Monthly Archives: December 2011

We have so much more than poverty: Native youth demanding respect

Even though injustice is rampant and life is very hard in America’s poorest communities, a wise response always requires first appreciating the special assets of every community or group of people (especially kids) as they understand those assets. Otherwise, you will overlook their capacity to shape their own futures, neglect the value of their resources and traditions, and propose solutions inappropriate to their circumstances.

Although I have not watched it, I gather that a recent ABC documentary called “Children of the Plains” depicted a Lakota Indian reservation as a place simply defined by suffering, deprivation, and pathology. The ABC special moved students from Rosebud South Dakota to respond with their own skillful video. “I know what you probably think of us…we saw the special too. Maybe you saw a picture, or read an article. But we want you to know, we’re more than that…We have so much more than poverty.”

young voters as of December 2011

We at CIRCLE provide detailed data on young voters, including demographic information and voting trends for all 50 states (accessible through the map on our homepage), in-depth research studies on young people and politics, and a recent overview report based on our own typology. Meanwhile, the Harvard Institute of Politics is contributing up-to-date national polls and focus groups in Iowa. Their latest poll (PDF) looks technically solid to me. It contains some interesting findings:

  • Eleven percent of young people support the Tea Party; 21% support Occupy Wall Street. Assuming that those two groups are largely composed of different people, that means that up to 32% of young Americans support an extra-partisan political movement. In 2008, youth activism was strong, but the most unusual aspect was massive support for one official political campaign. I think if youth activism proves important in 2012, it will be about young people participating through a variety of channels, not just presidential campaigns. Lest we get carried away with the potential of the insurgent movements, just 2% of respondents say they have been part of an OWS demonstration and 6% say they are following the movement “closely.”
  • One finding  seems to be attracting media attention today: only 30% of young people expect Obama to win, and 36% expect him to lose. I am not clear why this is interesting, unless confidence in his reelection is correlated with turnout. In 2008, most Obama supporters I knew did not believe he would win, but they worked and voted for him.
  • Barack Obama beats the generic Republican candidate as well as all named GOP candidates, albeit with many undecided. (In fact, the undecideds almost tie the Obama supporters in the generic matchup.)
  • Mitt Romney leads among young Republicans (at 23%). Ron Paul is next at 16%. The Ron Paul boomlet could matter to the nominating race. A recent Public Policy poll finds Paul actually leading among young Iowa Republicans. But that doesn’t mean that the typical young person supports Paul. Obama backers are far more numerous; they just don’t get to vote in the Republican primaries.
  • Young people’s top issue priorities are all economic. That’s also true of older people, according to other surveys. Never in my decade of working on youth and politics have I seen a big gap between young and older people on issues. That means, by the way, that candidates don’t need separate messages or agendas to appeal to young people; they must simply include them in their outreach.

is the public right or wrong about the stimulus?

I am very interested in gaps between expert or academic opinion and public opinion. An important current example is stimulus policy during recessions. Sixty-two percent of Americans recently said that the stimulus bills “just created debt,” whereas 28 percent said the stimulus “helped the economy.”That’s consistent with the belief of 64% of Americans that “big government” is the most serious threat to the country. (They are given a choice of big government, big business, or big labor.) The Keynesian argument that governments should stimulate the economy by borrowing and spending during recessions does not seem to persuade many Americans.

Meanwhile, many (although not all) economists think that Keynesianism does apply in a recession like the current one, and they estimate that federal stimulus has lowered unemployment and boosted growth. Perhaps average Americans misunderstand economic theory, overestimate the degree of waste in government, or measure impact against the wrong baseline. (The question is not whether unemployment has gone down, but whether it would be worse without the stimulus.). One might conclude that inattentive or misinformed voters are a problem.

But matters are at least a bit more complicated. The CBO calculates that the stimulus “Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million.” The stimulus cost about $787 billion. That means that each job cost between $163,958 and $393,500. The median full-time salary for a worker age 25-64 is just under $40,000. So the cost per job was equal to between four and ten salaries. Put another way, the stimulus cost about $26,200 per capita and budged the unemployment rate down just a touch. No wonder people are a little skeptical.

I don’t know why that is. I’m inclined to guess that the stimulus was highly inefficient either because it just isn’t possible to generate jobs efficiently after a financial meltdown or because too much of the money went to tax breaks rather than sustaining state and local government payrolls. But the fact remains that people aren’t crazy. It’s not that the stimulus was a great success and all we need is more of it. Maybe we need more and better, but the judgment that it was wasteful is a reasonable one on its face. (If I am missing why the American people are just off base, please let me know.)

the price of political Balkanization: making foolish choices in a primary

Republican voters currently prefer Newt Gingrich for their party’s nomination and consider him the most “electable” candidate against President Obama. If the DNC cooked up a Republican candidate in its secret underground labs, I don’t see how they could come up with a better prototype opponent–at a time of revulsion against Congress and Wall Street–than a career politician who was sanctioned for ethics violations while also conducting a secret extramarital affair, who left Congress to become a rich lobbyist, who is personally undisciplined and arrogant, and who enters the campaign season with virtually no money or organization.

But it’s a serious question why Republican voters currently favor him in polls.

We have sorted ourselves into largely homogeneous political communities that only talk to themselves. To judge by some conservative talk-radio that I recently heard, Barack Obama is setting records for abysmally low popularity and should be planning an immediate resignation. (Actual polls show his personal favorability at 47.9%, with 47% unfavorable) Plenty of conservatives live in physical and virtual communities completely free of liberals. Assuming that Obama is sure to lose in a landslide, and hearing very little criticism of the Republican movement that Gingrich once led, they are naturally optimistic about the former Speaker.

I think their isolation is particularly acute, because they have not accepted that most Americans reject strong versions of conservatism–whereas liberals tend to know that their side is a minority. But there are liberals who really believe that 99% of the American people are behind the Occupy Wall Street Movement. That is also a sign of isolation. (For the record, when asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum, 22 percent of Americans identified as liberals in 2008, 32 percent called themselves conservative, and the rest said “moderate” or “don’t know.” I include “slightly liberal” and “slightly conservative” among the liberals and conservatives.)

If the ruling coalition is in an echo-chamber, sheltered from critical views and convinced that all contrary evidence is manufactured by shadowy elites, that is dangerous for the whole country. But if the opposition party is in an echo-chamber, that is mainly bad for them. They are liable to make tactically foolish decisions.

contraception for teenagers is and must be a political question

The headline in Woman’s Health News says: “Evidence Trampled By Politics: Sebelius Overrides FDA Decision on OTC Emergency Contraception.” This is a common framing; Google finds more than 100,000 pages that use the words “Sibelius,” “FDA”, “TEVA” (the brand name of the morning-after pill) and “political.”

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius used her authority to overrule the FDA’s decision that it was safe for girls younger than 17 to purchase “Plan B” morning-after contraceptives. When her decision was  denounced as “political,” in contrast to “scientific,” she explicitly denied the charge, adopting the rhetoric of science: “There are always opportunities for the company to come back with additional data. … It is commonly understood that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age.”

It might be helpful for me to state my position (mainly as an example). I think that a newly fertilized human egg has no moral weight, and therefore morning-after contraception is morally equivalent to traditional contraception–but generally inferior to condoms, which protect against STDs. I think that young teenagers generally shouldn’t have sex, especially unprotected sex, but the fault when they do is shared, and the consequences should be mild. I think that good parents have a right to know when their young adolescent children have unprotected sex, because they can intervene supportively and lovingly. But some parents will react by blocking access to the morning-after pill or by abusing their children. Those outcomes are unjust, and for that reason, it is better to allow adolescents to purchase the morning-after pill without permission.

All the beliefs I tallied in the previous paragraph are moral. Science hardly comes into it. If the morning-after pill were dangerous for young girls (but not for older women), that might be an argument against allowing adolescents to purchase it–but it hardly seems the central issue. Finding that it isn’t dangerous is not an argument for permitting its use.

In a strongly positivist culture, many people carry around a simple distinction: facts and truths belong to science, and morality is a matter of opinion–or worse, an excuse for repression. But it is a moral, not a scientific, position to say that girls have a right to purchase a morning-after pill unless it harms their physical health. The right doesn’t come from science. Certainly the decision to weigh the young adolescent’s individual rights more heavily than parents’ and communities’ rights–as I would do–does not come from science.

People call Secretary Sibelius’ decision “political” because it isn’t scientific and they don’t want to call it morally wrong. (Where would that come from?) I say it has moral content, it is probably the judgment that most Americans would reach, and it can be defended, but it is wrong.

One might suspect that the Secretary’s decision was “political” in a different sense: calculated to improve the Democrats’ chances in the 2012 election. If that were really her motivation, I don’t think her calculation was all that wise. The Democratic “base”–which the administration increasingly worries about–is upset about Sibelius’ decision. Conservatives would have been outraged if the morning-after pill had been legalized for teenagers, but the administration could have blamed the scientists in the FDA. Besides, those outraged conservatives wouldn’t be likely to vote for Barack Obama. You could even argue that goading them into fury is smart play right now, when they can choose an unelectably right-wing nominee.

Of course, an electoral argument could be made on the other side as well. But why do we even suspect that Secretary Sibelius was motivated by electoral considerations? That makes sense if there are only two grounds for a decision: opinion (often colored by self-interest) and science. There might be a third motive–religious faith–but the Secretary refused to cite that, perhaps because the Supreme Court has ruled against religious arguments regarding abortion. In my view, there’s also a fourth possible motive: sincere moral conviction. We choose representatives in elections because of their moral worldviews, we argue about the issues they face, and we expect them to make moral decisions. Deferring to the scientists at the FDA would itself be a moral decision, and it would only be right if it reflected the right values.

“Politics” is just a word for making value judgments together. Even deciding not to make a given decision is a decision. Human beings are political animals, and we should be proud of that.