March: Research + Published Writings
Greetings, Dear Readers,
In this short update, I’ll share some research updates and also excerpt some of my recently published work which ranges from personal essay to industrial policy manifesto. I have a little over a month left in my semester, after which my writing here should be more regular. Before I jump in, a few items to note.
First, I note with sadness the passing of actress Jessica Walter - best known for her roles as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development and Malory Archer in Archer - as well as the passing of novelist Beverly Cleary, creator of Ramona Quimby.
Second, in my March Madness bracket, I have Gonzaga winning, with Baylor, Florida State, and Illinois (rip) making appearances in the final four. So far, in the Brookings group, I am lower-middle of the pack; but I hold out hope that if Florida State can pull the upset, I might launch toward the top. In the increasingly unlikely chance I place in the top 10 of the bracket, you better believe you won’t hear the end of it.
Third, this is an A+ tweet from my friend Nick Burns:
Research and Writing
This semester, a large part of my research is on online disinformation, conspiracy, alienation of mainstream media, etc. In this brief update, I want to highlight one concept that has a lot of mileage for me, “epistemic injustice.” Philosopher Miranda Fricker coined this term in her 2007 book of the same name. Epistemic injustice refers to particular kinds of harms against us in our capacity as knowers. Fricker outlined two forms of epistemic injustice, and the literature has since expanded to include many other forms.
One form of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice - this is when I discredit/disbelieve/undermine/silence your testimony, or your ability to offer testimony, on the basis of one or more aspects of your social identity. Fricker uses To Kill A Mockingbird as an example, with the all-white jury disregarding the testimony of Tom Robinson on account of his race. I’m particularly interested in how language is weaponized to enforce testimonial injustice, as in the case of dismissing a woman with the label “hysterical” as a way of saying that her concerns are “irrational” and thus not worth taking seriously. I’m also curious about less obvious forms of testimonial injustice rooted in social markers outside of race/gender/class, such as education status or regional accent or implicit norms around clothing, etc..
Another form of epistemic injustice outlined by Miranda Fricker is hermeneutical injustice, which is trickier to explain because it’s more structural than individual. The basic idea here is that this kind of injustice occurs when a social context lacks the needed conceptual framework to identify harms or articulate them. Fricker uses the example of sexual harassment in the workplace prior to the introduction of the concept/language of sexual harassment. It isn’t that women were not suffering from Mad Men style behavior, but rather that at the societal level, there was no framework for identifying discrete events as evincing a pattern that could be named and disallowed. I’m particularly interested in how testimonial injustice intersects with this hermeneutical injustice. For example, if the employer dismiss an individual female employee’s complaints about unwelcome sexual advances from a colleague, it could very well be the case that an individual case of testimonial injustice (“she’s just frigid”) is reinforcing (and being reinforced by) the injustice that comes from not being able to see a problem as a problem.
For the purposes of my research, I’m curious about how these (and other) forms of epistemic injustice can lead to broad alienation. For example, is some of the backlash against mainstream media a reaction to how “professional journalism” has become more and more rooted in a presumed sense of expertise, contrasted with the perceived general ignorance of the every-day citizen? Are there hermeneutical blindspots tied to social factors (journalists tend to at least have a bachelor’s degree, which two-thirds of Americans do not; they tend to cluster in urban cores, etc.) that increase a sense of disconnect?
On a totally different note, my research internship at Brookings has been focused on increasing post-secondary education attainment in America’s Black-majority cities. This more focused aim is contexualized within the broader work of my team on land valuation, asset-based development, and racial disparities in wages and employment opportunities. In the piece below regarding Detroit, you can start to get a sense of what my research looks like, but I am especially excited about a forthcoming report I labored on that looks at racial disparities in Philly’s workers, contexualized against a brief overview of Philly’s shift from manufacturing power-house to “knowledge economy” hub concentrated in Center City.
I’ll be at Brookings through most of the summer, so I’ll have plenty of time to spotlight my team’s work in the upcoming months. For now, here’s four pieces of mine that have been published this month:
Michigan wants to increase residents’ college enrollment, but student debt is holding them back (Brookings) - March 15th
College enrollments typically increase during economic downturns, as workers try to reskill themselves for jobs that are in greater demand. For example, between 2007 and 2010, postsecondary institutions saw a 16% jump in enrollments due to the Great Recession. This pattern has held true for every recession going back to the 1960s. But the COVID-19 recession may be different—many families and individuals are prioritizing their household budgets, and for low-income students, taking out student loans to prepare for an uncertain job market isn’t practical.
Read more here.
With Love We Shall Force Our Brothers: Prophetic Peacemaking with James Baldwin (Plough Magazine) - March 18th
The fundamental purpose of God’s prophets, then, is to make peace by calling us to the repentance that leads to reconciliation and by simultaneously advocating for the material and social conditions that make peace possible. And I think that the reason prophets run up against civil authorities so consistently is precisely because the work of creating peace requires confrontation with the forces that undermine peace through exploitation and violence. Peace is not the same thing as quiet.
Read more here.
A Hebrew in Pharaoh’s Court: Industrial Policy as Statecraft (Breaking Ground) - March 19
The key detail that marks the story of Joseph as an example of antifragility and not mere resilience is that in the years of famine, it is not simply Egyptians who benefited from this policy: the Genesis account says “all the world came to Egypt to buy grain.” In other words, Joseph’s policy not only allowed his nation to survive seven years of famine, it also gave the nation an absolute advantage in trade with other nations. While trade (of course, and by definition) isn’t a zero-sum game, especially in times of natural disasters it is certainly the case that nations that are well-prepared for such exigencies stand to gain the most from being the broker of aid.
Read more here.
More than McKinsey: A rising generation should consider anew the merits of public service. (American Purpose) - March 24
Public servants know the spotlight will rarely shine on them; they can’t be in their line of work to seek fame. But they may well be seeking honor, which requires only validation from the people and communities in which public servants are embedded. Fame requires a certain scale in terms of how widely we are celebrated. If our ambition is fueled by a desire for widespread fame and the recognition achieved through fame, public service will never fully satisfy. But if the desire is for honor and the recognition that follows from affirmation, plenty of honor is available to ambitious young people willing to work hard within communities that can evaluate their skills and achievements and match their talents with problems to be solved.
Read more here.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
Vice: “The Pentagon wrote a 23-page report about a single meme it created, which took 22 days to make and was ultimately RTed 190 times.” - Read it all here.
If you have any interest in public transit, and particularly how to improve it, you need to read Matthew Yglesias’s recent Substack post, How to make the bus better
Evanston city council just voted to approve a $10million reparations program, to be paid for by weed tax, and allocated to Black residents (with family who experienced quantifiable historic injustice) in funding toward purchasing/upgrading houses. - Chicago Tribune with the details.
I’m two-thirds of the way through my macroeconomics course, and I gotta tell ya, I still don’t really *get* inflation. But I do understand it a little better thanks to Noah Smith’s recent Substack post: “If people decide they don’t want to live in Detroit and would rather live in San Francisco, then yeah, prices in San Francisco are gonna go up. That doesn’t mean the U.S. dollar is worth any less than it used to be. Which means if you think the Fed is spamming dollars into the U.S. economy and driving down the value of the dollar, you probably shouldn’t just look at prices in the Bay Area. You should look at prices everywhere that things are priced in U.S. dollars.
A convincing argument by Ryan Cooper in The Week on why we should bring back earmarking. Cooper argues: "on the margin, politics will become more about negotiation, catering to the needs of one's constituents, and boasting about real accomplishment, and less about imaginary doomsday conspiracy theories."
Addison Del Mastro has a bracing article in The Bulwark warning urbanists not to be unrealistic about place, and instead asking us to recognize that, “a genuine localism can also be melancholy, in that it must recognize the broader economic context that has rendered some places obsolete, and forced the hand of those who leave.”