Prov. Committee on Foreign Relations speakers for the new season

July 13, 2019

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org).

Below is the  tentative list of our dinner speakers (at our venue, the Hope Club, in Providence) for our Sept. 2019-June 2020 season. (Suggestions welcome!) There will be refinements in topics, and we’re trying to remain somewhat flexible to respond to news and other events. (Just completed-season speaker list is also below.)

Please Email  pcfremail@gmail.com with any questions. Information on dues and dinner cost is at bottom of this memo.

Our first speaker, on Wednesday, Sept. 11, is to be Mackubin Thomas Owens, who will  discuss America’s current military and geo-strategic posture in the world. A retired Marine Corps colonel and combat veteran of the Vietnam War, he’s editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, of which he is a senior fellow, and is a former dean of academics for the Institute of World Politics, in Washington.

Dr. Owens is also a former editor-in-chief of the defense journal Strategic Review.

He has served as the associate dean of academics for electives and directed research, and professor of strategy and force planning, at the U.S. Naval War College,  as an adjunct professor of international relations at Boston University and as  a contributing editor to National Review,  among his many other academic and journalistic activities.

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Our next speaker comes  Wednesday, Oct, 2, with Jonathan Gage, who will talk about how coverage of such international economic stories as trade wars has changed over the years,  in part because of new technology, and how that coverage itself changes events.

Mr. Gage has had a very distinguished career in publishing and international journalism. He has served as  publisher and CEO of Institutional Investor magazine, as publisher of strategy+business magazine, as a director at Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Company, as enterprise editor for Bloomberg News and finance editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (of sainted memory) and as a senior writer for the Boston Consulting Group.

He is a trustee, and former vice chairman, of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

He has written or edited for  such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Psychology Today magazine.

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On Wednesday, Oct.  23, comes Ambassador Patrick Duddy, who will talk about Venezuelan internal political and economic conditions and relations with the U.S., Cuba, Russia and other nations.  Mr. Duddy, currently director of Duke University’s center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, served as American ambassador to Venezuela during some of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. The late President Hugo Chavez expelled him but eight months later he resumed his ambassadorship. He finished that assignment in 2010.

Before his ambassadorships, Mr. Duddy served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (DAS) for the Western Hemisphere, responsible for the Office of Economic Policy and Summit Coordination, which included the hemispheric energy portfolio, as well for the Offices of Brazil/ Southern Cone Affairs and of Caribbean Affairs. During his tenure as DAS, he played a lead role in coordinating U.S. support for the restoration of democracy in Haiti.

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On Wednesday, Nov. 6, comes Tweed Roosevelt, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and great-grandson of that president. He’ll talk about how TR’s foreign policy, which  was developed as the U.S. became truly a world power, affected subsequent presidents’ foreign policies. Mr., Roosevelt is also  chairman of Roosevelt China Investments, a Boston firm.

In 1992,  Mr. Roosevelt rafted down the 1,000-mile Rio Roosevelt in Brazil—a river previously explored by his great-grandfather in 1914 in the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition and then called the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. The former president almost died on that legendary and dangerous trip.

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On Thursday, Dec.  5, we’ll welcome Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou, who directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy, and is visiting associate professor of conflict resolution, at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  She titles her talk "God, Soft Power, and Geopolitics: Religion as a Tool for Conflict Prevention/Generation".

Dr. Prodromou is also a non-resident senior fellow and co-chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and is also non-resident fellow at The Hedayah International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism, based in Abu Dhabi.

Prodromou  is former vice chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the intersection of religion, democracy, and security in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Her current research project focus on Orthodox Christianity and geopolitics, as well as on religion and migration in Greece.

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On  Wednesday, Jan. 8, comes Michael Fine, M.D., who will talk about his novel Abundance, set in West Africa, and the challenges of providing health care in the Developing World. He will speak on: “Plagues and Pestilence: What we learned (or didn't) from Ebola about Foreign Policy and International Collaboration in the face of epidemics and outbreaks’’

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On Wednesday, Feb. 5, we will welcome  as speaker PCFR member Cornelia Dean, book author, science writer and former science editor of The New York and internationally known expert on coastal conditions. She’ll talk how rising seas threaten coastal cities around the world and what they can do about it.

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On Wednesday, March 18, comes Stephen Wellmeier, managing director of Poseidon Expeditions. He’ll talk about the future of adventure travel and especially about Antarctica, and its strange legal status.

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On Wednesday, April 29, comes Trita Parsi,  a native of Iran and founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance and A Single Roll of the Dice. He regularly writes articles and appears on TV to comment on foreign policy. He, of course, has a lot to say about U.S- Iranian relations and a lot more.

Mr. Parsi is a co-founder of  a new think tank, financed by an unlikely partnership of the right wing Koch Brothers and the left-of-center George Soros. It’s called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and dedicated to helping craft a new U.S. foreign policy that would be far less interventionist and put an end to America’s “endless foreign wars.’’

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On Wednesday, May 6, we’ll welcome Serenella Sferza, a political scientist and co-director of the program on Italy at MIT’s Center for International Studies, who will talk about the rise of right-wing populism and other developments in her native land.

She has taught at several US and European universities, and published numerous articles on European politics. Serenella's an affiliate at the Harvard De Gunzburg Center for European Studies and holds the title of Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia conferred by decree of the President of the Republic for the preservation and promotion of national prestige abroad.

June: Keeping open for now but possibly something on China.

Speakers in the  2018-2019 season of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations included:

Miguel Head, who spent the past decade as a senior adviser to the British Royal Family, on what it was like.

James Nealon, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras and former assistant secretary of state, on the migrant crisis flowing onto our southern border.

Walter A. Berbrick, founding director of the Arctic Studies Group at the U.S. Naval War College, on “An Arctic Policy for the Ages: Strengthening American Interests at Home and Abroad

Phillip Martin,  senior investigative reporter for WGBH News and a contributing reporter to Public Radio International’s The World, a co-production of WGBH, the BBC and PRI -- a program that he helped develop as a senior producer in 1995 – on the Indian caste system there and here.

Paulo Sotero, the director of the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute on the future of that huge nation.

Historian Fred Zilian on the “Real Thucydides Trap,”—an alternate to Graham Allison’s—which threatens America’s leadership of the free world.

Dr. Teresa Chahine on international social entrepreneurship.

London-based Journalist  and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb  on Brexit.

Sarah C.M. Paine of the U.S. Naval War College on the “Geopolitics Underlying U.S. Foreign Policy.’’

Douglas Hsu,   senior  Taiwan diplomat, on tension and ties with Mainland, and Taiwan’s relations with the U.S.

Prof. James Green, a leading expert on Brazil, where he lived for eight years,  and former president of the Brazilian Studies Association, on that nation’s new right-wing populist president.

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PCFR Dues & Dinner Cost

Sustaining - Dues remain $120.

 We urge as many members as possible to be sustaining members so that we can continue to try to improve our programs, and we plead with you to pay  your dues as early as possible so that we can properly budget for the new season!  

 We have no endowment. Dues pay for the speakers. The dinner charge is a passthrough to the Hope Club.

Regular Member - Dues remain $90.

Spousal, for spouses of members - Dues remain $50 in addition to the regular or sustaining membership.

Student - Current students may join free of charge.

Dinner price is being cut to $45 a person in the new season from $50 in the just-completed one.

Please check the PCFR Web site – thepcfr.org – on where to send dues checks.

'Split asunder'

— Photo by Bidgee

Now on the hills I hear the thunder mutter...
Nearer and nearer rolls the thunder-clap,—
You can hear the quick heart of the tempest beat....
Look! look! that livid flash!
And instantly follows the rattling thunder,
As if some cloud-crag, split asunder,
Fell, splintering with a ruinous crash,
On the Earth, which crouches in silence under;
And now a solid gray wall of rain
Shuts off the landscape, mile by mile...

— "Summer Storm," by James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), Massachusetts-based poet and diplomat

A Friendly sail

Friendship sloop (named for the Maine where they originated

“What is there about the plodding, nodding Friendship sloop, close-reaching so sturdily, so comfortably, against the summer sou-wester off the coast of her native Maine, that gives such a friendly tug to the heartstrings of the sailor?’’

Maybe it’s that “they don’t look like yachts and they don’t sail like yachts because they were originally fishing sloops, designed originally for wresting a living from the sea.’’

— Joseph E. Garland, in Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons

The wheel within the wheel

“Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. Boston therefore is often called the ‘hub of the world,’ since it has been the source and fountain of the ideas that have reared and made America.’’

— The Rev. F. B. Zinckle, in Last Winter in the United States (1868).

'Walling in or walling out'?

— Photo by TROO1

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, '‘Good fences make good neighbors’’.t

— “Mending Wall,’’ by Robert Frost

Newport Harbor is 'a public trust'

Boat-filled Newport Harbor in the upper center of the picture,

— Photo by MVASCO

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The rich are doing just fine pretty much everywhere – e.g., they effectively block off much of the coast to the peasantry with increasingly mammoth mansions and now they lay claim to part of the bottom of Newport Harbor: The New York Yacht Club makes available for sale – or rent? -- 17 commercial moorings only to club members and their guests.

I’m with the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council on this: The bottom of Newport Harbor is clearly state-owned and a private entity has no right to treat it as its own.

Deputy CRMC Director Jeffrey Willis wrote:

“A mooring permit is a government-issued temporary license given to a specific person or entity, for a specific duration, to utilize a specific area of the public’s waters for a specific private purpose. The permits do not confer property rights, perpetual or otherwise, on their holders and the holders may not assign, transfer or sell them.”

“It’s not necessarily just about the New York Yacht Club. It’s about any given group that wants to exclude people. The harbor land is held as a public trust for the general public.”

The NYYC’s mooring imperialism takes privatization another step too far.

Networking

“Network 2’’ (photography) , by Leah Abrahams, in the “New England Collective X Regional Juried Exhibition,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, July 31-Sept. 1.

Chris Powell: Looking for a freedom-of-information hero in Conn.

At its annual meeting the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information usually presents an award to a public official who has performed outstanding service to the right to know in the past year. But no such award was presented at the annual meeting a few weeks ago, for the council could not find such a hero.

As reported comprehensively last Sunday by Gabriella DeBenedictis in the Waterbury Republican-American, freedom of information is under attack in Connecticut. Bad as the previous administration was on this issue, Gov. Ned Lamont's administration may be worse, perhaps because the majorities of his party, the Democratic Party, have increased in the General Assembly.

The governor and legislature have just created an agency to disburse as much as $300 million to public education programs, at least $100 million of it state government money, while exempting the agency from freedom-of-information and ethics laws. The agency was prompted by a gift of $100 million from billionaire fund manager Ray Dalio and his wife, Barbara, a sum that has been matched by state appropriation. Another $100 million may be raised for the agency from other rich people. Apparently the Dalios requested the exemption from the FOI and ethics laws, though until now rich people in Connecticut somehow have managed to give money away without impairing open government.

With state officials on its board, the agency may operate as a slush fund for political patronage. Not surprisingly, the agency and its exemptions from accountability were enacted as part of the state budget bill without a public hearing.

A few weeks ago the governor signed and the legislature approved a new contract with the state police union that prohibits public access to complaints against troopers if the police administration finds the complaints false or unverifiable. This will facilitate whitewashes and cover-ups. For years a similar provision in the contract for the state university professors union has obstructed journalistic investigation of sexual harassment and other misconduct.

Approving the concealment provision in the state police contract, the governor and legislature signified that they haven't paid attention to the scandals with the professors or else that they place the interest of unionized government employees above the public interest.

Such provisions are possible only because state law authorizes state employee union contracts to supersede freedom-of-information law. Legislative leaders this year refused even to hold a hearing on repealing the supersedence law. Again legislators served the unions instead of the public.

The governor and legislature this year also enacted a law allowing secret arrests in domestic violence cases when both parties are charged. This will facilitate politics and influence peddling during secret resolution of the charges before they reach court and the defendants are identified. Public officials seeking to conceal their own misconduct will find this especially useful.

This year the legislature also failed to pass a bill proposed by state Rep. Michael Winkler, D-Vernon, to prohibit towns from charging $20 to people who want to make their own scans of public documents, avoiding photocopying charges. Town clerks want the extra revenue. They might as well charge admission to Town Hall.

Will Connecticut have a hero of freedom of information next year? It depends on whether more elected officials realize that good government might be good politics too.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Todd McLeish: Improved outlook for endangered coastal bird

Roseate terns

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The North American population of an endangered seabird, most of which nest on a few small islands in Buzzards Bay, is higher than at any time since 1987, providing scientists with a feeling of optimism following a period of decline in the 2000s that had them worried about the birds’ future.

Yet the roseate tern — a gull-like bird with a black cap, pointed wings, and a sharp beak — still faces threats from predators and climate change that require constant vigilance so the recent gains aren’t lost.

Ninety percent of the population nests on three islands: Bird Island and Ram Island in Buzzards Bay, each of which are home to about 1,100 nesting pairs; and Great Gull Island off the eastern end of Long Island, where 1,800 pairs nest. The remaining 400 pairs nest on a dozen islands scattered from Nova Scotia to New York.

“We don’t know what caused the decline, just as we don’t know what’s causing the increase,” said Carolyn Mostello, a coastal waterbird biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, who has monitored the terns in Buzzards Bay for more than 20 years. “That makes it really hard to have confidence that the gains are going to be permanent. It doesn’t allow us to relax anything we’re doing.”

Mostello and a team of eight biologists and students are spending almost every day of the breeding season — May through mid-July — monitoring the roseate terns on Bird and Ram islands, as well as on Penikese Island, another island in Buzzards Bay that has a small nesting population. They count and monitor every nest, assess the growth rate of every chick, band as many of the birds as possible, and conduct a variety of research studies. This year they are evaluating whether the banding process impacts the health and breeding success of the birds.

Gulls, which eat the eggs and chicks, are the terns’ primary predator, so the research team does its best to keep gulls from nesting on the islands and discourage them from getting close to the tern nests. Peregrine falcons are also an occasional concern, since they will eat the adult birds, as are any mammals such as mink, raccoons, or rats that somehow find their way to the breeding islands.

Climate change is a growing concern, according to Mostello. Because the islands are very low-lying — for example, Bird Island’s maximum elevation is just 10 feet — erosion and sea-level rise could reduce nesting habitat, and major storms could flood active nests.

Offshore wind turbines are also an increasing threat, especially with hundreds of turbines proposed for the waters just south of the breeding islands.

“Those are areas that the roseates fly through, so we’re really concerned about those projects,” Mostello said. “Even if each turbine doesn’t kill a lot of birds per year, they’ll be operational for a lot of years, and when you have a rare species that’s long-lived and produces few young per year, it starts to knock down the survival rate and could have an impact on the population. Hundreds of turbines could be a big risk to the terns.”

Biologist Carolyn Mostello and her team have been monitoring the terns on Buzzards Bay islands for two decades.

In an effort to boost the birds’ population, MassWildlife teamed with the Army Corps of Engineers and a number of other partners to restore habitat at Bird Island. By filling in some low-lying areas, planting native vegetation, and increasing the height of the seawall, the project has doubled the amount of potential nesting habitat on the 2-acre island.

“Before the restoration, the birds were very crowded, and that resulted in a lot of agonistic interactions,” Mostello said. “Their territories were small, so neighboring adults were attacking other adults and chicks, resulting in lower productivity. Now they can spread out a bit, they’re less aggressive towards each other, and the substrate is better for them. We have more habitat and it’s better habitat.”

A similar habitat-restoration project is in the planning stages for Ram Island.

Despite the improved habitat and recent population increase, Mostello isn’t ready to claim victory for the birds.

“If you have a population that fluctuates a lot — we went from 2,900 pairs to 4,400 pairs in six years — you would want to wait a while to make sure the population was actually stable before you considered them recovered,” she said. “They could be headed for a downturn. The rate of increase has slowed. It could be that we’re headed for a leveling off and a decline. Only time will tell.”

In the meantime, Mostello and her team will continue to spend almost every day of the breeding season keeping an eye on the roseate terns in Buzzards Bay, knowing that their progress could easily be reversed without a regular human presence.

“If we didn’t show up, we might get away with it for a year, but by the second year you’d have predators that knew they could feed uninhibited on the terns, you’d see declines in productivity, and partial or full abandonment of the colony,” Mostello said. “Having a human presence is non-negotiable.

“While we need to continue to shepherd them through the world, we’ll do it with the hope that someday they’ll be self-sufficient and won’t need this level of effort. We’ve been committed to this species for a long time; we have a huge responsibility here in Massachusetts with 50 percent of the continental population here, so we’re not about to slack off and lose the gains that we’ve made.”

Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Busing mostly a bust

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Joe Biden was excoriated by Sen Kamala Harris in the recent debate of Democratic presidential candidates for his opposition in the 1970s to busing ordered by federal judges to “integrate’’ public schools, mostly in cities. Senator Harris perhaps believed or hoped that there aren’t all that many people around who clearly remember what happened with busing.

Well, Biden was generally right. Forced busing was often a disaster, most famously in Boston, for which U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity, a resident of rich, and lily white, Wellesley, ordered a massive busing plan that sent African American students all over the city, via long bus trips. It was a disaster, and not just because it took time from schooling and gave it to transportation and led to racial violence.

It also undermined neighborhood schools and the parent and student commitment they encourage, and intensified “white flight’’ to the suburbs and private schools, which further destabilized the school system.

If only Garrity and his ilk had spent considerable time in poor white (especially South Boston, large parts of Dorchester and Charlestown) and black sections (mostly Roxbury) of Boston, as I did as a reporter for the old Boston Herald Traveler, they would have realized that court-ordered busing would do more harm than good.

Joe Biden, representing Delaware, a state with a large African-American population, mostly in Wilmington, some affluent and middle-class white suburbs around that city and the area south of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, which had more in common with the Deep South than with the New Jersey-like region to the north of the canal, understood the sociological complexities of busing more than most politicians. He never was a racist, though like other senators had to work with racist Southern senators to get important legislation through. (I worked for the News Journal, Delaware’s dominant newspaper, for part of 1975 and met Biden a few times.) The area “South of the Canal’’ was a trip! One local pol down there asked me when the News Journal “is going to start hiring Americans’’ – in a nasty reference to the paper’s superb political writer Ralph Moyed, who happened to be Jewish.

Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe’s conservative columnist, usefully reviewed Boston’s busing mess in a July 2 article. He noted in it:

“In 1982, a Globe poll found that only 14 percent of black Boston parents still favored busing. The overwhelming majority preferred a free-choice plan, allowing parents to send their children to any public school in the city. In practice, that would have meant schools their kids could walk to.’’

“Busing made everything worse. Public school enrollment plummeted. In Boston, 78 school buildings were closed. In 1970, 62,000 white children attended the city’s public schools — 64 percent of the total. By 1994, only 11,000 white students remained. Before busing began, the average black child in Boston attended a school that was 24 percent white. By the mid-1990s, the proportion was 17 percent. Far from reducing racial isolation, busing had intensified it.’’

The best way to encourage long-term integration is to try to ensure that all students, in whatever school they’re in, get as good an education as possible so they can succeed economically and otherwise and to eschew rigid, racially based formulas. This also requires public policies that encourage family stability, including as politically incorrect as it sounds, two-parent households in which the parents are married. Family stability is a key factor in most kids’ success in school.

I'm still me

“Remember Me’’ (oil on canvas), by Julia Lin, in show “iCreate 2019 ,’’ through July 21 at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Conn. Ms. Lin is a Ridgefield (Conn.) High School student. iCreate was created to encourage young artists and help them connect with other artists in their age group as well as celebrate their skill.

Alissa Quart: Tech execs should read history

The main reading room of the Boston Public Library

Via OtherWords.org

America’s tech giants are accused of many sins, including invading our privacy and even degrading our democracy. But one other commonality among these masters of the code universe is rarely discussed: Virtually no tech CEOs have a background in the humanities, such as literature and history.

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a citizen? And what are our responsibilities to one another? If their behavior is any guide, tech titans have never thought deeply about any of these questions.

Instead, major social platforms like Facebook simply build fines for privacy violations into their budgeting. Ride-sharing services like Uber underpay their hardworking drivers and offer no benefits. And hate speech runs rampant on all social networks.

If our tech overlords had studied the humanities — rather than just business or computer science — they might have been less likely to treat our data as a commodity to be used for their own purposes. Facebook might not have blithely violated its 2011 privacy consent decree, or stood back when hate speech consumed its platform.

I’m not alone in believing that arts and humanities training could create much better technologists. In a 2018 study, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine called for an integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with these less numerical disciplines.

In designing technology, empathy and other human-scale values are now being championed as well. After all, how can you sell good “user experience” if you know little about the users? And when the robots come for our jobs, human creative intelligence may be one of the only things still needed in the labor market.

One might ask: What are the chances of building a tech unicorn if you studied Chaucer or Weber rather than computer science?

But my argument isn’t that only English majors should run tech incubators, but that our digital masters should find a place in their lives and minds for Plato and Margaret Mead. As a study by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano shows, literature makes us better at comprehending other people’s feelings — a useful skill in both a leader and an employee.

If Uber and other gig economy “winners” had studied Dickens or labor history, would they have fought so nastily to maintain that their drivers are “side hustling,” concierge-like contractors with few employment rights?

If executives at Lyft had read Jane Addams’s 20 Years At Hull House, or even a textbook on the basics of maternal biology, would they have celebrated the fact that a driver had to pick up riders after she went into labor, and then Lyft herself to the hospital to give birth?

And if those who insist on creepily long hours from their employees had at least read Marx, they might not snicker so affectionately at the T-shirt slogan “9 to 5 is for the weak.”

Today’s tech jobs — with “nap pods” and campus environments that make it so their workers almost never leave work — evoke Marx’s account of how long work days rob people of their “normal, moral, and physical conditions of development.”

This is part of a broader problem, of course. In 1971, there were fewer than two business majors for every English major in American colleges. As of 2016, it’s more than 8 to 1 and growing.

As T.S. Eliot wrote: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Studying the humanities means engaging with what the Romantics called “the sympathetic imagination” — an idea that tech overlords would hopefully direct not just at themselves but also toward other people.

Alissa Quart is executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which produced this piece. It ran first at the San Francisco Chronicle as was adapted for distribution by OtherWords.org.

Developing human+ skills in students so they can thrive in workplace

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

“The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies.”

Michelle Weise is senior vice president for workforce strategies and chief innovation officer at Strada Education Network. Weise is a higher education expert who specializes in innovation and connections between higher education and the workforce. She built and led Sandbox ColLABorative at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and the higher education practice of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. With Christensen, she co-authored Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, a book that focuses on how to align online competency-based education with changing labor market needs.

In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Weise about her insights on connecting postsecondary education to the world of work.

Harney: The relationship between education and employability seems widely understood now. What’s truly new in this area?

Weise: What’s different today is that with all the trending conversations about the future of work, the new narrative is that the most valuable workers now and in the future will be those who can combine technical knowledge with uniquely human skills. Over the last few decades, students have moved in large numbers to career-oriented majors, such as business, health and engineering—clearly hearing that the surest path to a meaningful, financially stable career is also the most straightforward one. Those pursuing liberal arts degrees, on the other hand, are on the decline. Policymakers have been particularly down on the outcomes of liberal arts, questioning the value of these majors as relevant to the challenges ahead.

But it’s not either/or; it’s both/and. Human skills alone are not enough and neither are technical skills on their own. This runs somewhat counter to the rallying cries in the 2000s, warning of a dearth of STEM majors to meet the demands of the emerging tech-enabled knowledge economy. But not all of the jobs will require STEM majors or data science wizards or people who fully grasp the technicalities of artificial intelligence. There are differing levels of depth and shallowness of that technical expertise needed alongside human skills that are in high demand.

With that nuance comes the need for real-time labor market data. Fortunately, with partners like Emsi, we can now extract the skills from job postings from businesses (demand-side data) and social profiles and resumes from people (supply-side data), and begin to look underneath traditional occupational classification schemes to observe how specific knowledge and skills cluster with one another. By doing this, we can more clearly diagnose the realities of work, education and skills requirements, and how skills develop and morph across regions and industries. This is essential because it gives learning providers insights that are more current and certainly more accurate, so that they may develop and refine curriculum and advise learners for a rapidly changing workplace.

Harney: Strada’s work regarding “On-ramps to Good Jobs” explicitly references “working class Americans”? Who are they and what are some of the learn-earn-learn strategies with the best traction?

Weise: We use the term “working class” to refer to people who represent the lowest quartile of adults in terms of educational attainment, earnings, and income (26%). We estimate that there are approximately 44 million working-class adults who are of working age (25- to 64-years-old) earning less than $35,000 annually and with less than $70,000 of family income.

What we call on-ramps to good jobs are programs designed, tailored and targeted for these learners with significant barriers to educational and economic success. Some of the most interesting models we found leveraged a “try-before-you-buy” outsourced apprenticeship model. Unlike in traditional apprenticeship models, the employer of record is the on-ramp, and the hiring employer acts as a client to the on-ramp. Apprentices are paid by the on-ramp but work on projects for client firms that are testing out that particular apprentice as a future job candidate. These models are great ways of building steady revenue streams that are sustainable, so that on-ramps reduce dependence on philanthropic or government dollars.

LaunchCode, a St. Louis-based tech bootcamp, hires and manages apprentices from its own program and, in turn, charges businesses $35 an hour for services. If, at program’s end, the employer hires an apprentice, the employer does not have to pay a placement fee, as LaunchCode’s overhead costs have been covered by the hourly service charge paid by employers during the training and pre-hire apprenticeship period.

As another example, Techtonic, a software development company based in Denver, has implemented an outsourced apprenticeship, now certified by the U.S. Department of Labor. Candidates are screened and then put through 12 weeks of training, akin to a coding bootcamp. After learners finish their training, Techtonic “hires” the apprentices, pays them entry-level wages, and pairs them with senior developers to work on projects for its clients. Not only do apprentices get paid for work, but they also simultaneously develop and hone the skills they will need for long-term career success. At the same time, Techtonic’s client firms have a seamless, low-stakes way of evaluating a candidate’s work before committing to full-time employment.

Harney: You also reference “good/decent jobs” … what do these entail?

Weise: We’re talking about jobs that have strong starting salaries that can move a person out of low-wage work to be able to thrive in the labor market by making at least $35k per year as an individual, and a lot more than that in many cases. This is critical for the bottom quartile of working-age adults in terms of educational attainment, earnings and income. We now have 44 million Americans who are jobless or lacking the skills, credentials and networks they need to earn enough income to support themselves and their families. We need better solutions for our most vulnerable citizens.

So when we talk about a good job, we’re not just talking about a well-paying, dead-end job; we’re looking at jobs that have mobility built into them. We want to focus on jobs with promise, or the ability to advance and move up.

Harney: What is the role of non-degree credentials in our understanding of education and employability?

Weise: We know that when people pursue postsecondary education, their main motivation is around work and career outcomes. If they can get there without a degree, is that enough for some? And what about folks who already have degrees who want to advance with just a little bit more training? More college or more graduate school will not be the answer. Flexibility, convenience, relevance … these may be attributes that are much more alluring than the package of a degree.

The business of skills-building is mostly occurring within the confines of federal financial aid models and the credit hour, but there’s an even wider range of opportunities to dream up innovative funding models and partnerships with employers. I’m eager to see more solutions that tie in with the training and development \or learning and development sides of a business rather than through the human resources side of tuition-reimbursement benefits. Where are the employers innovating new forms of on-the-job training?

This, by the way, is a huge opportunity for competency-based education (CBE) providers to serve, but everyone’s busy creating new CBE degreeprograms. What makes CBE disruptive, which is what Clayton Christensen and I pointed to in Hire Education, is that when learning is broken down into competencies—not by courses or subject matter—online competency-based providers can easily arrange modules of learning and package them into different, scalable programs for very different industries. For newer fields such as data science, logistics or design thinking that do not necessarily exist at traditional institutions, online competency-based education providers can leverage modularization and advanced technologies and build tailored programs on demand that match the needs of the labor market.

Harney: Can an employability focus go too far in terms of turning education into a purely vocational endeavor? As an English major and expert in literature and arts, what are your concerns about how steps such as gainful employment guidelines could discourage students from going into such fields and teacher prep, for example?

Weise: That was actually one of the motivations for clarifying the outcomes of liberal arts grads in the labor market. Current views on the liberal arts are often polarizing and oversimplified, and so we wrote “Robot-Ready: Human+ Skills for the Future of Work.” This paper was designed to bring more nuance and rigor to the conversation. Liberal arts graduates are neither doomed to underemployment, nor are they prepared to do anything they want. The liberal arts can give us the agile thinkers of tomorrow, but to live up to their potential, they must evolve. The liberal arts are teaching high-demand skills that can help people transfer from domain to domain, but they do not provide students with enough insight into the pathways available and the practical grounding to acquire before they graduate. In this analysis, we show precisely the kinds of hybrid skills needed in the top 10 pathways that liberal arts grads tend to pursue.

As a quick example, if we have learners considering journalism, they need to know that the roles available now resemble those in IT fields. Not only must journalists report, write or develop stories, but they must also demonstrate metrics-based interpretive skills, fluency in analytics capabilities like search engine optimization (SEO), JavaScript, CSS and HTML, and experience using Google Analytics to better understand who is accessing their content.

A liberal arts education can, in fact, enable learners to learn for a lifetime, but it’s not some magical phenomenon. It takes work, effort and awareness to identify the skills that enable learners to make themselves more marketable and break down barriers to entry.

Harney: What will future workers need to work effectively alongside artificial intelligence?

Weise: The literature on the future of work points us to the more human side of work. The research underscores the growing need for human skills such as flexibility, mental agility, ethics, resilience, systems thinking, communication and critical thinking. The idea is that with the rapid developments in machine learning, robotics and computing, humans will have to relinquish certain activities to computers because there’s simply no way to compete. But things like emotional intelligence or creativity will become increasingly critical for coordinating with computers and robots and ensuring that we are indispensable.

The question then becomes: What are we doing in a deliberate way within our learning experiences—at schools, colleges, companies, government—to cultivate these uniquely human skills? I think we can be doing a whole lot more in terms of building robot-ready learners of the future through project-based learning. It’s nothing new; It occurs in pockets but is not nearly widespread enough. Ultimately, it gets us those nimble thinkers of the future.

Real-world human problem-solving is transdisciplinary by nature, tapping into varied skills and knowledge—and yet, our postsecondary system remains stubbornly stovepiped. Students must learn—and be taught—to connect one domain of knowledge to another through what is known as “far transfer.”

But again, human skills alone are not enough: It’s human+. The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies. Those workers will need both human and technical skills. With stronger problem-based models, it’ll be easier for education providers to stay ahead of the curve and build in new and emerging skill sets in data analytics, blockchain, web development or digital marketing that students will need in order to be successful in the job market. The integration of more project-based learning into the classroom would bring more clarity to how human+ skills translate into real-world problem solving and workplace dexterity.

David Warsh: The centrality of Hamilton

President Trump has appointed four of the five serving governors to the seven-member Board of the Federal Reserve System.  Last week he bruited his plans to make another attempt to nominate two more, Judy Shelton and Christopher Waller.   (Four previous proposals have gone nowhere this year:: Herman Cain and Steven Moore, and, before that, Marvin Goodfriend and Nellie Liang. So I spent the better part of the Fourth of July perusing the stack of books on the history of the Fed that have appeared since the financial crisis.

I started out with Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt (Columbia, 2018), a compilation of 18 compositions by America’s first secretary of the Treasury on the subject of finance.  It was arranged by Richard Sylla, of New York University, and David Cowen, president of the Museum of American Finance

At least until recently, Hamilton was best known as the author of many of The Federalist Papers, a leader of the movement for the Constitution. As George Washington’s Treasury Secretary, he was also architect of the U.S. financial system, the authors note in their introduction. It’s hard to believe that Hamilton’s writings on finance haven’t previously been collected, but as the editors point out in their introduction, it was only in recent decades that economists and economic historians have come to understand in their own terms the centrality of finance to growth and power.

As a voracious reader of history (while serving as a young officer in the Continental Army, for four years as Washington’s chief staff aide), Hamilton understood how institutions of public and private credit had enabled the Dutch Republic to win its independence from Spain, and go on to became the richest nation in Europe; how Britain after 1688 had copied and improved upon the Dutch system. The government bank, national currency, private banks and securities markets the British created fueled rapid economic growth and financed its frequent wars with France. Hamilton argued that the newly independent United States should follow its example.

Sylla is among America’s leading economic historians. Introductions to each document make clear and compelling reading; abridgements are welcome and, no doubt, judicious.  Still, eighteenth-century arguments require careful reading in the twenty-first. That led me to The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Harvard Belknap, 2012, by Thomas McCraw).  Another distinguished historian, McCraw begins,

Of the six major “founders” of the United States, Alexander was the only immigrant. He was also much the youngest of the six: fifty-one years younger than Benjamin Franklin, twenty-five years younger than George Washington, twenty-two years younger than John Adams, fourteen years younger than Thomas Jefferson, six years younger than James Madison. Hamilton alone died violently, in his famous duel with Aaron Burr.

Young, well, yes. And hot-blooded? The circumstances of Hamilton’s youth couldn’t have been more different from those of the other founders, all of whom lived far longer than he did. But his immigrant pedigree?  He was born in 1757, on  Nevis, a tiny Caribbean island near St. Kitts and St. Croix in the Danish Virgin Islands, to a headstrong mother and an aristocratic Scottish father, who abandoned the family when Alex was eight. The next year his mother died of yellow fever. After an astonishing series of further misfortunes, Hamilton was taken in by the family of a young friend (who may have been Hamilton’s half-brother) and went to work for a local merchant house of New York-based traders.  Hamilton learned bookkeeping, inventory control, short-term finance, and exchange-rate mechanics. He dealt with traders from ports throughout Western Europe.  He emigrated to New York when he was fifteen.

McCraw had just finished the first leg of a new line of inquiry when he died, at 72, in 2012.  His study of the work of Hamilton and Albert Gallatin, who succeeded him as Treasury Secretary under Jefferson and Madison, took the story through the War of 1812.  What might have been a second book, following the American financial revolution into the 20th Century, would not be written.  But Founders and Finance is a capstone work.  McCraw’s  first book, TVA and the Power Fight: 1933-1939, appeared in 1971. His second Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adam, Louis D. Brandeis, and Alfred E. Kahn (Harvard Belknap, 1984), won a Pulitzer Prize.  His third. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Belknap Harvard,2007), broadened his view.  It is remarkable that McCraw finished either one of the last two: a mysterious heart condition kept him flat on his back and away from the archives for most of his last 10 years.   Of all the books about Hamilton’s contributions, including Ron Chernow’s massive biography, on which the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical is based, Founders and Finance is the one to read.   After 364 pages, McCraw concludes:

So the dream of an integrated, diversified, and booming economy – the aspiration of Hamilton, Gallatin and many other immigrants – eventually came true. Robert Morris, who had grown up in England, Hamilton in St. Croix, Gallatin in Geneva, Haym Solomon in Poland, Alexander James Dallas in Jamaica, Stephen Girard in France, John Jacob Astor and David Parish in Germany – all emigrated from their homelands with open minds, fresh eyes, and a flair for finance.  All, in both the public and private sectors, took the profound personal step of uprooting themselves because they believed they might achieve a better future in North America.  And that is what they did, both for themselves and for the United States.

Finally, as dusk approached, I picked up Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian (Norton, 2019), a curiously off-the-mark biography of the great nineteenth-century financial journalist, famous chiefly as the third editor of The Economist, author of The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market  by James Grant, founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, an eminent practitioner of the same craft in the present day. It was Bagehot’s advice – in a banking panic, lend freely at penalty rates to solvent institutions, until fear goes away – that central bankers and finance ministers followed in halting a global panic during a desperate five weeks in the autumn of 2008. In his memoir, The Courage to Act, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke cited Bagehot more often than any living economist, Grant notes.

Yet Grant begins the book by confessing his doubts about the wisdom of the very dictum for which Bagehot (pronounce it Badge-it) is remembered, “his embrace of the dubious notion, so corrosive to financial prudence, that the central bank has a social obligation to the citizens who present themselves as borrowers and lenders, investors and speculators. No other class of person enjoy special access to the government’s money machinery,” Grant says.  He resurrects Bagehot’s great foe in the arguments of the 1860s and 1870s, Thomas Hankey, a former governor of the Bank of England, to argue against central bank intervention in banking panics.

This makes for some strange moments in Grant’s account, as when Britain experiences no bank run in 1873, after the Bank of England adopted the lending rule Bagehot spelled out in Lombard Street, which appeared the same year.  Instead the Panic of 1873, which began in Vienna with the default of Egypt’s Suez Canal bonds, quickly spread to North America and the rest of Europe, and, as Grant puts it, “disarranged commerce and finance on both sides of the Atlantic long after the first shock waves subsided” – 20 hard years known at the time  in the U.S. as the Great Depression and in Britain as the Long Depression.

The recurring U.S. panics of the Gilded Age, culminating in the Panic of 1907, led Congress to create the Federal Reserve System.  The Fed opened for business in 1915 – the central government bank and banking system regulator that Hamilton had envisioned one hundred and twenty-five years before. Events since then are a story for another day.

Of the most recent pair of putative nominees, Waller, director of research of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, would ordinarily be a perfectly presentable candidate, except that his views are more or less a carbon copy of those of his boss, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who already is a rotating member of the all-important policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.  And Shelton’s views, especially her enthusiasm for a gold standard, are fairly controversial.  There is, of course, no telling what the current Republican-led Senate might do.   But given the president’s fierce assault on the authority and independence of the Fed, I won’t be surprised of those  vacancies are still around next year.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran. He’s based in Somerville.

Spooky region

Stephen King’s house, in Bangor, Maine

“I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from. ‘‘

— Ted Naifeh, cartoon artist and writer

'Good-natured impression'

Pin oak

“In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor, the holly bush. ‘‘

— Hope Jahren, geochemist

A month of questions

Beatrix Potter's illustration of Babbity Bumble in “The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse” (1910).

Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—"

”Answer July,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who hardly ever left Amherst, Mass.

Am I blue?

Work by Bhen Alan in the Providence Art Club’s National Open Juried Exhibition through July 19.

How to do urban renewal

Hartford’s Constitution Plaza, an urban-renewal project that drove out many residents in what had been a stable neighborhood

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Tom Condon wrote a nice piece for The Connecticut Mirror on how to do and not do “urban renewal’’ with a focus, of course, on the Nutmeg State. A few particularly important things: Don’t tear up and/or divide city neighborhoods with huge limited-access highways, and try to avoid replacing structurally sound and attractive old buildings with sterile glass and steel structures.

When I lived near New Haven in the early and mid ’60s I remember how arrogant “urban renewal’’ tore apart that city. Without the presence of very rich Yale University as a moderating force, the well-meaning renewers, especially then Mayor Richard Lee and city development director Edward Logue, would have done even more damage to downtown New Haven. The repair work has been underway now for a generation, and the place looks much better.

Mr. Condon’s cites a new book by former New York City planner and Yale Prof. Alexander Garvin called In The Heart of the City. As explanation for the turnaround in some cities in recent years, he cites crime reduction, the creation of Business Improvement Districts to clean and promote downtowns (Providence has one) and the rise of the Internet, which has let companies sharply reduce the space they need for storage of documents. This has freed up a lot of space in buildings – space that can be converted to housing, this increasing population density downtown, which has provided more customers for local businesses and reduced crime (more eyes on the street), in a kind of virtuous circle.

To read Mr. Condon’s article, please hit this link.

Jim Hightower: Congress loves socialized medicine -- for itself

Good health care offered within.

Via OtherWords.org

For $3.5 trillion a year, shouldn’t we Americans have a world-class health care system? Yet while we spend the most of any advanced nation in the world to get care — more than $10,000 a year per person — we get the worst results.

No surprise, then, that Medicare for All is now backed by 85 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents, and (get this) 52 percent of Republicans!

So — why isn’t Congress responding to this overwhelming public demand for universal coverage?

I suspect that one big reason for Washington’s big yawn over the people’s plea for sweeping reform is that our lawmakers don’t personally feel the financial pain and emotional distress that are inflicted on millions of regular Americans by a system built on private greed.

After all, their health needs are met by a double-dose of the socialistic care that they so furiously deny to our families.

First, they’re given big taxpayer subsidies to cover the cost of their insurance, with you and me paying about 72 percent of the price. But second, there’s a secretive medical center right in the U.S. Capitol building that provides a full-blown system of — shhhhh — health-care socialism to our governing elites.

Called the Office of the Attending Physician (or OAP), it provides a complete range of free medical service for lawmakers. No appointment needed and no waiting — they walk in and doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, and other professionals tend to them right away.

No need to show an insurance card, and they never get a bill. But they do get what a former OAP staffer calls “the best health care on the planet.” Thus, members feel no urgency to restructure a system that’s working beautifully — for them.

So, to get good care for all of us, we might start by taking away the pampered care that lawmakers have quietly awarded to themselves.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.