regional public banks throughout the United States. Increased control over the money supply, greater access to affordable loans for low-income families and small businesses, higher returns on savings accounts, and a lower risk profile would all result from having a public bank in place. As it stands, commercial banks largely engage in rent-seeking behavior. Predatory lending practices, low interest on savings accounts, and high credit card rates serve to generate profits for large banks by taking money from the economically vulnerable. The IMF has found that, as the financial sector grows relative to the size of the economy, inequality increases. Recent research by economists at Columbia University confirms this rise in inequality, and further found that this effect is not significantly offset by the easier access to credit financial markets supposedly provide. As it stands, encouraging progress is being made in many places. Feasibility studies are an important first step in moving this idea into the mainstream, and we might soon see a bill to establish a state bank appear in New Jersey. However, the unfortunate truth remains that lawmakers view public banks unfavorably. Beyond the practical hurdles associated with establishing one, there seems to be a general sentiment that a public bank would not fit with the capitalist ideals of the United States. Lenin’s claim that “without [public] banks, socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the ‘state apparatus’ which we need to bring about socialism [...]” has fundamentally linked the idea of a state bank with an overly leftist vision for many. I would argue that a public bank is fundamentally American. It is a state apparatus that enables the government to more efficiently support entrepreneurship, local communities, and infrastructure. A public bank, if given proper direction, could facilitate the achievement of the elusive American Dream. The Founders vocally opposed monopolies, championed a stable currency, and believed all should be able to acquire property and benefit from public infrastructure. Stiglitz wrote that, Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable. [...] The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity. Commercial banks today are hurdles keeping us from innovation, wealth creation, and achieving equality. A bank should facilitate the dreams of entrepreneurs from all backgrounds, not just those from Silicon Valley. It should not charge the poor more than the rich. In many ways, commercial banks violate some of the core values on which this country was founded. In short, there is nothing un-American about a state bank. 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Divisive Identities: Exploring the Interplay of Personal and Social Identities Ella Neeka Sawhney Author Aimee Zheng Faith Li Editors I. Abstract Personal and social identity, whilst existing as two different entities, combine and interact to form our overall individual identities. Personal identity centres around how an individual’s fundamental beliefs and commitments are shaped by their personal experiences, whilst social identity arises from one’s belonging to various social groups, including one’s social relationships. This essay juxtaposes arguments from Amartya Sen and Bikhu Parekh to argue that our personal and social identities are profoundly intertwined and thus should not be viewed as separate from one another. By drawing on theoretical frameworks and real-life examples, I demonstrate how Parekh’s model offers a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of individual identity which encompasses personal and social dimensions as dynamic entities. Thus, through a critical examination of Parekh’s model and Sen’s respective criticisms, this essay concludes that Parekh’s model, by acknowledging the plurality and diversity of identities as well as the complex interplay between personal and social identities, provides a robust defence of individual identity as comprised of personal and social identities, expertly addressing concerns raised by Sen. II. Introduction Classical problems within this idea of personal identity can be categorised into families. For instance, the persistence problem and the personhood puzzle both focus on questions regarding the continuity and ethical implications of self-identity. I choose to concentrate on ‘The Characterisation Question’ which delves into what comprises our personalities. This question is important as it is one that we grapple with daily, permeating all aspects of our lives. Specifically, I focus on the debate between Parekh and Sen, as I find this debate to have strong implications for understanding individual identity In this essay, I investigate Parekh’s twofold model of individual identity, scrutinising its effectiveness in addressing the concerns raised by Sen. My thesis contends that through his emphasis on plurality and diversity, Parekh efficiently responds to Sen’s concerns about the divisive potential of social identities, ultimately undermining Sen’s criticisms. First, I explore the intricacies of the concept of philosophical (including both personal and social) identity. Next, I explain Parekh’s model and juxtapose it against Sen’s criticisms. I then evaluate whether Parekh’s theory can escape Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism. Lastly, I debate Sen’s critique of over-conformity to social roles as a result of combining social and personal identity. Prima facie, our identity addresses the ubiquitous question ‘Who am I?’, encompassing the beliefs, ideas and qualities that shape a person’s character. Yet, philosophical identity, namely individual identity, explores the intricacies of how an individual may deduce their identity from their various distinctive features. This individual identity is what “distinguishes” (Parekh, 2009, p. 267) agents, functioning as a “predicate” (Sollberger, 2013) used to describe specific attributes of a subject and identify its differentiators. Individual identity comprises two components: personal (shaped by one’s personal life experiences) and social (arising from one’s belonging in groups or a relationship), according to Parekh (2009). By examining personal identity one can better understand and analyse ‘The Characterisation Question’: ‘What is it that makes me the unique individual I am?’, a question originally termed by Schechtman (2007) who presented ‘The Characterisation Question’ as: “The question of which beliefs, values, desires, and other psychological features make someone the person she is.. [it] concerns identity in the sense of what is generally called… an ‘identity crisis’” (p. 1) My analysis of ‘The Characterisation Question’ throughout the remainder of this essay investigates the features which define one’s personal identity and how they render a person differentiable from others. Moreover, viewing personal identity as “contingent and temporary” (Olson, 2023) suggests that one’s definition of self changes throughout one’s lifetime. For example, an only child’s identity shifts when becoming an older sibling, following their younger sibling’s birth. Hence, personal identity evolves alongside changing exogenous factors and is influenced by introspective processes, such as changing religious beliefs. III. Parekh’s model Parekh’s (2009) model of “overall” (p. 268) identity, alternatively referred to as individual identity, encompasses both personal and social identity. Parekh’s concept of personal identity centres around how an individual’s “fundamental beliefs and commitments” (ibid., p. 267) shape their perceptions of the world and their role within it. This recurrent journey of “self-definition” (ibid., p. 268) permits individuals to make sense of their convictions, including values, beliefs and opinions, thus developing their inner comprehension of personal identity. Moreover, Parekh describes social identity as a key aspect of individual identity, arising from one’s belonging to various social groups. He interprets social identity as “inherently plural” (ibid., p. 267), acknowledging its multi-layered influence on a person’s identity. Social identity includes relationships and groups a person feels they belong to, which play a crucial role in shaping their self-perception. Hence, these interconnected layers contribute to one’s personal identity, allowing social identity to, more broadly, impact individual identity. Yet, an interpretive challenge lies in Parekh’s vague explication of the relationship between personal and social identity, leaving the permeability of the boundary, and the extent of their interaction unclear. These ambiguities in Parekh’s model make it difficult to interpret how personal and social identities coalesce. This is showcased in Parekh’s example of the two teachers: “For one it is nothing but a job that she would readily give up if she got a better one”, for the other “being a teacher means a great deal to her. She identifies with it, sees it as an integral part of who she is and would not even dream of giving it up” (ibid., p. 274) Here, the first teacher is mechanically fulfilling their role, while the other integrates teaching into their personal identity. This quote illustrates the challenge of unravelling the complex, and deeply intertwined web of overlapping personal and social identities. The interpretive challenge concerning Parekh’s claim that may arise here is how individuals navigate their identities and to what extent their social identities integrate into their overall identities. Thus, I acknowledge that there are some tensions within Parekh’s view that are slightly contradictory. Namely, when comparing this difficulty in interpreting Parekh’s view of the interaction between personal and social identities with Parekh’s persistent assertion that our personal and social identities are inherently linked, inconsistencies arise. This is something that I shall discuss further in my discussion of ‘dogmatic sectarianism’. IV. Sen’s concerns Sen (2009) presents three key objections to Parekh’s model of personal and social identity which I outline below: The proposition that “a change in social affiliation would make one a different person altogether” is flawed. Our personal identity shouldn’t be “combinable” with our social identity as our social identities can change, without our overall identity changing (p. 286). “One’s personal identity is not threatened by one’s decision to depart from the activities of others belonging to the same group.” Moreover, over-emphasising our social identity results in a lack of reasoning and mutual understanding between members from different groups (p. 287). “Once the priority of a social affiliation is accepted as an integral part of one’s ‘overall identity’, something substantial is lost.” This leads to a person’s lack of deviation from their group’s views and affiliations (p. 288). Sen critiques Parekh’s viewpoint on the combinability of personal and social identity. Specifically, he faults Parekh for overemphasising the impact of social identity on overall identity, asserting that his view is likely to foster dissent hence contributing to societal divides. Sen (2007, pp. xiii-xiv) further encourages the separation of our social influences from our personal decisions. This derives from his argument that a singular or “dominant” social “classification” may hinder deviation from one’s societal or cultural norms, impeding personal decision-making abilities. He stresses that acknowledging our “pluralit[y] of identity” prevents rigid adherence to social groups so that our personal decisions are not entirely dictated by them. A. Dogmatic sectarianism A key feature of Sen’s (2009, p. 286) first criticism is that Parekh’s model is illogical in strongly combining personal and social identity because this view suggests that a change in social affiliation will result in an entire change of personality. Thus, Sen reasons that, according to Parekh’s model “a change of social affiliation would make one a different person altogether” (ibid.). From this, Sen asserts that a likely consequence is the emergence of “dogmatic sectarianism”, meaning that individuals unwaveringly adhere to a strict set of beliefs which often leads to ignorance towards the views of other groups. This creates a lack of willingness to deviate from these norms, as well as ignorance towards and dismissal of other groups’ perspectives, breeding intolerance and hindering understanding between groups. I applaud Sen for identifying the dangers of dogmatic sectarianism. Specifically, he recognises a person’s reluctance to stray from their group’s collective views can foster strong antagonism towards outsiders with different opinions. For Sen, one must separate their personal and social identities to prevent this phenomenon. He asserts that through uncoupling one’s personal and social identity, one can retain a part of their social identity and remain associated with that social group without sacrificing one’s entire personal identity. Hence, Sen warns against Parekh’s model which arguably sees individuals as rigidly tying their personal identity to their social identity. An example supporting Sen’s reflections involves the separation of personal identity from religious affiliations, which falls within social identity. The consolidation of personal and social identity can lead to “sectarian violence” (ibid., p.287). Per Sen’s second criticism: individuals overly emphasise their religious identity and struggle to find areas of agreement or understanding with other religious groups. This is evident in the Northern Ireland conflict; a strong ethnoreligious divide which created a divergence between Catholics and Protestants (Ferguson, 2016). For the Northern Irish, this rigid adherence to religious groups blurred the lines between religious and social identity, fuelling violence and hostility between them. The entrenchment of religious identity within personal identity demonstrates the risk of overly combining personal and social identities, creating a scenario where separation becomes nearly unattainable. Moreover, one must acknowledge that Sen does not assert that dogmatic sectarianism is an inevitable result of combining personal and social identity. Instead, it is only a possibility that poses a significant threat and should be avoided. Thus, he envisions more than one potential outcome of combining personal and social identity, demonstrating his open-mindedness and nuanced analysis. However, I find that Parekh’s flexible and plural model can escape Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism. This is because Parekh’s (2009) emphasis on plural identities and his encouragement towards the usage of “plural perspectives” (p. 276) prevents the dominance of one single identity. Parekh’s interpretation allows a person to recognise different aspects of themselves, which combine to influence their overall identity. Sen fails to recognise the potential of Parekh’s model and emphasis on “plural identities” to counteract any dangers of dogmatic sectarianism. Under closer examination of Parekh’s model, his awareness of plural identities can provide an alternative solution to Sen’s criticisms, thus demonstrating his model’s versatility and robustness. Parekh’s ability to respond to Sen’s criticism can be demonstrated by applying his model to the aforementioned example of the Northern Irish conflict. Taking a more pluralistic approach, one can see that his model does not succumb to the pitfalls of dogmatic sectarianism. If Northern Irish citizens embraced a pluralistic understanding of their identities, recognising their shared nationality in addition to their differing religious affiliations, conflict might have been reduced. Thus, mutual recognition of plural social identities allows Parekh to maintain his argument of multifaceted and inter-connected personal and social identities, defying Sen’s criticism that Parekh’s model encourages rigid and unfaltering social divides. Therefore, Parekh expertly responds to Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism as his pluralistic emphasis and encouragement to recognise our own diverse social identities counteracts Sen’s concern that tying personal and social identities fosters inflexibility. B. Over-conformity and Combinability of Social and Personal Identity Sen’s third point criticises Parekh’s model for its over-emphasis of social identity when combined with personal identity. He argues that excessively coupling our personal identities to societal and cultural norms, renders our personal identity secondary. Consequently, people become compelled to strictly adhere to their social norms, constituting a loss of their personal sense of self. Sen (2009) criticises the apparent “reductionism” of a person’s identity to one aspect of their social identity such as their ethnicity or nationality, (p. 288) which, as Sen believes, arises from combining personal and social identities At first glance, Sen’s argument seems logically valid as over-conforming to one affiliation could correspond with disregarding other aspects of one’s overall identity. Sen terms this “epistemic failure” (ibid.) whereby people cannot understand certain aspects of their identity because one affiliation has taken priority. He illustrates this with the example of different groups such as ‘British Muslims’ in which over-emphasising religious identity “miniature[ises] human beings and their many affiliations” (ibid.). This leads to a neglect of plural identifying elements beyond religion, whereby people are reduced to this “single category” (ibid.). Sen further demonstrates his argument by referencing British Bangladeshis who are merely “defined” (ibid.) as ‘British Muslims’. Although a majority of Bengalis in Britain are Muslim, this reduction disregards the distinct culture of Bengali individuals, which may be secular and not solely defined by their religion, demonstrating how combining personal and social identities oversimplifies the manifold nature of individual identity. Moreover, Sen’s argument is further developed by his assertion that over-simplifying our identities leads people to seemingly lose their innate autonomous abilities. By “reducing” (ibid.) one’s identity, it becomes very difficult for one to perceive their identity outside of their social categorisation, thus obfuscating decision-making and threatening individual autonomy. When an individual’s social affiliations determine their overall identity, they confine themselves to making decisions only within these affiliations. For example, women forced to conform to their societal gender role as homemakers may have to forgo personal endeavours that exist outside of the home. This demonstrates how over-emphasising gender as a social affiliation can confine women and prevent them from exerting their agency. However, I believe Parekh’s model withstands Sen’s criticism by recognising the complexity of our identity, where combined aspects of our identity influence decision-making. Particularly, he acknowledges that there is great “variation” (Parekh, 2009, p. 273) in our perception of what constitutes individual identity. Here, Parekh emphasises the diverse interpretations of our social identities which can be assigned varying importance to different aspects. He specifies people can “define and relate” (p. 274) to their societal roles in various ways, demonstrating an awareness that people may choose to identify with different social identities to varied extents. In the above example, British Muslims can challenge their simplistic categorisation by prioritising their religious identity differently. Consequently, Parekh’s model evades Sen’s criticism of over-conformity by acknowledging social identities as qualitative, rather than objective, with some holding greater significance. Sen argues that, in order to prevent over-conformity, individuals can and should completely separate their personal and social identities. Yet, I cannot deem this as feasible, as I believe that personal and social identity cannot be viewed as two separate entities; instead, they constantly combine and influence one another throughout our lives. Specifically, our personal values are often shaped by our social context and so aiming to separate this largely oversimplifies our complex human identity. For example, growing up adhering to the Sikh faith, I was taught the importance of seva (selfless service) and helping those less fortunate than myself. These values instilled in me a passion for charity and volunteer work, which have become an integral aspect of my personal identity. I thus find that my social identity as a Sikh is deeply intertwined with my personal values and I therefore find it inconceivable to attempt to separate them. Therefore, I find Sen’s proposed alternative to Parekh’s model–in which an individual must divide personal and social identities–incomprehensible in practice. V. Conclusion My essay explored Parekh’s twofold model of individual identity, focusing on its capability to respond to Sen’s criticisms. Firstly, I disputed Sen’s point of dogmatic sectarianism, articulating the ability of Parekh’s pluralistic framework to evade Sen. Next, I asserted that Parekh’s acknowledgement of the differing importance of each social identity refutes Sen’s claim that Parekh’s combined framework leads individuals to over-conform to their social identity above personal identity. Ultimately, I conclude that Parekh’s framework expertly responds to each of Sen’s concerns about the divisive potential of social identities. References Ferguson, N. a. (2016). Social Identity Theory and Intergroup Conflict in Northern Ireland. In Understanding Peace and Conflict Through Social Identity Theory (pp. 215-277). Springer, Cham. Olson, E. T. (2023, June 30). Personal Identity . Retrieved from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/identity-personal/ Parekh, B. (2009). Logic of identity. Politics, philosophy & economics , 267-284. Schechtman, M. (2007). Introduction . In The Constitution of Selves (pp. 1-3). Cornell University Press . Sen, A. (2007). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Penguin Books India. Sen, A. (2009). 285The fog of identity. Politics, Philosophy & Economics , 251-352. Sollberger, D. (2013). On identity: from a philosophical point of view. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health volume , Article number 29.

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEW, PASCUAL RESTREPO: Pascual Restrepo is an assistant professor at Boston University. His research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, as well as labour markets and economic growth. Prior to joining BU’s faculty, he was a Cowles Foundation Fellow at Yale University, and earned his PhD in Economics at MIT. Besides research work, he has given numerous lectures at conferences, workshops and seminars across the country. October 2020 JPPE: Hi, everyone. I'm speaking right now with Professor Pascual Restrepo, who is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, whose research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, as well as labor markets and economic growth. Hi, Pascual. How are you? Restrepo: Hi, Julian. How are you? Thanks for inviting me. JPPE: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. So, the first thing I wanted to talk about is how you got into automation and inequality, and I saw that in your earlier work you tended to focus on the illicit economy--and from what I could tell, within that, the illicit economy in Colombia. And I wanted to know how you shifted from that towards automation and inequality. Restrepo: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm from Colombia, you know, and when I was doing my undergrad, I started doing my undergrad in mathematics, but then I got interested in economics. And the key topics in the public discussion in Colombia was always about violence, always about state capacity, always about corruption and political economy. And at the center of all of that, you always have these big illegal markets that were reinforcing, if not causing many of these things. So as a Colombian, it's natural to be interested in that, because it's a topic that is very close to our hearts, our history, and our future. And that's why I started doing research on that topic. Then when I moved to the US to start my PhD, the focus shifted a little bit. I guess that doing a PhD is a great opportunity to start seeing the world from a more global perspective, perhaps, and so I became more interested in problems that were perhaps not as important for Colombia. I mean, Colombia, I wouldn't say right now that automation, it's a big concern there. There's a lot of inequality, but for very different reasons. And so I became interested in these topics that I saw were very relevant for the developed world. And so I think that it's kind of nice that you get to do research on topics that you hear people talking about, right? So like, you open a newspaper, you read The Economist, and they're always talking about, you know, automation, inequality, technology, and so on, but when I was in Colombia, it was the case with illegal markets, so I guess that I'm just trying to follow that trail. You know, like, interesting stuff. JPPE: So the shift towards a more global topic, with far-reaching implications. So, do you remember, was there a specific thing that you read? That made you interested? Do you remember the moment when you thought that this is something you wanted to focus on? Restrepo: Yeah, I don't think that it was anything specific. I just think that it was like an accumulation of stuff. And you know, when I was starting my PhD, there was all of the fuss about Artificial Intelligence. Everyone was fussing about what it was going to be. And I was, like, listening to podcasts by, I don't know, Sam Harris and other people, or the book by Yuval Noah Harari, and I started reading all of these things, and I was like, "Oh, this is super interesting, I wonder if you can analyze this from an economics perspective," right? JPPE: Right. Restrepo: And then, like, Daron--who was my advisor--and Daron apparently was also super interested in this thing, so we started this collaboration. JPPE: Yeah, yeah. So, I- and I think that this is one of the things that is so interesting about the topic, too, is that it is something that gets discussed in these journalistic spheres like The Economist or more central, mainstream publications, but also in academia. And also in a slightly more sensationalistic way by futurists and so on, because the name 'Artificial Intelligence' is kind of, you know, some people think of Blade Runner, or cyborgs walking down the streets. So I think cutting through that is very interesting, which is why one thing I did want to ask is where you stand on the question of automation. And I have four or five studies that you wrote that I just wanted to briefly mention, in case some people aren't familiar with that. One is a piece that you co-authored called "Demographics in Automation," where--and correct me if any of these takeaways are wrong, but--you showed that robots tend to substitute for middle-aged workers. In the paper "Automation of New Tasks," you showed that there is a reinstatement effect of labor, these new digital, labor-saving technologies. In "Competing With Robots," you showed that the overall impact of robot adoption on an industry tends to reduce the employment in that same industry--the number of jobs, at least in the short run. And in "Unpacking the Skill Bias," which I believe is the most recent paper you showed that there is this powerful impact on inequality, and that there is a reduction in real wages. And that productivity increases might not even be that high relative to inequality, which I thought was a very interesting point. So to the extent that you can, where do you stand on automation and AI? Restrepo: Perfect, so let me try to reframe this question a little bit. One of the questions that you sent me earlier on--and feel free to tell me if you're going to discuss it later on, or where this is a good moment to discuss it, because you asked what's wrong with public discourse about automation, right? JPPE: That was my next one, so we can do that now. Restrepo: Perfect. So I guess that what would be useful for me is to tell you how I see public discourse, and where I see myself into the public discourse, and why I think that some of the perspectives that Daron and I have brought are different from the main views that you would find out there, right? Because you see that you are asking me where do I stand on automation. And I think that that's part of what's the problem with this topic, is that people want to divide themselves into two groups. There's kind of a false dichotomy, so either you believe in the robot-apocalypse: you know, robots are going to come and are going to take over all of jobs or you are a firm believer that this has happened before, and that we have already seen this, and technology is great, and nothing is going to happen. And I think that the reality's in the middle. Undoubtedly, technology is the only thing that has allowed us to achieve our standards of living. But I also think that there's no denying that technology sometimes achieves that at the expense of some groups of society. And I think that that's where I stand. Technology is a great force. Technology allows us to live better lives. But some technologies--not every technology, because technologies are all so different, right? Like, I wouldn't say that automation is the same thing as inventing new products, right? Those two things do different things. Some technologies, like automation in particular, have this peculiar feature that the way that they generate productivity--that the way that they generate additional capacity to produce--is by substituting very specific types of human labor. And those workers that get replaced and that get substituted, from their perspective, technology is a bad thing. Socially, technology is a good thing, but there are going to be losers--net losers. And I think that my thing is just to put the spotlight on those losers, and try to identify them and quantify those losses. The idea that technology generates winners and losers--I mean, people have that around, but we tend to think that the gains are so large that this is okay, we just need to redistribute. I don't know, the losses sometimes might be much more problematic than what you can compensate for with the gains. JPPE: Right, certainly. I think even in the way that people phrase it: 'short term losses,' 'disruption.' Some people might say that there's a slight underselling of what the human costs of that disruption are. But I wanted to ask about whether or not AI is fundamentally different in your view, because you said it's somewhere in the middle. And it sounded like you were saying it's not going to be "a temporary loss of some jobs, but it's fine because we'll create new ones" or "a complete joblessness apocalypse." It might be somewhere in the middle. And that seems to me very much in line with what past labor-saving technologies did during the Industrial Revolution. You know, the classic example where you had a spike in the automation- or, a spike in labor-saving devices that increased inequality in the short run--and we can talk about the extent to which that was tolerable--but in the long run, those jobs came back. So do you think that it is fundamentally different from how devices in the past performed, or is it in line with that history? Restrepo: Perfect, so that's a great question. You know, we talk a lot about Artificial Intelligence, but we don't really know what it does. Right? JPPE: [laughing] Yeah . Restrepo: Right, so I can talk about technologies that I know what they do. So for instance, automation of manufacturing via industrial robotics, or automation of white-collar jobs via software, right? So let's just start there, and then we'll speculate a little bit more about AI. So I think that industrial robotics and automation of white-collar jobs via software--the economic forces are very similar to what we saw in the past, let's say, with the mechanization of agriculture. Or the mechanization of textile production in England during the Industrial Revolution, right? You have very artisanal techniques where it took a bunch of people, kids and women, to weave and knit a particular piece of clothing. And then you come out with these machines where you just need one person to operate the whole machinery, and essentially what you did is you replaced all that artisanal and labor-intensive technique that used to be the main technique before. Like with agriculture, you see the same thing, right? Before it was like people with rudimentary tools, such as a scythe, or whatever who would reap the land. And then you have a tractor, right? And the tractor, there's just one person; and that person, the only thing that he has to do is drive the tractor. Nowadays they don't even need to drive the tractor, because these tractors are becoming increasingly self-driving tractors. And so, you can see that, essentially, we are moving to technologies that are more, more, more capital-intensive and that rely less and less and less on human labor. And I think that the consequences, to some extent, are similar. So like, many people say, "Oh no, we have a lot of mechanization in history, and we still have a bunch of jobs, so that's not bad." But then you look at historical records; that argument is not exactly right. Because for instance, England around the Industrial Revolution, there were about 60 years where wages were essentially stagnant. So yes, this technology created more bounty, they created higher incomes per capita, but most of this income went to the hands of capital owners: people who owned the machinery, people who owned the land. And those gains didn't trickle down to wages until after 60 years of these developments. 60 years is a long time. During these years we had a lot of unrest. We had many, many social reforms to appease, some of the unrest that resulted from these. We had the Luddites, right? That was kind of a response to all of these developments. So, you know, it was not a rosy- it was not an easy transition. Now, of course, that puts us into a fantastic path where eventually, people acquire skills; we came out with new industries, products, and so want to employ a bunch of people. But that was kind of like a choice, right? I mean, maybe that wouldn't happen. And so I guess that that's the next question: what are we going to be able to come out with? The jobs, the ideas, the tech force, the tasks, or all of the people that we displaced from manufacturing and all of the people that we are displacing from services. I mean, what are we going to employ all of these people, right? And perhaps, what if the future is one where we're going to have fewer jobs? JPPE: You really think that there's a chance that the future could look like, on aggregate, there are fewer jobs that the economy requires. Restrepo: Yeah. JPPE: So in essence, the whole principle of efficiency gains creating jobs in new industries, that that principle might break down. Restrepo: I mean, I think that that principle has worked in the past, but the fact that it has worked in the past does not guarantee that it's going to keep working in the future. I think that at least theoretically, conceptually, I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but it's possible that we go into a future where the economy uses less labor. So you know, like, only 20% of the population works, and that's enough to supply all of the labor that the economy needs. I mean, this is a great thing if all of us only work one day per week. But the problem is that we might be going to a future where only 20% of us work the entire week. And that's very different because the implications for inequality are quite different, right? So I guess that that's kind of the challenge. The challenge to me is not so much whether the level of employment that you need to produce something is going to go down--for sure that's going to go down. I mean, we're going to produce much more with fewer workers. The question is, who's going to provide those hours of human labor, and who are the people in a position to benefit from that demand for labor that's going to be out there? JPPE: Mm. So, I'd love to talk more about the social and political implications of what you just said, but first I want to ask about a pandemic-related question. Restrepo: Yep. JPPE: So, The Wall Street Journal just ran a headline where they said that, essentially, meatpackers were, all of a sudden, beginning to automate more and more labor, and that that automated technology was not necessarily doing as good a job as the humans were, but the coronavirus had essentially hastened that shift. And I believe there are other instances of that in manufacturing as well. So is this something that you view as bringing automation much faster? Restrepo: Totally. One of the papers that you mentioned earlier on was this paper on demographics. And in that paper, what we showed is that a lot of what you see in terms of industrial automation--that is, automation by industrial robots and machinery in car manufacturing plants, for example--is driven by the scarcity of work. This is technology that responds to incentive. So what are the most automated countries in the world? Japan, Germany, Italy, countries where the population is aging very rapidly--where young workers with the muscle to weld a car are scarce. And so it's that scarcity of labor, in some sense, what has fueled a lot of this automation. And you can think of the pandemic as doing something similar; it's generating a scarcity of labor. Because workers--on the one hand, they cannot go to work because of either concerns or lockdown measures--but also, there's also some safety measures that might make some automation technologies more safe than human workers, right? So there's an element of that. On the other hand, you know, this pandemic also gave me another reflection that many of us- or, many people thought that humans were already kind of obsolete, and humans were no longer needed, and this pandemic kind of made me revisit that view because it does suggest that humans are still extremely important for the country. JPPE: [laughing] Yeah. Restrepo: Extremely important, right? You take out the human element, and the economy completely gets destroyed. JPPE: And human contact too. Restrepo: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, it's not only about production, but so much of our economy is about humans interacting with other humans, and human contact that- it also kind of gives me some pause. Yeah, maybe, sure, maybe we're going to automate a lot of jobs, but maybe there's- you know, the economy's increasingly becoming more intensive in the sort of activities that, by their nature, they're just not automatable. Or we don't want to automate them because the quality of the goods that we are consuming then, they're dependent on human interaction, right? JPPE: Mm. And certainly I think there are instances- I mean, the skeptics that I've talked to about AI have definitely brought up instances; they'll pull up a treasure trove of articles where someone says, "We can now automate kindergarten teachers." Restrepo: Exactly. JPPE: And then we could do some polling on the number of moms and dads that would be happy with a robot teaching their kids- or, their kindergarteners. Restrepo: Yeah. Absolutely. JPPE: [laughing] But, so, I did want to ask more about the social and political side of this as well, and I don't mean to be flippant with this question, but I wanted to know why inequality is necessarily a bad thing. Restrepo: Great. I think that that's a great question, and I think that the answer is that it's not necessarily a bad thing, at least in my mind. Let me tell you the feature about current inequality that I think is absolutely a bad thing. I think that the problem with current inequality is not- I mean, you can have inequality for two reasons. You can have inequality because everyone's incomes are growing, but some incomes are growing much more rapidly than others. Right? Maybe there are some political, philosophical, or ethical reasons to be opposed to that type of inequality. Okay. But there, I don't think there's a very strong argument that everyone should agree that that type of inequality is very bad. Because that type of inequality might reflect, "Oh, maybe the people whose incomes are growing more, it's because they started a business." Right? You know, like Bezos. But Bezos has- is like a billionaire. But I would say yeah, if you ask me, I think that--well, maybe I'm more stating my case here, but--yes, he deserves to be a millionaire because-and a billionaire, because the product that he created delivers a lot of value, right? So I think that there's a chunk of inequality that is good and that I'm not opposed, at least, in terms of first principle. But. I do think that the nature of contemporary inequality is very different from that story that I was telling. Contemporary inequality is not just about some people who came up with great ideas, and their incomes grow a lot, and all of our incomes kind of grow just if we happen to work hard, and so on. Contemporary inequality, if I had to describe it, has this feature that we see groups of society who are worse off than before. So it's not just how incomes are growing. It is that some incomes are falling in real terms. And for me, that is something that is just... the biggest contemporaneous problem. That we have people who are worse off than their parents, than their previous generation. So if, in the U.S., you are a person who has high school or less than a high school degree, who comes from a poor background, actually your parents were better off than you in terms of labor market income. And that's kind of the scary aspect of inequality, that it's not even progress, but sometimes it means no progress at all for some society. That's the reason that makes me worry. And those groups, of course--I mean, that's going to have political implications, everything. But just from a humanity perspective, I think that as a society we can afford- I mean, we should aspire for trying to make everyone gain from technology, everyone gain from globalization, there shouldn't be anyone who is worse off than a person like him or her 30 years ago. JPPE: Mm. Mm. Yeah, and so, I mean, there is the data from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez that tries to quantify how that inequality is today; and from what I have seen, it shows that it's roughly where it was at in the early 20th century. And so when you think about automation in conjunction with the general financialization of the economy, the rise of private debt, the extension of credit in the economy, do you feel like now is a particularly vulnerable moment for a shock to inequality through digitally-enabled automation? Restrepo: Yeah, absolutely. I think that part of the problem is that there's no safety net in this country. I mean, the safety net is kind of like- I mean we are seeing that with COVID, right? There's people whose finances are in an incredibly vulnerable position. And so imagine that you're in your 30s, you're in 40s, you have some debts, you don't own a lot of assets, and then they come out with this software that can do exactly what you're doing at your work, right? You are screwed! There's nothing you can do. JPPE: [laughing] Yeah. Restrepo: And then we turn to economists and the economists said, ‘no, because people can re-train, and people can relocate, and we're going to take that person and make that a coder, right? Or a software engineer.’ That's not going to happen! That's kind of like a lost generation there. And I think that we should care more about that potentially lost generation. JPPE: Mm. And in terms of reducing inequality, I actually- a month ago, I got to speak with historian Walter Scheidel on his thesis and The Great Leveler, that inequality only gets reduced or leveled by mass military mobilization, civil war, plague, or government collapse. And what was so striking about reading his book and talking with him was, it seemed to--on some level--be in opposition to a lot of the language in economics that seems to frame inequality and shocks as almost cyclical in nature, where there's a short run and a long run. And it seemed like Professor Scheidel's point was essentially that actually, there's been these exogenous forces in the form of, essentially, catastrophe, that have reduced inequality. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. Restrepo: Yeah. So I think that for economists in general, I wouldn't say that inequality's just a cyclical phenomenon. I mean, if you read the labor economics literature, there's a lot of literature kind of emphasizing these trends and it's long-run trends. So like, over the long run, what we are seeing is that someone who has a college degree is earning much more than someone who does not have a college degree. And that just keeps expanding and expanding and expanding, and decelerated a bit and so on. But you know, there are these big trends. I wouldn't say that it's only about shocks. But I do think that economists emphasize much more the role of technology than politics. Right? I mean, there are some fields in Economics that emphasize much more the role of politics, and I think that in these shocks that you're mentioning, what needs to happen is a big shock, so that it triggers political reform, and so on. And that perhaps hasn't been so much included into the language of economists. The other thing that I would like to say is that, while I think that thesis is kind of interesting, you also see a lot of variation across countries. When you look at the data that are countries that technology is kind of universal- I mean, I was telling you about, you know, the Germans were the ones who invented industrial automation, same as Japan. And they don't have as much inequality as we do here in the U.S., right? That's also kind of a choice; I don't think that you need to have a war to reduce inequality. But you need to have more progressive taxation, and I mean when you think about inequality, that's the first thing that you should do! I mean, it's very simple. I mean, simple, technically. Politically, it might be difficult, but the solution is clear. JPPE: Right. And so, what do you think about proposals like a universal basic income, or a progressive basic income, or any variation of that? Negative income tax, and so on. Restrepo: Yeah, I think that anything that looks like a negative income tax, I think that would be greatly beneficial. Anything that looks like an earned income tax credit, that is subsidizing work for low-wage workers would be very beneficial. Also because it helps convince firms not to automate those jobs, so part of those jobs are subsidized. Anything like a universal basic income, I mean, I think it's- again, I like the idea; I don't like the idea of a universal basic income essentially substituting the whole safety net. I think that still having a government that buys insurance and that supplies all our programs that are more targeted to whoever it's useful. But I think that the spirit of all of these things is the same. We need a better safety net, right? And so, if you implement it one way or the other; if politically this is more feasible than this...I don't know. I'm fine. I just think that we do need some more safety net. JPPE: Right. So the last question I wanted to ask is: looking to the future, what are some open questions that you think would be really interesting to look at, either on inequality alone, or on automation and inequality and so on? And also, if not questions, some areas of research that you think, thus far, have been untapped. Restrepo: Perfect. So let me start with the first one. I think that one of the things that I find more puzzling about current technologies is that if you look at the labor market, you would conclude that there is a lot of disruption. You would conclude that there's inequality; the prices of different skills are changing the nature of jobs is changing; the types of jobs that we are posting are changing the skills that the labor market is valuing are changing. From looking at that, you would think, "Oh, technology is advancing at this amazing pace," but when you look at productivity, there's not a lot of productivity growth. And you know, this lack of productivity growth has been used by many to argue that automation, or that technology, is not a concern. So like, I saw that you did an interview with Paul Krugman at some point. JPPE: Yeah. He brought it up. Restrepo: Yeah, and I think he made that point. And I think that that point is kind of misguided. Because I think that one of the interesting things about automation technologies is that--and you already mentioned that this is something that we emphasize a lot--is that you can have automation without big productivity gains. And let me just give you an example of why that is the case. Imagine that I'm a worker working in a supermarket checkout machine, right? And then someone comes and invents a self-service kiosk, or whatever, right? That innovation is going to substitute me; but in terms of cost, how much is it going to reduce the cost for the supermarket? Very little! Because the worker was already very cheap; the machine itself is very cheap, but not as much! Right? Installing all of the equipment, programming, all of that--at the end of the day, the productivity gains is, I don't know, 1%? Something even smaller than that, that's just a small part of the cost? So at the end of the day, you unroll this technology, you deploy this technology, you substitute all of the checkout clerks, right? So that's a chunk of the population, and what are the productivity gains from doing that? Not that big. They're not that big; it's just like, you saved a little bit on costs. So automation has this thing that as long as you save a little bit on costs, you're going to adopt it. So you can have the adoption of a lot of automation technologies that have very small efficiency gains. And I think that that principle has escaped current discussions about automation. People equate productivity or technology with automation. Automation is just one particular type of technology--concerning one particular component of productivity--that has this feature that it can generate big distributional impacts just by having small productivity gains. But I think that the interesting research question there is to try to understand, why are we adopting automation technologies that have such, very low productivity gains? And that our candidate- one candidate is perhaps taxation. Maybe we're doing this because we're taxing labor a lot so that's inducing us to adopt more automation, even if that's not very profitable, from an engineering perspective. Or maybe it's a cultural thing. So I think that those are the big, important questions. What determines the direction of technology? Are we going to keep focusing on automation, automation, automation? Or are we going to have a more balanced element of technologies that, in the long run, it's going to end up being more beneficial for all of those people--that I already discussed--that have experienced net losses in their income in the last 30, 40 years? JPPE: Professor Restrepo, thanks so much. Restrepo: Thanks. Thanks for having me, Julian.

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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. Thus, the successive literature might focus on expanding upon this framework to also include influencer audiences, or zoom into a certain concept such as authenticity, as there is still much to be observed. For example, due to the common knowledge that social media stars are economically compensated generously for this labour, a further question that could arise is whether a person can be alienated in one respect, but not another. For example, given that alienation and well-being are opposed, could someone be economically alienated but not alienated on the axis of social media? Might a person have positive well-being in one dimension while feeling alienated in another? References Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1958) Armstrong, M., Jr. (1991). The Reification of Celebrity: Persona as Property. 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One Planet, One Oklahoma: Exploring a Framework for Assessing the Feasibility of Localized Energy Transitions in the United States Anna Hyslop Author Arjun Ray Arthur Shamgunov Benjamin Levy Editors Abstract Net-zero energy transitions, necessitated by the threat of climate change, need to occur on an international scale. However, powerful economic lobbies and political stagnation often mar the negotiation processes driving national and international action. In this context, local communities become increasingly important in achieving widespread emissions reduction objectives. This analysis centers on exploring a framework that evaluates the feasibility of net-zero energy transitions in U.S. localities. The framework highlights the technological and political feasibility of transitioning the electricity and transportation sectors of a given municipality. While such a framework does not capture the entirety of a community’s energy system, it nonetheless serves to address two sectors that dominate emissions production and energy usage. I apply this framework to the suburban community of Norman, Oklahoma, to both highlight the value of such analysis and to provide important information to local officials in my community. By collecting information from administrative and primary sources, this study documents forecasted decreases in the cost of renewable energy sources, residual emissions abatement technologies, and energy storage solutions for Norman. Further, an analysis of the local transportation sector reveals that the costs associated with public transit improvements—an important component of decarbonization in the transportation sector—generally ranged from 0.01-5.1% of the City’s 2023 budget (excluding national high-speed rail enhancements, which involve cost-sharing between local, state, and federal governments). I also examined the political feasibility of this transition, documenting the partisan preferences that may hinder clean energy implementation. My findings suggest that while technology costs may decrease, political opinion could hinder clean energy transitions in Oklahoma. The model of analysis employed throughout this study presents significant opportunities for further exploration of localized energy transitions in suburban areas and college towns, two types of municipalities often left out of transition scholarship. At the end of March in 2023, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a Synthesis Report covering the burgeoning climate crisis. The report served as the sixth installment in a series designed to inform international climate negotiations with updated scientific findings. Within the first ten pages, the IPCC reaffirmed common scientific consensus, declaring that “human activities, principally through the emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming.” Increasing global temperatures pose threats to people throughout the United States. Coastal communities in states like Texas and Florida have experienced a greater volume of flooding in part due to sea level rise resulting from climate change. Out West, Zhuang et al. (2021) found that “anthropogenic warming…contributed at least twice as much natural variability to the rapid increase of fire weather risk” observed in the record-breaking fires of 2020 in California, Washington, and Oregon. These two studies, as a part of a growing academic literature, demonstrate the variability found in the impacts of climate change across geographies. The United States, for its part in contributing to the crisis, produced 6.0 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents (Gt CO2eq) of greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, making up 11.2% of total global emissions. This makes the U.S. the second-largest global emitter behind China–which produced 15.7 Gt CO2eq in 2022–and puts it in the top ten global emitters per capita. With a population of approximately 4 million people, Oklahoma produces about 2% of the U.S.’s share of global emissions. Total emissions data for Norman, Oklahoma—home to the University of Oklahoma and the subject of this analysis—does not currently exist. If Norman, like many American cities, does not individually contribute much to the climate impact of the entire United States, then why does the possibility of a localized energy transition and a net-zero future for this municipality merit discussion? First and foremost, local communities play a critical role in achieving national carbon neutrality as they can overcome federal policy inertia. After the release of the first IPCC report in 1990, several transnational associations of municipalities–including Local Governments for Sustainability, Climate Alliance, and Energy Cities–were formed to help cities pursue climate targets in the face of “strong economic lobbies [that] were blocking national and international climate policies.” By belonging to these organizations, cities are granted legitimacy and support from other municipalities in pursuing localized climate policy action. Rutherford and Coutard (2014) further acknowledge the capability of cities to pursue climate work despite national gridlock, stating that “cities may have a window of opportunity for action on energy transitions by their distinctive…political and/or sociotechnical contexts compared with those at a national level.” The ability of cities to pursue sustainability work despite national constraints presents a compelling argument for exploring a local energy transition. Furthermore, greenhouse gas emissions—and the systems that lead to their release into the atmosphere—exist at local, regional, and national levels. Municipalities regularly make decisions regarding transportation, energy consumption, and land-use planning, three sectors that contribute heavily to total U.S. emissions. Collier and Löfstedt (1997) point out, however, that the financial and legal capacities of a city to enact local change vary greatly by location. Regardless of such limitations, changes at the community level contribute to broader national decarbonization objectives. The Biden Administration supported this argument in its long-term climate strategy, citing the importance of non-federal leadership—including municipalities—in reaching domestic carbon neutrality by 2050. Even smaller, suburban cities like Norman possess the power to radically reshape local transit and energy policy, addressing both its local carbon footprint and national carbon contributions. Third, Oklahoma—and Norman by extension—cannot escape the impacts of the climate crisis. The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center predicts an average high temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit by midcentury without significant action to reduce emissions. The Fifth National Climate Assessment expands on these projected temperature increases, forecasting negative economic and public health consequences. The authors observed with high confidence that warmer temperatures and increasingly erratic weather patterns will “force widespread and costly changes” to the employment of Oklahomans. Additionally, climate change will result in increased water scarcity, animal extinction, and declining public health as extreme heat events become more common in the south-central United States. Tropical diseases and heat-related deaths are projected to increase in the warming region. Other public health impacts have already been observed in Tulsa, where the expansion of eastern red cedars—associated with longer pollen seasons—resulted in a 205% increase in allergic pollen intensity. Although the consequences of climate change borne by Oklahomans are largely not self-inflicted, we still bear responsibility for addressing our carbon footprint. Assessing Norman’s current capacity to transition to carbon-free consumption may encourage further action within Oklahoma’s cities, as only Oklahoma City currently pursues sustainable policy initiatives. Finally, analyzing the feasibility of an energy transition within Norman may spark further discussions about an energy transition in Oklahoma at large. Our local context incorporates both the resources of a nationally-recognized research institution and heavy dependence on the automobile. This combination of factors should make Norman—and other suburban college towns—a subject of interest. Drewello notes the importance of university partnerships in assessing “unique local situations” and generating innovative solutions. With access to the University of Oklahoma and its faculty, Norman offers a great opportunity for building a model to inspire a statewide or regional energy transition. Furthermore, our dependence on the automobile mirrors that of other suburban communities within the state; accordingly, any assessment of Norman’s potential for changes in the transportation sector can provide a framework for similar analyses within Oklahoma. In the Routledge Handbook of Energy Transitions , Miller et al. (2022) call for the systematic “mapping” of the policies, processes, and pathways needed to achieve regional carbon neutrality. The study offers a novel framework for analyzing the feasibility of net-zero localized energy transitions in the United States. Though Norman, Oklahoma, is used merely as an example of the application of this framework, the case study provides a model for similar analyses to be conducted in other localities. I focus on establishing this underlying framework for a local energy transition by assessing the current energy system and analyzing the technological and political feasibility of achieving a net-zero future in Norman. To conduct this assessment, I researched administrative, academic, news, and primary sources to gather cost estimates of different technologies. I also analyzed national and state-level assessments of public opinion on renewable energy development to understand the transition’s political feasibility. The remainder of this paper outlines the definitions and criteria used throughout the study, with an in-depth examination of Norman’s current energy system following soon after. Then, I offer an assessment of both the technological and political feasibility of pursuing an energy transition. My general conclusions from this research follow the feasibility assessments. I. Outlining the Energy Transition: Definitions and Criteria In this section, I provide an overview of several proposed definitions of energy transitions, as well as the objectives that such transitions seek to achieve. I then articulate this study’s interpretation of a net-zero energy transition and my justification for selecting such a definition. Finally, I conclude with an explanation of the criteria by which I will assess feasibility in later sections of this paper. Prior academic work provides many definitions that explain the fundamentals of energy transitions. Araújo (2022) postulates that basic energy transitions involve a “considerable shift in the nature or pattern of how energy is used within a system, including the type, quantity, or quality of how energy is sourced, delivered, or utilized.” Zinecker et al. (2018) offer a simpler yet similar definition to Araújo, defining energy transitions as “shifts… [in] the way people produce and consume electricity using different technologies and sources.” Drewello builds on the foundations provided by Araújo and Zinecker et al. to postulate that an energy transition “is nothing less than a revolutionary restructuring of the entire energy supply in the sectors of electricity, heat, and transportation.” Here, Drewello points out specific sectors involved in a transition. These three definitions articulate the basics of an energy transition, defined in this study as a fundamental, multi-sectoral shift in both the consumption and production of energy towards a net-zero future. A net-zero future achieves maximum emissions reductions while using carbon capture technologies to remove any residual emissions. Accordingly, net-zero transitions involve deploying renewable energy technologies–like solar, wind, and nuclear power facilities–at scale. I elected to study the feasibility of a net-zero energy transition with a framework inspired in part by the literature. In evaluating Norman’s current energy sector, I focus on two of the sectors highlighted by Drewello: electricity and transportation. These sectors compromise 53% of U.S. emissions, with transportation at 28% of the total. Although Norman may not observe the same trends in emissions as the greater United States, addressing emissions in these two sectors is of great national importance and should be relevant to an energy transition in Norman as well. The decision to focus on the electricity and transportation sectors represents the first layer of my analytical framework. The second layer consists of considering both the technological and political feasibility of making net-zero transitions in each sector. Sovacool and Geels (2016) provide justification for these considerations. They divide the elements of an energy transition into three “interrelated” categories: “the tangible elements of socio-technical systems…actors and social networks…[and] socio-technical regimes.” In practice, these three dimensions prove difficult to distinguish from each other, but still roughly suggest a division between the intangibles and the tangibles of energy transitions. This study understands political feasibility to be the intangibles of transitions—namely, public support for clean energy development–and technological feasibility to be the tangible elements of an energy transition, most notably the costs associated with shifting to renewable energy and developing emissions reduction techniques. II. Norman Now: Our Energy Today Of the 90 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity generated in Oklahoma in 2023, 40 million MWh (or around 44%) of this generation came from renewable sources. Norman hosts two primary electric utilities: Oklahoma Gas and Electric (OG&E) and Oklahoma Electric Cooperative (OEC). OG&E provides generation, transmission, and distribution services across Oklahoma and parts of western Arkansas. While public data listing the number of OG&E customers in Norman is not currently available, it serves approximately 888,800 customers across its service territory. OG&E reports that 60% of the utility’s generation capacity comes from natural gas, 30% from coal, and 10% from renewable sources. This data also incorporates OG&E’s power purchases, which account for 58% of OG&E’s total generation portfolio. OG&E purchases this power from other producers in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP). As a member of SPP, OG&E’s energy could come from any generation site within the regional transmission organization (RTO) at any given time. SPP’s generation mix in 2022 consisted of 37.5% wind, 33.3% coal, 20.9% natural gas, and 8.3% of energy produced from other sources. This data mirrors SPP’s generation mixes from 2020 and 2021. In 2020, SPP produced 31.3% of its power from wind, 30.9% from coal, and 26.6% from natural gas. In 2021, 35.6% of SPP’s power came from coal, 34.6% from wind, and 20% from natural gas. Instead of generating its own power, OEC operates an electricity distribution business. OEC purchases its power from the Western Farmers Electric Cooperative (WFEC), a generation and transmission provider. WFEC possesses a diverse fuel mix, generating 30% of its power from renewable sources and 11% from coal and natural gas. Additionally, WFEC imports 42% of its electricity from SPP. Power purchased from the Grand River Dam Authority, Oneta Power Plant, and Southwestern Public Service provided the final 17% of WFEC’s generation mix in 2022. The complexity of power generation networks, exemplified by OG&E and OEC, makes it difficult to determine Norman’s exact energy landscape based on public data alone. Future applications of this framework may run into similar challenges due to public data limitations. OG&E’s and OEC’s connections to SPP mean that consumers in Norman could theoretically receive energy from anywhere in SPP at any given time. However, some consumers have a limited degree of choice in deciding where their electricity comes from. OG&E customers can opt-in to receiving power from the utility’s solar farms, while OEC allows its customers to purchase renewable energy certificates that support renewable generation. These programs are naturally limited in scope, and data regarding the number of customers choosing to participate in these initiatives is not currently available. While I cannot accurately provide a detailed picture of Norman’s electricity provision, I can use SPP generation data to construct general assumptions. As mentioned previously, the largest share of SPP’s electricity production came from wind power, indicating that Norman could theoretically receive a notable amount of our electricity from that source. This assertion can be extrapolated to other cities within SPP’s 14-state service territory, assuming that a city’s serving utility maintains membership in SPP and that SPP’s generation portfolio remains consistent across states. This second assumption, however, cannot be verified by publicly-available SPP data; as such, the statement remains largely speculative. Decarbonizing the electricity sector requires a combination of multiple technologies. Regardless of the combination, however, a net-zero transition necessitates either elimination or removal of the emissions from coal and natural gas power plants that supplied over 50% of SPP’s generation in 2022. Power plant emissions can be reduced through a replacement of generation fuels—in this case, via renewable energy—or a deployment of smokestack emissions-reduction technologies. Emissions that cannot be addressed through the replacement of generation fuels or other reduction technologies must be removed through carbon capture. The costs of these options are explored in depth in the “Technological Feasibility” section of this paper. An assessment of Norman’s current transportation sector consists of analyzing both private and public transportation. Oklahoman workers display a strong dependence on private forms of transit, with 77.8% driving alone to work in 2022. In comparison, 68.7% of U.S. residents display a similar commuting pattern. Furthermore, 9.4% of Oklahomans carpool and 0.3% use public transportation to get to work. Nationally, 3.1% of people use public transit and 8.6% carpool. Evidently, passenger vehicles predominate Oklahomans’ commutes. These vehicles are overwhelmingly gasoline-powered. Though data specific to cars owned by Normanites is not available, of the 4,287,900 total vehicles registered in Oklahoma, 83% are powered by gasoline. 0.5% of cars registered in the state are fully electric, while 0.8% are plug-in hybrid electric and 1.3% are hybrid electric. These trends reflect larger national patterns, as 85% of vehicles registered in the United States are gasoline-powered, while 1.2% are fully electric. Norman’s public transportation consists of five fixed bus routes, operated by EMBARK Norman, which serve local destinations six days a week. EMBARK Norman also partners with EMBARK OKC to provide weekday commuter service to Oklahoma City. Intracity service is free and the commuter route to Oklahoma City costs $3 per adult and $1.50 for qualifying riders. Buses are scheduled at least every hour on four out of the five routes. The Norman fixed-route fleet consists of 10 compressed natural gas (CNG) buses, 2 electric buses, and 1 diesel-powered vehicle. The paratransit fleet uses 9 CNG buses, 2 diesel buses, and 3 gasoline-powered shuttles. Additionally, the University of Oklahoma possesses four bus routes on its campus. Norman also has an Amtrak station, with service ending in Oklahoma City. In this study, I also include biking as a form of public transportation. In 2022, only 0.2% of Oklahomans biked to work. Given that much of Oklahoma lacks biking infrastructure, this finding is unsurprising. Current data on the number and type of bike lanes within Norman is not readily available. However, given Norman’s possession of bike-friendly infrastructure, we may safely assume that Norman’s commuter biking statistics are higher than the Oklahoma average. III. Technological Feasibility The exploration of Norman’s electricity and transportation sectors reveals the community’s overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels. In this section, I use estimated costs of different clean energy technologies as a metric for assessing the technological feasibility of a net-zero transition in Norman. My study of electricity-related feasibility primarily concerns the costs associated with increasing the share of low-carbon energy sources in power generation, incorporating power storage methods, and abating residual emissions. In the transportation sector, I consider different scenarios in which the City of Norman improves public transportation. I do not focus on action taken by individual Normanites (commonly termed “reductions in demand”), as such action falls outside the scope of the analysis I hope to provide. Evaluating the technological feasibility of a power-sector transition in Norman begins with an understanding of the costs associated with alternative energies. The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) “combines technology cost and performance parameters, capital expenditures, operations and maintenance costs, and capacity factors” into a statistic that helps researchers, government agencies, and private companies predict the costliness of different forms of energy per MWh generated. The LCOEs for various sources of energy in Cleveland County—where Norman is located—in 2023 dollars are reported in Table 1. Table 1: Data from NREL (2020); Lewis et al. (2022); IEA (2020). All costs—including cost projections—are in 2023 dollars, with inflation adjustment calculations made based on OECD (2024) data. County-level costs for key renewable energy technologies like solar and wind are expected to experience significant declines by 2050, while the costs of traditional fossil fuel generation facilities are expected to increase. Across the board, the median costs associated with renewable sources of energy in Cleveland County are expected to drop by 2050. Gas-induced power plants, on the other hand, are expected to experience cost increases, regardless of whether these plants incorporate carbon capture and storage (CCS) techniques into plant practices. Unlike gas-powered plants, however, coal is expected to experience cost declines, but will likely remain more expensive than solar, wind, nuclear, or even gas-powered generation. This insight is significant, as coal generation produces more emissions than natural gas and renewable resource generation. Since the county-level statistics parallel the patterns observed in state-level analysis (not pictured), I observe that the comparatively-high costs will likely discourage the use of coal within Oklahoma, reducing the state’s emissions. Decreases in renewable energy costs for Cleveland County, depicted in Table 1, indicate that our electricity sector may feasibly transition to renewable energy. However, the data provided for county-level costs by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) neglects to mention an increasingly-popular form of alternative energy: hydrogen power. The fuel is expected to play a critical role in decarbonizing personal transportation. Currently, steam methane reforming (SMR), a process dependent on fossil fuels, dominates hydrogen production in the United States. The implementation of CCS with SMR practices is expected to increase the LCOE of hydrogen production, but still maintains the “highest potential for low-cost clean hydrogen supply.” Transitioning to sources like wind and solar also requires measures to manage their intermittent nature. Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are touted as the solution to the need for power storage. NREL reports that costs of utility-scale LIBs within Cleveland County will decrease approximately 53% by 2050, making the reality of incorporating this technology into a transitioned power grid increasingly plausible. This assertion is further supported by the declining prices of renewable power sources, allowing greater amounts of capital to be allocated to power storage instead of generation. Addressing residual emissions—those that cannot be easily reduced through the previously-discussed strategies—necessitates the usage of carbon capture technologies. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves removing carbon dioxide at its emission source. NREL already provides a Cleveland County LCOE for CCS in the context of natural gas generation, placing the 2020 LCOE at $60.06 and expecting a $68.3 LCOE by 2050. Global estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) further contextualize this data. Globally, the LCOE for CCS ranges from 17.87-143.02 USD per ton of carbon dioxide captured. Direct air capture (DAC), another emissions-reduction technology, captures carbon dioxide after its release into the atmosphere. The technology generally costs more than CCS, with global LCOE estimates ranging from 160.9-411.19 USD per ton captured. NREL’s forecasted costs to 2050 are helpful in evaluating the feasibility of a net-zero power sector transition. Such forecasting, however, remains difficult to find for transportation improvements. Instead, I rely on the costs associated with different public transit improvement scenarios that Norman explored in fiscal year 2023 (FY23). Table 2: Data from City of Norman (2021); City of Norman (2022); City of Norman (2024); Taylor Johnson at the City of Norman; Lazo (2023); Feigenbaum (2023). All costs are adjusted to 2023 dollars using data from OECD (2024). In 2021, the Norman City Council approved the Go Norman Transit Plan, a document detailing different transportation improvements anticipated for Norman’s bus system. Adding an additional bus route, Route 113, requires nearly $9 million in capital and operational investments. Increasing route frequency for two of the current bus routes entails expenditures of between $8.21-$8.91 million, depending on route length and the number of buses needed to achieve frequency improvements. Improving the frequency of Route 111 stops from a 30-minute to the ideal 15-minute frequency necessitates $11.55 million from the City. These frequency improvements are intended to make public transit options competitive with the convenience and consistency offered by single-passenger vehicular transport. Expanding route service often demands adding additional buses to the City’s fleet. To gather information on the historical costs of purchasing CNG and electric buses, I contacted Taylor Johnson, the Transit and Parking Program Manager for the City of Norman. Mr. Johnson offered information on the current fixed-route fleet and the previous costs of purchasing individual electric and CNG buses. One fixed-route CNG bus cost the City $639,741.79 in 2023 dollars, whereas an electric bus cost over $1 million in the same year. The cost estimates specific to certain route improvements cannot accurately predict the expected future costs of similar improvements. However, this information still provides an important overview of what such improvements may entail. Regardless of future inflation or specified costs associated with different projects, improvements to Norman’s bus system will cost millions of dollars to implement. As mentioned in the “Norman Now: Our Energy Today” section, Norman possesses one Amtrak station with service to Oklahoma City. Finding a cost estimate for adding additional rail lines or increasing train speed in Oklahoma is not currently feasible; therefore, I turned to two case studies of these improvements in other areas. Amtrak anticipates increasing the speed of the Washington-to-Boston route with new trains. This project, originally proposed in 2011, costs $3.11 billion in 2023 dollars. The proposed Dallas-to-Houston Amtrak project, involving the development of completely-new rail lines, costs a whopping $33.6 billion in 2023 dollars. Support for the development of additional Amtrak lines through Norman would need to occur at the state level; after all, as the two currently-proposed projects demonstrate, Amtrak projects are extremely expensive and involve multiple municipalities. While it is unlikely that Amtrak will expand coverage in Oklahoma in the near future–given the minimal demand for such infrastructure–this discussion still offers important context for comprehensive public transit considerations in the state. Bike infrastructure serves as the final area of analysis within the public transportation sector. For this exploration, I use data from an Association of Central Oklahoma Governments grant received by the City for air quality improvements. Adding two bike lanes cost the City $11,497.99 in total. Details on the length and cost of each individual bike lane were not provided by the City. Table 3: Data from City of Norman (2021); City of Norman (2022); City of Norman (2023); City of Norman (2024). *The “Actual Public Transit Expenditures” for FY24 have yet to be released; accordingly, I provided the City’s current estimate. During FY23, the City of Norman proposed and passed a $225,785,971 budget. As exemplified in Table 2, the costs of transportation improvements under Norman’s control ranged from 0.01% of the budget to 5.1% of the budget. Given the trends in public transit spending observed in Table 3, the budget typically allows enough flexibility for only one of the transit improvements detailed in Table 2 to occur. This finding suggests that substantial improvements to Norman’s public transit system will likely occur slowly, unless the City’s spending patterns change. The technology exists to support a net-zero energy transition. The challenge, then, comes with the cost of such technologies. As the NREL forecast predicts, renewable energy sources will likely continue to decline in cost, encouraging utilities to adopt these forms of energy for power generation. Additionally, both long-term energy storage solutions and residual emissions reduction technologies are anticipated to experience declining costs. Norman’s electricity sector, therefore, could realistically experience a clean energy transition in the coming decades, contingent on utility adoption of necessary technologies. The feasibility of adjustments to Norman’s transportation sector proves incredibly difficult to predict due to the challenge of obtaining cost forecasting data. Regardless of this limitation, the scenarios explored demonstrate realistic costs for the City, although the pace at which such projects are pursued may be slower than desired. IV. Political Feasibility In this study, political feasibility is more challenging to quantify and anticipate than technological feasibility. By its very nature, public opinion is dynamic, and the individuals surveyed often possess opinions that do not fit cleanly into prescribed party affiliations or expectations. Furthermore, creating an accurate measure of political support for an energy transition proves difficult, considering the complexity of interacting components in such a transition. Given these constraints, I focus this section on a broad investigation of the views on renewable energy development that are associated with national and statewide partisan identifications while acknowledging the complexity of these affiliations. I also highlight studies specific to Oklahoma that offer valuable insights into the nuances of support for a carbon-neutral energy transition. According to the Pew Research Center, 31% of Americans currently support the complete phasing out of fossil fuels across the United States, compared to the 68% that support the use of a fossil fuel and renewables mixture. This belief does not necessarily conflict with the net-zero transition proposal, as carbon capture techniques could theoretically support the strictly-limited use of fossil fuels. Regarding renewable energy development, 74% of Americans highlight this type of development as “the most important energy priority for the U.S.” when compared to “expanding [the] production of fossil fuels.” Evidently, national support for a net-zero future depends on the specific limitations of that energy transition. Attempting to break down support for the transition by political party causes further difficulties, as the opinions of both Democrats and Republicans do not always follow expectations. For example, 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents believe that fossil fuel expansion should operate as the U.S.’s top energy priority, but 70% of this group still support the development of more solar farms. 90% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents give renewable energy priority over fossil fuels, but 51% “oppose phasing out fossil fuels completely” for right now. The responses to these questions do not clearly indicate partisan support for a net-zero future. For additional clarity, Kennedy et al. asked respondents about their opinions regarding the complete phase-out of fossil fuels. 87% of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents reported a belief in the need to use a mix of fossil fuels and renewables in the near-term, while 51% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents reported the same. Understanding national party positioning on the phase-out of fossil fuels, a component of net-zero energy transitions, contextualizes an analysis of Oklahoma’s current partisan makeup. As of January 15th, 2024, approximately 52% of Oklahoman voters are registered with the Republican party, while 28% are registered Democrats and 19% are registered Independents. However, these affiliations do not directly indicate voters’ position on energy transitions. Generally, 57% of American Republicans believe the U.S. should never stop using fossil fuels, a viewpoint likely shared by many Oklahoma Republicans given the historical importance of the fossil fuel sector within the state. Republican State Representatives and Senators also dominate our legislature. Only 20% of seats in the Oklahoma House and 16% of seats in the Senate belong to Democrats. The prevalence of the Republican party, when considered in the context of national survey data, indicates that political support for renewable energy development at the state level is likely low. The Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (IPPRA), based at the University of Oklahoma, surveyed 3,564 Oklahoma residents to gather “advice and guidance on how to develop socially sustainable solutions to water, carbon, and infrastructure problems in Oklahoma." This study revealed that 92% of the Democrats surveyed believe that greenhouse gas emissions are causing average global temperatures to rise, compared to the 38% of Oklahoma Republicans believing the same. Additionally, only 28% of Republicans surveyed believe that global warming has resulted in changes to Oklahoma’s weather patterns. In the context of Republican domination in the Oklahoma House and Senate, these findings further indicate that political support for measures addressing GHG emissions and climate change is likely minimal. Within Cleveland County, 47% of registered voters identify as Republicans, 30% identify as Democrats, and 22% identify as Independents (Cleveland County Election Board 2024). This data does not reveal Norman’s specific situation, as it includes registered voters throughout the entire county. Under such circumstances, I choose instead to refer to the state-level data described in the preceding paragraph. Using the data available to me, I provided an initial assessment of the political climate in Oklahoma. In doing so, I offer a broad overview of the expected political feasibility regarding a net-zero energy transition. My analysis of the state-level situation, contextualized in the presence of national polling data, indicates that support for the phase-out of fossil fuels in Oklahoma likely remains low. These findings cannot be directly applied to Norman’s specific local context. Further public opinion research should be conducted to determine the opinions of Normanites and their City Council members on the topic. Given the challenges in conducting this political analysis for Norman, similar obstacles may appear when applying this model to other municipalities. V. Conclusion Throughout this study, I offered and explored the applications of a particular model for analyzing the feasibility of localized energy transitions in the United States. Here, I will summarize the model and discuss the implications of both the framework and the case study I used to evaluate the framework. I derived the model of analysis employed throughout this study from observations of both U.S. emissions data and literature concerning energy transitions. I wanted to ensure that a localized energy transition focused on the sectors with the largest greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.; thus, I chose to focus on the electricity and transportation sectors. This selection was reaffirmed within the literature, as explored in “Outlining the Energy Transition: Definitions and Criteria.” The next level of my analysis focused on evaluating the technological and political feasibility of transitioning each sector. I separated the discussion of technological feasibility by sector and highlighted the costs associated with clean energy developments accordingly. In the political feasibility section of my analysis, I largely focused on generalized public opinion data surrounding an energy transition due to the limited availability of data related to electricity and transportation decarbonization specifically. I articulated this framework of analysis through my case study of Norman, Oklahoma. The assessment of technological feasibility generally reflects declining costs in renewable technologies across Cleveland County, the United States, and the world. These declining costs appear to indicate that decarbonization in Norman is feasible. Given Oklahoma’s geographical conditions and expected cost declines, solar and wind energy could drive a transition away from fossil fuel dominance. Declining costs of utility-scale batteries will help mitigate the intermittent nature of these two sources. Additionally, nuclear energy possesses significant promise in helping Norman to achieve net-zero, especially given the apparent political support for nuclear energy within the state legislature. During the 59th regular session of the Oklahoma legislature, both the House and Senate passed Senate Bill 1535, which amended the Oklahoma Low Carbon Energy Initiative to include nuclear energy. The support for this legislation, however, does not mean that the legislature or the Public Utilities Commission will prioritize clean energy over fossil fuel interests in the future. Thus, predicting an energy transition in Norman remains exceedingly difficult. With regards to transportation, the City possesses the ability to fund both bike lane and bus route improvements, as costs for these advances ranged between 0.01-5.1% of the City’s 2023 budget. These costs are in line with the total amount of actual public transit expenditures made by the City in prior years. Improving and adding regional high-speed rail lines, however, proves increasingly expensive and is outside of the City’s regulatory purview. Accordingly, the City can realistically pursue localized public transit improvements over the next couple of years, ideally leading to decreased dependency on personal automobiles within Norman. The political preferences of Oklahomans possess a strong bearing on the overall feasibility of pursuing net-zero energy transitions. Republican domination in both the Oklahoma House and Senate indicates that statewide measures supporting energy transitions remain unlikely, especially given the general Republican stance on climate change and renewable energy versus fossil fuels. Data for Norman specifically cannot be found; accordingly, future research can focus on evaluating public opinion within the municipality. The difficulties present in ascertaining the feasibility of an energy transition in Norman reflect the limitations of the model I developed. First, this model does not cover all components of a municipality’s energy sector, leading to inconclusive predictions regarding the feasibility of total localized decarbonization. Second, the model relies on forecasting cost data, which is generated via a naturally uncertain practice. Third, the limited availability of publicly-accessible data—the backbone of this framework and my observations in Norman—weakens the conclusivity of assertions made using the application of the model to a given local context. This third component can be addressed in future uses of the model by obtaining access to private company and government data. Future applications of a similar framework possess ample opportunity for improving and innovating based on the foundation provided in this research. Regardless of its limitations, this model possesses significant implications for planning processes and improvements within my local community. Local strategic energy plans, which often possess decarbonization as a primary objective, rely on the type of in-depth analysis conducted throughout this report to accurately ascertain the current realities and future possibilities of local energy systems. Communities can use the model explored here as a guide in strategic energy plan development. Within Norman specifically, this paper provides critical analysis absent from the City’s long-term planning processes and suggests the need to develop some type of energy plan within the municipality. Climate change threatens all of humanity, regardless of one’s proximity to a coastline or dry zone. Addressing this crisis and preventing its exacerbation entails decarbonization across our energy systems. Throughout this study, I explored a framework to assess local energy transition feasibility and applied it to my local community. In doing so, I hope to encourage greater localized action in Norman and in the United States at large. 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