Americans Elect 2012

Americans Elect 2012 is an online movement to empower citizens to affect the 2012 presidential election. As I write this, 1.7 million people have signed up on the site. There will be more content on the site, which is new, as we move closer to the election in November 2012 including nominations for and a straw vote on candidates, and a discussion section.

At the moment, the site includes a long questionnaire on political issues of the moment. You can take as much of it as you like, and you can save the partial response and return to the questionnaire later. The interesting part for me is that you can see the frequency of alternative responses so far as soon as you complete your answer.

Clearly, the participants in this survey, self selected as they are, represent a variety of political views. Still, the responses indicate a large number of Americans are worried about the decline of America's economy,  and want a government which is more effective in regulating industry, in assuring health care for all, in improving our educational system, and in rationalizing the situation with respect to immigration.

Statistics are clear that a tiny minority of Americans are very rich and getting richer, while the poor are seeing their chances of rising out of poverty decreasing, and many who have been in the middle class are getting poorer.

The recent circus in which the Republicans and Democrats haggled over ways to reduce the debt in the next decade by reducing the deficit, which almost resulted in a default on our current national debt and led directly to a downgrade in the credit rating of the nation, has outraged a lot of Americans, It is just one example among many of dysfunctional failure to compromise in the public interest among our politicians.

I believe that the political problem is in part due to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, and in part due to the changes in our media which have seen more strident and partisan current events programming and have allowed people to spend more time listening to and communicating with people who share their own political philosophy. I think it is also due in part to the proliferation of lobbying, and the ability of the very rich and economically powerful to influence legislation by their support of lobbyists and of political campaigns.

I suspect that the economic and political problems have a circular partial causality, but whether they are or are not, a lot of Americans are mad about the concatenation of problems. I think that some of that anger on the part of one group of Americans (older, middle class, white, southerners especially) has resulted in the Tea Party Movement.

In my last history history book club meeting, discussing 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election that Changed the Country, I noted the parallel between that time in which "malefactors of great wealth" were at the opposite pole of wealth and power from the majority of American workers and today, at least in terms of the alienation of the majority of voters from the traditional political parties. I live in a very liberal community and my fellow book club members (having all read a lot of history?) are a pretty liberal group. They questioned whether there was a political parallel to the Progressive movement that so influenced the election of 1912 (which saw Teddy Roosevelt come in second heading the Progressive or Bull Moose Party, Eugene Debs heading the Socialist Party obtain some six percent of the vote).

I suspect that on the liberal side, the gathering of voters around the Center for American Progress is another outcome of the wide spread anger of Americans about the trends in our economy and our politics, and is directly analogous to the rise of the progressive movement in 1912.

I suspect that Americans Elect is still another outcome of the anger of so many Americans about the way things are going. I hope that it will mobilize Americans in support of doing things differently and better. I hope that it will not only raise the visibility of issues important to us, but show that there is a lot of support for policies that make more sense than those we are currently following. I hope that it will show support for candidates who might not otherwise emerge from the debates among party hacks and the "true believer" wings of the Democratic and Republican parties.

A comment on the Blair - Hitchens Debate on Religion

Christopher Hitchens vs Tony Blair Debate:
Is Religion A Force For Good In The World?

Blair and Hitchens are remarkably articulate, with the ability to utilize rhetoric very well in the moment before a huge audience. I still found the positions unsatisfactory.

• Hitchens fundamentally seems to be arguing that he prefers not to believe in a deity because he does not want to accept the authority of the spokespersons for the organized religions. One might offer an argument about organized religions without denying the existence of a deity.
• Blair seems to argue for religion because he believes a lot of good people have done more good in implementing their religious convictions, while admitting that other people had done ill in implementing their religious convictions and that those convictions are supported not only by religious leaders but by their texts, and that there are people who have done good motivated by beliefs which we all now believe to be false, and indeed by no religious beliefs at all.

I think both would agree that the problems of the Middle East would be reduced if Christians, Jews and Muslims involved would act differently. Blair feels that the route to such improved behavior would be a shift from extremist, pro-violence religious positions to ones within the same faiths that honored more the Golden Rule. Hitchens advocates a more secular, less religious positions. I suspect that each would give value to the other's recommendation. I suspect that each is guessing, and doesn't really know.

It is a joy simply to listen to two men so fast on their verbal feet!

Something I missed: Texas School Board Attack on Social Sciences

 
Earlier this year 15 elected members of the Texas School Board balderized the draft standards for the teaching of social studies in Texas schools. More.....

Check out the PBS Need to Know program on the balderization.

School text books are written to help teachers teach to the standards, and since the Texas-wide school system is the largest in the country, textbook publishers work hard to assure that their books fit the Texas standards. Other school districts across the country, with a variety of standards, to some degree are stuck with books written to satisfice the Texas School Board and its standards.

A letter signed by 800 historians, the vast majority teaching at universities and many in Texas universities wrote an open letter protesting the action pushed by the right wing majority of the School Board. I quote:

Those of us who teach and conduct research in colleges and universities have grown concerned, however, that social studies curriculum standards in Texas do not meet student needs. We also believe that the Texas State Board of Education has been derelict in its duty to revise the public school curriculum. In short, recent proposals by Board members have undermined the study of the social sciences in our public schools by misrepresenting and even distorting the historical record and the functioning of American society.

Some of the problematic revisions that they have proposed include:

• Weakening the study of constitutional protections for religious liberty that keep government out of matters of faith;
• Minimizing the struggle of women and ethnic minorities for equal and civil rights;
• Striking Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political changes since the 1700s; and
• Excluding an important historical figure from Latin America because some board members did not recognize him

I have in the past posted my concerns about the balderization of curricula in the evolution and climate change curricula, and the effort to change social science curricula to suit a conservative ideology is equally or more worrisome. I want the best available knowledge of economics, sociology, anthropology, political science and history used to inform the school social science curricula, not the most correct conservative ideology!

Fortunately, the mathematics curriculum is not subject to this revisionism, and there is a national mathematics curriculum available from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Perhaps we should seek to have as many school districts as possible subscribe to a national curricula in science and to a national curriculum in social studies and history so that they will outweigh the Texas school system in the decision making of the text book publishers.

The International Science and Mathematics Study looks at student performance in 41 countries, based on a very large sample of students. I quote from an article on U.S. student performance in these tests:

In short, the tests showed U.S. fourth-graders performing poorly, middle school students worse. and high school students are unable to compete. By the same criteria used to say we were "average" in elementary school, "we appear to be "near the bottom" at the high school level. People have a tendency to think this picture is  bleak but it doesn't apply to their own school. Chances are, even if your school compares well in SAT scores, it will still be a lightweight on an international scale.

1. By the time our students are ready to leave high school - ready to enter higher education and the labor force - they are doing so badly with science they are significantly weaker than their peers in other countries.
2. Our idea of "advanced" is clearly below international standards.
3. There appears to be a consistent weakness in our teaching performance in physical sciences that becomes magnified over the years.

I suspect that a major reason for this poor performance is that too many school districts accept second rate education for their students, having underpaid teachers in inadequate facilities teaching to poor curricula and weak standards. Perhaps we need real national standards and serious national testing, and a system that holds all U.S. school systems and U.S. school boards accountable for the education they provide their students!

A means of getting a better estimate of true poverty rankings

I have just read about a study that used four methods to rank order village families according to their poverty. The purpose of the study was to determine which of the three other methods best approximated the most expensive and "best" method.  (I assume that something like the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient was used to judge the approximation.)

 It occurs to me that none of the four methods can be taken to provide "the true" poverty ranking of villagers. Yet the researchers accepted the most expensive approach as defining the "truth" and judged the other methods according to their differences from its results.

One approach to improving on the "truthiness" of the ranking would be to add the rank orders from each indicator for each family, and reorder the families according to the sum of their previous rankings.

Perhaps a better way would be to weight the rank in each indicator by a weight proportional to the confidence one has in that indicator.

Indeed, one might iterate the procedure, weighing the ranking of each indicator according the Spearman's rho of that that ranking with respect to the weighted average ranking of the previous iteration.

It is hard to get at the truth!

Boycott Hershey Chocolate

I quote from an email from SEIU describing a situation that I find unacceptable:

Once upon a time, unionized workers packing chocolate at the Hershey company in Pennsylvania made $18 to $30 an hour.

Today, the company relies on a "cultural exchange" program that asks foreign students to pay up to $6,000 to come to America to work for $8 an hour to work at a companies like Hershey and experience what its like to live in America.

Then, when they arrive, "program fees" and rent are deducted from their salaries to the point many are unable to recoup what it costs to obtain their visa.

SEIU is collecting money to support a strike of the current crop of foreign workers.

http://action.seiu.org/hershey-students

I propose to boycott Hershey products until this practice is stopped. I invite any readers to join me.

We will soon all be connected all the time!

Source: The Economist

The growth of Android's market share is impressive, but I find the overall growth in the market even more impressive. More than 100 million cell phones a year shipments is an indication of the very high rate of improvement of telecom connectivity!

"Race, Ethnicity, and NIH Research Awards"

Donna K. Ginther, Walter T. Schaffer. Joshua Schnell, Beth Masimore, Faye Liu, Laurel L. Haak and Raynard Kington

Science 19 August 2011:
Vol. 333 no. 6045 pp. 1015-1019
DOI: 10.1126/science.1196783

Abstract: "We investigated the association between a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 applicant’s self-identified race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award by using data from the NIH IMPAC II grant database, the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and other sources. Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that Asians are 4 percentage points and black or African-American applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding. Our results suggest some leverage points for policy intervention."

The legacy of Americans racism is very hard to escape. The black or African-American scientists in this study have used all the possible educational means to escape from racial prejudice and it still affects them. This is especially troublesome to me in science, where we should value knowledge for itself and not from the race of its discoverer!

The Price of Corn is Going Up

Source: The Economist

"The price of corn is up by almost a quarter since the start of the year, to around $7.30 a bushel and is forecast to keep rising."


My one day as a member of the Agriculture Policy Committee of the U.S. Government was marked by the discovery by another member that their previous decision on feed grains affected the price of food grains. Everything connects to everything else.


We may see the price of beef and poultry go up, and people in developing countries may see the prices of the basics of their diet go up because of the subsidies we are providing for the production of alcohol for fuel from corn.


"Next season, for the first time, more corn could be used to make ethanol than to provide animal feed."

A great project design?

I was struck by a thought when watching Terrence McNally on television as he spoke about the new production of his play, The Master Class. He mentioned learning about the linkage between teacher and student in the new version of the play, as the star Tyne Daly interacted with the master class students on stage, and he mentioned his pleasure in hearing his lines delivered even better than he imagined when he wrote them. The play won the Tony for best play when it was first introduced on Broadway.

Tyne Daly on stage

It occurred to me that a great play is open in the sense that others in the production can bring their own genius to its production, that different directors can make riveting theater with different interpretations of the text, that different casts can find different depths in the characters and different beauties in the lines. New companies are making Shakespeare's plays live five centuries after they were first performed.

I suppose there is a similar aspect of great pieces of music, in that a piece can have many great interpretations. Why are there many recordings of a Beethovan symphony, a Verde Opera, or a Chopin etude? Is it not that different conductors, different orchestras, different artists find new riches in the same scores?

Perhaps that is the way we should consider the design of development projects. A project paper might be seen as an open document in the sense that the people implementing the project can and should go beyond the specific content of the paper, responding to the evolving specific circumstances that they face, using their own genius to bring excellence to the implementation of the project. A great project design might then be seen as one that gives range to people to achieve a great implementation and indeed encourages the implementers to greatness!

I recall Jack Donoghue, who taught me about community development at Michigan State University, telling me about a successful community development project which consisted only of refusing a community development contract by publicly dressing down the community leaders for not working together. That is the extreme in sending a group forward to work on a project in an open manner, with strong (if unconventional) motivation.

Check out the Daily Show's Jon Stewart on Class Warfare

The Daily Show - World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Not surprisingly, Jon Stewart says it better than I do. We clearly need a stronger progressive movement in this country, focusing on the reduced expectations of the two-thirds of our people with the lowest incomes. I suspect that the increasing separation of the top one percent and the top ten percent of our people by income from the rest of the population is contributing to the problems of the poor and the middle class. I also think that letting the income and wealth differentials get worse and worse is going to be bad news for the whole population and the political systems of our democracy.

Thoughts about the evaluation of knowledge based projects/programs

This talk by Stacey Young is from the KM Impact Challenge of the Knowledge-Driven International Development Project of USAID. Dr. Young makes a great point that many factors effect the success of a development project, and in the complex world of developing nations it is likely that the combination of factors that lead to success in one place will not exist in the next place. She doubts the utility of cookie-cutter approaches, preferring rather an approach in which there is careful monitoring of each project, always informed by knowledge, leading to modification of designs and objectives according to the local situation to achieve success. She notes that the things that she thinks can be useful to measure how good a knowledge management project is are seldom quantifiable, while donor agencies these days tend to be slaves to quantitative evaluation.

I wonder how good the evaluation has been of evaluation efforts. What are the "quantifiable" indicators of the information that evaluations provide decision makers? What is the ratio of the improved yield of donor program expenditures due to evaluation efforts to the costs of those efforts? Of course, there is no satisfactory information of this kind, in part because monitoring and evaluation are knowledge activities that are by nature poorly suited for such quantitative approaches.

What are other knowledge based programs, and how are they evaluated. Teaching is such a knowledge-based program. In my teaching I have found course evaluations by students to be helpful, but I suspect that the university goes more by whether students sign up for the courses each semester in sufficient numbers that the course costs are adequately paid. I note that business schools use the average salaries of the graduates on entering the job market as an indicator (which would seem likely to be of use in attracting future students). I note that billionaires Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg left college early and probably had rather low starting incomes as they began to make their billions; perhaps starting salaries on graduation are not the best indicator of social value!

Research is another knowledge based program. I recall that the National Science Foundation found in a study of research projects that had made major discoveries, a significant portion of those discoveries were not mentioned as possible outcomes in project proposals. This is an illustration of the fact that decision on research are made with incomplete information and limited rationality. Still, I suspect the process of planning and evaluating scientific research projects typical of those funded by the National Science Foundation is more informed and more rational than that of assistance projects funded by NGO's or donot agencies.

I have long been concerned about the conceptualization of small projects, and the use of terms such as "pilot projects" and "demonstration projects"; terms such as "going to scale" and "scaling up" also concern me. The diffusion of innovations is often more of a viral than bureaucratic process, and if done well involves innovation, deepening, and tailoring at each level. It may be that one can test a curriculum with a group of teachers, but I bet that when that curriculum is rolled out to a wider user group each good teacher modifies it to meet the needs of her students and to fit the style and approach to teaching he/she finds to work best. In the small projects funded by the programs that I ran, knowledge was generated and it was diffused by publication, by teaching, by example, and by other means, influencing others in many ways.

Perhaps "monitoring" is a better term than "evaluation". Perhaps the effort should be based on finding out what is actually happening, rather than trying to measure how fully the original conceptions (made with incomplete information and limited rationality) are actually fulfilled.

Not everything that can be measured is worth measuring.

We don't know how to measure everything that is important.

Good decisions are sometimes made on unsatisfactory information and analysis.

Bad decisions are often made on the basis of pretty good information and analysis.

Development seems to me something to tackle with a fair amount of humility and a willingness to reexamine assumptions and revise plans on a continuing basis. I do like to quantify and I do like to ask experts for their opinion and I do like to analyse that information that I can obtain, but I try not to take myself too seriously!

Horn of Africa - Key Facts and Figures from UNICEF

An estimated 12.5million people in the Horn of Africa need urgent humanitarian support

Over 2.3 million children are estimated to be malnourished across the region

Over half a million severely malnourished children are at imminent risk of death

In parts of Southern Somalia children under 5 are dying at a rate of 15 per 10,000 per day

Famine has been declared in Lower Shabelle and parts of Bakool in southern Somali as well as in the agropastoral areas of Middle Shabelle, Afgoye IDP settlement and the Mogadishu IDP Community.

Other southern regions of Somalia may also reach famine in the coming weeks

Tens of thousands of people have died and many more lives are at risk

3.7 million people in Somalia, almost half the population, are in crisis

1.4 million children in southern Somalia alone are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance

In Somalia only 30% of the population has access to clean water

More.....

Science and the change in world view

The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise
Giovanni di Paolo (Italian (Sienese), ca. 1400 - 1482)

I think I am going to begin a series of posts on scientific ideas that have or should have changed our view of the world. The obvious place to start is Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. Copernicus not only proposed that the earth revolved around the sun (while the earth was also revolving about its axis), but demonstrated that that assumption could be used as the basis to accurately predict the observations of the sun's place in the sky. He published the book proposing and defending that theory in 1543.

Giordano Bruno went beyond Copernicus to postulate that the sun was a star, differing from other stars in that it was much closer to the earth than the other stars. He was executed for heresy in 1600.

Galileo observed that the moons of Jupiter revolved around the planet, not only accepting the Copernican idea that the earth revolved around the sun but that moons revolved around the earth and other planets. He observed the stars with a telescope, accepting Bruno's hypothesis that they were also suns, and recognizing by their size that that they were very far away indeed. (It was not until 1838 the Friedrick Bessel first measured the distance to a star other than the sun, showing that that distance was very great.) Galileo also observed the moon surface to be uneven, and noted that sunspots changed the appearance of the sun as they moved over its surface. He was tried for heresy in 1632 and forced to recant.

In 1665 Newton generalized the theory of gravity to celestial distances. He showed that the movement of objects in the solar system could be explained by the operation of "natural" forces and "natural" laws.

The understanding of the sky held "religiously" in western civilization before these scientists went back to Aristotle and Ptolemy. It conceived of the stars and planets as being mounted on celestial spheres around the earth, with differing views on the nature of the spheres and the way they were motivated.

They scientists introduced a view in which the solar system was composed of real objects moving according to natural laws, with the earth as but one of the planets circling the sun, and the entire system a small part of a universe containing very distant stars.

According to Wikipedia:

On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, and issued a declaration acknowledging the errors committed by the Catholic Church tribunal that judged the scientific positions of Galileo Galilei, as the result of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Source

Too many of our kids are in trouble!

I quote from a new study by the Anne E. Casey Foundation:

The most worrisome trend of all is the decline in economic well-being for children and families at the lower half of the income distribution. The last decade—the recession and the years preceding it—wiped out tremendous gains made in the late 1990s when child poverty declined dramatically, especially among African Americans, as did the percent of children growing up without at least one parent employed full time, yearround. After dropping to a low of 39 percent in 2000, the percent of children living in low-income families (that is, with incomes of twice the official poverty line) gradually began to increase. Since 2001, the number of low-income children climbed steadily from 27 million to 31 million in 2009, or 42 percent of children. The official child poverty rate, which is a conservative measure of economic hardship, reached 20 percent in 2009, essentially the same level as 1990.

Kids from poor families don't have the opportunities that we promise to all our citizens. Their parents are too often preoccupied with survival. They don't enjoy the rich environment of more affluent kids, they have fewer educational opportunities, they may be hungry, more often sick, and less well cared for when they are sick.

The United States is based on the premise put forth in the Declaration of Independence:

All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The children we are allowing with increasing frequency to grow up in poverty are not getting a fair shake, they are not given the full right to pursue happiness. Moreover, as their current poverty leads them to prosper less in future decades, all our children and children's children are likely to have fewer opportunities than we could guarantee now.

Data Book Widget - Data Book 2011 - Data Book - KIDS COUNT Data Center

Source of image

Drought and Famine Plague Horn of Africa

More than 11 million people are in danger of malnutrition or starvation in the Horn of Africa region, a geographic area made up of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia. The most acute problem is in Somalia, where drought, poverty, a failed state and militant armed forces combine to create a perfect storm leading to mass migration to refugee camps and famine, and complicating efforts to help the suffering. It has been estimated that as many as 400,000 people are in danger of dying in the crisis, mostly children.

This is a crisis that demands U.S. Government full-scale efforts of disaster assistance!

Compared to the suffering in the Horn of Africa, American financial problems fade into insignificance. There are a lot of places we can find the funds to help in Somalia and the Horn of Africa with domestic human costs that can not be compared to the suffering of the starving African children. I would recommend increasing taxes on the rich and decreasing military expenditures as the first places to look for the money!

Karachi Pakistan is falling apart!

According to the Gulf News there have been more than 40 killed in the last two days in Karachi. In July there were more than 300 killed. The violence seems to be between gangs, between different ethnic groups and between different political parties. This is in a city of three to five million people, a city with great differences in wealth among its people and with huge slums.

The South Asia News Agency writes, "Broad day murders and loot and arson have become order of the day in Karachi that has taken a toll of over 2000 people so far." Reportedly, in the conflicts among ethnic neighborhoods, women and children are targeted.

Given the importance of stability in Pakistan, this pattern is really worrisome! 

3D Printing

3D Printed Object

My friend Julianne pointed me to this article on 3D printing, which states:

(M)yriad industries – from automotive (which already created the first 3D printed car) and aerospace to footwear and jewelry – have embraced 3D printing that creates objects by laying down successive layers of materials.The Wohlers Report, an annual in-depth study of the advances in additive manufacturing technologies and applications, estimates 3D printing will grow to become a $5.2 billion industry by 2020, up from $1.3 billion last year.

While the technology is currently used for prototypes, demonstrations, and some fairly low value applications, as the cost of 3D printers has come down and is continuing to come down, the technology seems likely to have an increasing economic impact. 

Thinking about inflation

Source: Wolfram Alpha

The United States Government has experienced high rates of inflation from time to time over history, as is shown in the graph above. There were high rates of inflation associated with World War I and World War II and a high rate of inflation related to the Viet Nam War and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979.

I find I don't understand the relationship between monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, fiscal policy of the federal government and the control of the money supply, as they affect the inflation rate. I wonder how many of the other people commenting on our debt problem fully understand the complex processes that control inflation, and the impact of inflation on the growth of the economy.

Trust as social capital in international affairs

The downgrading of U.S. federal debt from AAA to AA+ is a statement by Standard and Poor's that investors should trust the United States Government to honor that debt less than they did previously.

Money is always based on trust. In ancient history when people used silver and gold coins, they did so trusting that they could exchange those coins for something of comparable value to what they themselves had traded to obtain them. When the United States federal government began to issue paper money, they did so as treasury notes under the fiction that they could be redeemed for metal coins. These days U.S. paper money is simply paper, not backed by gold nor silver, and depends on the trust of people that it will buy roughly as much tomorrow as it does today.  I lived in Chile while it was experiencing very high rates of inflation, and I can testify that when people lose that faith in their currency, life becomes more difficult.

The United States issued silver certificates, bills which were to be redeemable in silver, until 1964 (and they could only be redeemed for federal reserve notes since 1968). When President Nixon took the United States off of the gold standard in 1971, that is when the United States stopped offering to exchange its money for gold, the Bretton Woods system of international financial exchange had to be rebuilt. The result has been called the "Nixon Shock". This was a much more severe blow to international trust in the ability and willingness of the United States Government to honor its financial commitments.

Treaties are of value only when there is trust that they will honored. Mutual security treaties, such as that implemented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are perhaps the best known, but there are many other treaties that are important to the United States, providing protection to U.S. citizens abroad and to our international commerce and interests. The Constitution has the Executive Branch of the Government negotiate treaties, but requires that they be ratified by the Congress. The Senate has failed to ratify 21 treaties. Think of the treaty establishing the League of Nations which the Senate refused to ratify without a reservation; the President refused to sign the law putting the treaty into effect with that reservation. Given the key role of President Wilson played in the negotiation of that treaty, what must that failure have done to the trust placed by our allies in the negotiating positions of the Government.

Source of illustration

Note too that the United States Government has unilaterally broken treaties, often with Indian nations but also with foreign nations. Again, this is a history which reduces trust in the willingness of the government to honor its obligations.

We think of trust as critical to social capital. In an environment in which people trust each other and their institutions institutions can work well. Building that trust takes time and effort and thus is counted as social capital. Without such trust, even the most elegantly conceived institutions are not likely to work well.

I suggest that comparably belief of national leaders in the trustworthiness of other nations is the glue that makes international institutions work. When the United States works hard to promote the creation of UNESCO, modeling its constitution to meet U.S. interests, and then withdraws from the Organization leaving it to deal with an immense budget shock, the behavior does not encourage other nations to trust our support for international institutions.

At the end of World War II the United States enjoyed great trust from our allies, a trust that I think continued strong through the Eisenhower administration. The Kennedy administration seems to me to have worked to promote and sustain that trust. Since then, American wars and other aspects of foreign policy have resulted in a reduction of trust by our allies. Our recent financial policies have similarly eroded trust.

It is not clear to me how much the lack of trust in the United States is likely to cost in money and in security, but I wish we would invest more in building and keeping that trust.

Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic

I quote from an article by Cornelia Dean in the New York Times of August 8:

When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.

Now several groups are trying to promote more scientific literacy and to encourage scientists and engineers to speak out in public debates and even run for public office. These include:

• A Science Ambassadors Program of the National Academies
• Scientists and Engineers for America
• Ben Franklin's List (started by scientists who are members of the House of Representatives, Dr. Vernon Ehlers and Dr. Bill Foster, "to offer engineers and scientists the credibility and money they need to win office)
• The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowships
• The Aldo Leopold Leadership Program
• The CDC Science Ambassador Program

Reexamine your ideas about America as a land of opportunity!

My friend Sid pointed me to an editorial by Gus Speth on the Solutions website. I quote extensively:

(I)n a 20-country group of America’s peer countries in the OECD, the U.S. is now worst, or almost worst, on nearly 30 leading indicators of social, environmental, and economic well-being...... 

To our great shame, among the 20 major advanced countries America now has

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
• the lowest number of paid holiday, annual, and maternity leaves;
• the lowest score on the United Nations’ index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the United Nations’ gender inequality index;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP, 

yet accompanied by the highest

• infant mortality rate;
• prevalence of mental health problems;
• obesity rate;
• portion of people going without health care due to cost;
• low-birth-weight children per capita (except for Japan);
• consumption of antidepressants per capita;

along with the shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);

• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s environmental performance index (except for Belgium), and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Belgium and Denmark);
• the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;
• the highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
• the largest international arms sales;
• the most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal);
• the lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far from the top in both science and reading);
• the highest high school dropout rate (except for Spain);
• the highest homicide rate;
• and the largest prison population per capita.

Basically, the list indicates that in spite of our wealth the United States has a higher percentage of its people living in poverty than any other developed nations and that the poor have less opportunity to progress economically here than in any other developed nation. For those who (mistakenly) believe that the poor are poor due to their own fault, note that the indicators show that far too many of our children are growing up poor, unhealthy, and poorly educated.

I find that situation to be unacceptable!

Thinking about questions that would help understand how candidates would make decisions

In a democracy I suggest that voters should hare a right to know how candidates for office would make decisions if elected. The rights of the candidates for privacy should be balanced against the rights of the voters to adequate access to information to make good decisions.

Of course, there are many sources of information on the ways candidates would make decisions, from their speeches on the campaign trail, to the platforms of their parties, to their performance in debates. Perhaps even more informative is the history of the candidate's decisions in previous offices and roles in life. Still, we may be entitled to still more information.

It might be useful if there were standard questions for candidates on some specific aspects of the ways that they would make decisions in office. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have believed in a specific interpretation of the separation of powers  -- that the President as Commander in Chief had the power to act first, but that the judiciary and legislative branches had the power to respond to those acts under the Constitution. George W Bush made many formal signing statements when signing legislation into law, apparently believing that those statements affected the implementation of the legislation; his administration accepted interpretations by political appointees in the Justice Department of international treaties on the treatment of prisoners that have been widely criticized. So, candidates might be asked how they would take into account the actions of other branches and departments of government in their White House decision making.

Graham Allison's book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis showed the way in which decisions were made in the Kennedy administration that could have led to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. Those decisions were made in consultation with a relatively small number of key advisers, but in a process in which contrarian opinion was sought; in earlier decisions on the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy apparently gave greater credence to opinions filtering up through the bureaucratic systems of the CIA and Department of Defense, with less desirable results. Perhaps candidates should regularly be asked how they would avoid the "bubble effect" of the oval office in order to obtain a broad spectrum of advice on important decisions while keeping the decision process agile and capable of producing timely decisions, and how they would balance the advice of kitchen cabinet with that of their political appointees and those of the non-political bureaucracy of the executive branch of government.

History suggests that voters are not adequately informed as to health conditions that may influence a candidate's decision making were he/she to be elected. Woodrow Wilson had three strokes before his election which were not disclosed to the public followed by a major stroke late in his second term which incapacitated him; apparently his wife made major policy decisions for the nation while he was incapacitated. Thomas Eagleton, vice presidential candidate to George McGovern, did not disclose a history of mental health problems to McGovern when being considered for the ticket, and left the ticket after that history was revealed and psychiatrists indicated that condition might affect his decisions in office if elected. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was far more ill, especially during his fourth term, than the public was allowed to know; one must wonder whether his illness affected his decisions at critical points during those years. Grover Cleveland had a large tumor removed from his jaw and hard palate during his presidency and neither the operation nor the recuperation was disclosed to the public. John Kennedy had medical problems not disclosed to the public. Certainly candidates have a right to privacy, but it seems to me that voter choices would be better made were conditions known that might affect decision making. Might there not be a means of requiring disclosure of some medical conditions for candidates, at least for key elected posts?

Salon has an article questioning the candidacy of  Michele Bachman because she has publicly described herself as believing in a "submission theology" both in terms of making decisions based on her belief that a specific choice was the revealed will of God or on the basis that a wife should submit to her husband (her husband apparently directed her decision to become a tax lawyer). Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer who is thought to have influenced decisions of President Reagan. Candidates in the past have had to address whether their decisions would be influenced by religious leaders, including Obama with respect to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Kennedy, as a Catholic, with respect to the Pope; while I believe these concerns were unjustified and the result of prejudice, there is clearly a history of cults in the United States in which members of the cults would submit their decisions to the cult leaders for approval. Clearly we don't want a religious test for candidates and clearly many if not all presidents consult their (religious) consciences when making important decisions, but it seems to me that it voters have a right to be concerned if someone other than their elected official were to be making policy decisions for the nation. It also seems to me that it would be better if all candidates for the presidency were asked a standard question as to whether they would submit their decision making to any religious (or other) outside authority, and if so the nature of that authority. Perhaps the League of Women Voters of some other neutral body could introduce such a practice.

A Modest Proposal to Reduce the Debt

In the early days of the United States, the states sold their land and used the revenues from land sales to pay their debts. The problem that the United States government faces now is not that it owes money, but that it owes too much money. If half the debt were to be paid off, then the government would be solbent enough to restore full faith in our credit. I suggest that the federal government follow the precedent of the individual states in selling off property. I suggest we sell off something worth seven billion dollars.

I suggest we sell Texas!

Recall, the United States bought the Louisiana Territory, Florida, Alaska and made the Gadsden Purchase from other nations. It bought the New Mexico Territory from the Republic of Texas. In each case, the purchase included sovereignty over the land and the people of the purchased area. So lets sell a big state. The Civil War demonstrated that states, including Texas which tried, did not have the right to secede from the Union. However, since the Constitution has been demonstrated to allow the United States to buy territory we may assume that the sale of territory would also be constitutional.

Texas has a total area of 171 million acres. So how much could we get for it?

Remember the story of the Texas plutocrats meeting in an exclusive club in downtown Dallas. They start to compare their land holdings. The first says he has a ranch of 100,000 acres. The second scoffs, allows how his is not as big as the King Ranch, but is about 200,000 acres; that is a real ranch. The third huy says he has barely 500 acres. Smiling, the owner of the fifth of a million acre ranch asks what the little piece of land was called. The answer was "downtown Dallas".

The point of the story is that while a lot of Texas land is not worth very much per acre, some of it would be quite expensive to purchase. So lets put the value at $7 trillion!

If we think of another precedent, the British Empire acquired India by the Government of India Act of 1858, before which India was ruled by the East India Company. Lets reverse the process and privatize Texas. The United States could simply form the "Texas Corporation" with a large number of shares, value those shares at seven trillion dollars, and trade them at face values to the holders of half the federal debt. The company would hold sovereignty over the land and people of Texas.

There continues to be a secession movement in Texas, and indeed there was a secession rally there earlier this year. Since so many people in Texas want to secede, they should not object if we sell the state. A lot  of Texans might also be pleased by turning the state into a corporation. Another advantage is that Texans would loudly argue that Texas was worth more than $7 trillion, and that turning over the state to our debtors was not a default on our sovereign debt.

Democrats -- Blame Obama or Blame the Dems in Congress

A lot of Democrats seem to be blaming Obama for the current situation. It seems to me that the Democrats in Congress are more to blame. The Republicans showed in the first two years of the Obama administration, when they were in the minority in both the Senate and the House, that they could influence legislation especially through the threat of filibuster. That brings up the question of why the Democratic majority did not change the rules of order when they had the chance in late 2010 to make the Congress more responsive to Democratic legislative proposals.

When the Republicans gained the majority in the House, they had even greater influence on legislation.

During the George W. Bush administrations, the Congress passed legislation creating tax breaks for the rich, supported two unfunded and expensive wars, allowed the financial industries to continue with inadequate regulation until the crisis occurred leading to the Great Recession, and allowed the debt to grow to unhealthy levels. It did so with Democratic majorities in both houses after 2007 and in the House from 2001 to 2003. Even during the periods in which the Republicans were in the majority, their majorities were less than those of the Democrats in the first two years of the Obama administration.

Why then were the Democrats less effective in restraining Republican legislative proposals and preventing the problems that they created than the Republicans have been in the last two and a half years? I suggest that it is because the Democrats in Congress were less effective then than the Republicans have been recently. It also means that the Democrats in Congress have been less effective in this administration in supporting their president than the Republicans in Congress were under Bush.

I think a lot of the blame for lack of Democratic legislative success in this administration goes to the legislators rather than to the president.

Hope for new drugs against viral infections

My son alerted me to this report of a new approach to anti-viral drugs pioneered by MIT researchers. It is great news, suggesting new lines of research for a great many communicable viral diseases. Of course, there is a lot of work still to be done before the approach is reduced to practice, including developing drugs for human use, finding ways to deliver the drugs to infected cells, demonstrating the safety of the drugs in animals and in humans, demonstrating their efficacy in curing infections, demonstrating their effectiveness in large scale trials, and assuring that there are no adverse environmental impacts of their use in public health. Don't give up your schedules of immunization for a few years yet!

New Donors of Foreign Aid

According to The Economist we are soon to see the creation of a new foreign assistance agency, the India Agency for Partnership in Development. This agency reportedly will have $11.3 billion to spend over the next five to seven years. The article describes the rise of new donors of foreign assistance, including China and Saudi Arabia. Brazil is also considering "setting up its own aid agency, gives up to $4 billion a year of assistance".

Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, has promised that in 2010-13 China will provide $10 billion in low-interest loans to African countries, bolster the China-Africa Development Fund by $1 billion (bringing it to $5 billion) and cancel debt owed by highly indebted countries with which China has diplomatic relations. In April this year the Chinese government issued its first white paper on its foreign-aid programme. The amount budgeted for aid had “increased rapidly” since 2000, it said, with growth of nearly 30% a year between 2004 and 2009.......

According to a new report by a non-governmental organisation called Global Humanitarian Assistance, aid (conservatively defined) from non-DAC countries rose by 143% in 2005-08, to $11.2 billion, before falling during the financial crisis. Aid from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) more than doubled. The establishment donors’ aid monopoly is finished.

I suppose the most encouraging aspect of this story is that former recipients of foreign aid have progressed so much economically that their governments feel that they can now provide help for other still poorer nations. I find it encouraging too that these countries with their different experiences in social and economic development will provide new and different perspectives on foreign aid. The emphasis of China on support for infrastructure development seems especially useful, and indeed the approach by which China ties improving infrastructure to trade relations which encourage exports from the aided country over that road and port infrastructure seems interesting and potentially valuable.

On the other hand, it occurs to me that there are large geographic areas in Brazil, China, India and Russia in which poverty is a big problem and in which support for social and economic development seems to be very much needed. It has been hard to justify U.S. aid to countries with relatively large economies and relatively high average per capita income, since any such U.S. aid would be so small a part of their total development budgets. I can only hope that the countries with emerging foreign aid programs will continue to emphasize also domestic efforts to help their poor regions to develop and to fight poverty!

From a couple of NSF Infobriefs

"Federal Funding of Basic and Applied Research Increases in FY 2009"  NSF 11-324 | July 2011

Federal obligations for R&D and R&D plant in 2010 were an estimated $118.6 billion, in 2009 were $123.2 billion, and in 2008 were $129.1 billion. The reduction is real buying power is greater since there was inflation during the period.

"Community Colleges: Playing an Important Role in the Education of Science, Engineering, and Health Graduates" NSF 11-317 (revised) | July 2011

Over academic years (AY) 2001 to 2007, the percentage of science, engineering, and health (SEH) graduates who had ever attended community college at some point in their studies remained fairly steady, at around 50% for bachelor's degree recipients and just under 45% for master's degree recipients. In addition, the percentage of SEH graduates who earned an associate's degree also remained steady during this time, at 28% for both bachelor's and master's degree recipients. Community college attendance was driven largely by a desire to earn credits toward a bachelor's degree, followed by financial reasons and then by a desire to gain further skills or knowledge in an academic or occupational field.

The cuts in R&D expenditures are going to get worse in the near future. Who knew that the community colleges were so important in cutting the costs of producing our SEH graduates? On the other hand, for some reason people who got to community colleges are less likely than those who do their whole undergraduate time in universities to go on and get a masters degree. 

Americans should pay more taxes to finance the war!

I quote from The Economist:

America is far less inclined than many of its rich-world peers to use taxation and redistribution to reduce inequality. The OECD, a think-tank, reckons that taxation eats up a little less than 30% of the average American’s total compensation, compared with nearly 50% in Germany and France. America’s top federal income-tax rate of 35% is lower than in many other advanced economies (although most Americans also pay state taxes). Britain’s top tax rate is 50%. Swedes and Danes acquiesce to tax rates that would outrage many Americans: Sweden’s top rate is 57% and Denmark’s is 55%. Unsurprisingly, the American state is also less generous to the poor. Unemployment benefits in the United States replace a smaller share of income, and run out more quickly, than in most European countries.

The deficit is due to a decade of war, implying a $4 trillion cost due in part to the use of expensive contractors (often foreigners) rather than a draft (which would have solved a lot of our employment problem), the Bush tax cuts, and the stimulus packages to reduce a threatened depression to the Great Recession.

We should tax the rich more over the next decade, while cutting spending, ending the wars, growing the economy and allowing a reasonable level of inflation to get the federal debt to GDP ratio down to a level that will not freak out the financial markets. It would not hurt to provide a temporary tax holiday to allow companies to repatriate profits that are being held abroad.

If wars hurt the affluent and comfortable more, perhaps we would fight fewer of them!

Positive Trends on a Global Level

My friend Julianne alerted me to the 2011 edition of The State of the Future by Jerome Glenn and his team. We were struck by the number of encouraging trends that the report notes, since we so often focus on the challenges still before us. Here is a summary chart of those successes:

A thought on decision making in the Cuban Missile Crisis

There is an interesting lecture by James Hershberg on "the Cuban Missile Crisis", presented on CSPAN Ameriican History. I found the way he framed the discussion interesting. More and more information has become available over the decades since the crisis, including from Cuba and the former Soviet Union, clarifying the day to day evolution of the crisis when the world almost saw a nuclear war between superpowers. However, the crisis was a part of longer term foreign policy development as seen from each country:

• From the point of view of the Soviet Union, the crisis was primarily about the threat of the United States to board Soviet ships en route to Cuba. The placement of nuclear-weapon capable mid-range missiles in Cuba was in part due to the difficulties that the USSR was having developing intercontinental guided missiles, and in part a response to the U.S. announcement that it was placing nuclear-weapon capable mid-range missiles in Turkey. It was also seen in the context of Soviet plans for expansion of Communism and its competition with China for leadership of the Communist world.
• From the point of view of Cuba, the crisis was one of a number of crises in the establishment and life of the Castro regime in Cuba, following the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was seen both in terms of the long term relations of Cuba with the Soviet Union and the long term relations of Cuba with the United States.
• From the point of view of the United States, the crisis was primarily about the threat to the United States of a nuclear attack on American cities. It was also seen in terms of the military expenditures needed for effective prosecution of the Cold War and U.S. leadership of NATO. It was seen in a larger context of containing the expansion of Communism, and especially in the context of denying further Communist intrusion in the Western Hemisphere.

The decision making in the governments can be seen in terms of the chief executives of each nation and their views of each other, in terms of the relations of those chief executives and the small groups of their key advisors on foreign affairs, and in terms of the domestic policies and concerns of each government.

Of course, the crisis must also be seen in terms of the Cold War in general, including the Berlin Blockade and its response, the Suez Crisis, and other key events since and including the Second World War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing policies under a concept of "brinkmanship" in which willingness to go to the brink of war was used as a means to extract a maximum of concessions from competing nations.

The way in which each country responded to the crisis was conditioned by the way it saw the overall course of foreign affairs and the meanings that were attached to the actions of the various parties in previous crises and interactions.

I wonder how well each nation was able to understand and take into account the concepts and processes of the others? Would the crisis have evolved differently had the parties understood each other better?

A Parallel between 1911 and 2011?

The United States is a very different place now than it was in 1911, but I see one possible parallel. Today we are a much richer country, with a healthier and better educated population occupying a far more influential position in the world.

In 1911, the country was in the process of moving from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. Immensely rich people such as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford had fortunes from the ownership of huge corporations, while the working class was suffering from poor salaries, dismal working conditions and declining expectations. Those conditions resulted in the emergence of a strong progressive movement (with a socialist fringe) that split the Republican party (and led to the Bull Moose Party being formed to compete in the 1912 presidential election).

Today the country is in the process of moving from an industrial economy to a service and information economy. Immensely rich people such as Gates, Buffett and Ellison have fortunes from their ownership of major corporations, while the middle class is suffering from declining salaries and declining expectations. Those conditions appear to have resulted in the emergence of the Tea Party movement. We will see the impact of the Tea Party on the Republican Party in the 2012 presidential election.

Growth of the e-book market

According to the New York Times, summarizing results from a newly published survey:

In 2008 e-books were 0.6 percent of the total trade market; in 2010, they were 6.4 percent. Publishers have seen especially robust e-book sales in genre fiction like romance, mystery and thrillers, as well as literary fiction. In 2010, 114 million e-books were sold, the report said. 

The survey does not include sales data from 2011, a year of substantial e-book growth.

I have one of the early Kindles and I enjoyed reading with it. It certainly makes purchase of books easy. On the other hand, I am buying my books in paperback, and primarily from the Barnes and Nobel book store where my history book club meets. I do so partly in gratitude for the store making its facilities available for out meetings, but more importantly in gratitude for the curatorial services provided by the leader of the book club and the help in choosing good books from the discussions among book club members.

Still, the article suggests that publishers are doing well, as presumably are authors, from the e-books even as the bricks-and-mortar book stores are suffering from competition from online book dealers of all kinds. 

Incentives to research productivity

There is an interesting article in Science, presenting the results of a study to understand the effect of different incentive systems on the efforts to publish of scientists. Many countries have been concerned to increase their scientific productivity, and several have introduced incentive schemes to encourage scientific publications. In some cases the funding for research institutions has been made contingent on the papers produced by the institution, in others cash awards have been made to the authors, and in still a third career progression has been enhanced for authors.

The authors studied the journal Science because of its high impact factor and international and interdisciplinary scope; the annual number of articles published in Science has remained fairly constant at ∼800 over the decade studied. "During the 10-year study period, first authors from 144 different countries submitted 110,870 original research articles; 7.3% of these submissions were accepted for publication, with first authors from 53 different countries."

Results of the study are summarized in the following table.

It appears relatively easy to increase the number of papers submitted to Science, since that occurred for all the incentive schemes. On the other hand, the actual number of publications was increased primarily by incentive schemes that provided career advancement for those who succeeded in publishing. Note that the institutional and cash bonus incentive schemes may have tended to decrease the portion of submitted papers that were accepted. It is tempting to assume that "publish or perish" schemes, such as those used by universities in the United States and Canada, are a good option for science policy experts seeking to increase the output of high quality research reports.

A Modest Proposal on the Teaching of Controversial Issues Related to Science

There is an article in the August 5th issue of Science magazine which reports that high school teachers across the country are being asked to teach both evolution and climate change as "controversial issues" assuring balanced treatment in the classroom.

Let me make a modest proposal. The teachers should do so.

Image source

In the case of evolution, one controversy is between creationism and evolution, In the case of climate change, the controversy is over whether the evidence supports human action as causing rapid global warming in this century or whether it does not. Thus, in both cases one can examine the degree to which the scientific community is united on each side of the question. In point of fact, scientific consensus is a crucial element in the credibility of scientific issues. In both cases, the bodies of scientific evidence will be too extensive and complex for secondary school students to master, but it is possible to give an idea in the classroom of the quantity and quality of evidence adduced on each side, and to show in specific examples why evidence adduced by the creationists and the antagonists to climate change theory is fatally flawed.

I believe that students in secondary schools studying science should be prepared, as part of their courses, to judge political arguments that are purported to be scientific in nature. Thus I suggest that teachers teach that creationists are arguing a religious position under the guise of science, and opponents of climate change theory are arguing a position in support of commercial interest who don't want the expense of reducing emissions in the guise of science.

Thus, I would suggest that in the classroom teachers explain that students should find evolution much more credible than creationism and anthropogenic climate change to be more credible as a basis for action than the position offered by its critics.

In the case of evolution as a controversial subject, there are those who oppose evolution on the basis of religious beliefs. In the case of controversy between religion and science, I rather like the solution that if there are two bodies of evidence for theories that you wish to believe simultaneously that appear to conflict, you are probably interpreting one or the other theory or one or the other body of evidence incorrectly. One can explain, as a model, how the Catholic Church reinterpreted the bible to allow it to accept the Copernican theory that the earth revolves around the sun (having previously punished Galileo for advancing evidence in support of that theory).

Of course, teaching these controversies honestly will be more objectionable to those promoting bad science than ignoring the controversy, but so it goes.

A photo from Reuters that says it all!!!

Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development

As UNESCO undertakes a new engineering initiative you may wish to review the major report on world engineering introduced in the World Engineers Convention in 2008 and published in 2009.

Read:

• The background of the report
• The report leaflet summarizing the report's content
• The report -- Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development

From Famine to Food Security: Meeting the Challenge in the Horn of Africa

It is good to see Secretary of State Clinton providing this talk at the International Food Policy Research Institute. I suppose it was written for her (by a committee) and thus provides a broad overview of the U.S. policy on food aid for the Horn of Africa. It is a very strong presentation, focusing not only on emergency relief, but also on the long term problem of food security for the region. The fact that this talk is given at such a high political level is indicative of a high priority to the problem given by the Obama administration. The fact that it is given at IFPRI shows a support for that organization, for the CGIAR and indeed for a multinational approach to the problem of food security, one which also involves the private sector.