Each week, Dr. Aaron Carroll, one of the bloggers at The Incidental Economist, releases a 5-10 min video called "Health Care Triage," in which he discusses current issues in health. This week's installment will be of special interest to single payer advocates, since it concerns the French health care system, which he considers the best in the world. You may not know whether to laugh or cry.
On
December 7, 2012, a Florida State University (FSU) student reported
to Tallahassee police that she was raped the night before by an
unknown assailant after an evening of drinking. The alleged rapist
turned out to be FSU's star quarterback Jameis Winston, who claimed
that the sex was consensual. The charges were ultimately dropped for
lack of evidence. FSU went on to win the NCAA's national football
championship, and Winston won the Heisman trophy as the best college
football player of the year. An April 16 investgation by Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times
sheds further light on this incident.
When
the young woman reported to police, she had recent bruises and semen
was found on her underwear. Detective Scott Angulo was put in charge
of the case, but apparently there was almost no investigation. He
failed to pursue obvious leads that would have easily identified the
suspect and revealed that one of two teammates who witnessed the
encounter, Chris Cashner, had videotaped the event. (In this age of
cell phones, apparently some students like to film one another
having sex.)
On
January 10, 2013, Angulo got a huge break when the victim identified
her assailant by name after seeing him on campus. Even then, he
waited two weeks before taking the unusual step of calling Winston on
the phone to request an interview. Not surprisingly, Winston
lawyered up and never did speak to the police. The police finally
interviewed his two teammates (who supported his claim of innocence)
on November 14, almost a full year after the fact, but by that time, the tape had been erased. They
also took a DNA sample from Winston, which matched that found on the
accuser's clothing. On December 5, prosecutor William Meggs dropped
the charges due to lack of evidence. He acknowledged that there had
been deficiencies in the investigation, saying, “They just missed all the basic fundamental stuff that you are supposed to do.”
Meanwhile,
FSU appears to have violated federal law by conducting no official
investigation of the incident. Telephone records show that the
university was aware of the charges against Winston on January 13,
2013, when an assistant athletic director called the police to ask
about the progress of the investigation. Title IX of the Equal Opportunity in Education Act requires that when a university knows
about a case of student on student harrassment—obviously including
alleged rape—it “must promptly investigate to determine what occurred, and then take appropriate steps to resolve the situation.”
FSU refuses to discuss the case citing privacy concerns, but
whatever they did (if anything) did not interfere with their
successful football season.
A
strange presence lurking behind the scenes is the Seminole Boosters,
a nonprofit organization with $150 million in assets that
finances FSU varsity athletics. Bogdanich makes two interesting points. First, Detective Angulo had done private security work for
the Seminole Boosters prior to the investigation. Secondly, the
Boosters paid about 25% of FSU President—now Penn State
President—Eric Barron's $600,000 annual salary! (What does this
tell us about his job responsibilities?)
There
are obvious similarities between this incident and recent events at
Penn State. Former President Graham Spanier, Coach Joe Paterno, and
administrators Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are accused of covering up
child molestation charges against Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky for
several years. Since then, elections to the Penn State Board of Trustees have pitted candidates representing Penn Staters for
Responsible Stewardship (PS4RS), who believe Paterno and his
colleagues did nothing wrong, against candidates who accept the Freeh
Report and NCAA sanctions against the university and want to move on.
So far, four of six PS4SR candidates have been elected. Another
round of Board of Trustees elections ends on May 8.
Penn
State football fans can apparently take comfort in the fact that
President-Elect Barron, in a situation with echoes of the Sandusky
scandal, showed a similar reluctance to pursue charges against an
important member of the football program.
Yesterday's
paper reports that Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) intends to conduct hearings on college sexual assault policies, and will invite victims,
administrators and university presidents to testify. She
specifically mentioned the Winston case in her remarks. The U. S.
Department of Education is reviewing FSU's handling of the
incident. We can only hope that President Barron will receive an
invitation to this party to share his perspective with the Senators.
Two months ago, Dr. Eric Barron,
President of Florida State University (FSU), was appointed President of Penn State effective May 12. It seemed an odd choice, since FSU
has a mediocre academic reputation and its integrity is tainted by
two recent scandals. However, FSU won the NCAA National Football
Championship last year, which may suggest what Penn State's #1
priority actually is. New information has recently emerged that
raises troubling questions about the university Dr. Barron has spent
the last four years governing.
FSU drew the attention of the academic
community in 2011, when the Tampa Bay Times revealed that multibillionaire and conservative activist Charles Koch, through the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, had made a
$1.5 million donation to the FSU Economics Department in 2008 to be
used to hire new faculty for a program promoting “free enterprise.”
In exchange, the Foundation's representatives participated in the
screening process and were given veto power over new hires for the
program. Under this agreement, Koch rejected 60% of the applicants
suggested by the faculty, and two new faculty members approved by
Koch were hired. When the the agreement become public, it was
rejected by the FSU University Senate, but university senates have no power.
Dr.
Barron came to FSU in 2010. He responded to the Times
story and the Senate's objections by renegotiating the agreement in a way that leaves its consequences largely unchanged. Koch's
representatives no longer participate in the screening process, but
the Foundation is permitted to withdraw its funding if it objects to
the faculty's choices. Since this would leave FSU on the hook for
their salaries, it gives them an obvious incentive to hire candidates
acceptable to Koch.
It
would be naïve to think that academic scholarship is unaffected by
political considerations. Government and corporate grants often
determine what research topics are investigated and have been shown
to exert a subtle influence on research results. The Koch Foundation gives approximately $80 million per year to about 150 universities
(including Penn State). However, the FSU arrangement is a
particularly egregious violation of the norms of academic freedom.
Economics is a highly polarized discipline with clear differences
between mainstream and conservative economists. The FSU donation
seems to suggest that members of the corporate class can use
donations to buy their own version of economic “knowledge.” It's
not surprising that they would try to do this, but disappointing that
a state-owned university would allow it to happen.
The
Koch-FSU controversy takes on an additional twist given that Dr.
Barron is a climate scientist, while the Koch brothers, deeply
involved in oil and gas production, have used their wealth to secretly promote climate change denial. The FSU Economics Department uses an
introductory textbook, Economics: Private and Public Choices, by James W. Gwartney, et
al. Dr. Gwartney is an FSU
faculty member, and two of his three co-authors were formerly
affiliated with the university. Dr. Yoram Bauman, an economist with the Sightline Institute, has given the textbook a failing grade for misrepresenting the findings of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate research.
It is rated second worst on this issue of 18 popular introductory economics texts.
No one
is accusing Dr. Barron of being a climate change denier. Between
1986 and 2006, while he was director of the Earth System Science Center and later Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at
Penn State, he recruited Drs. Richard Alley and Michael Mann, two
distinguished climate scientists. Dr. Barron's views of climate
science can be heard about 21 minutes into this interview. He
appears to be a climate moderate concerned with predicting the future
effects of climate change but emphasizing the scientific uncertainty
about what these effects will be.
When
Dr. Barron reports to State College for work next month, one of his
first orders of business should be to explain how he intends to
ensure that the Koch Foundation's Penn State donations do not
influence research and teaching at the university.
After signing his landmark 1964 Civil
Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson is said to have become
depressed. When asked what was troubling him, he said, “I think we
just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to
come.” He was wrong. It was not just the South. Although Johnson
won that fall, since 1964 a majority of whites have voted for the
Republican candidate in every presidential election. The last column of the table shows the Republican margin of victory among
white voters.
Year
Republican Candidate
Democratic Candidate
Margin
1964
Goldwater
Johnson
-29%
1968
Nixon
Humphrey
16%
1972
Nixon
McGovern
40%
1976
Ford
Carter
4%
1980
Reagan
Carter
20%
1984
Reagan
Mondale
32%
1988
Bush I
Dukakis
20%
1992
Bush I
Clinton
2%
1996
Dole
Clinton
2%
2000
Bush II
Gore
13%
2004
Bush II
Kerry
17%
2008
McCain
Obama
12%
2012
Romney
Obama
20%
In Dog Whistle Politics,
Ian Haney Lopez makes a strong case for the argument that race has
been the driving force in American politics since the '60s.
Beginning with Nixon in 1968, the Republican Party developed a
winning strategy of appealing to white voters with messages based on
symbolic racism. One of the results
is that the Republicans have increasingly become the “white man's
party.” A new set of studies by Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University suggests that what is now a bad
situation is likely to become worse.
The
Census Bureau projects that by 2042, the US will become a
majority-minority
nation. That is, more than 50% of Americans will be non-whites. The authors hypothesized that this information is threatening to white voters, and making it salient will cause them to shift toward a more
conservative ideology and become more likely to vote Republican. The
information is, in effect, a dog whistle, that Republicans will be
able to use to their advantage in future elections.
The
Craig and Richeson article presents three increasingly impressive
experiments. The first is an internet study of a random sample of
white Independent voters—that is, voters not affiliated with either
the Republican or Democratic Party—living in the Western US.
California is already a majority-minority state, and in one
condition, respondents were informed of this fact. In the control
condition, they were told that Hispanics had become roughly equal
in number to blacks in the US. Participants were then asked to
indicate the extent to which they leaned toward one of the two major
parties, and to rate their political attitudes on a 5-point scale
from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The results of
the political leaning question are shown below.
People
informed of the majority-minority status of California also rated
their political attitudes as significantly more conservative than the
control group.
A second experiment used a random sample of white American adults from
all regions and political parties. Some of the participants—the
racial shift
condition—were told that America would become a majority-minority
nation in 2042, while those in the control group were given
information about geographic mobility. Attitudes were measures
toward five social policies, such as immigration and health care
reform. The authors proposed that the conservative shift was
mediated by group status threat.
This was measured by two questions about whether the American way of
life is threatened, and whether conditions in the US are getting
better or worse. Three other potential mediators of the conservative
shift were measured, but, as expected, none of them panned out.
As in
study 1, the participants in the racial shift condition shifted in
the conservative direction on the five attitudes and those in the
control group did not. Those in the racial shift condition also
showed greater evidence of group status threat, and, as predicted,
group status threat mediated the relationship between the racial
shift information and political conservatism. (See my earlier post explaining how mediation is inferred.)
Finally,
if the conservative shift is mediated by group status threat, then
providing participants with information that mitigates that threat
should reduce the size of the shift. Their third experiment had three conditions. Some participants were given the racial shift
information. The control group was again told about geographic
mobility. And finally, there was an assuaged-threat
condition. Two sentences were added to the racial shift information
reassuring the respondents that, despite the majority-minority shift,
white privilege would be maintained. Specifically, “white
Americans are expected to continue to have higher average incomes and
wealth compared to other racial groups.” Some new social policy
questions were also added.
As
expected, only the racial shift group showed a conservative shift on
the social policy questions. The participants in the assuaged-threat
condition did not differ from the control group.
It
should be noted the authors divided their social policy questions
into those they thought were race-related, i.e.,
immigration, and those they thought were not, i.e.,
health care reform. The size of the conservative shift was the same
on both sets of questions. This result would not surprise Lopez,
since he maintains that virtually all domestic political issues have
been racialized. For example, the term “Obamacare” is a dog
whistle meant to persuade white voters—incorrectly, of course—that
their heard-earned money is being taken by the government and given
to “Obama's people”—undeserving minority citizens.
The
Craig and Richeson article may help Republicans to identify
another reliable dog whistle, although Pat Buchanan called it to their attention years ago. The majority-minority shift is sometimes
said to foretell the demise of the Republican Party. However, in the
short run, it is likely to increase the racial polarization of the
two parties, and it may help Republicans temporarily by increasing
their appeal to white voters. Lopez suggests that whether the Republican Party can remain viable in the long run may depend on
their ability to persuade some non-whites, i.e., Asian-Americans and
light-skinned Hispanics, to redefine themselves as “white.”
No, this 52-min film by Temujin Doran is not about Stanley Milgram's experiments. It's a selective summary of the ideas contained in Chris Hedges' 2010 book, The Death of the Liberal Class, a short book with a small by enthusiastic following, which I highly recommend. To say that Hedges is pessimistic about the future is an understatement. Among other things, he addresses the question of what we should do when we (quite rationally) conclude that the human situation is hopeless.
The film uses negative photographic images and electronic music that I suspect most people will find annoying after a while. I certainly did. I've thought of several possible explanations for these choices, but none that I'm willing to state with confidence.
Chris Hedges publishes a short article each week at Truthdig. You can keep track of them on my blogroll.