is the public right or wrong about the stimulus?

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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

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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

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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.

DemocracyU

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The American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), to be launched in January, is an initiative of the White House Office of Public Engagement, the Association of American Colleges and Universities,  the Department of Education, and supportive partners such as the  American Democracy Project, The Democracy Commitment, NERCHE, the National Conference on Citizenship, Campus Compact, and the Anchor Institutions Task Force (see Tim Eatman’s summary).

Today, the ACP unveiled a website called DemocracyU that’s devoted to presenting students’ personal stories of civic activism, plus discussion and debate on the evolving role of university and college students in engaging in public work that benefits society. The website will be hosted on CIRCLE’s site, as our contribution to the effort. It links to a new blog on which some of my friends have already contributed.

jobs in civic engagement

(Dayton Airport) As the latest installment of an occasional feature, here are some job openings that involve civic engagement: