The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market / Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, NY: Bloomsbury Pub., 2023

 In 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway released The Merchants of Doubt, an account of the actions of the fossil fuel industry and their agents to sow doubt in the public mind about the reality and danger of climate change.  Their book had a powerful effect on how the public understands the politics of climate policy, and it set the stage for numerous legal actions to hold the "merchants of doubt" responsible for the current and accumulating harms of climate change.  Law suits are slowing making their way through state courts around the country.  If these cases succeed, the transition toward a clean and reliable energy economy will be much accelerated.

Among the questions raised by The Merchants of Doubt was how four scientists, who were the leading figures challenging climate action, could deny the scientific consensus regarding the fact and danger of climate change.  Oreskes and Conway concluded that they were entranced by the ideology of "the free market."  How did this ideology become so powerful?  The Big Myth provides a powerful case that it was the result of a decades-long public relations effort by American business and industrial associations.

The propaganda effort began in the early decades of the 20th century when the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), founded in 1895, fought progressive era regulations to restrict child labor, establish workers' compensation relief systems, and empower unionization.  They were, of course ultimately unsuccessful, but their opposition demonstrated the necessity of government regulation to protect the interests of ordinary citizens from exploitation by business and industrial elites. 

Later, in the 1920s, the nation's privately owned electrical grids were failing to bring electricity to rural areas.  This led to a drive for "rural electrification" legislation that would create a rational electrical grid system serving urban and rural regions alike.  The effort was opposed by the National Electric Light Association (NELA), an association of electric utilities founded in 1885 and which later became the Edison Electric Institute.  NELA was successful until New Deal legislation finally established the Rural Electrification Administration and imposed regulations to expand access to electricity.  Here we see government action, as opposed to unregulated market forces, being responsible for creating the conditions for expanded economic prosperity.

The danger of regulations, unionization, and government planning alleged by NAM and NELA was, of course, said to be the slippery slope leading to socialism.  They argued that once government intrudes in one sector of life, it will inevitably intrude in every sector.  Oreskes and Conway point out that this reveals the false dilemma that lay behind the propaganda: economies must either be laissez faire or entirely controlled by a central authority.  The business propagandists never acknowledged that there are countless ways to organize an economy between these two poles.  

Despite the massive market failure that produced the Great Depression, business and industry lobbyists doubled down on their commitment to unregulated capitalism and resisted New Deal efforts to restore economic stability and security.  Out of this, NAM developed what Oreskes and Conway call the "indivisibility thesis," i.e., that political, religious, and economic freedom were "indivisible."  This meant any assault on the prerogatives of the private sector was also (or ultimately) an assault on political and religious freedom.  Later, this "tripod of freedom" was boiled down simply to the inseparability of "democracy" and "free enterprise," though Billy Graham continued to promote a connection between religious freedom and "free markets."  

Business leaders created several organizations, most notably NAM's National Industrial Information Council (NIIC).  These organizations were established to propagandize in favor of unregulated capitalism.  Edward Bernays, the founder of modern public relations, was enlisted for support. The NIIC played a major role in the the campaign to shape public opinion through films, slide shows, newspaper advertisements, direct mail, billboards, posters, pamphlets, window displays, and other media.  In the late 1930s, NAM produced an extremely popular radio program, The American Family Robinson, which promoted "free market" fundamentalism.  In the 1940s and 1950s, NAM, with the assistance of Hollywood, was responsible for numerous films and news reels.

Also in the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder was publishing her "little house" books, particularly Little House on the Prairie.  These books contained an intentional and not-so-well-disguised severe libertarian message.  The message was in large part due to the editorial influence of Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.  Lane is considered among the three most important founders of the modern libertarian movement, along with Ayn Rand and Isabelle Paterson or "the three furies" as William F. Buckley dubbed them.

Oreskes and Conway also provide an interesting account of General Electric's television series General Electric Theatre, hosted by Ronald Reagan.  General Electric Theatre, airing weekly from 1953-1962, provided well-produced and engaging stories that promoted unregulated capitalism.  Reagan's involvement with the program is widely recognized as what transformed him from a supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal to the "anti-government" ideologue that he became.  

Much of the public relations efforts on behalf of unregulated capitalism came from business interests.  As this would easily be seen as self-serving, business leaders sought academic economists to give their ideology independent credibility.  Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman served this purpose.  The careers of each were made possible by financial support from libertarian business interests despite strong opposition from the profession.  It is noteworthy, though, that the economic views of each were far less austere than how they were promoted by their patrons.  For example, Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom, was republished in a dumbed-down version in Reader's Digest in 1945, where any recognition of the important role of government in economic affairs was edited out.  A similar redaction of pro-government passages in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was done by George Stigler for the University of Chicago Press in 1957.

One reoccurring theme in The Big Myth is that claims that a "free market" will better provide for economic prosperity and general social well-being are belied by the historical facts.  Instead, the unregulated capitalism has led to numerous significant market failures (especially the climate crisis), and that nearly all of the material and technological advances that make our lives safe and comfortable today have been the result of either direct government action or public-private partnerships initiated by the public sector.  Oreskes and Conway make a powerful case that the popular admiration of "free markets" is a product of special business and industrial interests working for their private gain without regard for the well-being of workers and consumers.   

The Big Myth is a massive work (565 pages, including bibliography and index).  This review provides only a slim sample of the history of the "free market" propaganda that has shaped so much of our discourse today.  It is a brilliant, extensive study that deserves anyone's attention who is interested in the controversies over the present day organization of our political and economic institutions.   

Above Average Carbon Emitters Among Low Income Households

I recently did a little research attempting to understand the effects of Citizens' Climate Lobby's carbon fee and dividend proposal on people in the lowest quintile of income earners.  Below is the result of that research.

Above Average Carbon Emitters Among Low Income Households[*]

Alan Mattlage, Ph.D., M.L.S.

One of many strengths of Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s (CCL) carbon fee and dividend proposal is that it provides a net benefit to 86% of households in the lowest quintile of income earners (Ummel, 2016).  The progressive distribution of benefits is driven by the fact that lower income households tend to have lower than average carbon footprints but will receive a modified equal per capita share of the revenues from the fee (one share for each adult and one-half share for each child up to two children per family).  This makes the proposal one of the most economically progressive methods for transitioning to a de-carbonized economy.  See Figure 1.  Benefiting 86% still leaves 14% of the lowest quintile worse off – that’s about 2.8% of all American households or about 3.5 million households (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016).  The following is an attempt to understand why these households are made worse off, how significant the burden is, and what can be done to relieve that burden.

The short answer is that we cannot know precisely who is burdened, but there are data that can give us a general understanding of the circumstances that will tend to make a household worse-off.

Figure 1 – Distribution of benefits and burdens across quintiles

Why are households made worse-off?

The obvious reason households are made worse off is that their dividend is less than the cost they incur from the carbon fee.  This is true no matter which quintile the household is in.  To answer the question why are 14% of the lowest income households made worse off, we need to understand why a household might have above-average emissions.  Some of those reasons will be particularly common to low income households. 

A net financial loss is probably the result of some combination of the following factors:

1. the household is composed of a single person,

2. the household’s electricity is provided disproportionately by a carbon-intensive fuel, like coal,

3. the household is located in a particularly harsh climate,

4. the household is poorly insulated and has inefficient HVAC equipment and appliances,

5. the household’s transportation costs are particularly high, and

6. the household buys an unusually large amount of carbon intensive consumer goods and services.

1. Household Composition

Perhaps the most important factor of all is the household’s size.  Single person households will receive only one dividend share, while needing to cover the entire cost of maintaining the household, e.g., utilities, transportation, and necessary household consumer goods.  Meanwhile, a two-adult household will receive twice the dividend, but they will share many of the costs of maintaining the household.  Consequently, single person households are likely to be disproportionately represented in those households suffering a loss no matter what income quintile they are in. 

This has been borne out by the household impact study conducted by Kevin Ummel for Citizens’ Climate Lobby.  Ummel compared the net benefits going to two household types: “minority households” and “elderly households.”  Minority households are composed of more members (sometimes more than two adults which compounds the dividend).  Elderly households are, by definition, composed of only one or two adults.  These households have similar incomes, but the mean benefit accruing to minority households would be significantly greater than the mean benefit accruing to elderly households:  $148/year for minority households versus $2/year for elderly households considering all households (Ummel, 2016, p. 31; U.S. Census Bureau, 2016).  For households in just the lowest quintile, 99% of families of four are benefitted, while 81% of elderly households are benefitted.  The mean benefits for these households are $596/year and $138/year respectively.  These disparities show that living in a small or single person household contributes to a financial burden under the fee and dividend proposal.

2. Local Carbon Intensity of Electricity

Ummel also broke down the consumer habits of each income quintile into nine categories and determined the carbon tax burden for each category.  See Figure 2.  The largest single category for all but the top quintile is “utilities.”  Consequently, households that run on especially carbon intensive electricity would be disadvantaged by the carbon fee, while households running on clean energy would tend to benefit (Ummel, 2016, p. 34).  The importance of this factor is suggested by comparing Figures 3 and 4.  There is a rough correlation between the geographic distribution of the carbon intensity of the electricity supply and the financial impact on households in the lowest quintile.

3. Harsh Climates

Little need be said about this.  Households in especially cold or hot climates certainly will have higher utility costs than households in milder climates; however, in light of Figure 4, this factor does not seem to be particularly significant as many regions of the country experiencing harsh climates tend to enjoy

Figure 2 – National tax burden by quintile

 Note: From BEA NIPA Handbook (https://www.bea.gov/national/pdf/NIPAhandbookch6.pdf): “Private fixed investment (PFI) measures spending by private businesses, nonprofit institutions, and households on fixed assets in the U.S. economy. Fixed assets consist of structures, equipment, and software that are used in the production of goods and services. PFI encompasses the creation of new productive assets, the improvement of existing assets, and the replacement of worn out or obsolete assets.”

relatively greater benefits, e.g. New England, Florida, the Southwest, and Montana.  With inevitable changes to the climate, many climates will become harsher, increasing the importance of this factor.

4. Poor Insulation and Inefficient HVAC Equipment and Appliances

Again, it is obvious that households which live in poorly insulated housing and have inefficient HVAC equipment and appliances will bear a greater burden from a carbon tax as more energy will be required to achieve the same results.  This is a particularly significant problem for poor, low income households.  Such households often live in rental property, the owner of which is unconcerned about energy efficiency since the utilities are paid by the tenants.  Low income housing stock is significantly less efficient than average.  If low income housing were brought up to the national average, low income households would see a 35% reduction in their utility costs (Drehbol and Ross, 2016).

5. Transportation

The second largest category is “gasoline,” but while our common acquaintance with gasoline as a fossil fuel might lead us to think this would be the most significant factor in establishing a household’s carbon footprint, it actually makes up less than 25% of the total carbon footprint of U.S. households.  Still, if a household uses more gasoline than the national average, this factor will contribute to reducing the benefit they would receive from the carbon dividend and might, like other carbon-intensive factors, push them into a net loss. 

Figure 3 – Carbon intensity of energy supply

       

Figure 4 – Lowest quintile households benefited by fee and dividend

However, simply comparing gasoline costs between the lowest quintile and other quintiles might not be very revealing, since a disproportionate number of households in the lowest quintile likely will not have cars.  This means the gasoline costs borne by households in the lowest quintile will fall mainly on the car-owning households.

6. Indirect Costs

Utility costs and gasoline costs are “direct” energy purchases.  For the lowest income quintile, they make up 50% of the total costs.  The other categories are “indirect” energy purchases that appear as embodied energy in the goods and services that a household purchases.  Any household which purchases goods and services which are in total more carbon intensive than those purchased by the average household will find their net financial benefits lowered by these categories of expenditures, possibly pushing them into a net loss.  Because indirect purchases make up 50% of the lowest quintile’s energy purchases and even larger percentages of higher quintiles, these purchases are especially important in determining a household’s net benefit.  Indirect costs are the primary factor that burdens the higher quintiles and benefits the lowest income quintile, but lowest quintile households that purchase consumer products with an above average carbon footprint, nevertheless, will be penalized by these categories of purchases.

                                          

If a household remains well-enough below average in enough of the consumption categories, it will likely benefit from the fee and dividend mechanism, despite a high carbon footprint in other categories; however, if their consumption is in total above average across these categories, they will suffer a loss.  The worst-case scenario would likely be a single-person household, reliant upon carbon-based electricity, in a harsh environment, living in a poorly insulated house, with a long commute, purchasing unusually carbon-intensive goods and services.  Surely not every one of these conditions need hold to push someone into a loss, but various combinations of these factors could do so.  No single profile of a low-income household can tell the story for all 3.5 million households.

How significant is the burden?

Forty-seven percent of all households suffer a loss and their median loss amounts to $195/year.  Among the lowest income quintile, only 14% of households suffer a loss and their median loss is only $96/year or $8/month.  Consequently, the absolute burden is least for households in the lowest income quintile, but their median loss amounts to 0.79% of their income while the median loss nationally is only 0.25% of income.  So even as the lowest quintile is much more carbon virtuous than higher quintiles, their low income could make managing their loss nevertheless more difficult.  

There are additional considerations that are aggravating factors:

1. steadily rising fee,

2. limited conservation options for households in the lowest income quintile, and

3. the ability of higher income quintiles to achieve conservation savings.

CCL’s fees are proposed to begin at $15 in the first year and rise $10 in each subsequent year.  This means that the households (in all quintiles) that benefit will gain greater benefits as more revenue is collected, but burdened households will be made increasingly worse-off.  This could become a significant problem over time for households in the lowest quintile, unless those households are able to reduce their carbon footprint.  In many cases, we cannot reasonably expect this.  Furthermore, if households in higher quintiles are able to reduce their emission faster than households in the lowest quintile, less revenue will be collected without a comparable reduction of costs for the lowest quintile.  Households in the lowest quintile might be left behind in the race to reduce carbon emissions. 

There are several mitigating factors, however.  Ummel’s study does not seek to predict how the quintiles will fair in future years, but another study by Regional Economic Modeling, Inc. has projected the consequences of the fee and dividend nationally and regionally.  It provides some consolation that the fee and dividend will boost economic growth and create 2.1 million jobs in the first ten years.  These potentially could help reduce the harms across the board and soften the burden for the lowest quintile.  There are, however, more immediately recognizable mitigating factors:

1. the pass-through assumption,

2. under-reported high quintile expenditures,

3. price insensitivity among high income quintiles,

4. home ownership,

5. family wealth, and

6. temporary loss of income.

1. The Pass-Through Assumption

Perhaps most significant mitigating factor is that Ummel has assumed that 100% of the fee is passed on to consumers.  This undoubtedly will not happen.  For excise taxes generally, businesses commonly assume roughly 25% of the cost by reducing returns to capital and restricting or reducing wages (Tax Policy Center, 2017).  To some extent, as wages are reduced across all wage levels and as stockholders tend to be in higher income quintiles, the costs borne by the business will largely burden households in the higher quintiles.  So, the 14% of low-income households or 3.5 million households that are projected to lose financially is an overestimate.  Other analyses use different pass-through assumptions.  For example, the Department of Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis assumes no costs are passed on to the consumer (Horowitz, 2017). 

2. Under-Reported Expenditures

Ummel also noted that there is a discrepancy between expenditures reported in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Personal Consumption Expenditures component of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’s national accounts.  The consequence of this is that reported expenditures are known to be underestimates of actual expenditures.  Utilities, gasoline, and a few other expenditures are reported more or less accurately, but other categories were under-reported by 47%.  Importantly, expenditures made by households in higher income quintiles are disproportionately under-reported.  Nonetheless, Ummel assumes that under-reporting is uniform across all income levels.  In a footnote, he recognizes that this will underestimate spending among the rich (Ummel, 2016, p. 4-6).  Underestimating these expenditures means that the aggregate revenue will be larger than estimated, and the dividend to the lowest income quintile also will be larger.  This is especially important as the underestimated expenditures are indirect expenditures and make up 60% of the expenditures of the highest income quintile.  Again, this will not only increase the dividend to all households, it will reduce the percent of lowest income households that are expected to be made worse off by the fee and dividend. 

3. Price Insensitivity

Perhaps one of the reasons that expenditures are under-reported by households in the higher quintiles is that they are less concerned about their expenditures than less well-off households.  Consequently, they do not notice those expenditures.  They also are likely to be less price sensitive than the less well-off.  They will be willing to make the same purchases even as prices rise somewhat.  According to Randy Schnepf of the Congressional Research Service, this is true for consumers making food purchases, “low-income consumers who spend a significant share of their household budget on food are likely to be … more responsive to price changes … than high-income consumers with lower food budget shares” (Schnepf, 2013, p. 28).  In the long run, this is very good news for households in the lowest income quintile.  That households in the higher quintiles will be relatively insensitive to price changes will mean that the lowest income households will be better able to keep pace with any conservation efforts made by those in higher quintiles.

4. Home Ownership

Not everyone who is in the lowest income quintile is poor.  Many people have substantial wealth in their houses.  Retirees who have paid off their mortgage can live comfortably with a relatively low income.  Others may have substantial savings conservatively invested.  While their income is low, they nonetheless could enjoy a lifestyle that involves higher than average expenditures and large carbon footprints.  Nationally, there are 6,896,000 homeowners with incomes less than $30,000 who are 65 years old or older (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).  Some of these still might be carrying a mortgage, but the number is likely small.  While they may not have the security of people in the highest quintiles, their ability to afford the increased costs of a carbon fee might be similar to middle class households.  The existence of these households reduces the percent of households about which we should be acutely concerned.

5. Family Wealth

Like homeowners with low incomes, other households in the lowest quintile are not poor in the concerning sense.  They may be nominally distinct households, but benefit from their wealthy families.  Some college students would be good examples of these “households.”  While officially falling within the lowest quintile, they could have resources that allow them to make above average expenditures and thereby be among the households that are made worse off by the fee and dividend.  Roughly 20.5 million students attended college in fall of 2016.  A plurality of them came from the highest income quartile of families, i.e., families with an income of at least $116,000.  87% of high school students in the highest quartile went on to college (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017; Pell Institute, 2016).  Again, many “households” composed of college students from this stratum of society might be nominally in the lowest income quintile, but well-able to afford an increase in the cost of carbon intensive goods and services.

6. Temporary Loss of Income

The unemployment rate is currently 4.3% or 6.86 million people and the average length of unemployment is about 26 weeks.  Only a quarter of the unemployed remain unemployed for longer than 26 weeks (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017).  Loss of employment will surely send some number of households into the lowest income quintile for a time.  All other things being equal, they will likely not moderate their consumption habits significantly, if they have some savings to tide them over the period of temporary unemployment.  As household consumption correlates strongly with income, some number of them likely will be above the national average.  What this means is that some number of households with large carbon footprints will be in the lowest quintile only temporarily and will have greater resources in future years to recoup whatever burdens they experience during their weeks or months of unemployment.  These households will, in essence, be more likely to have high consumption habits and be more financially secure than those with chronically low incomes.  Recent research has revealed that in addition to people losing employment, income is often temporarily lost because of reduced hours during a business downturn (Morduch and Schneider, 2017).  The same situation faces small business owners suffering temporary losses.  We, of course, should be concerned about all of these groups, but their plight can be distinguished from households with chronically low incomes and for which we should be acutely concerned.

These six mitigating factors or categories of households all reduce the number of households and the burden they would suffer from the fee and dividend.  That is, each will reduce the percent of households in the lowest income quintile that are made worse off by the fee and dividend, such that 14% is an over estimate of households that will be significantly or chronically disadvantaged.  Additionally, the first three factors (the pass-through assumption and under-reported expenditures and price insensitivity by the higher income households) should increase the dividend for everyone and the mean net financial returns for the lowest income quintile.

Finally, data indicate that the burden among the lowest quintile will fall less on the lowest decile (Ummel, 2016 and Horowitz, 2017).

What can be done to relieve the burdens that remain?

Despite the expected reduction in the number of households that will suffer a net financial loss and the expected reduction in the size of that loss, some households in the lowest income quintile will continue to suffer losses.  Consequently, it will be important to find ways to relieve those burdens.  One simple way would be to modify the formula for distributing revenue.  CCL is promoting a modified per capita distribution (one share for each adult and one-half share for each child up to two children per family).  CCL believes the simplicity of this formula will be a political selling point, but it tends to burden single person households.  Other distribution formulas, nearly as simple, could be implemented that would protect those households.

Another significant method to protect people in the lowest quintile would be to reduce their carbon intensive expenditures.  As the largest single category of expenditures is utilities, significant relief can be achieved by de-carbonizing electricity generation.  This is precisely what the carbon fee and dividend is most likely to accomplish.  With rising costs for generating coal and gas fueled electricity, wind, solar, and other clean energy sources will gain greater and greater market share.  Already, coal-fired power plants are closing around the country and are announced to be retired sooner than initially planned.  If, ideally, all electricity was generated from clean sources, the carbon-based expenditures of the lowest quintile would be reduced significantly.  As this expenditure is proportionately larger than expenditures by higher income households, the net benefits to the lowest income households would further improve.  As electricity becomes cleaner, the carbon fee burden associated with consumer goods would also fall.  Businesses will seek to reduce their production costs by making use of low-carbon inputs, thereby reducing the cost of the fee to consumers.  So, the success of the fee and dividend would reduce both the fee and the dividend, essentially making it less and less relevant to household finances.  The problem of the steadily rising fee would be counter-acted by the reduced number of goods and services to which the fee applies.

The increased cost of gasoline production would stimulate more fuel-efficient transportation.  Already, hybrids and electric vehicles are gaining market share.  Countries such as Norway, India, China, and France have already announced intentions to promote or move entirely to electric vehicles. These are, of course, foreign markets, but they indicate the direction that the automobile industry is heading.  Virtually all major auto manufacturers are now producing an all-electric car.  While the upfront cost of new hybrid or electric vehicles will be beyond the reach of most all low-income households, more efficient vehicles in the used car market will become within reach.  As these vehicles appear on the market, the carbon-intensity of transportation expenditures by the lowest quintile will fall.  Here, too, the fee and dividend is designed to make itself obsolete.

There are a number of ways to reduce the cost of the fee to the lowest quintile that lie outside the fee and dividend proposal:  local, state, and federal support for energy efficiency upgrades for affordable housing, support for “Energy Star” appliances, “cash for clunkers” programs, and progressive utility rate structures are a few obvious tools.  Money for these programs could be raised by allowing households to voluntarily decline their dividend.  Checks would come to them with a notice that if they chose not to cash the check in a specific time period, the money would be used to support energy efficiency programs or perhaps research and development into alternative fuels.  Given that most of the revenue generated would come from the highest quintiles and that these checks would make up typically only about 0.2% of their annual income, many well-off households likely would be willing to make this contribution.

Finally, the costs and benefits examined here are only financial.  De-carbonizing our economy will benefit vulnerable communities located near polluting power plants.  This is a significant concern among environmental justice advocates.  Cap-and-trade carbon pricing plans do not address this problem.  Under a cap-and-trade system, polluting power plants can purchase off-sets and continue to operate polluting plants usually affecting poorer neighborhoods.  In contrast, a fee and dividend plan puts market pressures on all fossil fuel plants equally, thereby promoting healthier conditions for vulnerable communities.  The study conducted by Regional Economic Modeling, Inc. for CCL found that CCL’s fee and dividend plan would prevent 230,000 premature deaths in the courses of 20 years. 

While we cannot expect that all households within the lowest quintile will be benefitted by CCL’s carbon fee and dividend, it is clear that the proposal is extremely progressive and that the estimate that 14% of the lowest quintile will suffer a burden is an overestimation.   There are clearly ways in which the households in the lowest quintile can be protected.  Among these is simply the fact the fee and dividend plan is designed to make itself obsolete, particularly in those expenditure categories that are most damaging to the lowest quintile.  

Sources

Drehbol, Ariel and Lauren Ross, “Lifting the High Energy Burden in America’s Largest Cities: How Energy Efficiency Can Improve Low Income and Underserved Communities,” American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, April 2016.

Horowitz, John, et al., “Methodology for Analyzing a Carbon Tax,” Working Paper 115, Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Department of Treasury, January 2017.

Morduch, Jonathan and Rachel Schneider, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

National Center for Educational Statistics, “Fast Facts,” U.S. Department of Education, 2017 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372, retrieved 6/26/2017.

Nystrom, Scott and Patrick Luckowk, “The economic, climate, fiscal, power, and demographic impact of a national fee-and-dividend carbon tax,” Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Mass.:  Regional Economic Modeling, Inc. and Synapse Energy Economics, Inc., June 9, 2014.

Pell Institute, “Indicators of higher education equity in the United States: 2016 historical trend report,” 2016, http://www.pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-Indicators_of_Higher_Education_Equity_in_the_US_2016_Historical_Trend_Report.pdf, retrieved 6/26/2017.

Schnepf, Randy, “Consumers and food price inflation,” Congressional Research Service, Sept. 13, 2013. 

Tax Policy Center, “Briefing Book,” Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, 2017, http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/who-bears-burden-federal-excise-taxes, retrieved 6/26/2017.

Ummel, Kevin, “Impact of CCL’s proposed carbon fee and dividend policy: A high-resolution analysis of the financial effect of U.S. households,” prepared for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Working Paper v1.4, April, 2016.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017, https://www.bls.gov/home.htm, retrieved 7/6/2017.

U.S. Census Bureau, “America’s Families Living Arrangements,” 2016, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2016/demo/families/cps-2016.html, retrieved 6/26/2017.

U.S. Census Bureau, “American Housing Survey,” 2016, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive/ahstablecreator.html#?s_areas=a00000&s_year=n2015&s_tableName=Table1&s_byGroup1=a1&s_byGroup2=a1&s_filterGroup1=t1&s_filterGroup2=g1, retrieved 6/26/2017

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[*] I would like to thank Rebecca Schaaf, Ellyn Dooley, David Brittain, and Danny Richter for editorial comments and general guidance.  

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions / Edwin A. Abbott -- N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1992

First published in 1884, Abbott's Flatland is a whimsical story about a square (or Mr. A. Square) living in a two dimensional world who is visited by a sphere from a three dimensional world.  Eventually, Mr. A. Square is transported by the sphere into the three dimensional world so that he might understand the limitations of his own experience.  Flatland is at once a lesson in geometry and an allegory on two levels.  The geometry lesson is quite simple.  Abbott provides the reader with a reasonably plausible account of how a two dimensional world might appear to a two dimensional being.  At one point he also provides us with an account of how a one dimensional world might appear to a one dimensional being.  However, it is the allegories that are the most interesting aspects of the book.  One the most obvious level, Mr. A. Square's world is rife with the social and political hierarchies of the late 19th century.  Class is represented by the number of sides the resident polygons have.  Near circles are the highest, nearly priestly class, while on the other end of the hierarchy, women are nearly simple straight lines.  On a less obvious level, the allegory is about how we are limited by the metaphysical contours of our world and our faculties of mind.

Abbott does not explicitly write of this, but his work clearly suggests that our ordinary manner of thinking about the world as being laid out in four dimensions might be a product of our faculties of mind.  Indeed, theories in contemporary physics suggest that we in fact live in a world best described by numerous more dimensions than the four we commonly accept.  For someone not acquainted with these theories, one feels like Mr. A. Square wrestling with the arguments of the sphere that assert unimaginable ideas.

Flatland is utterly charming.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion / Jonathan Haidt -- N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 2012

There is an extremely good motive behind Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, i.e., a desire to get people of good will, both conservative and liberal, to see past their own moral perspectives and take one another seriously.  To do so, one needs first of all to see one’s moral perspective as being in some sense subjective and also to assume the legitimacy of the perspective of those with whom one disagrees.  In short, Haidt is calling on us to exercise a little humility and charity when it comes to moral debates.  His main approach for inculcating these virtues is to connect our moral thinking to emotions that are generated by a set of pre-established values.  By examining the moral psychology of liberals and conservatives, he hopes that we will be able to recognize the causes of our differing moral attitudes and find a vocabulary that will allow us to disagree constructively.

The central metaphor for Haidt's moral psychology is that of someone riding an elephant.  The rider is the reasoning/rational aspect of a person, while the elephant is the emotive aspect.  By and large, the elephant goes where it wants to go and the rider provides an after-the-fact justification of the elephant's actions.  At best, the rider can inflect the elephant's movement.  For Haidt, emotions are doing the main work in moral behavior.  Against this, view he poses "rationalist philosophers" or often simply "philosophers."  Setting aside his view of moral psychology, his critique of his alleged opponents is quite misguided.  His mistakes comes from thinking that normative philosophical theories are moral psychological theories.  I'll say more about this later.

The most intersting aspect of his work is his analysis of the sets of values he finds in liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.  According to Haidt, the values of each are based on six "foundations:"  care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation; but the importance of these foundations (or values) is different for the different political groups.  Again, according to Haidt, the moral judgments of liberals are dominated by care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating (in that order of importance.)  The moral judgments of libertarians overwhelmingly dominated by liberty/oppression with some influence coming from fairness/cheating.  The moral judgments of social conservatives are, however, motivated equally by all six of the moral foundations. 

These conclusions are by no means surprising, but on first glance, one might question how Haidt has quantified his results.  By looking at the copious references to psychological studies and the number of surveys available on Haidt's website, yourmorals.org, one can be reasonably convinced that his work on this score is of high quality.  One might object, however, to an overly general assessment of the regulating relationship between emotion and reason.  While it is true that much that goes by the name "reason" is in fact rationalization, reason nonetheless has a role in moral judgments -- a role that might differ among different people.  Some of us drive elephants while others of us drive horses;  Some of us are assertive drivers while others are passive.  Haidt glosses over these distinctions between the varying strengths of emotion and reason among individuals in a population.

It is important to make these distinctions as without them, one is left without an ability to evaluate moral judgments.  If we are stuck with pre-established values which drive us in spite of reason, it becomes impossible to constructively discuss moral differences.  Our moral conclusions are no more amenable to review and change than our culinary tastes.  That Haidt largely overlooks the significance of applying reason to moral decision making turns his work, at best, into a recommendation to apologists on how to address and persuade people with different moral perspectives and not an appeal to see past one's own initial moral perspective and to seriously entertain reaching more valid conclusions about moral questions.  Haidt needs to put aside deterministic psychology and take seriously the moral questions we face.  His antipathy to and misunderstanding of normative philosophy makes it unlikely that he will ever do that.

Winning the Presidency 2012 / William J. Crotty, ed. -- Boulder, Col.: Paradigm Publishers, 2013

The 2012 presidential campaign arguably was one of the most important campaigns in recent times.  The campaign pitted a status quo candidate (Barak Obama) against a candidate (Mitt Romney) who was fronting a party that was intent upon making sweeping changes to the role of government in American life.  That Obama came out the victor can be attributed to many things.  It is easy to suggest that the American people (or a slim majority of those who voted) rejected the Republican Party's libertarian agenda in favor of Obama, but that misses two more profound lessons of the election.  The 2012 presidential campaign was the first campaign to be waged under the campaign finance rules set by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling and it was the first campaign to make truly effective use of "big data."  In a collection of essays edited by William J. Crotty entitled Winning the Presidency 2012, both superficial and profound elements of the campaign are examined with uneven success.

Most of the articles provide analyses that are well-known to anyone who paid moderate attention to the campaign and the post-election media pundits.  The demographic shift in the American body politic and the gender gap are reviewed as is the trouble that Mitt Romney had gaining support from the Tea Party elements during the primaries and through to election day.  Many of the widely covered watershed events are brought into the spotlight:  Romney's refusal to release his tax filings, Obama's "you didn't build that" and Romney's "47%" remarks, Obama's poor showing in the first debate, and Chris Christy's praise of Obama for his leadership following superstorm Sandy.  All of these were, of course, important conditions and events of the campaign and so it is valuable that the essays memorialize them.  After all, most will be forgotten in ten years.  A good, clear record will be useful, but it certainly isn't the stuff that will reveal the true historical importance of the campaign.

The first big change from previous elections that would seem to make more than a marginal difference was the ability to form  "super PACs."  Winning the Presidency 2012 contains an essay by Dowdle, Adkins, Sebold, and Stewart that admirably discusses the role of super PACs.   In short, super PACs are political action committees that are able to raise unlimited amounts of money from donors.  This money can be spent directly on election activities as long as they are not "coordinated" with the candidate's campaign.   The prohibition against coordinating with the campaign quickly became meaningless and the assumption was that the candidate that was able to make use of the largest super PACs would destroy the competition.  This did not turn out to be the case as Karl Rove's massive super PAC campaign chest failed to deliver results for Romney or for candidates down ticket.  The lesson, however, has not been made completely clear.  It is not that money will not win elections, but that is is important how that money is spent.  The Republican spending strategy focused on negative media buys, and while these were not without effect, it appears that a saturation point was reached long before the money ran out.  In contrast, Obama's campaign money and sympathetic super PAC money was spent building a highly "data driven" retail campaign organization, particularly targeting swing states.  Though outspent by his opponents, his more sophisticated strategy was able to turn out the votes necessary to prevail, particularly in the electoral vote.

The employment of data was the crucial difference in the 2012 election.  In an essay entitled, "A Transformational Political Campaign: Marketing and Candidate Messaging in the 2012 Election," Wayne P. Steger describes the Obama campaign's use of massive pools of data gathered during the 2008 election campaign and in the period leading up to 2012.  These data were effectively used to segment the voting public in complex ways so that messages could be tailored to fit the audience in ways never before possible.  The segmentation of the voting population went well beyond determining likely voters and persuadable voters, it was able to test messages and funding requests to ensure that the audience would be maximally receptive to the campaign's appeal.  This is the future of campaigning, and we can only expect the science to be developed well beyond the techniques of 2012.

Campaigns certainly will make use of what has come to be known as "big data," i.e., data sets that are so large that traditional means for storing and processing the data are insufficient, and campaigns increasingly will make use of distributed repositories of data, possibly owned by corporations and organizations other than the campaign.  Computer programs will then be written to reveal tendencies within the voting population that will allow highly effective campaign messaging.  Imagine, for example, that a campaign is able to acquire the records of automobiles owned by a voting population and segregate them according to gas guzzling vs. more efficient vehicles.  The campaign might then match the gas guzzlers to voters who have long daily commutes.  The resultant population likely would be quite sympathetic to a message promising to keep gasoline prices low.  Other similarly devised messages could be tailored to other sub-populations of voters.

That SUV owners would be gratefully receive promises to keep gas prices low would not be surprising, but other "big data" mining techniques are thought to be able to reveal extremely surprising and powerful results.  A campaign that can acquire massive amounts of data about voters and can employ talented computer programmers could become extremely effective in reaching and motivating voters.

And so we can put together the two most important developments in the 2012 campaign: money and data.  The disappearance of limits on campaign contributions means that large, valuable, and privately held pools of data, will be able to empower campaigns as never before.  The 2012 Obama campaign was the first to reveal this dynamic.  It will mark the dawn of a new era of political campaigning in which the owners and managers of our society will be able to employ their vast repositories of data to ensure that their candidates win primary competitions and ultimately general elections.  Crotty's book, Winning the Presidency 2012 only hints at this future.

Maryland Women in the Civil War: Unionists, Rebels, Slaves, & Spies / Claudia Floyd -- Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2013

Most histories of the Civil War have approached the topic either from the perspective of a limited military campaign or battle or from a national military-political perspective.  Some, of course, examine specific themes related to the war, e.g., the emancipation of slaves, international relations, or political intrigue.  Others focus on the biographies of key historic figures.  Many of these approaches overlook how different the war seemed to people in different states.  The people of Virginia experienced the war quite differently, of course, from how it was experienced by the people of Wisconsin.  Ohio University Press has begun a very interesting series of Civil War histories that recognize the importance of these state differences.  Included in their offerings are Ohio's War, Indiana's War, Illinois's War
, Missouri's War (reviewed in this blog), and Kansas's War.
In this vein, The History Press has published Maryland Women in the Civil War by Claudia Floyd.  The work treats exactly what you would expect from the title.  Examining the role of women in Maryland's war is particularly interesting, in that the Maryland was a slave state that was secured by the Union in the early months of the war.  Consequently, a large number of southern sympathizers found themselves going about their normal domestic lives under what they perceived as a hostile occupation and resisting that occupation or supporting the southern cause often involved covert activities and not open, armed Resistance.  Both men and women could and were fully engaged in these activities.

By and large, Floyd's book examines the roles of a handful of women who we might assume are representative of larger groups of women.  We learn about Anna Ella Carroll, a prolific pro-Union propagandist; Elizabeth Phoebe Key Howard, a member of a prominent Baltimore pro-secession family; Madge Preston, a diarist and southern supporter living outside Baltimore; and perhaps the most famous woman from Maryland during the Civil War era, Harriet Tubman; but there are a host of other women who's lives and views make brief appearances in the work.

Floyd does an admirable job of illustrating how different women reacted differently to the war, not just based on their sympathies for the Union or Confederacy, but due to their station in society and particularly due to the effects that the war had on their families.  One gets the sense that more than in many other states, the women of Maryland were driven to engage in politics because of the high stakes that existed for families living in a slave state, that bordered the nation's capital and separated free states from slave states.  The controversial suspension of habeas corpus by the Lincoln administration mostly affected men living in Maryland, Maryland's geographic location made it particularly important to the underground railroad, and Baltimore's large free black population complicated race relations in ways that the rest of country did not experience.  Again, elements of this sort meant that the war reached into domestic life in a way that was not common in other states.

If there is a weakness in the work, it is that it appears to rely too completely on diaries and letters.  While this gives the work an admirable immediacy, it is not clear how much the experiences of the women who are the subjects of the book can be generalized to the rest of the women in Maryland.  Many of Floyd's women are socially prominent, making it less clear that working class women experienced the war in the same way.   For what it is, though, Maryland Women in the Civil War is an engaging and informative work.

Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up / Raymond S. Bradley -- Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

In 1998, the journal Nature published an article by Michael Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes (MBH).  It included a graph that showed a recent, steep rise in the Earth's surface temperature.   The article presented evidence that the recent temperature was as high as it has been since the fifteenth century.  In 1999, the journal Geophysical Research Letters published another paper by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes that extended the data back to 1000 A.D.  In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, included their graph in its third Assessment Report.  While the graph illustrated only one piece of research that supported the claim that the Earth's climate was rapidly changing, it was a striking "infographic" which helped to focus attention on the developing climate crisis.  It also triggered a surprising backlash from conservative pundits and politicians.  Global Warming and Political Intimidation is Raymond Bradley's account of the ensuing controversy over the MBH or "hockey stick" graph.

From time to time, conservative pundits and politicians seize upon a minor error, a cautious qualification, or a poorly phrased statement made by climate scientists to discredit the growing body of research that has demonstrated that our climate is changing at a catastrophic rate.  Their attacks also are sometimes tied to the work of a small number of contrarian scientists or others with vaguely related academic credentials.  In this instance, the excuse for criticism of the MBH graph came from an article written by Stephen McIntyre (an economist) and Ross McKitrick (a mathematician).  Their article was initially published in an obscure journal Energy & Environment and latter published in Geophysical Research Letters, though GRL did not apply its normal review process before publishing the article.

Since then, MM's critique has been shown to be unfounded, but it was sufficient to prompt the Wall Street Journal to publish an article making reference to the critique.  This, in turn, prompted two conservative congressional representatives to Joe Barton, chair of the House Energy Committee, and Ed Whitfield, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, to write letters to Mann, Bradley, and Hughes asking for an enormous amount of information related to their research and its financial support, not just for their 1998 Nature paper, but for all the work they had conducted in the course of their career.  Clearly, a frivolous investigation was now underway, aimed at obstructing their work and possibly smearing their scientific reputations.  It was comparable to a lawyer's massive discovery motion aimed at burdening the opposing litigants. 

In the end, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes were able to avoid the worst  possible outcomes of this partisan governmental intrusion into science,  because the Republican chair of the House Committee on Science, Sherwood Boerlert, objected to Barton and Whitfield's harassment of scientists.  The standoff between powerful Republicans was widely covered in the national and foreign press and eventually led to the National Academy of Science investigating the issue and larger issues related to climate change research.  Unsurprisingly, the National Academy of Science found the MBH graph supported by "an array of evidence."  Barton continued to harass Mann, Bradley, and Hughes over the graph, but the real threats to their work were largely over.

This incident is merely one of many efforts by the climate crisis deniers to attack the scientist who are working to understand the dangers we face with the continued pollution of our atmosphere with greenhouse gases.  While it is quite valuable to read Bradley's insider account of the "hockey stick" debate, one is left wishing he had included more information about other incidents.  He does provide some detail on the theft of emails from several climate scientists (most prominently Phil Jones) that were made public just prior to the Copenhagen UN climate summit in 2009.  Bradley also briefly describes the harassment of Ben Santer, the lead author of Chapter 8 of the second IPCC Assessment Report (1996). Chapter 8 focused on the causes of climate change.  Its qualified conclusions were that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate."  We now know this beyond any doubt, but this was one of the first times that anthropogenic climate change was so publicly endorsed.  The reaction was swift and ruthless from the carbon industry lobbyists and libertarian bloggers.  Santer's work was said to be the result of a "corruption of the peer-review process."  Fortunately for Santer, the criticisms did not result in governmental harassment as occurred in the "hockey stick" and stolen email affairs and the overwhelming evidence of the human impact on the climate has made his critics look utterly foolish, but not before causing him a great deal of headache and unnecessary distraction.

It is commendable perhaps that Bradley sticks to his first hand experiences with his Nature graph, but asking Jones and Santer to give him a brief account of their experiences that he could fold into his book would have helped establish his main argument that partisan political intrusions into the conduct of science is common and significant and that in order for public policy on climate change to be based on an accurate understanding of the physical world, we must insist that politicians stay out of the scientific debates.  We must allow the tried and true methods of scientific enquiry to light our way toward solutions to our mounting environmental problems.

Bradley's book is a welcome contribution to understanding how politics is interfering with science.  Perhaps the best book on this subject,however, is Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (reviewed in this blog).

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption / Clay A. Johnson -- Sebastopol, Cal.: O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2012

Quite a number of books have been published in response to the explosion of digital information and the technology that delivers it. Many of the works are breathless panegyrics. Others are panicky jeremiads. This should come as no surprise. Digital and internet technology has transformed our lives in unexpected ways and promises to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Consequently, assessing the opportunities and dangers is no easy task, making it easy to predict both best case and worst case scenarios for the future.

Clay Johnson's The Information Diet is neither a best nor worst case assessment of our information future. His general disposition is that our social problems can often be addressed by technical solutions and as the founder of Blue State Digital and a former director of the Sunlight Foundation. So one might expect his leanings would be toward panegyrics. Nonetheless, the overall tone of his book is cautionary. Johnson has become concerned that far from solving our social problems, current information and internet technology is filling our information diets with the equivalent of junk food and poses a significant threat to the rational formation of public policy. Johnson is not only concerned about the individual's epistemic health, he is concerned about the effects that widespread "information obesity" is having and will have on society as a whole.

Much of Johnson's work is not particularly ground breaking. His analogy between information and food diets is perhaps the most novel feature of the work. The two critiques that most inform Johnson are by Nicholas Carr and Eli Pariser. Carr argues that the internet has come to be a complex distraction machine, designed to maximize the number of pages that we view. This has grave psychological consequences for our ability to concentrate, engage in deep, thoughtful reading, and remember what it is that we have read. Eli Pariser argues that the personalization of search results on the internet results in your receiving only information with which you agree, doing nothing more than confirming your previously held views. For politics, this means that people of with differing views are becoming more deeply convinced that their views are well-substantiated. Consequently, our ability to carry on reasonable dialogs with those who hold different views from us is declining.

Johnson is clearly sympathetic to Pariser's concerns. His attitudes toward Carr's thesis is, however, more complicated. Johnson writes, "the Internet is not some kind of meta bogey man that's sneaking into Mr. Carr's room while he sleeps and rewiring his brain." He also suggests that there is a "subtext" to Carr's thesis that "there may be some sort of corporate conspiracy to try to...'dumb us down.'" Having read Carr's recent book The Shallows, I am amazed that Johnson would find a conspiracy subtext in it. Furthermore, suggesting that Carr sees the Internet as a "meta bogey man" (whatever that might be) trivializes his arguments.

Johnson's critique of Carr appears to be founded on the power a person's will. He writes, "Blaming a medium or its creators for changing our minds and habits is like blaming food for making us fat." Such a view, "wrongly take[s] free will and choice out of the equation." For Johnson, the problem arises because we choose specific friends in an online social network, we choose to follow specific links, and we choose to spend a specific amount of time "consuming" specific information. Apparently for Johnson, only we are to blame for the changes we experience as we live our lives, more and more, in front of computer screens.

It is strange, though, that the great bulk of Johnson's book describes the powerful influences that the internet has on shaping all of these behaviors. One is left with the sense that Johnson has internalized Carr's criticism, but is unwilling to acknowledge it. To avoid doing so, he constructs a straw argument to attack and appeals to a dubious metaphysical dogma about free will.

His metaphysics does, however, underwrite the practical point of his book: to encourage us to take responsibility for the information we acquire. He writes, "This book's agenda is to help people make more sense of the world around them by encouraging them to tune into things that matter most and to tune out things that make them sick." This is unquestionably a worthy agenda. The amount of trivia that pours out of the internet when you dare to expose yourself to it is breathtaking.

Johnson's recommendations for tuning into the stuff that matters and tuning out the trivia is technological. For example, he recommends various filters and email preference settings that will reduce unwanted information. He recommends software that will show you the amount of time you spend at various kinds of Web sites and techniques for developing your ability to concentrate. All of his suggestions are fine as far as they go, but are hardly likely to achieve great success. The internet is insidious and seductive. Most of all, it is constructed to serve a profit motive which will not succeed unless most people participate in what it is doing to us. When information becomes the lure for commerce, widespread information obesity will naturally follow.

In general, Johnson's The Information Diet underestimates the power of the structural forces driving the internet and overestimates the power of individuals to resist its damaging force. Realistically, we may have only two choices: to embrace the brave new world of the digital information or to create a nearly internet-free counterculture that values face-to-face social interactions over virtual ones and makes limited forays into the virtual world for only specific and limited purposes.

The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being / Carol Graham -- Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2011

Economists have been measuring the gross national product and gross domestic product since the middle of the 20th century. These measures often are thought to indicate the "health" of the economy and moreover the aggregate well-being of the nation's people; however, almost as often, these conclusions have been challenged. In a speech on March 18, 1968, Robert Kennedy, now famously said that the gross national product

counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts...the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

It is surprising, then, that it was only in the last 10-20 years that economists have begun seriously studying an alternative to GNP as a measure of social well-being. In The Pursuit of Happiness, Carol Graham reviews much of this literature and poses important questions as to how and whether happiness research can inform policy debates.

In the second chapter, Graham recognizes the difficulty we face in defining happiness. A number of similar concepts cloud the issue: well-being, satisfaction, contentment, and pleasures of various sorts are among many such concepts, and measuring them involves measuring a number of different factors: health, family, friendships, security, income, freedom, education, expectations, etc. Any of these factors can be complicated by temporary changes in a person's life circumstance. Furthermore, Graham plausibly asserts that individuals have different baseline dispositions toward happiness.

Graham distinguishes two significant forms of happiness recognized in the recent economics literature, hedonism and eudaimonism, roughly labeling them Benthamite and Aristotelian respectively. Labeling the former Benthamite is apt. It refers to simple pleasure or hedonic utility. The latter, while not completely mis-attributed to Aristotle, misses an important aspect of Aristotle's view of happiness. Graham first describes eudaimonia as related to "meaning" or "life evaluation," applying the cooncept to people who establish long-term plans and take steps to complete those plans. A critical component of this is "agency," or the ability to determine the outcome of one's life plans. As the work proceeds, agency becomes the tail which wags the dog in Graham's "Aristotelianism."

Certainly, Aristotle's notion of happiness involves agency. For Aristotle, a happy person is someone who exercises the uniquely human capacity of reason to shape the whole of his or her life; however, Graham's Aristotelian happiness underplays the importance of makarios, i.e., divine, or god-given happiness. Moreover, the etymology of eudaimonia combines the Greek words for "good" and "in dwelling spirit" -- a being halfway between the gods and humans (from which we get our word demon). For Aristotle, happiness, while it certainly is something we work to create by exercising our uniquely human reason, it is also something that happens to us; it is god-given or is a product of being possessed by a good demon. Furthermore, the highest happiness for a person is something that can be measured only after one's full life has been lived and one's posthumous reputation has been assessed. This is certainly a minor academic objection, but overlooking (or underplaying) Aristotle's concept of happiness in its fullness will lead the economics of happiness to policy agendas that overemphasize the autonomy of individuals and underemphasize true human needs.

To better understand policy goal options, one should distinguish three forms of happiness, Benthamite hedonism, Graham's Aristotelian eudaimonism (which might simply be called "liberty"), and the more fully Aristotelian happiness of a good life. Graham's review of happiness surveys makes reasonably clear that Benthamite hedonism is not an adequate policy goal. Our overall happiness requires more than obtaining day-to-day pleasures. By and large, we also require accomplishments that we can trace to our own choices and actions; consequently, we require the social conditions which are conducive to the exercise of our capacity to chose and pursue our own conception of a good life. We require, in the terminology of John Rawls, basic liberties; however, it is doubtful that this will be enough to promote happiness in its fullest sense.

Graham's title The Pursuit of Happiness comes, of course, from the American Declaration of Independence, indicating Carol's bias in favor of a liberal state -- one which is concerned with creating opportunities for happiness where the individual is at liberty to pursue whatever reasonable lifestyle he or she chooses as opposed to a state that seeks to equalize the outcome of the distribution of benefits and burdens. Such a liberal state is clearly an advance over an autocratic state which narrows the life choices of its citizens for the benefit of a ruling minority, but allowing over-wide latitude in life choices has three significant drawbacks. It may allow self-destructive natural temptations to compromise true human needs, it does not recognize the inability of citizens to be fully informed about the consequences of their choices, and it can result in what could be called happiness market failures.

Proper policy decisions might require a recognition that some conceptions of a good life might be objectively preferable to others and that our natures, circumstances, and rational individual actions may sometimes lead us away from the objective good. The remedy would seem paternalistic to the libertarian (or even to the classical liberal), but a way of life endorsed by state policy need not be particularly limiting and it could be justified by appealing to deep psychological and biological needs. Even John Rawls, for example, recognizes that his liberal principles of justice are only apropos to a society that has reached a certain level of development, but the question that Aristotle's view of happiness raises is whether a more communitarian society should be the object of public policy.

My own preferences would be largely to follow Rawls, and protect liberty and equal opportunity before establishing policies that would maximize basic goods for the least well off. As I argued in my dissertation, this alone will result in a fairly thorough-going egalitarianism. Still, I'm not entirely convinced that placing boundaries on the range of permissible conceptions of the good is only relevant for societies in deep poverty or to exclude unreasonable conceptions of the good. The Kantian notion of true human needs obviously applies to conditions of dire poverty, but I'm not entirely certain that it does not reach further into the lives of people who on first glance have all that they need. This is not to suggest that I am especially concerned about what Graham calls the plight of "frustrated achievers" or the "miserable millionaire." As far as I'm concerned, the misery of the millionaire is his or her own damn fault.

According to the happiness literature cited by Graham, an egalitarian society is more conducive to happiness than a society characterized by vast disparities of wealth and I would add that the egalitarian society more effectively respects the full dignity of persons. A truly happy society must provide for equality of opportunity, and mitigate tendencies toward unequal outcomes; but assuming these conditions, a deeper understanding of human nature and the nature of happiness might restrict conceptions of the good life beyond what would be chosen by people without full information, by people without a superhuman ability to withstand temptation, and by people who are not so selfless as to voluntarily accept limitation to avoid happiness market failures. Broadly expressed, an egalitarian society that ensures equality of opportunity may still need a degree of communitarian organization to respect the contours of human nature.

The third chapter of The Pursuit of Happiness is essentially a literature review of happiness economics. Its organization is somewhat confusing and it presents the findings without assessing the validity of the studies. Of course, to do so would have significantly enlarged the book, but at 164 pages (including notes and index), adding a bit more about the validity of the studies would have helped. Hopefully, Graham has carefully examined the studies and is only including those that are most reliable. In any case, one should be extremely cautious about accepting the conclusion of happiness surveys due to the complexity of the concept. Time and again, one is led to wonder if one or another confounding factor is really responsible for results attributed to the independent variable. Even more often, correlations are observed that may be merely a coincidental product of a large data set.

The fourth chapter is entitled, "Adaptation and Other Puzzles." Here Graham demonstrates a good understanding of the concerns that I have raised in this review. Graham understands, perhaps was well as anyone, the difficulties facing happiness economics.

The final chapter describes the how we might incorporate a "gross national happiness" measure into existing social and economic measures to provide a better understanding of the lives of people for making policy decisions. As difficult as measuring happiness is, a "GNH" measure would certainly be worthwhile, if only to de-thrown unlimited economic growth from our policy objectives.

Overall, The Pursuit of Happiness is a valuable contribution to an emerging field within economics. It will probably not become seminal, but hopefully it will prompt further discussion of its important topics.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era / Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks -- Los Angeles: Litwin Books, 2012

In Prophets of the Fourth Estate, Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks have given us a window on the relationships among money, politics, and the press during the Progressive Era in the U.S. or perhaps their window is really a mirror for our own times. Certainly, the book is first and foremost an excellent account of criticisms of the press in the Progressive Era, but the parallels to today are unmistakable.

The first chapter is a brief history of the politics of the Progressive Era. While it is true that important reforms were won by progressive political forces, regressive forces were not without accomplishments. The Progressive Era in politics was also roughly co-terminus with the regressive Lochner Era in American legal history during which the power of corporations became firmly entrenched for decades. Furthermore, the elections of William McKinley and the rise of the big money politics of Mark Hanna permanently transformed politics. Overall, the era saw a bitter political struggle between more or less equally powerful political factions that broke apart during the four-candidate presidential election of 1912. One aspect was largely progressive, though: the prominence of muckraking journalism, especially between 1903 and 1912. Reynolds and Hicks recall the work of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Upton Sinclair, but also provides us with a more in depth account of the earlier work of Jacob Riis.

The primary focus of the work, however, is on the effect that advertising and other "controlling interests" have on newspapers, the lecture circuit, and their role in forming public opinion. The final chapter directly addresses propaganda and the rise of the public relations industry. Their analysis is based on a careful study of both secondary and primary material. Indeed, the most noteworthy feature of the book is the republication of media criticisms published during the Progressive Era. Prophets of the Fourth Estate provides us with the full text of articles by Charles Edward Russell, Robert L. Duffus, Morefield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard, Donald Wilhelm, and Roscoe C. E. Brown.

The relevance of these articles to late 20th century media criticism is astonishing. One might think that the objects of the Progressive Era critics were Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Talk Radio, the major city daily newspapers and most of our popular news magazines. This is both a strength and a weakness of the work, though. Prophets of the Fourth Estate provides valuable insight into a one hundred year period of the press in the U.S. How relevant the analysis is to "new media" is questionable. The basic principles that it exposes are likely, however, to be relevant to a new, contemporary analysis.

The finest analysis of the press in the 20th century is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In it they describe a propaganda model that is a natural creation of the private ownership of media and the commodification of information. Herman and Chomsky point out that the imperatives of the market require media corporations to present information or programing (including news) that is not dysfunctional to their profitability. To do this, publishing executives must accept a moral and economic world view that will not compromise the interests of stockholders. They must hire editors who will do the same, who in turn hire reporters of a like mind. Whatever information that results from these institutions can be thoroughly critical of any organization or sector of society except those upon which the media corporation is dependent.

Advertisers are particularly important. For a media corporation to succeed, it must attract advertising dollars. Consequently, presenting programing that will be attractive to businesses with a lot of money is critical. Finally, a well-heeled audience is the bedrock of the entire system. The product of media corporations are not newspaper copy or programing, it is the audience which they sell to advertisers. A large audience is important, but more important is the amount of disposable income that the audience commands. A large but impoverished audience can be less valuable to an advertiser than a smaller but much richer audience. Every element of the system works toward skewing the media's message toward what is compatible with consumer capitalism. Prophets of the Fourth Estate makes it clear that most of this was very well understood by a number of journalists in the Progressive Era. This may be the most significant difference between the late twentieth century and the Progressive Era: decades of institutional pressure have selected for journalist who are largely unaware of their conformity to the dictates of power.

Extending the analysis into the 21st century is, however, problematic. New media have created avenues through which critical voices can speak. Just as Facebook and Twitter have facilitated communication from and among democratic movements in the Middle East, they have helped coordinate actions of the Occupy movement and exposed brutal police responses. It has become commonplace to suggest that new media is and will become a leveling technology that will democratize political discourse. This may well be true, but it remains to be seen.

Two factors suggest that new media will be less destabilizing than is thought. First, while social media permits communication from and to countless people, the channels through which they communicate are increasingly narrow. The vast majority of messages sent over the internet are carried by Verizon, AT&T, and cable companies that have little competition, and of course Google dominates internet searches. The movement to guarantee "Net neutrality" is critical to keeping these corporations from obstructing free expression, but as internet communication will always be controlled by major corporations, it is likely that corporate America will be able to legislate "exceptions" to unrestricted speech, probably in the name of national security, cybersecurity, or the "war on terror," systematically eliminating threats to corporate power.

Second, while the internet may permit the proliferation of voices and an increase in the sheer amount of information available to the public, the time that the public has to assimilate this information will not expand. "Data smog" and on line distractions are an increasingly significant obstacle to gaining a deep understanding of the political world and the role of corporations in our lives and government. Under these conditions, organizations will need significant resources to mount effective communication campaigns, be they corporate or anti-corporate, giving clear advantage to plutocratic messages.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate is an extremely valuable analysis of the press of the 20th century. Whether we can glean from the last century the principles that allowed corporations to control the press and apply them to the 21st century is an open question.

Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth about the "Real" America / Dante Chinni and James Gimpel -- N.Y.: Gotham Books, 2010

During the past ten or twelve years, political pundits often have repeated that the U.S. is "deeply divided" between "red" and "blue" states. It is, of course, an easy and dramatic shorthand that belies the real state of our society. I suspect that most of those same pundits would recognize this, but few people have offered any alternative description of the natural breaks in the body politic, except perhaps to describe congressional districts or counties as "red" or "blue." While offering a more fine grained analysis of the red-blue divide, these descriptions still fall prey to the deficiency of the basic distinction: geographic regions in the U.S. are categorized merely on the outcomes of a two-party, plurality-take-all electoral system. This system ignores nonvoters and voters who vote for losing candidates; furthermore, it lumps heterogeneous local voting coalitions into two heterogeneous national coalitions. Indeed, most often the only fact revealed by the distinction on a national scale is which party won a majority of electoral college votes.

In Our Patchwork Nation, journalist Dante Chinni and political scientist James Gimpel provide a more nuanced portrait of the country. Chinni and Gimpel analysed data for each of the 3,141 counties that make up the country and postulate that the country can be understood to be composed of twelve distinct kinds of communities, calling them boom towns, campus and careers, emptying nests, evangelical epicenters, immigration nation, industrial metropolis, military bastions, minority central, monied burbs, Morman outposts, service worker centers, and tractor country.

Some of these communities fit squarely into "red America" or "blue America," but others are up for grabs and it isn't always clear why this is. In some instances, the economic interests of the community and/or its dominant social values are directly supported by one or another party, but in other instances, the population of the community is not so homogeneous as to place it squarely in the Democratic or Republican column. For example, the hallmark of minority central is a large African American (or Native American) population; however, in most of these counties European Americans still make up a majority of the population. Moreover, any particular county can and will fit more or less well into one or more community categories, sometimes making it difficult to know what the dominant political motive is for that community on election day.

Dividing the country into twelve categories is, no doubt, an improvement over the simple red-blue distinction, but whether Chinni and Gimpel's twelve categories are a good reflection of the population is questionable. Their method for creating these categories is revealed in the book's appendix. The authors collected a large body of data describing specific "socioeconomic and religious indicators" applicable to every U.S. county. By comparing them, the authors discovered common intersections among the indicators that allowed them to reduce these indicators to an underlying structure of twelve "basic factors." These factors defined the twelve communities. Each county could then be scored for how well it embodied each of the twelve basic factors and histograms were created to show which counties scored highest in those twelve factors. Finally, the authors sorted the counties based upon which basic factor a county most embodied. Some counties scored similarly high on more than one basic factor. In those cases, the authors made judgement calls to complete the sorting.

The results of their work is not particularly surprising, if one has a general understanding of the human geography of the country. Mormons live in Utah, the Great Plains are sparsely populated and dominated by agribusiness, major cities are diverse and densely populated, there are large populations of African Americans in the South living very close to European American who are Evangelical Christians, many people retire to Florida, etc. To get a deeper understanding of these communities, one needs to expose their less dominant characteristics and understand how they qualify the dominant character. Unfortunately Our Patchwork Nation does not do this. Presumably because it is meant for a popular audience, the appendix does not give detailed descriptions of the actual data used in sorting the communities.

The validity of the twelve-fold division is said to have been tested against additional data sets, but it's hard to know how valid it really is. The mere fact that the total population of Mormon outposts is less than two million people makes one wonder if this is worthy of a category at all or if it should be folded into evangelical epicenters or divided among the other eleven communities. The answer depends on one's views about comparative religion. Emptying nests poses a different problem: are the Florida retirees sufficiently like the retirees who remain in the Upper Midwest to consider them part of the same community? It is an open question as to how the various socioeconomic and religious indicators should be weighted in determining the basic factors. If one's economic condition is weighted heavily and one's age is weighted less heavily, the retirees in Florida would make up a separate group from those in the Upper Midwest. Chinni and Gimpel give no indication as to how they choose to weight their indicators.

As vexing as these problems are, Our Patchwork Nation invites the reader to consider the variegated character of our nation and its communities. One conclusion that easily might be drawn from this is that our two-party system cannot possibly be sufficient to represent the interests of such varied communities and their numerous shadings. A more adequate political system would allow these communities (or more precisely, voters) to gather together in numerous politic parties that could express clearly the voter's primary interests and not be subsumed (and often lost) within a heterogeneous big-tent party. Our "patchwork nation," no matter how you slice it, cries out for a multi-party democracy in which our legislatures represent us proportionally. Were we to adopt such a system, many political question that are currently held hostage to our two party gridlock could be separated from the bi-polar power struggle and resolved to the satisfaction of an issue-specific majority.