We’re launching a new minor within the Civic Studies program. It complements the Civic Studies Major and the existing minor, which is called Peace & Justice Studies. I anticipate that these two minors will draw students with different interests, thereby promoting intellectual diversity and debate. We’re thinking about adding even more minors over time. One prospect is a minor in Interfaith Civic Studies, or something along those lines.
The Entrepreneurship for Social Impact minor requires six courses, including Intro to Civic Studies (which I regularly reach) and the Innovative Social Enterprise course offered through the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center. The remaining four courses include two from the approved Civic Studies list and two from the approved Entrepreneurship course list.
The APSA has approved a new section on Civic Engagement. In the proposal for this section, we noted that “APSA has been dedicated to civics education and the task of stimulating civic engagement since its inception in 1903.” However, there had not been “an organized section” for “political scientists who specialize in teaching and/or research in civic engagement.”
We said that our purposes would include:
To promote the teaching of and scholarship in civic engagement through sponsorship of civics education and civic research panels and/or short courses.
To facilitate the development of faculty in this field through mentoring.
To publicize new research and share pedagogical experiences through a newsletter and/or journal.
With APSA’s approval, we are now in business and we invite political scientists to join the section. For APSA members, the cost is minimal ($5 per year). After you log in to apsanet.org, click on your name and you will go to your own profile. “Add section” will be one of the options. That will bring up a list of sections you can join. Ours is the second from the bottom on the list. Or you can do so by adding it the next time you renew your registration.
We welcome scholars working with diverse methodological backgrounds and in diverse institutional settings including research-intensive universities, teaching-intensive colleges and universities, HBSUs and HSIs, community colleges, and in the nonprofit sector.
We have been given two panels at the APSA annual meeting in September. Please look for those in the program and help us out by attending, if you can. Also, we are planning to hold a business meeting and a reception at the annual meeting. They should be listed in the program or we will advertise them separately. Please join us for those events. The business meeting will be our first as an organized section and we would appreciate your input on the governance of this new section.
The co-chairs are Elizabeth Bennion and Richard Davis. I am the Vice-Chair, and Malliga Ochs is the Treasurer.
Major news sources are reporting that the USA has had the most cumulative COVID-19 deaths. That is a meaningless statistic, since our population is, for example, seven times larger than Spain’s. On a per capita basis, the US is reporting far fewer cumulative deaths than ten major OECD countries.
One objection is that we are experiencing the pandemic later than Spain and Italy, and our per-capita cumulative rate will grow to meet theirs. However, assuming we peak (as expected) early this week, then we should not converge with Italy and Spain.
For a more precise comparison, here are per-capita cumulative deaths on the 30th day after each country saw its deaths reach one in ten million.
(I have consulted Kevin Drum’s daily updates to find Day 30 for each country. Several nations have not yet reached Day 30 and are not shown.)
The ratios are, indeed, smaller in this second graph than in the first. For example, on April 10, Spain had almost six times more cumulative deaths per capita than the USA that same day. If you compare the two countries on their respective Day-30’s, which happened weeks apart, the ratio is just 4.8-to-one. Still, the gap is unlikely to close much further, which means that Spain’s outcome will be four or five times worse than ours.
Another objection is that national aggregates are misleading because health outcomes in the USA are badly unequal by race. If per capita mortality for African Americans and Native Americans were shown separately, those numbers might look much worse. Then again, white Americans would then look even more fortunate in international comparison.
The same goes for regional breakdowns. On its own, New York City would look bad, but removing New York would make the national statistics look even better.
A third objection is that these statistics are inaccurate. No doubt, some COVID-19 deaths are not being appropriately counted. However, I am using deaths instead of diagnoses, because mortality statistics are generally considered pretty reliable and comparable across countries. Also, the epi-curves in these countries are rising smoothly in the expected ways.
A fourth objection is that we have only considered the first wave. If the pandemic revives in a second wave, all bets are off. I would say that it is wise to prepare for a second wave, but the only data we can discuss come from the current phase. It’s worth trying to analyze what it means.
Assuming that these statistics are fairly accurate, there doesn’t seem to be a meaningful relationship between COVID-19 mortality and the size of a welfare state (% of GDP spent on social welfare). The correlation would be positive (more spending goes with higher mortality), but the scatterplot is diffuse.
Nor is there a correlation between COVID mortality and health expenditures per capita, adjusted for purchasing power.
The preliminary evidence suggests that public policy, political leadership, and the social contract matter much less in this pandemic than I would have thought. I think we must look elsewhere for explanations of the variance in COVID-19 deaths.
Some differences in national outcomes may be due to social and geographical factors, such as the median age of populations, population density, or the frequency of living together in intergenerational households. I suspect a major variable is the timing of the onset of the disease. By the time the pandemic was starting its rise in the USA, many Americans had already become alarmed by the news from Italy and Spain; we self-isolated pretty rigorously. Like Iran, Italy and Spain didn’t have the benefit of as much warning. Meanwhile Taiwan and South Korea did better because they had previously experienced SARS.
This analysis is preliminary and amateurish and could easily change. That said, it challenges my own ideological priors. I would have assumed that Donald Trump would make things worse here than in other countries, and that our lack of health coverage would set us up for failure. It is always worth challenging your own ideological premises when conflicting evidence arises.
It’s also important to prepare for a summer and fall in which anti-Trump forces will try to blame the US situation on him, and the most cogent defense will be that the US is actually faring better than most social democracies. I don’t expect Trump to present his defense with any discipline, but his critics should be ready for it.
How will the current pandemic affect civic engagement? We certainly cannot know, but I would offer the following hypotheses:
People’s voluntary behaviors, values, and preferences will not change very much. If you can, you will snap back to pre-COVID habits and beliefs as soon as possible. However, the economic turmoil caused by the shutdown will destroy many nonprofit associations, newspapers, and businesses that are integrated into community life (such as cafes and barber shops). In the short term, not only will that destruction harm many people, but it will suppress civic life, since most people engage in and because of organizations. In the longer term, there will be space for civic innovation and growth, and maybe younger and more diverse leadership will emerge. However, civic organizations–particularly, local newspapers–that already have fragile business models may never be replaced.
Although it’s a century old, our best model for predicting the pandemic’s effects is the great influenza pandemic of 1918. In many parts of the world, its effects are impossible to disentangle from the impact of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the collapse of empires. However, the US was peripheral to those matters and lost less than 1/20th of one percent of our population in the Great War. Changes that occurred between 1918 and 1920 can be plausibly attributed to the pandemic, which killed 650,000 out of 103 million Americans (equivalent to about 2 million deaths today).
Graphs from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone show no significant or lasting impact on civil society. Deep trends–industrialization, urbanization, the Great Migration–were ongoing, and so were trends in civic life. For instance, the early 1900s was the era when Americans constructed national organizations with local chapters, and their growth proceeded unabated through 1918.
Putnam also presents trends for membership in professional associations and unions, the rate of playing card games, the number of police officers per capita, and telephone ownership. These rates do not all smoothly rise in the early 1900s, but none seems to bend around 1918.
One possible exception is the rate of founding of major membership organizations, which was lower in the 1920s than in the 1910s:
Putnam lists the actual associations by their date of founding. None were launched in 1918, but three came into being in 1919. I see little evidence that the pandemic affected associations, unless it caused a delay in foundings during the actual year of the flu. In 1920, Warren Harding won election on the promise of a “return to normalcy”–poor grammar but a pretty accurate prediction.
However, the civic life that Americans built in the early 1900s depended on small contributions, dues, or subscriptions (in the case of newspapers) from many ordinary people. As long as they had jobs, they could support the associations. Organizations seemed to have weathered any short-term loss of income.
In contrast, today’s civil society is heavily dependent on philanthropy from foundations and wealthy individuals and contracts with governments. Many 21st century nonprofits basically run as businesses with a small number of investors and lots of constituents who do not pay for their services. A market meltdown could easily kill them off. In an international survey conducted from March 24-26, 68% of nonprofits already report a decline in contributions.
I worry especially about the metropolitan daily newspaper, because I believe it was an interesting hybrid invented between 1890 and 1920. Newspapers were often very profitable thanks to advertising and wide reach. At their peak, they attracted more than 80% of households by providing a basket of goods–sports, classified ads, comics. Meanwhile, they served a civic function by presenting important news on the front page. They did not invest in reporting because it maximized their profits but because professional reporters and editors–“the press”–exercised some influence over the owners of newspapers. The resulting combination was valuable but vulnerable and already in steep decline by 2010. If the recession now kills the last surviving metropolitan daily newspapers, there is no reason to think that any functional equivalent will replace them.
In my public policy course today, my students took a short opinion survey that I created for them, with questions about the justice or injustice of a variety of circumstances. For instance:
Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, was paid about $45 million last year. A customer service representative at Disney starts at $10.43/hour. Is this unjust?
A child raised in Lexington, MA can expect a much better education than a child raised in Lowell, MA, who can expect a much better education than a counterpart born in Jackson, MS, who (in turn) is likely to get much more schooling than a child born in Malawi. Are those gaps unjust?
Who has the responsibility to fix the Lexington/Jackson gap? If the gap between Lexington and Lowell persists, does that imply that Massachusetts voters hold unjust values or attitudes?
Most Amish or [Haredi] Orthodox Jewish children will grow up to have lower incomes and less advanced health-care than average Americans. Is this unjust? Are the Amish or Orthodox parents responsible for an injustice toward their children?
Was this (below) a bad thing to express?
Are people who object to David Geffen’s Tweet demonstrating the vice of envy?
If David Geffen self-isolated on his yacht but didn’t Tweet about it, would it be OK?
Many of the examples in my survey are derived from Tim Scanlon’s very useful article, “When Does Equality Matter?” ?
The survey’s forced choices generated a range of responses. In discussion, students offered more nuance.
