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Listening to Rwandan Popular Music with Victoria Netanus Grubbs

Published August 7, 2023

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Victoria Netanus Grubbs, a Black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator. Victoria is currently the Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. She completed her PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in May 2021.

Her current book project, Kumva Meze Neza: Sounding Blackness in Rwanda, examines how popular Rwandan music worked in the aftermath of genocide to produce a collective social body. Drawing on five years of participant observation among Rwandan music industry professionals and their audiences, her work demonstrates how shared investments in the sensory experience of Blackness produce formations of togetherness that defy traditional organizing categories.

Listen to the podcast below or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts. An edited transcript of the interview is below.

Let’s start by understanding Rwandan music in the context of African popular music. What’s distinctive about Rwandan music in the Afropop landscape?

Rwanda’s popular music resonates within a global context of Black diasporic music. There are two really broad genres: hip-hop and Afrobeat. Hip-hop draws on a lot of African spoken word and poetry traditions, griot storytelling traditions, Caribbean DJing and toasting, and American emcees and DJs playing funk and R&B hooks. It’s a long history.

This includes localized African sub-genres of hip hop — for example, Ghanaian hiplife or Nigerian blues and funk from the 1970s and 1980s. Coming out of East Africa, Tanzania has bongo flava, an early hip-hop style that was really influential. Gengetone comes out of Kenya and kapuka also comes out of Kenya and Ugandan styles. (Rwandan) hip-hop generally pulls from a lot of that. It’s a very transatlantic, diasporic sound, but it’s also pulling from a more local spoken-word tradition.

And then there’s Afrobeat, which is dance music. It’s recognized globally as dance music, extending the pan-African legacy of iconic African artists of the 1960s and 1970s, like Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba. These artists incorporated rumba, which came out of the major cities in Congo, like Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and major cities in what was then Belgian-occupied Congo by way of Cuba. So we got early jazz and electronic house music, and then also house music coming out of Cape Town (South Africa), and Nigerian funk and Nigerian soul.

You can see the two genres were growing simultaneously, but using different vocal delivery styles. They do transfer sounds between them. I don’t want to make them sound like completely independent genres. But those are styles that popular artists right now can go into a studio and say, I want to do Afrobeat, or I want to do hip-hop, and be immediately understood by the producer.

In Rwanda, there’s also a strong gospel tradition, especially in choirs. Choirs record a lot of popular music, drawing connections from local spiritual practices of singing, drumming, and dancing, but also from the influences from the church, whether it be the Catholic Church, or Methodist and Adventist and Pentecostal churches, which all have different sonic landscapes of their own. This is something that I know less about, but something that I’m definitely interested in, and it’s definitely influential in Rwanda to think about the different kinds of auditory practices that the church brought in and placed in relation to spirituality.

There’s an obvious, I think, noisiness to a Pentecostal sound compared to the quietness of a Catholic sound. There are a lot of really interesting dynamics, even within the gospel tradition, but I would say that within the gospel tradition, there’s a really localized subgenre of music, which is music for memorializing the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. That music is a political project, but also a grief project and mourning project, and also a financial project, because there’s usually money from the state for recording this genre of music, which makes it so that artists who wouldn’t traditionally be recording gospel music per se might venture into that style to record a memorial song.

A broader theme of your work is that how people think about and listen to and participate in popular music has a lot to do with their national identity. Can you tell us about how music has become central for Rwandan national identity (or lack thereof)?

I think music, and specifically Black music, is always trying to evade capture by the state. So it’s not that the music is producing an investment in national identity, as much as the value of the music is always trying to be taken up by the state, and incorporated into their project of state-making and statecraft. So when you see popular artists performing the narratives of state power, and when you see popular artists performing the narratives of party lines or a particular history, there’s an investment that is often monetary. But beyond that, there’s an investment that is a recognition of the value of their work, which is something that a lot of artists are looking for. Artists know that it’s hard out here for all of us, so to feel that somebody sees value in what you’re doing and thinks that it matters is part of that recognition.

Let’s dig into a specific example that you look at in your research of this phenomenon of the state trying to capture the value of the work of an individual artist, which is that of Bruce Melodie’s big two hits. Tell us about these songs before we take a listen.

Bruce Melodie re-recorded his song with another studio with a specific intention. We can listen to the first one. I can give you a bit of context before we do that. The song came out in 2017 in May, I believe, and it was produced by a producer named David Pro, who was a popular producer at that time. The video was also really popular. It showed girls shaking and smoking hookah and Bruce Melodie and his friends drinking out of red solo cups and dancing around. Everyone’s just having a great time. Musically, it’s a perfect pop song for Rwanda. So I think that’s a really good place to stop and take a listen.

What an infectious song. It does actually just make you want to go party.

Right? It’s a party. And it was very successful in being circulated on the radio for that entire year. 2017 was also an election year for Rwanda. It was a watched election because it was Paul Kagame running for a third term, which had required altering the Rwandan Constitution, because typically, you’re supposed to only take two terms. (“Typically,” as in since he had taken power, because he was the first president since the Genocide.)

So the election was being watched because there was a lot of Western critique of African presidents taking long presidencies, or lifelong presidencies. These critiques from the West were that African states were not participating in their idea of democracy, or that African states were feigning performances of peaceful transferences of power within the model of the state that the West had tried to promote as their own. So it doesn’t necessarily look good from that perspective that he changed the Constitution. But it was an election where 98% of the population voted for Paul Kagame to take this third term. Voting in Rwanda is required for everybody over 16. Everybody has to vote. It’s different than here, but I think it’s important to know that there are lots of ways that the state can look and operate, but in the same ways, capitalism still finds its way in.

All of that is to say that the song was re-recorded in consultation with some “RG Consult Group” (which is what it says if you look up the citation). The song was recorded with new lyrics. The original lyrics are “Twaneye, twatsinze” (“we drank; we got drunk; we were drinking, having a great time.”) It’s a story of, we didn’t have any problems. We were just hanging out, getting drunk regularly. That was the vibe. The “twaneye, twatsinze” then was changed from “we drank, we got drunk” to “we voted, we won.” We can listen to the second version.

Let’s talk about some of the differences between this version and the previous version musically. I’m not a musician. What’s going on here?

The citations are obvious to most people. I think you could hear it without being musically experienced or trained and say, “That sounds like the same song.” A lot of that happens because the rhythms and pitches are the same, even though the songs are re-recorded, perhaps with slightly different instruments, because it was produced in a different studio. You never know what instruments a producer will have around or will have on their computer or their hard drive.

The basic core of the song is reproduced almost identically: it’s the same kick pattern, snare pattern, the same chord changes, the same vocal melodies. The one distinct difference that you hear is a difference in the vocal performance. It’s got a lot more energy in it. It’s got more forward direction, and it’s a lot less laid back. It’s a lot more driving and aggressive, and the tempo of the new one is also a little bit faster, so it gives it a little bit more of that “get up and go” energy.

There’s also a very dramatic lyrical shift. The lyrics transfer from a message of a memory of “oh, we didn’t have any problems because we were just hanging around drinking,” to “we voted, we won [twatoye, twatsinze] and now we don’t have any problems, right? We’ve solved them all.” I think really importantly, the lyrical shift here goes to calling all of the people together – calling all abanyarwanda, the people of Rwanda, and saying, abanyarwanda, turishimiye, “we are happy.” It pulls everyone into one feeling about this particular event.

And then it says in the chorus, “we’ve done what the foreigners failed to do.” So you can form a group around an inside and an outside perimeter around success: we, the winners, did what the foreigners failed to do, and we brought everybody together, with the ultimate goal being national unity. We brought everybody together because we chose our old man (Paul Kagame). And you hear his papa voice. That’s Paul Kagame at the beginning of the intro to the video, saying, we can do anything together. And he’s speaking in the tone of voice as a father with a child that gets very tender and paternal. The song takes a lot of popular inertia and turns it into a very effective celebration of a state project of national unity.

It’s interesting because it’s a hyper nationalist song in the same way that country songs in America have come to serve that same void, like “I’m proud to be an American.” This is, I’m proud to be Rwandan. But one of the things that you’re looking at in your research is how producers aren’t only producing Rwandan identity through songs. Can we talk a little bit about the other identity politics or identity formation in the songs?

What’s interesting to me about Rwandan music is that it’s produced in a context. Immediately and specifically, this generation is living in a state of reconciliation, a post-traumatic state of reconciliation. What that means is that you have experienced some kind of violent rupture in your community and that you are also actively living together. Any music that comes out of that context that can produce a sense of togetherness or a sense of collectivity, it’s going to be important for us to listen to and understand and take seriously that social work. That’s also something that the state recognizes, that it’s serious social work that this music is doing. And arguably, the kind of togetherness that the music I’m seeing produced in Rwanda (maybe we can listen to a couple of these examples of more contemporary songs, even some stuff that just came more recently) is in its sonic landscape, citing a much broader reference point than Rwanda. It’s not citing a specifically localized national history, or even the way that the state is citing a specific local national identity around a particular sort of class status and a presentation of royalty. And so there’s a very narrow state project in terms of identity. And then there is the multiplicitous, broad, diasporic project of Blackness that you hear in the songs that are being produced. Let’s listen to a song by B-Threy.

This sounds like it could play on American radio in many ways. What’s the circulation of music that you’re seeing with these Rwandan music producers? Where are they listening to music? How are they getting their ideas? And how are they putting that together with what they want their songs to be about?

That’s a great question. A lot of artists want their work on YouTube, which is why music videos have become really important. If you can’t get the funds together to make a video, people make lyric videos, or some put up an image some way to get their content on YouTube. Within the country and the region, YouTube is still really accessible to people in ways that paid streaming platforms aren’t. YouTube you can use pretty effectively for free. More recently, Rwandan artists are putting their music on platforms like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, but it’s not as accessible to most.

Other than that, on a local circuit, the radio is still very important. And songs travel hand-to-hand on thumb drives, or they just bring the whole computer or use Bluetooth from your phone to whatever local DJ you can get to play it, or maybe, add a little “soda” (cash incentive) to see if you can get them to play it for you. If you can get your songs to DJs in nightclubs, maybe they’ll play it. If you are looking for music, you’re probably either listening to the radio or searching on YouTube.

What about this specific song that we just listened to? How does this play in the popular scene? Is this a typical song on the radio?

B-Threy would like to say that he’s an original artist, and I think he’s really talented. He’s really pushing ahead. This is a genre that he and a collective of artists he was working with (out of a studio called Green Ferry Records) that they are calling “Kinyatrap.” This is a reference to trap music, which is an evolution of the southern US hip-hop style of trap music, but in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s native language.

There are efforts within these diasporic genres to always localize, to always make it feel like your own. B-Threy is also coming from a specific part of the capital city of Rwanda that has a very urban, all-night, 24-hour kind of energy, as opposed to other parts of the city which may be a little quieter or sleepier. So you can also hear his environment in that reference to trap music in the first place. Let’s listen to one by Double N called “Abaswa.”

This is an even more contemporary style, pulling from the American drill style, which is also a sub-genre of trap music. So thinking about how you also hear the umuduri, which is a local traditional Rwandan instrument. This is another example of that intention to really try to localize these diasporic genres, so this artist calls this style “Rap Gakondo,” meaning tradition, roots, or culture rap. And if you want to play just quickly, the track “umuziki,” you can hear another local instrument just as a solo instrument with a vocalist.

That’s a lovely example of how local sounds get incorporated into these diasporic styles, which then have the intention of being heard around the world. That’s the desire, to put them on YouTube or on the radio. You want the DJ to play your song, because you want this song to travel. And I think that’s also a real characteristic of this diasporic Black music is that it wants to travel: it’s catchy, it’s music that holds on to you, it’s music that you take with you. It’s music that gets in your body. The intention to make a hit is really a desire to make a song that’s going to grab on to you, and you take it with you and go somewhere with it.

Let’s talk about listening and listening practices. One of the things you’re really interested in is focusing on not only the way this music gets produced for an international audience, but how people talk about and embody the practices of listening.

Yeah, I think it’s something that we need to be more intentional about. I think listening is really under-theorized. We’re not as reflective about it in our everyday lives as we need to be. And I think we consistently underestimate the fact that perception is theory-laden. But there’s an influence of the world on how you might imagine yourself as an individual to experience sound, for example. So it’s not natural or inherently instinctual that when you hear a sound, you respond a particular way. That’s entrainment, right? That’s learned in practice. It’s experience in the world and observing the people around you and imitating what you see. Even in the ways that we use our voice to reach out to other people, we’re performing a very narrow set of sounds. Our voice is capable of making all kinds of outrageous noises that we generally don’t make because it’s unattractive or unappealing. So it’s important that we really take care to think about where the values that we place upon the sounds that we hear come from, and why things sound a particular way to us, why things feel a particular way, what makes something feel the way that you think it should feel (or doesn’t feel the way you think it should feel), and what makes you comfortable with your evaluations of what you hear.

Sometimes we’re so confident in what we think we hear and we can be completely wrong. Part of my learning and growth as a theorist and a scholar in sound is trying to slow down and really take care to think about, why did I hear that that way? What does it mean that I have this reference? What does that mean about me as a referent? I’m participating in this listening, understanding that in another context, another person might hear such a thing differently. What would that mean if, perhaps in another context, a person heard it the same as I did? And what might that mean if another person in another context heard that the same as I did, and it moved them in a particular way that was familiar to me? Now I find myself moving in a familiar way with other people that I don’t even recognize myself in union with, but moving in unison and in chorus nonetheless.

I think that’s what diasporic music is doing. Diasporic music is producing a body that can see itself, feel itself, and hear itself as a collective. It’s not a state project. It’s not a national identity, it’s not something that can be voted upon or claimed to be by some military. It actually just has to be built by these producers in their studios, trying to make beats, listening to what they hear on YouTube, downloading the sound, sampling the sounds, trying to make a hit song that somebody else is gonna listen to, and have a little bit of influence on how the culture grows.

That’s so interesting, because it points to both the ways that there are these intended modes of producing music to try to create a community, as well as the ways that people take them up. They are never the ways that are entirely intended, even if they might resonate with those original ways. You have two other clips you want to share: tell us about these.

I have another example of earlier influences of these local artists. The first one is Miss Jojo. I wanted to just make sure that we hear her because I think that the Rwandan music scene is dominated by male artists. And the women don’t get nearly enough airtime, or nearly enough money. And I think in the culture globally, we just don’t see women in leading producer roles either and so she’s just a really important voice to see. So she was producing songs a little bit earlier than the others we listened to. We’ll listen to one of her songs.

I think you can hear a lot of the influences in her music. Even though she’s a solo artist, she’s pulling from these 1990s girl groups. She has her girls behind her as backing vocalists, which was something that other artists weren’t really doing at the time like she was. So I really appreciate her for that reason. Also, she keeps that classic afrobeat clave in the back to keep consistent with that 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s rumba tradition. It’s also part of a larger African legacy in that way.

The last song, by Mavenge Sudi, is an even older example. I like that we’re traveling back in time, but it shows a more traditional solo artist’s style. Maybe this style would evolve from someone playing the single string umuduri to now playing a guitar.

In that song, Mavenge Sudi is actually citing his teacher, who is a guitar player named Gaetan Kayitare, who was killed in the Genocide in 1994. He had played and shared a lot of his songs with Mavenge Sudi, who keeps those songs as a living tradition by playing them and recording them.

I think you can hear the African roots of the blues when he plays them. It’s a really lovely, stripped-down, pure example of those sonic elements of Black diasporic sound, because you have this very repetitive but moving backbeat, and then you have just the two chords being played over and over again, in a circle. And then you have this poetry on top of it.

Those are the things that, you know, stand out to me when I look at artists from the 1950s, to the 1970s, to the early 2000s in Rwanda after the Genocide when the industry was able to rebuild itself, to what’s happening now 25 years later. It’s that consistency. That’s what makes me think that they (Rwandan musicians) are invested in this larger global project, and are less focused on producing music that is specifically or inherently Rwandan. So when you see music like “Ntidukina,” for example, it stood out. It wasn’t that that was an expected thing for him to do necessarily, but it was a very insightful thing for him to do nonetheless.

Article

Advancing Computational Psychology: A Visual Interview with Bill Thompson

Published August 1, 2023

How do humans pass on complex concepts and knowledge to subsequent generations? In his research, UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Bill Thompson uses computational methods and large-scale experiments to understand problems like knowledge transmission, the universality of language categories, and the social aspects of human problem-solving.

Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and Director of the Experimental Cognition Laboratory. Thompson is also affiliated with the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Program in Cognitive Science.

In this visual interview, conducted by Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek, we focus on one of Thompson’s most recent research projects, which considers how humans can become successful at a problem-solving task. The findings from the research were published in Science.

One of the big questions you grapple with is how people learn and what the relationship is between learned traits and “universal” human traits. What new tools and methods have emerged to conduct this research?

Psychological research can help us understand the basic cognitive processes involved in learning, memory, and reasoning, but traditional experiments were often limited to simple judgments of very simple stimuli and to small groups of participants. With modern computational methods, we can study these aspects of the mind ever more precisely. My research tries to make use of these emerging tools, and combine them with large-scale behavioral experiments to learn more about human language and cognition, especially our capacity to learn from and reason about each other.

For example, our recent studies have used machine learning methods such as neural networks to analyze large-scale behavioral datasets, uncovering patterns in the strategies people use to solve problems in groups. Using these methods, we’re able to study entire networks of participants, and leverage this larger-scale data to understand the underlying algorithmic structure of how people reason about more complex problems. That’s significant because it brings us much closer to the kinds of problems people face in the real world; moreover, understanding cognition in computational terms allows us to translate new findings into more human-like artificial intelligence systems.

In a study on cultural learning, you focus on a question about how humans pass along strategies for performing tasks. In an experiment, you asked participants to try a difficult sorting task. Can you describe the task and how the experiment works?

Suppose I lay out six images on the table in front of you. I tell you that each image has a number on the back from 1 to 6. Your task is to put the images in order from left (1) to right (6). If you can get the order correct, I will pay you.

The trick is that you have to do this without ever seeing the numbers. All you can do is choose pairs of images to compare: if the pair you choose is out of order, I will swap their positions. However, every comparison you make reduces the eventual payout.

It might sound like a magic trick, but this is a difficult puzzle to solve. Computer scientists have studied the algorithms capable of solving this kind of problem extensively. Even the simpler algorithms can be quite counterintuitive.

We studied this task because we are interested in how people discover solutions to difficult problems – a key ingredient of all human societies. We asked people to solve the puzzle without any kind of training, and write down any insights they had into what makes a good or bad solution. The messages people wrote were handed to the next group of participants, who also tried to solve the problem and wrote down their own insights.

Over the course of the experiment, thousands of participants tried to solve the problem and transmitted information to each other about their successes and failures. Over time, the strategies people discovered evolved to become more efficient, but also more complex. By the end of the experiment, people had discovered some highly unlikely and very efficient algorithms – even some algorithms that have been discovered and documented in computer science!

In this process, participants were able to learn from others – and choose who to learn from. How did research participants decide who to choose as their teachers?

The key to this process of cumulative improvement, we found, was the ability to be selective about whose advice you seek out. If people were paired up randomly with teachers, there was no way for high-performers to pass on their knowledge. Rare discoveries of innovative solutions often went extinct because people were never exposed to them.

Instead, if people were allowed to choose a teacher based on the solutions the teacher had discovered, then many people were exposed to innovative discoveries, even when they were rare.

algorithmic trees — Algorithm lineages in the experiment. Each row in the trees represents a generation of the experiment. From “Complex cognitive algorithms preserved by selective social learning in experimental populations,” by B. Thompson, B. van Opheusden, T. Sumers, and T. L. Griffiths, *Science*, 376 (6588), DOI: 10.1126/science.abn0915.

How did participants sort between the strategies when they were able to pick between teachers?

One of the most interesting things that the experiment illustrated was a kind of tradeoff in the accumulation of knowledge: as people’s strategies became more efficient over time, they also became harder for the next generation to learn. People at later generations in the experiment inherited more complex algorithms, but this meant that they often had a harder time acquiring this inherited knowledge. Another way of putting this is that as time goes on, we need to invest more and more in mechanisms that support learning and preserve knowledge.

Cognitive psychology has traditionally focused on the idea of fixed, universal cognitive functions such as an innate ability to learn language or distinct types of memory. But there is a greater appreciation now for the role that learning in culturally embedded social contexts plays in the construction of our cognition, shaping the way we conceptualize even basic aspects of the world. The culture we grow up in provides us with counting systems, maps, calendars, categories of kinship relationships, and many other cognitive tools for thought. Our hope is that research like this can help highlight some of the ways that cognition is always evolving, and how we can study aspects of that process experimentally and from a computational perspective.

How might your work have a broader application for explaining how strategies spread that are harder to learn, but more successful?

The trade-off between a person’s ease of learning a strategy and their efficiency and success at completing a task can help us understand the importance of mechanisms that mitigate barriers to knowledge. One area where this is potentially quite important is in the design of computational technologies that capture and transmit knowledge – social networking algorithms, large language models, or educational technologies, for example.

Understanding the tradeoffs that arise when thousands of people start to learn from each other via algorithms is a core challenge for contemporary psychological research in my view, especially in the context of cognitive development among children and young adults. For example, the use of large language models to support education offers significant potential for personalization and increased access to knowledge, but at the same time these systems have the potential to reinforce biases and reproduce harmful content that was present in their training data. More generally, increasing mediation of human interaction by machine learning systems has the potential to amplify misinformation, promote simplification over understanding, and distort our impression of what other people believe.

Here at UC Berkeley, one of my goals is to create the research infrastructure and training that new generations of students in behavioral science need in order to address these challenges with cutting-edge methods, including computational modeling, machine learning, and high-powered, large-scale experiments. Broadening access to these innovations is critical.

Podcast

The Binational Politics of Return Migrant Activism: Interview with Caroline Tracey

Published July 27, 2023

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Caroline Tracey, who holds a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, and whose research uses ethnographic, archival, and literary methods to study the American Southwest, Mexico, and the US-Mexico border. Tracey’s dissertation, “Binational Politics from Intimate Scales: Motherist, Feminist, Queer and Trans Activism by Deportees and Return Migrants in Mexico City,” responds to existing scholarship that has focused on deportation as a male phenomenon, and argues that women and trans deportees and returnees carry out fundamental community-building and activism on the ground in Mexico that has improved emplacement over the long term for all return migrants.

As a journalist, Tracey’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and other outlets, and in Spanish she is a frequent contributor to Mexico’s Nexos. She is currently the Climate Justice reporting fellow at the High Country News and an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square.

The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Social Science Matrix. Listen to the podcast below, or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts. An edited transcript of the interview is included below.

Your research focuses on women and gender-nonconforming deportees and returnees to Mexico, while most research has focused on men who are returnees and deportees. What has been missed by excluding people who are not men?

That’s a really important question. I can start by speaking about how I came to the project and in that way, get to a larger answer. I became aware of mass deportation through covering the US southwest and the US Mexico border as a journalist and participating in migration activism in the US. Deportation was always talked about as something that was practically unthinkable. It was something that was such a terrible outcome that no one really talked about what people’s lives were like after it happened, because so much of the energy was focused on preventing deportation.

I had a curiosity about what people’s lives were like after they got back to Mexico. And, of course, this coincided with a large uptick in deportations by the Obama Administration and in the early 2000s, generally. Something that I found once I got back to Mexico was that it wasn’t just deportations, it was also return migration. Starting after the 2008 recession, you actually started to see more return migration and deportation than you saw net in-migration to the United States. It breaks down almost half and half: it’s about 55% deportation and 45% return-migration that is bringing people back to Mexico. The factors that are taking people back, aside from deportation, include following a deported family member or fears of deportation, and also things like the failure of the Dream Act to pass and not having a vision of a future in which you can study or work long-term in the United States.

On some level, there is good reason for deportation scholarship to focus on men, because about 90% of deportees to Mexico are men. But about a third of return migrants are women. So you do see a slightly higher number of return migrants who are women. Qualitatively, what I found on the ground was that women — and also queer and trans deportees and return migrants who may or may not identify as women — are undertaking fundamental community-building and political activism that affects the entire deportation and return migration community.

Let’s dive into what these people are doing on the ground and how it affects the day-to-day lives of returnees and deportees. What are some of the challenges that deportees or returnees might face when they get back to Mexico?

There’s an assumption that once people get back to their country of citizenship — in the case of undocumented immigrants in the US, once they’re in a country where they’re documented – they have fewer problems. But in fact, what happens is that many times, people have either grown up in the United States since they were small children, or they’ve been in the United States for long enough that they no longer have their Mexican documents.

So they have to go through a process of “citizening,” essentially. That’s a term that a researcher named Gabriela Pinillos uses, and that I think very well captures the experience of these return migrants, where you have to get a copy of your birth certificate, and you get have to get a copy of your CURP, which is a unique number that is associated with the population registry, and that is asked for in any instance you can think of that would be associated with something bureaucratic.

This then becomes a secondary process when you have US-born children who, by law, are Mexican citizens, but they have to go through a process of registering their Mexican nationality. For those children, the bureaucratic process is even more complicated, because you have to correctly bureaucratically prove their Mexican nationality with documents that carry an apostille, which is a seal of authenticity that crosses borders, but that can only be obtained in the United States.

So if a family has returned to Mexico without apostille documents, and they want to register their children’s Mexican nationality so they can have access to all the basic rights that a citizen would have, they often face obstacles that can be sometimes insurmountable because of the lack of the apostille and an inability to navigate the US system from the Mexican side to obtain it.

One of the activities that my research included was helping families to obtain documents from the US side. So for instance, ordering birth certificates from the state of the children’s birth, arranging for them to be sent from the county to the Secretary of State that would give the apostille, then arranging for them to be mailed to a relative in the United States, who then could mail them to Mexico. Those kinds of steps really require both U.S. bureaucratic know-how and English to navigate and have prevented many families from being able to fully register their children’s nationality.

In addition to challenges to getting your kids registered in school, there are also presumably other bureaucratic problems that people face when they get back. What do those look like, and how do people try to navigate those?

Concurrent with the bureaucratic problems, you have non-bureaucratic problems, including discrimination, whether by potential employers (age and gender discrimination) in the process of applying for jobs, discrimination because of perceived criminalization for being a deportee, or bad sentiments on the part of one’s family, because there’s a sense of having failed because of deportation. There are all these ugly feelings, to use the Sianne Ngai’s term, wrapped up in deportation, and to a certain extent in return migration, although the experiences are a wider gamut of reasons for return, and a wider variety of sentiments that surround it.

But then once you are back in Mexico, there’s the bureaucratic challenge of obtaining all the different documents, and again the problem of discrimination repeats itself in navigating that bureaucracy, because these ideas of criminalization or of betrayal of the country or that deportees and returnees are stealing jobs, these all repeat themselves in the navigation of the bureaucracy.

One idea that people talk about in Mexico is criteria de la ventanilla, “window criteria,” because the desk agent who’s in charge of your case can have a degree of latitude that can really change your outcome, in many cases for the worse, if they so choose.

What I saw in my research was that a lot of the political organizing by the deportee and returnee community is in order to make these processes easier. In many cases, that means organizing so that you do not have to have an apostille for certain things, such as school registration, or more recently, the fight is for the registration of children’s Mexican nationality. Previously and successfully, there was organizing around trying to remove the requirement that transcripts and other documents have a translation by an expert, because in many cases, there were returnees that had been educated in US schools and could provide a complete and correct translation themselves, and they didn’t need to pay for that service. So that’s something that has actually been successful in the past seven years or so.

You mention education as being a major component of the challenges of coming back to Mexico, including for those who are undocumented in the US and who decide to return to Mexico because they don’t have access to higher education in the US. Can you tell us more about what that process looks like and how someone who might be a Dreamer here in the US decides to go back to Mexico?

A fairly large subset of the community that I was interacting with in Mexico City, and a large segment of the community that runs the organization Otros Dreams en Acción, which is one of my field sites, are people who are in the correct age range for the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act failed to pass many times over the course of the early 2000s before DACA was finally created in 2012.

For many young people who are returnees, the fact that there was this consistent failure of a pathway to residency or citizenship made it very clear that there was not a stable future available, and there were not immediate options in many states, because only certain states had or have in-state tuition for undocumented students. Other states, such as Georgia, outright forbid universities from charging in-state tuition to undocumented students from that state. There are many young people from states in which the state DREAM Acts did not exist, or from states where they did, but who didn’t see a future for themselves, who ended up returning to Mexico before DACA was passed in some cases. In other cases, they were people who have DACA, but feel like it’s not a long-term option because it has to be renewed so often or because it is at risk of being cut by politicians, and so end up returning to Mexico.

One of the theoretical interventions that returnees have made through their activism is demonstrating that, while this is not a deportation, it’s also not a choice to return. The young activists tend to frame their return as necessarily forced return, because it’s a situation in which they don’t have an option to remain in the United States and have a future in which they can study and work.

This brings up the question of why they don’t have these options to stay here in California, where we are. There’s often an idea that people can stay because there are immigrant-friendly policies, but this is obviously not always true in California and also not true across the US. How has immigration changed, and under what conditions are people feeling forced to move back rather than seeing an opportunity to stay in the US?

There are a number of changes to the immigration system that really go into answering that question.

One is the way that immigration changed over the course of the 1990s. First, you had a lot of new push factors on the Mexican side, because of NAFTA and domestic privatization policies that unfolded over the course of the early 1990s. Much of the rural economy in Mexico collapsed in a way that people who were working as small farmers or otherwise living in rural areas could no longer make a living. And so you saw massive emigration to not only the United States, where about 11 million people emigrated over the course of the 1990s, but you also see migration to the country’s northern border and to the cities. So first of all, you have that big push factor.

And then at the same time, you have new, increased border security in the United States that makes it very, very challenging to have any form of circular migration. Whereas in the past, there were one or both parents going to the United States and eventually returning, but leaving the rest of the family behind. Over the course of the 1990s, you started to see increased whole family migration and permanent migration. You had the creation, over the course of that decade, of a permanent class of undocumented families.

That’s really significant, because it means that you have a lot of young people growing up in the United States without papers. And that’s a novel phenomenon. It’s not that it’s never existed before, but it’s never existed in these kinds of numbers. And so it is novel that you have this organizing by young returnees and deportees back in Mexico, because there has never been that class of people in the United States, nor that class of people in Mexico historically.

And then concurrently with that, there’s also a demographic shift of immigrant settlement within the United States. So for the first time in 2000,more than half of the non-metropolitan Latino population in the US was outside of the US southwest. What that meant in my research was that, while I would meet older deportees who were from more traditional immigrant communities — Latinx immigrant communities like Chicago, California, or other regions that had historic Mexican and other Latinx immigrant populations — many of the young people were coming from states where the Latinx populations had grown over the course of the 1990s. And really, that was from the US southeast.

Because of changes in immigration policy in the 1980s – for instance, the 1986 IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986) amnesty of many people who are already undocumented in the US, suddenly having work authorization in traditional Latino communities – there wasn’t as much demand for undocumented labor in traditional Latinx communities. Soon, you also saw other communities being saturated with immigrant labor.

And so people started to find other regions where the labor was in more demand. You also concurrently had a restructuring of the US poultry industry. You started to see a movement from the southwest and California to the southeast, and that’s where a lot of the young people that I interviewed came from. And that’s something that also has been written about by Perla Guerrero, who is a scholar of the Latinx US South. There’s also a journalist named Alice Driver, who’s right now writing a book about poultry workers in Arkansas. That demographic shift is something that a lot of people are noticing and researching, and I had a lot of reading material that shows how significant it was.

You mentioned that the demographic shift is not only to different parts of the US being the US South, but it’s also the age of the folks who are being forced to return to Mexico, many of whom are just out of high school. How do they manage and navigate this move to Mexico, which is a place where they may have never really lived?

In my research, I observed a number of people who initially went to places where they had family ties, and then many of them later moved to Mexico City. I should add that I originally intended to do multi-sited fieldwork, but I did my fieldwork during the COVID pandemic, so I ended up completing all of it in Mexico City. That’s really where all my data is from. It was because of the fact that it all had to be moved to virtual at a moment when that was where all my interlocutors were.

One pattern I can point to is that people went initially to places where they had family, sometimes extended family that they didn’t know very well if they had grown up in the United States. And then they moved to pursue educational and work opportunities, but also places to have community. But at the same time, and this is especially true in the last few years, Mexico City has a very high cost of living relative to what wages are in Mexico City. Many of the deportees and returnees in Mexico City are living in the periphery of the city. It’s probably becoming more and more common that people are moving to other cities in Mexico where there is a better balance between salaries and cost of living.

Another thing to add is that one of the first ways that many deportees and returnees make inroads into the Mexican economy is by working at call centers. American companies have taken advantage of deportees’ and returnees’ bi-nationality, in terms of both fluent American-accented English and familiarity with American colloquialisms and culture in terms of interpersonal relationships, customer service, and other aspects of American business. Companies have set up call centers in cities in Mexico that hire primarily deportees and returnees. Those places, because they cater to that hiring, often make the hiring process smoother than in other places that would have more requirements that would make it harder for someone who has recently returned to the country to get a job.

You mentioned that one of the forms of employment that people go back to when they’re in Mexico are these call centers. This obviously brings together people who are coming back from the US, including people who are deported for committing crimes, or those who are forced to return for other reasons. What does the call center community, and the broader community of people who are returning or going back to Mexico, look like?

It’s a really big part of many people’s entry into Mexico, and I think that it has very disparate outcomes and a lot of pros and cons. I can talk about one deportee whom I accompanied through a lot of different bureaucratic processes, and who worked at a call center, and who I talked with at length about that experience. For him, it was a way to have a social circle in which he could speak English. But that had pros and cons for him because on the one hand, he made friends who he felt comfortable socializing with. And on the other hand, it limited his opportunities to improve his Spanish and make friends outside of that circle. For him, there was both a double-edged sword of the comfort of working with English-speaking people and a feeling of continued isolation after being deported.

Other interlocutors of mine talked to me about call centers being a challenging work environment with very high turnover because they’re very hierarchical, the supervisors are often not understanding of people’s needs, or can be very strict. That’s because, as one person put it to me, if you just throw a whole bunch of people with the same trauma in a big room, there are issues of substance abuse, and emotional needs that go unmet that are shared by many of the employees.

The call centers also gave rise to a lot of the deportee and returnee organizing that now exists. Specifically, the organization Otros Dreams en Acción was co-founded by an American researcher named Jill Anderson, who noticed that there were these large English-speaking communities surrounding call centers and began to work with them to find out what they needed. She found that they needed help revalidating their US high school diploma so that they could continue their education in Mexico. The other co-founder was not working in a call center, but was struggling to revalidate her US high school diploma. She was actually going through the same process as many of the call center workers. Her name is Maggie Loredo. Together, they founded this organization that works to support deportees and returnees, and that addresses a much wider swath of needs, both bureaucratic, cultural, emotional, and creative. I did a lot of my research with them.

That highlights how people go back to Mexico and aren’t just reintegrating or going back to a place they already know, but they’re coming back with a lot of trauma from the experience of being deported, or from being forced to return. They might feel cut off from their communities. How does this change the way that we think about scholarship about deportation or returning to countries of origin?

A lot of the scholarship about deportation has been conducted with very recent arrivals, people that are in their first few days after deportation. Or if it’s not conducted right at that time, it’s asking questions about that experience. Much of the scholarship is trying to understand how deportation fits into US immigration policy, and what is the process of removal is like. But I think that there’s much less scholarship about what happens back on the ground. That really motivated my initial research, but I think that there are a number of really interesting conceptual ideas that have come out of the organizing.

One of the main things, besides conceptualizing “all return is forced return” that my interlocutors really insisted upon, was the idea that terms like reintegration, or repatriation, are really normative. They signal an idea that you should blindly integrate into the society in which you’re a citizen, or that you are, in the case of repatriation, returning to your homeland in a “correct” way.

For many people, that’s not at all their experience. They’re showing up in a place that they barely know, and that they don’t want to be in, and that is challenging for them to settle in, even if they have had some degree of volition in the return. It’s still a challenging process. A term that I use is emplacement, which is signaling that it’s a long-term process of getting settled in a place that involves both personal settling as well as political activism to help out the entire community, community-building, cultural production, and all kinds of different tacks on emplacement.

A term that I drew on a lot in my in my dissertation is the idea of “diasporic intimacy,” which is used by a number of scholars, but I especially drew on Svetlana Boym’s idea of it, which is that there is affection generated through recognizing one another’s alienation and/or trauma, and that community-building can come out of that. That particularly speaks well to the deportee and returnee community, and especially to the activism of the young people in the community, who have really drawn on the idea of being pocha, which is a derogatory term in Mexico that they are reclaiming that refers to people who don’t speak perfect Spanish or who are otherwise very Americanized. Boym talks about the idea that diasporic intimacy has an accent in both one’s native language and the language of one’s adopted country. In the case of pocha activism, for many people there, they’ve been educated in the United States, even though it’s not their country of citizenship, and so they feel like English might be their more dominant language, despite the fact of having Mexican citizenship. And so Spanglish and the sort of right to speak in a non-normative Spanish, and the opportunity to participate in creative production that draws on the unique ability to switch between both or to combine both, has been a really important part of the community organizing.

In this community organizing, they are bringing together a lot of people who are interested in not only getting together, but in helping out the community and producing different cultural artifacts, maybe producing art. Can you speak toward some of the events that they have, or some of the community-building they are doing on the ground?

Definitely. At Otros Dreams en Acción, one of the organizations I volunteered with, poetry slams are a really important part of the community-building. And the Spanglish element that I mentioned has a lot to do with that. Poetry slams are an invitation to experiment with language. But also they are highly political, and so many people talk about their migration experiences, their deportation and return experiences, the experiences of their family, the emotional challenges of re-citizening in Mexico, and other aspects of their experience that tie into the politics of migration. They use the poetry to creatively reimagine those experiences.

Your dissertation also looks at the role of mothers and motherist activism. Who are the mothers and what are the forms of activism they’re organizing around?

I talk about motherist activism in my dissertation as coming from a line of motherist activism in Latin America. Some famous examples include the mothers at the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who were demanding justice for their disappeared children. Or more recently in Mexico, there are many small collectives of mothers who are searching for their murdered and disappeared children who are victims of the War on Drugs and the general ambience of violence in the country currently. So there is an existing set of scholarship about motherist activism in Latin America, and I also saw this among deportee mothers. They occupy a really important position in my dissertation in part because they really strongly challenge the vision of the solo male deportee, in that many of these mothers are single mothers, or they’re divorced mothers, so they are having to do the bureaucratic processes not only for themselves, but for their children. They have really borne a lot of the effort of the political organizing of the deportee community in partnership with migration NGOs, both by national ones that have both Mexican and US employees, and also local NGOs that are staffed by Mexicans.

So much of being a motherist activist obviously has to do with the rights of your children and what that means. What are the specific issues that they are mobilizing around, and what are the ways that they came to organize together and to make mothers, rather than women into a class of people?

A lot of the organizing by mothers and mothers finding each other came out of seeing that many of the people who work in civil society in Mexico are men, finding each other within the larger groups that were mainly men and then came together over shared concerns. And a big one was the need of the apostille, and the aspostilled birth certificate to enter into schools.

One of the first big achievements of migrant organizing, not only deportee but also in the service of people from other countries coming to live in Mexico, from Central America and other countries, was that Mexico’s public education secretary changed his policy regarding school registration so that schools are now required to accept foreign birth certificates in order to enroll students.

However, in practice, in many cases, they don’t. And this leaves mothers of foreign-born children in a very challenging spot, where they are demanding again and again that a school enroll their child and being denied that, or the school is saying, we have enrolled your child, but they are later being denied to continue into the next level of school, either the next grade or middle or high school. The biggest issue there is the unique population registry number, that schools really feel like they can’t have a student who doesn’t have a CURP. Getting citizenship without an apostille has become a big focus for continued organizing, because it’s the citizenship process that gives individuals their CURP. If they can get that without an apostille, it will be much easier for returnees’ children to enroll in school and stay in school.

Interestingly, the COVID pandemic created a new layer of challenges here, not only because it stymied organizing, but also because, for some people who had enrolled their children initially with a temporary CURP generated by the school, who had then been able to get their children’s nationality over the course of a year or two, when schools moved to virtual modality, the education secretary’s virtual platform didn’t immediately and didn’t (with a lag time of months) update its CURP registry. So students who had been correctly enrolled in schools, suddenly on online school, were not able to access the resources.

That raises a broader question about the effects of the pandemic on both return migration and deportation. What have the effects of the pandemic been, since you conducted most of your research during the pandemic?

That’s a very manifold question, so I’ll try and offer a few different snippets of insight. Looking from the US side, one thing that was true at the beginning of the pandemic was that not only detention centers, but also prisons were places where a virus could spread very fast. There should have been a push to release people with alternatives to detention. Before Trump, for instance, many times people who were not considered risks — which is the majority of people held in detention, because it has been mandatory detention for all asylum seekers and people facing deportation since 1997 — there should have been a push to release people with ankle bracelets or other alternatives to detention. But there wasn’t. And so we saw truly unnecessary deaths from COVID, from people awaiting deportation processes in detention centers. That’s one major effect of the pandemic that needs to be flagged strongly.

A second is that, when people were deported during COVID, there was no real reception protocol on the Mexican side, so there was no place for people to quarantine. There were also many small villages that closed completely to outsiders during the pandemic. And so people who had been deported couldn’t go home, because they were an outsider returning to a village that had closed. That was a big problem not only in Mexico, but in Central America as well. And then, of course, the issues of stigma and criminalization were heightened because of the fear that people had been on a deportation flight that was filled with COVID.

At the same time, the deportee and returnee community had in place an organized infrastructure for mutual aid that was really remarkable, and that had a lot to teach other communities. They were able to quickly get in touch with large numbers of people (and I helped in this process), to assess their needs, prioritize who was the most at risk from loss of income, or from complicating health factors that made them need to be more isolated, or more at risk. They were able to mobilize shared resources and networks of information. And also, because they were separated from loved ones by a border, they were used to virtual technologies. Interestingly, despite there being a big digital divide globally, people that one might not have expected to have been particularly digitally literate within the deportee and returnee community were able to adjust to the virtual modality pretty readily.

Thank you so much for sharing these stories of returnees and deportees. The ways they were able to connect during the pandemic through all the virtual modalities is really instructive for us to think about the ways that returnees and deportees bring a lot to our understanding of what it means to be connected.

Thank you.

Economy

Balancing Property Taxes for Schools: An Interview with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey

Published June 26, 2023

Public education in the United States is profoundly unequal. Many public school systems are highly dependent on local revenues generated by local property taxes, meaning that areas with higher home values have better-funded schools. Wealthier people self-sort into areas with higher property values and better schools, while poorer communities have poorly funded schools. As a result, policymakers have asked: how can we solve the problem of inequality among school districts?

Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics, has conducted research on how to address this thorny problem. Valenzuela-Stookey came to Berkeley after completing his PhD at Northwestern in 2021 and spending a year visiting Duke as a postdoctoral fellow. His main interests lie in the field of economic theory, and his research has broadly examined market-based policy design, allocation mechanisms, platform markets, and bounded rationality.

In part because of the longstanding effects of racial redlining, school districts in the U.S. have been profoundly shaped by legacies of racial segregation and inequality. While this might seem like a problem that a geographer or sociologist would study, how do you understand this as an economic problem?

It is impossible to understand the current state of geographic and racial disparities in income and education without recognizing the impact of policies such as racial redlining. These policies were designed to segregate people of color, protect the advantages in property wealth enjoyed by White families, and sustain school segregation. Redlining achieved all of these objectives.

Redlining achieved its discriminatory objectives by using the tools of economics. The term refers to a policy that designated homes as “high-risk” for lending purposes due to the presence of Black and immigrant communities in the neighborhood. Homes in these neighborhoods were usually ineligible for federally backed mortgages, and received disadvantageous mortgage terms. Redlining had far-reaching consequences, but one immediate and explicitly economic effect was that it prevented people of color from accessing credit to invest in capital, and thus inhibited their ability to accumulate wealth.

It is important to understand that while, at least in theory, redlining ended with the Equal Housing Act of 1968, the policy continues to impact areas such as housing and education to this day. This is where I think an economic understanding of the problem can play an important role. We need to understand the mechanisms through which the initial impacts of redlining on mortgage availability propagated to other areas of life, and how these effects were preserved and even magnified over time. For example, by reducing property wealth in redlined neighborhoods, these policies diminished the funding available for local schools. My own work touches on this mechanism. There is a self-sustaining process by which high property values support higher-quality schools, which in turn attracts richer people to an area and raises property values. This feedback loop helps perpetuate the discriminatory impact of redlining across generations. I study how tax policy today can be used to help redress some of these inequities.

The broad lesson is that policies do not exist in isolation. People live their lives in a web of economic systems, and changes to any one of these can have wide-ranging consequences. Economics as a discipline is largely about understanding the indirect effects that the actions of one person or institution has on others.

In part, you’re working with an economic theory from Charles Tiebout, who argued that, in efficient markets, people will move to areas with better service provision — in other words, that wealthier people might move to areas with better services. How did you model the ways that people do (or do not) select into different housing?

Tiebout’s theory is generally understood as an argument in favor of local control over the funding and provision of public goods, such as schools. The idea is that if some people really value a particular amenity, say education, they can choose to live in a district that provides it. They pay for the amenity by paying local taxes, which are set at the district level. People who don’t value education as much, or who value some other amenity relatively more, will choose to live in a different district and pay only for the amenities they want.

In essence, the argument is that by giving districts control over the type and quantity of amenities they offer, and giving them the power to tax, they essentially become firms that produce amenities and sell them in a market. The market is “free” insofar as people find it easy to move and, the classical thinking goes, free markets produce efficient outcomes.

While the analogy between location-specific amenities and markets for goods is useful, there are of course many problems with the classical Tiebout argument that this market will produce “good” outcomes. One important shortcoming is that the notion of efficiency, according to which idealized markets perform well, is limited: even if both rich and poor families value education the same in absolute terms, rich families will be willing to spend more to live in a district with good schools. It may be “efficient” for rich kids to go to better schools, but it is not desirable from a societal perspective. Moreover, the market may fail to deliver on even this limited efficiency criterion. This is exactly the problem my paper seeks to address.

In the model that I use, each district has a stock of houses that differ in terms of quality, and each family has a different level of wealth. Unsurprisingly, the model predicts that the richest families move to the best houses in the district with the best schools. The very poorest families move to the worst houses in districts with the worst schools. Middle-income families might choose to live in a better house in a district with worse schools, or a worse house in a district with better schools.

The upside of all this is that when a district raises taxes and increases expenditure on schools, it attracts a wealthier subset of the population. This in turn leads to higher property values in this district relative to what you would expect if there was no change in the wealth distribution of new arrivals. Higher property values benefit current homeowners, who are also the voters responsible for setting tax policy. This effect on property values gives the district an additional incentive to raise taxes, beyond what they would do if there was no mobility in the population.

The flip side of the dynamic I just described is that other districts receive a less wealthy set of new arrivals, which suppresses property values in these districts. This is what is known as a fiscal externality: the actions of one district impact how much money is available to local governments in other districts. Districts must compete with each other for the richest new residents by raising taxes and increasing expenditure. This competition leads to inefficient outcomes, but it also means that there is a policy intervention that can make all districts better off while reducing inequality in access to quality education: tax caps.

What are tax caps, and what would a tax cap look like for a school district?

The solution I propose is to cap tax revenue that the richest districts are allowed to collect. This can help alleviate a wasteful arms race in which rich districts compete for wealthier residents by investing in unnecessary amenities. A school may not need to build a second pool, but it might feel compelled to do so if the school in the next town over has done so. Importantly, the tax caps can be constructed in a way that these districts actually like. While each district would of course like to be free to choose its own tax and expenditure policy, each district also recognizes that they benefit if other districts can’t spend so much to lure away richer residents. At the same time, by reducing the disparity in expenditure between rich and poor districts, the caps imply that more middle-income people will move to the poorer districts. This allows the poorer districts to actually increase their expenditure on schools.

What are some of the other solutions that have been offered to the problem of property taxes determining school revenue?

Interestingly, many states, including California, do impose some type of cap on local property taxes, but these policies have generally not been tied explicitly to reducing inequality in education funding. High property taxes are a salient political issue. Indeed, the fact that many people feel their property taxes are too high is consistent with the idea that rich districts are engaged in wasteful one-upmanship. Tax caps are seen as a way to reduce people’s tax burden.

In California, the best-known legislation related to tax caps is known as Proposition 13, or Prop 13, a law passed by voters in 1978 to limit property taxes across the state. Prop 13 is really two different tax policies rolled into one. The first piece concerns the assessment of property values. Property taxes are specified as a percentage of a home’s assessed value, and this value is determined in different ways in each state. Prop 13 limits how much assessed values can change over time for properties in California.

The second piece of Prop 13 is a cap on the rate at which property can be taxed. Unless voters in the district approve an increase, the property tax rate cannot exceed 1% of assessed value.

Volumes have been written on the various implications of this type of policy. In the context of my work, one important issue with Prop 13 is that the expenditure caps are not tied directly to a district’s wealth or income. Moreover, the cap is in terms of the tax rate, whereas I suggest caps on aggregate tax revenue. The latter approach decouples the tax cap from the assessed value of homes in the area, which makes it easier to balance expenditure levels across districts.

An important piece of my policy proposal is that tax caps should be applied differently to rich and poor districts. The goal, after all, is to increase expenditure on schools in the poorest districts. It is important that poorer districts be able to increase their revenue when property values rise.

A related proposal, which I also discuss in the paper, is that districts be allowed to increase their revenue collection above the cap, but must pay a percentage of this additional revenue to the state government. You can think of this as a “luxury tax” on excessive expenditure. The state government can then transfer this money directly to poorer districts. In fact, Texas already has a system like this in place, which gives me hope that this type of policy could be implemented more broadly.

Another type of policy that has been proposed to deal with inequalities in access to education is simply to do away with the local control of funding altogether. The idea is to centralize education funding, say at the state level, and distribute funds equitably across districts. I think some version of this would be the ideal policy. Unfortunately, it is politically challenging. Rich districts that are currently able to spend only on their own schools will oppose efforts to redistribute funds to poorer districts. This is not to say that reforms along these lines are not possible. Illinois, for example, passed a reform a few years back that both increased state-level funding for education, thus reducing dependence on local tax revenue, and created a formula for equitably distributing these funds across districts.

What is the role of rental markets in your analysis?

This is an important question. The model I discussed above assumes that everyone is a homeowner. An increase in property values makes people who own property richer. This is the source of the competitive pressure toward higher expenditure. On the other hand, if rents increase because of an influx of wealthy residents, this hurts existing renters. In essence, increased expenditure on schools can exacerbate gentrification. If most residents of a district are renters, this means that the district has less of an incentive to increase spending than if most residents were homeowners.

If all districts have mostly renters, competition between districts could lead to expenditure on schools that is too low, and tax cap proposals could be counterproductive. Moreover, we might expect poorer districts to have a higher proportion of renters, and these are the districts where, by design, the tax cap raises property values.

Fortunately, a modification of the tax cap policy still works. One solution when poor districts have a high proportion of renters is to transfer money directly to poorer districts using the “luxury tax” system that I mentioned earlier. This would help offset some of the negative effects of higher rental rates, and still allow poor districts to spend more on schools.

What do you think policymakers can learn from your analysis?

I think there are two important takeaways. First, while people may be used to thinking about tax competition in terms of states or countries cutting taxes to attract investment, in the context of school funding, competition may have the opposite effect. In the fight for richer residents, districts may end up taxing more than is optimal. Second, this inefficiency is something that a policymaker can exploit to construct a policy that delivers on three seemingly incompatible objectives: reduced taxes in the highest-tax districts and increased funding for education in the poorest districts, all while making every district better off. The fact that every district benefits from the policy should make it politically feasible, unlike some other proposals to address these issues.

Podcast

Structural Determinants of Police Violence: Interview with Kimberly Cecilia Burke

Published May 17, 2023

Kimberly Cecilia Burke, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley, researches the relationships between institutional violence and social stratification, utilizing multi-level mixed-methods analysis. Her dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how Black-White interracial couples understand and experience police violence in their relationships. Her current research aims to determine how the dynamics of intimate partnerships can perpetuate and challenge patterns of racial inequality structured by police violence. As a scholar-activist, Kimberly is guided by feminist ethics of love and mutuality and seeks to bring insights from social science to the broader public to advance social equity.

For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek interviewed Burke about her research. Listen to this talk as a podcast below, or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts. An edited transcript of the interview is included below.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California Berkeley.

Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix podcast. Today, our guest is Kimberly Cecilia Burke, a PhD candidate in sociology at Berkeley. Her dissertation research focuses on examining policing, inequality, and state violence, looking at the ways that these institutions shape romantic relationships. Her research, which is grounded in a feminist ethics of love, mutuality, and respect, is reflected in her scholar activist work in which she seeks to challenge anti-black racism and build equitable solutions to the problems inherent to carceral institutions. Welcome to the podcast.

Kimberly Burke: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited for this conversation.

Julia Sizek: So during the past couple of years, public attention has really turned toward policing and specifically to the negative effects of policing on people being actively policed. But your research turns this around by examining the effects of policing on intimate relationships. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you chose this research topic and what you’ve started to find?

Kimberly Burke: So the research that has been most exciting for me coming out of the policing literature has been those scholars looking at the broader impacts of policing beyond the direct targets of police violence or police activity, to examine the ways that it’s impacting educational outcomes, civic participation, emergency room usage, all of these unexpected spillover consequences of harsh policing tactics.

And so I am taking that to look at how policing is impacting our most intimate relationships, our capacity to love, and connect, and realize our humanity in these most sacred spaces. And that was, I guess, largely inspired by my conversations with police officers themselves. And they, unprompted usually, share with me the challenges that being a police officer has brought to their romantic partnerships, their many divorces and breakups, their experiences of intimate partner violence.

So I wanted to understand how can we love in a punitive society? What does it mean to try to forge relationships of mutuality and respect in the context of policing, which requires a lot of blame, and domination, and control. What does that mean for the people doing the work of policing, but what does it mean also to those people who are living in the context of police violence?

Julia Sizek: Yeah. So you’ve outlined, I mean, sort of an amazing research goal to try to figure out what love looks like in a policing state. And I guess my question is, how do you approach this somewhat capacious topic? Who are the folks who you’re talking to? So you mentioned police officers but also ordinary people whose lives are surrounded by police violence.

Kimberly Burke: So I actually have started with civilians, and I’m looking at Black and White interracial couples. Because police violence in the US is largely painted as a problem for the Black community, I wanted to examine within these relationships where race is a boundary-making process that keeps people separated, and policing is a mechanism of that racializing process.

So I’m trying to understand first how is it that Black and White couples are able to love and connect in the context of police violence? And to ask questions that really try to get at how policing structures their racial identity, how they are resisting and negotiating that within their relationship dynamics.

And just in the few pilot interviews I’ve done, there are some really exciting strategies that couples are employing that really point to a socialist understanding of relationships rather than this transactional, hierarchical, capitalist, punitive dynamic that make me feel as though the strategies these couples are using to love, to enact love, to be in this relationship in a way that garners mutual respect and support could also be a vision for how we can imagine public safety to look differently if that makes sense.

Julia Sizek: Wow. I think that’s really cool because it points exactly to the ways that people are finding ways to resist a structure of domination that is really important in their lives. What are some of the strategies that people are using?

Kimberly Burke: Yes. It’s a re-envisioning of work and a transfer of the kinds of risk that are definitive of the Black experience. So every couple talks about the labor, mental, emotional sometimes physical labor that White partners have to do to show up and support their Black partners, specifically when they are thinking about interactions with police or ways to prevent interactions with police because of the fear of the kind of violence that the Black partner would be subjected to, right?

And so it’s a shift in labor for sure, but it’s a way of thinking about labor, like I said, almost in the socialist lens, where it is what do I need to do to enable my partner to realize their full humanity? And in doing that work, it’s not even work. It’s almost just what it means to be human, what it means to love.

And in turn, the Black partner also has recognized their work in helping the White partner to understand their experiences, right? And so it moves beyond I do this, you owe me this, to just this beautiful understanding of what we need to do for one another, so that we can all be human and experience safety and support in every space that we occupy.

Julia Sizek: That’s really remarkable also because this is obviously a really touchy topic to bring up with your interlocutors. How have you been able to forge a relationship with them and also to bring people into this study, which is about a very personal topic?

Kimberly Burke: So I felt really motivated to do this project because of my past interviews with police officers. And as I said, unprompted, they would share with me details of their personal life, of their marriage, of their intimate partnerships and how becoming a police officer negatively impacted those relationships and distance them from their civilian friends or families.

And that was without me asking. So I thought, OK, if police officers who are notoriously skeptical of outsiders and researchers, right? This is documented in the literature. If they are willing to share with me these stories, then certainly civilians who are perhaps open to participating in social science research would be willing to do so. And I started recruiting just through my network, and it has snowballed.

And already, I’ve gotten 25 participants who want to talk about their relationships and their experiences and what it has meant to love across race during the COVID and George Floyd protests of 2020. Particularly, this time period has been incredibly salient and important for people in navigating these relationships, many of whom were quarantined, locked down together, and couldn’t escape these issues, couldn’t turn away from issues in the way that they had in the past. And they’ve just been really forthcoming. So I get to be pretty direct. And I don’t have to say a lot, and they just share. Yeah.

Julia Sizek: Well, it sounds like it’s really a ripe topic for research and that also relates back to some of the other work that you’ve been doing that specifically with police officers and about police trainings and the use of force trainings. Can you tell us just a little bit about what police use of force training looks like on the ground?

Kimberly Burke: Yes. So I will speak to the use of force trainings that I have participated in because we have thousands and thousands of departments in the US, and they all have a lot of leeway in what their trainings can look like. So here in California, there is a state-level standard, it’s called POST, that regulates trainings. And so I was able to go through a use of force training that was really aimed at de-escalation tactics. And it was shocking.

So what I found was this dynamic where officers are simultaneously trained to be wary of overperceiving threat. So what I mean by that is not seeing threat or reacting to threat where none exists or where they could respond with more minimal force. And also underperceiving threat so not discounting someone as a victim or as non-threatening when perhaps, they could present a safety issue for the officer.

So this presented officers with almost a double bind, right? It seemed inescapable. So if I have to assume that everyone could potentially take my life and also not overreact to the fear that someone could potentially take my life, what tools do I have left to use?

And this is where the department that I observed, I’ll call it Pacific Police Department for anonymity, really trained officers to close the distance between them and the suspect or the person they were interacting with and use basic control holds, gripping, grabbing, handcuffing, to maximize the officer’s control of the person.

And in that way, that person is no longer presenting a threat to the officer, so it’s reducing the risk that officers will respond with potentially lethal force. And it’s also reducing the risk that that person could be a threat and harm the officer.

Julia Sizek: So that raises a question for an ordinary person like me who would say, like isn’t putting someone in a control hold a use of force? How is this portrayed as a use of force or maybe not as a use of force by these officers or by the training?

Kimberly Burke: Yes. So per Pacific Police Department policy, basic control holds, handcuffing, and even brandishing a weapon are not considered reportable use of force incidents or interactions. And so officers really reflected that policy language. The training reflected that policy language. And the law reflected that assessment of those kinds of force encounters as often not meeting a threshold of harmful force. So being treated in the law as a minimal intervention to achieve peace or compliance with the law.

Julia Sizek: Well, so legally, what does that look like? What are the legal standards that we use in the US and in California more specifically to understand what a use of force is?

Kimberly Burke: So all police use of force is adjudicated under the 1989 Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor, which established that police use of force must be objectively reasonable according to a reasonable officer at the time of the encounter, rather than assessed with the 2020 vision of hindsight.

The court also held that objectively reasonable force was not capable of precise definition or mechanical application. So this created the conditions whereby all of these 16,000 plus police departments in the US could create their own specific standards of what reasonable force is. And there are states like Washington who are moving away from the reasonable standard toward a necessary standard. So police use of force when necessary.

But other scholars have pointed to the limitations of the existing laws and actually regulating and constraining police use of force. So a scholar here, Osagie Obasogie, published an article looking at police policies and court decisions when citizens try to sue for excessive force. And he found that overwhelmingly, courts defer to police departments’ own policies and standards in determining whether or not force adheres to the Graham v Conner standard.

So in this way, he uses the term legal endogeneity, which was a concept developed by Laurie Edelman, also here at Berkeley, which essentially means that the law is being defined by the very organizations it’s meant to regulate. And I think that is very much the case here in California as well.

And that’s obviously a big problem for policing in the case that we might want to change some of the standards if they are effectively setting their own rules. What does that look like in the training that you attended for use of force? What would be an example of a kind of situation that a police officer would be put in?

So I actually think that the department I observed is laudable in its interpretation of what reasonable force is. And that their goal is really to reduce officer involved shootings, right? So their number one goals are officer safety and public safety.

And unfortunately, that prioritization is what led to this what I call forceful de-escalation standard in this department, where the best way that they can see to protect their officers while also empowering their officers to protect communities is to use these lower levels of force early in interactions as soon as individuals present any signs of noncompliance as a way to, again, prevent the potential that the officer is going to respond with force, even if the courts would decide that higher level of force would be reasonable, as well as to protect the officers from any sort of harmful behavior on the part of the citizen.

Julia Sizek: So if someone is being noncompliant, how do they define that? Like what does noncompliance I guess look like?

Kimberly Burke: Yes. So noncompliance, again, in the department that I observed, could look like failing to identify yourself . An officer told me a story of an unhoused woman who had thrown water I think at the manager of a Starbucks. And he went to respond to the call from the manager. And the woman would not give the officer her name.

So at that point, he describes it as a red flag. This is a sign that this interaction could go sideways, meaning that it could escalate to something that is harmful for both of them. So the officer decided at that point to grab her, and handcuff her, and remove her from the establishment. And in telling me the story, he said, so that was my de-escalation tactic. I didn’t use any force. I just cuffed her and removed her after she failed to identify herself, right?

So that’s a kind of passive form of resistance or noncompliance. That two officers can mean, OK, this person is not going to go with the program. That’s cop lingo. They’re not going to go with the program. They’re not going to cooperate with me. And that could mean an argument, but it could also mean that this person presents a threat to me or to others.

And so at that point, they can decide to detain the person to maximize their control of this non-compliant person. So again, failing to identify oneself, failing to follow orders even if those orders are not necessarily lawful orders, right? Even if they are not compliant with search and seizure laws or within the scope of an officer’s rights can also signal noncompliance to officers and present this early warning sign of potential threat.

And I think that points to a lot of the conflicts that we’ve seen in terms of, I guess I would say like peoples whose cars are searched and then are subsequently detained by police in ways that result in serious injury or even death. And it points to this real disconnect between what an ordinary person might see as a use of force or compliance or noncompliance and what police officers think as compliance or noncompliance. How do police officers deal with this disconnect because presumably, they feel it too. They’ve also been civilians.

Yeah. I had an interesting conversation with an officer who was born and raised in the town he policed, a predominantly Black and Latinx town. He had experiences with being unhoused. His mom was unhoused for a long time. He was a Black officer in every way the kind of model police officer that’s held up in reform efforts, right?

And he described a traffic stop where the driver, I believe it was a Black man, was not going with the program. He wasn’t doing what he was trying to tell him. He was asking him to get out of the car because I think he didn’t want to have the conversation with the guy with the kids in the car or something. The man refused to get out of his car.

And the officer explained it to me as like, look, if I tell you to do something, you do it because my safety and your safety is on the line. He’s implicitly understanding that he’s assessing this noncompliance as a threat to his safety. And then also when he’s threatened, guess what? You’re threatened, right? Because he can respond with lethal force.

And so he said, if at that point, you feel I’m violating your civil rights, then you pursue actions after the interaction is over. You go and make a complaint. You file a lawsuit. But in the moment, both of our lives are on the line. And that was so striking to me that he was able to articulate that assessment of the interaction, right? That even though I might be violating your rights, and I understand that, you also have to understand that I perceive my job as danger, as potential deadly interactions, every single one. So if I’m telling you to do something, you do it. And that is just the way that they understand how they can do their job safely.

Julia Sizek: And that raises real questions about police reform efforts and efforts for community policing or for moving away from policing altogether. Based on what you’ve learned, how do you think about these efforts to change the system of policing in the US today?

Kimberly Burke: So I think it is very important that I observed these logics among egalitarian minority officers in what I consider one of the departments that’s leading the way in equitable policing standards. Because for me, that signals, OK, if this is kind of the best of the best, right? The best of the best officers and the best of the best departments, and they are still having these problematic interpretations of what reasonable force looks like and how to manage interactions with civilians, then the most effective thing we can do is to reduce police contacts overall. To reduce the footprint of policing.

And we’re seeing agencies implement these kinds of reforms. Right here in Berkeley, Chief Greenwood announced that they wouldn’t be enforcing lower level traffic stops, right? Traffic stops are one of the most fearful interactions with police officers, especially at night because they can’t see in the car. They can’t see the driver. They can’t see your hands. So these are more likely to result in unnecessary uses of force. So that’s one thing.

Norfolk in Virginia, they did something similar, where lower level offenses, misdemeanor offenses are now being handled over the phone or over Zoom calls. So if civilians have a complaint of petty theft or these other misdemeanor-type crimes, officers aren’t going to interact in person. They are managing these cases virtually. And those I think are the most exciting interventions for me right now, is how do we think about reducing policing overall, so that they’re having fewer contacts and fewer opportunities for things to escalate into lethal force?

Julia Sizek: And what are some of the other potential benefits of changing these strategies, which is to say, what are some of the big harms of forceful, what you call forceful de-escalation or other forms of police violence on communities?

Kimberly Burke: So aggressive police encounters or living in a neighborhood where there is high police activity is shown to have really negative impacts on mental health and well-being and all of these spillover effects that I mentioned earlier, right? Reduced civic participation linked to negative educational outcomes, just a myriad. And now I’m looking at how it impacts our personal relationships.

So I think if we can reimagine the scope of policing, we can also refocus on building alternative public safety systems that actually provide people with positive resources for their mental health well-being. It can force us to rethink about the kinds of financial instability that is contributing to some of these crimes. It can force a reckoning with how we think about property and property crimes and how we value that over the well-being of these communities that are subjected to harsh and burdensome policing practices.

Julia Sizek: So this is obviously a very heavy topic. How did you come to start studying policing?

Kimberly Burke: So I am actually trained in women’s studies. I got my bachelor’s in women’s studies and my master’s in women’s studies. And I was broadly interested in issues of social justice, gender, race, class, those intersecting identities and power dynamics in society. And I started working at the Center for Policing Equity following my master’s program, which focused on race and equity in the context of policing.

When I started, I knew nothing about policing. I knew nothing about the social psychology measures they were using to assess what kinds of policing attitudes predicted negative outcomes. And it was really a grad level course in criminal legal systems under Phillip Atiba Goff, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Policing Equity. He’s a professor in African American Studies at Yale now. But he was really kind of my mentor and professor and entree into the world of policing.

And so from 2013 to 2017, I managed various initiatives at policing equity aimed at reducing harms. We were asking the question, how do we make policing less deadly for Black communities? And as part of that, I was the project director at the Department of Justice-funded National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, and we partnered with six police departments across the nation to test out interventions at building community trust, at reducing police use of force in the communities most burdened by policing outcomes.

And so that’s when I was working on issues of implicit bias and these other cognitive predictors of negative policing outcomes. And that’s also when I saw that again, in the best of police departments, there were still these stubborn intractable issues of unnecessary force. And that’s what really got me interested in pursuing my doctoral degree and pursuing my own research that asked these questions.

And I think I’ve come kind of full circle now in these questions of love and mutuality back to my women’s studies and feminist theory background. So I’m seeing a real marriage of those two disciplinary trainings, right? Or three, really. So I have my women’s studies, my social psychology and formal training, and now my sociology training, where I’m really able to study the dyad, the most basic building block of society, the partners, right? And to look at how those dynamics, both create and are created by the structures that define our society.

Julia Sizek: Thank you so much for coming on and telling us about how we can start to reimagine policing.

Kimberly Burke: Thank you so much for having me.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Burke won second place in the 2022 UC Grad Slam Competition: watch her presentation below or on YouTube.

Culture

Do Food Labels Work? A Visual Interview with Nano Barahona

Published May 11, 2023

In the wake of concerns about the negative effects of high-sugar and calorie-dense foods on human health, governments have tried to intervene through sugar taxes and changes in food labeling. What changes are most effective in shaping consumer behavior?

For this “visual interview,” we spoke with Nano Barahona, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, who recently examined how a food labeling policy has changed the approaches of both consumers and food producers in Chile. Spanning the fields of industrial organization and public economics, Barahona’s research broadly focuses on studying and quantifying the effects of government policies on individuals’ outcomes and welfare, with an emphasis on health, educational, and environmental policies.

Barahona and his co-authors, Cristóbal Otero, and Sebastián Otero, recently wrote an article about their research for Berkeley Economics, wherein they provided a summary of their recent papers (here and here). “We study the impact of warning labels on nutritional intake in Chile,” they explained. “We partnered with Walmart-Chile, the largest supermarket chain in the country, and accessed scanner data on food purchases between May 2015 and March 2018 in all their supermarkets in the country. We matched each product to its nutritional information, and by connecting transactions to individual shoppers, we were able to compute the impact of the policy on overall nutritional intake.”

Front-of-package labels on selected products.

What are some of the approaches for addressing consumer food choices through food labeling?

The idea that food labels can improve consumer information — and, therefore, consumer choices — has been floating around for a long time. In the United States, for example, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act mandated nutrition labeling of all prepackaged foods beginning in 1994. Nevertheless, empirical evidence shows that nutritional fact tables have not been effective at improving consumers’ food choices, mainly because consumers don’t use them or do not understand them.

Since then, governments and international institutions have been exploring numerous policies to improve nutritional choice and combat obesity. An increasingly popular policy is providing simplified information to consumers through front-of-package labels (FoPL), which consist of warning stickers placed on the front of packages to clearly signal to consumers when a given product is unhealthy. Today, more than 35 countries – mostly in Europe and Latin America – have voluntary or mandatory FoPL schemes, compared to only 10 countries in 2010.

Some countries have implemented “nutri-scores,” a quantitative value indicating a healthiness index calculated by an external institution. Other countries have labels in different colors, resembling street lights, with green for healthy products, yellow for intermediate, and red for unhealthy. Other countries, like Chile, have opted for binary labels that warn consumers when a given product is above a specific threshold on some particular critical nutrient, such as sugar, sodium, or saturated fat.

What are the aspects of food labeling in Chile that made it particularly interesting to study, and what’s different about the approach that Chile has taken compared to other countries?

In 2016, Chile became the first country in the world to implement a mandatory nationwide food labeling regulation. Since 2016, more than 25 countries have followed Chile and have either implemented or are in the process of implementing country-wide mandatory food labeling policies.

The following table shows the set of countries that have already implemented or are discussing implementing policies similar to the ones in Chile. All of them include warning stickers for high concentrations of sugar, sodium, and saturated fat. Some, like Chile, include an additional label for products with a high number of calories.

Mandatory front-of-package labeling policies implemented or being discussed around the world

This graph shows how sugar and calorie intake changed as a result of nutrition labeling. How did consumers change their behavior when the new policy went in place?

Consumer calories and sugar per dollar spent following the introduction of nutrition labels.

Through tracking shopping data at Walmart locations in Chile, we documented a sharp overall decrease in sugar and caloric intake of 8.8% and 6.5% per dollar spent, respectively, immediately after the policy was implemented. This reduction, which persisted for the two-year post-policy window in our data, is explained by a combination of demand- and supply-side responses. On the one hand, consumers reacted to the regulation by making healthier choices. On the other hand, companies responded to the regulation by reducing the concentration of regulated nutrients in their products, such as sugar, to push them under the threshold of the regulation. To disentangle these mechanisms, we can zoom into the cereal market.

Log-quantities (logarithm of total grams of products) of labeled and unlabeled ready-to-eat-cereal purchased at supermarkets over an eight-week period.

Through tracking sales over time, we found that the policy induced consumers to switch from labeled to unlabeled products. We also found, though, that the total demand for cereal didn’t change much after the policy was implemented. The decrease in demand for labeled products was compensated by a comparable increase in demand for unlabeled products. The figure above shows percentage changes in demand because we used a logarithmic scale. Because the baseline demand was larger for labeled products, the percentage change in demand was smaller. That doesn’t mean that the net change in demand is actually smaller.

You also studied how consumers’ beliefs about these products changed when they saw the new labels. How did consumers respond to this new information, and how did it vary for different kinds of food?

Log-quantities of labeled and unlabeled ready-to-eat-cereal purchased before and after food labeling. Colored lines represent the prior beliefs held by consumers about products that received the high-calorie label.

We conducted a survey to elicit consumers’ beliefs about the nutritional characteristics of a set of cereal and soft drink products in the absence of warning labels. We found that, on average, individuals had relatively accurate beliefs about the concentration of sugar in cereal. However, respondents’ beliefs about the calorie concentrations in cereal (calories per gram) were less aligned with reality. Certain granolas, for example, were perceived as being low in calories while they are actually high.

We then split products between those that were believed to be low in calories but were tagged with a high-in-calories label, and those that were known to be high in calories and also received a high-in-calories label. We found that products that were mistakenly believed to be healthy but ended up with a high-in-calories label saw the greatest decline in sales as a result of the policy. These empirical findings suggest that labels are especially effective for products about which consumers are more misinformed.

Under what circumstances were the food labels most effective in changing consumer demand?

Two important features of a product category determine how much food labels affect consumer demand. First, categories in which labeled and unlabeled products are closer substitutes are more likely to show larger substitution effects, which we found in grocery store data. For example, if a high-in-sugar cereal has an alternative available with similar taste but lower levels of sugar concentration, consumers who were misinformed about its sugar content will be more likely to switch than if an alternative wasn’t available.

Second, food labels are more effective in shaping consumer demand for categories in which they are more informative. In the soft drinks category, for example, consumer beliefs about sugar concentration are relatively accurate, mostly because soft drinks are already categorized as either diet and non-diet drinks. When we estimate the effects of food labels on demand for soft drinks, we find that the relative change in quantities sold between labeled and unlabeled products is half that for products in the breakfast cereal category.

How did different consumers respond to the new labels?

We find fairly similar effects of the policy on consumer responses across the income distribution. On the one hand, you might think that richer consumers care more about the healthiness of the products they buy. On the other hand, richer consumers might be better informed about products before the policy was implemented. This is particularly important when we compare food labels to sugar taxes. Lower-income households tend to eat more sugary products. Then, if we impose a high tax on sugary products, we end up with a quite regressive policy that ends up charging low-income individuals more. Food labels, on the other hand, don’t require transfers from consumers to the government. Moreover, if low-income consumers are less informed about the nutritional content of the products, they may benefit more from food labels as they will provide more useful information to them.

How does food labeling compare to sugar taxes and other strategies for encouraging healthier diets?

When we compare food labels to sugar taxes, we find that food labels present both advantages and disadvantages. In categories such as chocolates and candy, in which all products receive labels and are known to be high in what policymakers called critical nutrients (sugars or fats), food labels are less effective at improving diet quality. Other market imperfections, such as lack of self control, can be important drivers of consumer bias in these categories. Sugar taxes may be a better tool for fighting obesity in these cases.

However, in categories where low-socioeconomic status consumers are more likely to prefer sugary products or have more misaligned beliefs about products’ nutritional contents, food labels present distributional benefits over sugar taxes that need to be considered.

Our findings suggest that the optimal policy is to combine food labels with sugar taxes, with higher taxes on categories in which non-informational biases are larger, and lower taxes in categories that are consumed more by the lower-income individuals than they are by higher-income individuals. For example, a sugar tax might be effective in reducing consumption of chocolate or sugar-sweetened beverages, categories for which consumers are already aware of their sugar content. In categories where awareness is lower, such as cereal, food labels can be a more effective policy.

You also studied the supply-side effects of the new labeling system. How did food manufacturers respond?

To study how firms responded to the labeling policy, we compared the distribution of nutritional content before and after the policy was implemented. In 2016, before the policy was implemented, 55 cereal products were above the threshold for caloric concentration. In 2018, 13 of those products reduced their concentration of calories to just below the threshold. In economic terms, eight of the products bunched at the threshold of 350 kcal per 100 grams.

We observed a similar pattern when we looked at sugar concentration. In 2016, 27 regulated products were above the threshold. In 2018, nine of these reduced their sugar content to be below the threshold, and six reduced it to between 20 and 22.5 grams of sugar per 100 grams of cereal. This suggests that firms chose to respond strategically to the labeling policy, bunching at the threshold to avoid receiving a label.

This behavior by firms resulted in a net reduction in the caloric and sugar concentration of cereal products offered in the market. The average caloric concentration of products decreased from 383.6 to 372.8 kcal per 100 grams, while the average sugar concentration of products decreased from 21.54 to 19.06 grams of sugar per 100 grams of cereal.

Distribution of cereal calorie and sugar concentrations pre- and post-legislation.

How do the supply- and demand-side effects of this policy compare to each other?

To answer this question, we first needed to find a way of quantifying the net effects of the policy. Consumer and firm decisions changed in many different ways due to the policy. Consumers changed their purchasing decisions due to the new information, and firms changed both prices and nutritional content of products, which impacts consumer well-being. We calculated consumer well-being, a dollar-value measure of people’s happiness, by estimating consumers’ willingness to pay for different product characteristics, and we used this measure to value the net gains of the policy. In other words, we calculated how much a consumer would be willing to pay in order to get this policy implemented.

We first quantify the effects of food labels in the absence of supply-side responses. If companies were not able to change their food formulations or change their prices, we find that the regulation reduces sugar and caloric intake in the cereal market by 6.8% and 0.6%, respectively, resulting in average gains in consumer well-being equivalent to 1.1% of total cereal expenditure, or about $0.28 per year. This is the amount that consumers would be willing to pay in order to have the policy implemented.

Second, we asked what would have happened if firms were not allowed to change the content of their food but could still optimally choose prices. We find that prices of unlabeled and labeled products go up and down, respectively, with average prices remaining relatively constant. Gains in consumer welfare relative to the no-intervention counterfactual are 7% lower than in the absence of supply-side responses.

Finally, we allow firms to optimally reformulate their products to avoid receiving labels. This exercise recovers the full effect of the policy. Overall, we find that products that were tasty but unhealthy became now healthier but more expensive due to higher production costs. Consumer well-being gains under this counterfactual are 48% larger than in the absence of supply-side responses.

What implications does your research have for policymakers?

Our research has important implications for the design of food labeling policies. Policymakers choosing regulatory thresholds for labeling policies should take into account several dimensions. First, it is important to target categories that represent a large share of consumers’ intake of harmful critical nutrients like saturated fats and sugars, such as soft drinks and cereal. Second, thresholds must be set to maximize substitutability within targeted categories, which means that the categories need to have both healthy and unhealthy products that are close substitutes — like cereal, where there are both healthy and unhealthy products, and unlike candy, where all products have similar sugar content. The categories should also be categories where consumers are misinformed about the healthiness of their products. Third, thresholds must be tighter in targeted categories in which reformulation is feasible at a low cost, such as liquids, where replacing sugar by artificial sweeteners is relatively easy. In solid categories such as cookies, reformulation is much harder because sugar acts as a bulking agent that is harder to replace without losing consistency of the product.

Our results also shed light on the importance of combining different policies to tackle obesity. In categories such as chocolates and candy, in which all products receive labels and are known to be high in sugar, food labels are less effective for improving diet quality. Other market imperfections, such as lack of self-control or time inconsistency, can be important drivers of consumer bias in these categories. Sugar taxes can be a better tool to fight obesity in those cases. Consequently, food labels and sugar taxes should be seen as complementary policies rather than incompatible alternatives.

Alumni

Understanding the Opioid Overdose Crisis: An Interview with David Showalter

Published April 19, 2023

How does the opioid overdose crisis reshape rural communities? Through their research on opioid use and opioid-related services in backcountry California, David Showalter argues that an ethnographic sensibility can help us understand how drug use both becomes an ordinary part of people’s lives and what policymakers might do to help prevent overdoses.

David Showalter completed a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2022, and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department at Harvard University and will be Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard starting in July 2023. David’s research has been published in Social Science and Medicine, Theory and Society, International Journal of Drug Policy, Mobilization, and elsewhere. Outside of their academic work, David previously served as President of the Board of Directors for NEED, a harm reduction services organization in Berkeley.

For this visual interview (an interview accompanied by images or graphs related to a scholar’s research), Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Showalter about trends that have defined the opioid crisis in recent decades.

Figure 1, Drug-related deaths in the United States — Figure 1: Drug-related deaths in the United States

As noted in this figure, drug-related deaths have been on the rise across the US broadly. What first interested you in studying this topic?

I’ve been working directly with people who use drugs since 2009, when I started volunteering with a harm reduction organization called Chicago Recovery Alliance. At CRA, we distributed supplies like sterile syringes to help people use drugs more safely. We also gave out naloxone, a medication that reverses opioid overdoses.

I had many conversations with people about overdoses they had experienced or witnessed. These stories were heartbreaking and, in most cases, could have been prevented if people had the resources, information, and support to use drugs more safely. Back then, overdose rates were already at record highs, and they continued to climb almost every year since.

By the time I started graduate school in 2013, the opioid overdose crisis was becoming one of the top news stories. I decided to combine my commitments to harm reduction and my social science research skills to better understand the experiences of people at risk of opioid overdose, as well as the policies that could help prevent overdose deaths.

For my dissertation, I conducted a multi-site ethnographic study of opioid use and opioid-related services in California’s remote and mountainous backcountry. In total, I conducted interviews across a dozen counties and did more intensive ethnographic fieldwork in five counties. I interviewed dozens of people who used drugs, health care and treatment providers, and law enforcement officers to understand what it was like to live in isolated places where “everybody knows everybody,” and how drug use and local government were shaped by those surroundings.

I also spent a lot of time hanging out with people as they bought, sold, and used drugs, and with service providers as they planned new programs. Participant-observation research like this helps us see the complexity of people’s lives and avoid reducing them to their drug use.

What I found is that the social intimacy and geographic isolation of small towns affects almost every aspect of everyday life, including drug use. Looking for drugs meant traversing long distances to cities while avoiding law enforcement officers who might know you personally. Using drugs meant scrounging for scarce supplies and avoiding health care providers who might tag you as an “addict.” And quitting drugs could mean leaving home altogether to access treatment or escape a negative reputation.

This seems like it could be a challenging group to research. How did you gain access to this community?

Building trusting and authentic relationships with the people you are studying is key to ethnographic research. It can be difficult for outsiders entering isolated communities to study stigmatized topics like drug use.

However, I found that, by and large, local officials were easy to meet because they recognized opioid use and overdose as issues in their communities and wanted help with addressing them. They appreciated my interest in their communities, and assumed that I must be an expert if I studied at Cal!

Local officials in rural areas were also more accessible to the public: their offices were small and open, and they were personally acquainted with many of their constituents. For example, in one small town, I called to make appointments with the chief of police and other officials and was told to just stop by the next morning whenever I had time.

When it came to meeting people who use drugs, I got lucky a few times by meeting the right people. I met one key individual because they happened to be friends with the person from whom I rented a room.

But what was really important was my experience with harm reduction programs. Throughout graduate school, I was a member of NEED, a volunteer-led harm reduction organization in Berkeley. We distributed new syringes and other equipment, disposed of used syringes, trained people to use naloxone, and gave out other essential health and wellness supplies.

As a result of my work in harm reduction, I was able to communicate with people about their drug use in a knowledgeable and nonjudgmental way. I didn’t assume that they were “addicted,” for example, or that they viewed their drug use as a problem.

I also didn’t exoticize their lives because they did something most people don’t do, nor did I dramatize their drug use as something edgy, spectacular, or rebellious. If you use drugs every day, it’s a pretty mundane part of your life; sometimes it is almost like another chore to complete. I think recognizing the “normality” of drug use in people’s lives helped put them more at ease.

Because I was connected to harm reduction programs, I was also sometimes able to bring people important health supplies, like new syringes to help prevent transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis C, biohazard disposal containers to safely dispose of used syringes, and naloxone in case of overdose. By these words and actions, I convinced people that I viewed them with the same respect and care as I did anyone else, rather than with curiosity or suspicion.

Figure 2: Estimated rates of past-year heroin use in California between 2016-2018. Rates per 100,000 people age 12+.

In this figure, we can see how rural regions in California, particularly in the northeastern part of the state, have higher rates of opioid use. How has this been explained by scholars, and what did you find in your research?

Researchers studying rural opioid use have highlighted both “supply” and “demand” factors. On the supply side, some rural regions were targeted by opioid companies with intense marketing, and doctors there prescribed opioids at high rates.

On the demand side, rural populations are in overall poorer health and are served by weaker health care systems, making painkillers an attractive solution for overworked health care providers and patients suffering from pain. These trends contributed to increases in the number of people using and dependent on opioids.

As awareness of the crisis grew in the early 2010s, policymakers pushed to restrict prescribing; around the same time, rates of heroin use and overdose increased. Researchers were split on whether people were switching because their dependence was growing or if it was because heroin had become cheaper or easier to get than pills.

One of the reasons I focused on rural California is that it had received much less attention from reporters and researchers than other rural regions, like Appalachia and New England. I wondered whether the stories I had heard about those places would translate to another region.

In my fieldwork, I found that because there were few health care providers, changes in their opioid prescribing practices could have broad and unintended ripple effects. Providers reduced opioid prescriptions out of concern that people might overdose, but some people who depended on those pills didn’t quit and instead sought out alternatives, including heroin.

Media attention has focused on the role that pharmaceutical companies have played in furthering the opioid epidemic. Teva, CVS, Walgreens and other companies in the opioid industry have recently settled or been ordered to pay damages for their roles in the crisis. In your research, you challenge this focus on pharmaceutical companies and instead suggest a different history of the crisis. What did you find?

Pharmaceutical companies did introduce and irresponsibly market powerful opioid medications that significantly contributed to the initial rise in overdose deaths. This included targeting physicians in some rural regions in order to increase opioid prescribing.

But the contemporary overdose crisis was not the beginning of rural opioid use. Morphine and opium first took hold in rural California during the 19th-century Gold Rush, when both were used medicinally and recreationally, and concerns about opioid use cropped up repeatedly in the region during the 20th century. This recurring affinity between opioid and rural places is therefore not solely due to pharmaceutical marketing.

Rather, I found that opioids helped address two important preexisting complaints in these places. First, rural health care systems are understaffed and often lack specialized services, and opioids were an easy solution for health care providers who could not comprehensively address their patients’ health concerns.

Second, rural residents frequently complained of boredom and hopelessness due to economic decline, population loss, and lack of local amenities. Opioids, like other drugs, can distract from these conditions and soothe the negative emotions that they provoke. In short, focusing on the actions of pharmaceutical companies can overshadow the reasons why opioids were so appealing in rural areas to begin with.

Age-adjusted opioid-related mortality rates, by urbanization- California, 1999–2019 — Age-adjusted opioid-related mortality rates by urbanization in California, 1999-2019

As noted in this figure, age-adjusted mortality rates have been higher in rural California. In comparison to cities, what social and medical services are available to rural residents, and how do you think this has shaped the opioid epidemic?

I think about opioid overdose (and other drug-related health problems) in two ways. On the one hand, people risk dying from overdose if the drugs they are using are too potent or too inconsistent for them to accurately gauge their dose and tolerance.

But overdose risk is also shaped by the presence or absence of protective factors, such as harm reduction services that distribute naloxone, and treatment programs that offer medications for opioid use disorder, like methadone and buprenorphine. Historically these services have been much more common and accessible in urban areas.

Harm reduction services grew out of urban social movements and until recently were very scarce in rural areas. For example, when I started my fieldwork in 2017, only a handful of rural counties in California had syringe services programs, and community-based access to naloxone was almost nonexistent in many places.

Substance use treatment services in these counties were also scarce, and were in some cases limited to self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Standard-of-care medications like methadone and buprenorphine were unavailable in many communities due to regulatory requirements and because rural providers were hesitant to offer them.

The absence of these services during the first wave of the overdose crisis meant that it was harder for people in rural areas to use opioids safely and to get help managing or reducing their opioid use.

One of your key contributions is the idea of “acquainted marginality,” which you use to describe how people in small towns have enduring connections. How did these forms of acquainted marginality change how people acted in the local drug scene, as well as with local medical practitioners and service providers?

Acquainted marginality is the condition of being marginalized in your community — by poverty, ethnoracial discrimination, or criminalization, for example — yet personally acquainted with those who exercise power over you: the police, health care providers, or even elected officials. In the small towns I studied, it was common for people who used drugs to know sheriff deputies by name, or even to have grown up with them.

Those personal connections multiplied opportunities for law enforcement to gather information, whether through gossip or direct observation. You risked being seen any time you left your home, or your car could be recognized on the road. And any information you shared with others — or any assumption they made about you — could potentially get back to law enforcement. That made people who used drugs cautious about their movements, and reluctant to engage with health care and other services for fear that they would be marked as an “addict” or even reported to law enforcement.

For some people, this even meant refusing to call 911 in emergencies or go to the hospital for serious health problems. I heard stories of people abandoning their friends who overdosed and watched people treat abscesses at home rather than risk being identified in the emergency room. The intersection of dense social networks and harsh punishment of drug use keeps people from getting the help they want and need.

Most research on drug use within sociology has an urban focus. What do you think a return to rural sociology can bring to the field as a whole?

Rural areas and small towns are important for sociological research for several reasons. First, even in urbanized societies like the United States, significant numbers of people live outside of large cities. Their lives are just as complex and their wellbeing is just as important as anyone else’s, and if we truly mean to study society as a whole, we can’t ignore the full spectrum of human settlements.

I have been struck by how perceptions of “rural Americans” have veered from one stereotype to another in recent years. When I was planning this research in 2016, those I talked with tended to express pity for rural areas that were suffering so-called “deaths of despair.” But in the wake of the Trump Administration, I have heard more contempt for rural Americans, even a feeling that they deserve what they get. In-depth research can help counteract these inaccurate and simplistic images.

Second, studying non-urban areas helps to define the “scope conditions” of our theories, to see whether they apply to all people and places, or only to those that receive the most attention. I found that some aspects of rural drug markets were similar to those in urban areas that have been studied more extensively. For instance, people in small towns have to share money, drugs, and other resources to get by, much like poor urban residents do. But other aspects were much different. While urban police often overlook personal drug use to avoid wasting time on an arrest, people I talked to in small towns received comparatively harsh punishment for offenses as minor as being under the influence of drugs.

Third, small populations in rural areas allow us to study “simplified” versions of social groups, organizations, and interactions that take on more complex forms in larger places, which is useful for thinking about fundamental relationships between place, social structure, and inequality. Whereas in large cities interactions between government agencies and residents are innumerable and highly dispersed, in small towns the connections between officials and their constituents are closer and clearer. For example, it’s easier to see how the behavior of prosecutors and judges affects residents’ views of their courts when there are only one, two, or a few prosecutors and judges making all the decisions.

Finally, social dynamics that may seem distinct to more remote and isolated places can reappear in unexpected ways in urban settings. For instance, the experience of being personally acquainted with influential and powerful members of your community is not unique to small towns, but shows up to varying degrees in segregated neighborhoods, insular subcultures, or organizations like schools, universities, and hospitals. Studying rural areas can therefore also illuminate important aspects of other kinds of settlements as well.

What advice would you have for policymakers who are trying to create policies about opioid abuse?

The story of policy responses to the overdose crisis has been one of tragic unintended consequences. Lax oversight of opioid prescribing exposed vulnerable populations to powerful and potentially deadly drugs. But more recently, crackdowns on prescribing have pushed some people who lose access to pills toward more dangerous substances like heroin and fentanyl. With such a potent and dangerous drug supply, we should be very careful to consider whether policy changes risk leaving people in more dangerous situations than they are in now.

With that in mind, here are three directions I think we need to push to address overdose deaths.

First, we need to universalize harm reduction services to reach people who are currently using drugs — not just basic services like distributing new syringes and naloxone, but also overdose prevention sites, where people can bring their drugs to be rapidly tested for fentanyl and other substances, and can use drugs under trained supervision.

Second, we need to make treatment medications easier to get and more appealing than illicit opioids. This means designing low-barrier, flexible, patient-centered programs that reach people directly in their communities, including through mobile and telehealth services. We also need a wider range of treatment medications to address all patients’ needs, such as heroin and hydromorphone, which are sometimes prescribed for opioid use disorder in Canada.

Third, we need to give people who don’t want or need treatment access to safer alternatives to the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable illicit drug supply. To access treatment and other services, people have to stay alive. Compassion clubs in Canada have demonstrated at a small scale the feasibility of sourcing, testing, and non-commercially distributing pure supplies of heroin and other drugs to people who are dependent on them. These efforts deserve serious attention.

Podcast

The Scandal of Access: An Interview with Zahra Hayat

Published February 14, 2023

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Zahra Hayat, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and is also trained as a lawyer with a background in intellectual property.

Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Hayat about her research on pharmaceutical access in the global South, particularly in Pakistan, and the regimes of price and property on which such access is contingent.

Listen to the podcast below or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts. A transcript of the interview is included below.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Julia Sizek: Hello and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m Julia Sizek, your host. And today our guest is Zahra Hayat, who is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She obtained her PhD in anthropology at UC Berkeley this last year and is also trained as a lawyer with a background in intellectual property. Her research focuses on pharmaceutical access in the Global South, particularly in Pakistan, and the regimes of price and property on which such access is contingent. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Zahra.

Zahra Hayat: Thanks for having me, Julia.

Julia Sizek: So let’s get started with the big overarching question of your research, which is the scandal of access, the way that pharmaceuticals are easily accessed in the West but are inaccessible in the Global South, and specifically in Pakistan, and the preventable deaths that result from this lack of access. What does contemporary access to pharmaceuticals in Pakistan look like?

Zahra Hayat: Yeah. Thank you for that. So I think– best to start off with why or what I’m trying to gesture at with the title of my dissertation, which is The Scandal of Access. And the idea of scandal is something that emerged very organically during fieldwork for me. A lot of my interlocutors would refer to various things vis a vis pharmaceuticals and people’s inability to access them through the language of scandal.

And over time, I began to think of it as much more than just a figure of speech or something that people would say rhetorically, and think about how conceptualizing scandal might help us understand what is going on vis a vis access to medicines in Pakistan. And so I’m trying to get at a couple of things with this idea of scandal.

First of all that I think the sort of overarching meta scandal that defines the stakes of my work really is that of preventable death. And by that I mean in a country with a population of 220 million people– it’s the fifth most populous country in the world. And people have some of the highest incidences of diseases that are treatable if not fully curable in the West, you know, so-called.

This includes hepatitis C. It includes breast cancer. Pakistan is among the highest rates of breast cancer in South Asia. Now these are all diseases for which medicines exist. And yet, due to lack of these and many other far simpler, far older medicines, Pakistanis are either suffering needlessly or dying prematurely.

And a particular example, I think, that might illustrate this idea of scandal is not a curative substance but a palliative substance, morphine. And I can talk more about morphine later. But I think the idea of scandal really first hit home for me when I started hearing over and over again from the people that I spoke to about how people with late-stage cancer in Pakistan, for whom treatment is now no longer a viable option, and who can only be given palliation at this point, simply do not have access to pain relief medication.

It is almost impossible in hospitals to get either fentanyl or morphine, which is sort of absolute basic standard of care for terminal cancer patients in the West. And the reasons for that are very counterintuitive. Usually, we think of drugs being difficult to access because they are too expensive, right, or they are under patent, and generic manufacture is not allowed in the Global South, which is something we see in India a lot.

In the case of morphine, none of these barriers to access actually / morphine is a drug that’s 200 years old. It’s been used for pain relief for 200 years. It’s not under patent anywhere. And it’s one of the cheapest medicines, even in the Pakistani scale of medicine pricing. And yet it’s almost impossible to get in hospitals.

And there is a very complicated constellation of bureaucratic policies, bureaucratic agencies, which has to do with a phobia of drug addiction and of morphine kind of percolating into the illicit realm, and therefore contributing to the problem of addiction as it’s called, that people who have cancer are not able to get it.

So it’s things like this that I’m trying to get at with the idea of scandal. There’s something egregious about this that you have illicit counterparts of morphine circulating on street corners. And doctors are forced to tell patients to go to the street to use that, figure of speech, and try to find morphine for their loved ones.

So this element of egregiousness, this element of outrage of a violation of some norm of decency or ethics, and also an affect. When people talk about this, there is this affect of this should not be happening, this should be easily preventable.

And yet, as I tried to show and as I’ve learned, it’s anything but easy. So this is sort of the, I guess, a little bit of a texture of what I’m trying to get at with the idea of scandal.

Julia Sizek: Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit more about access to morphine. So let’s say that you or a loved one is in a hospital, and you are trying to figure out how to get access to morphine for palliative care. What do those steps look like, and what are the rules that are governing whether or not you have access to morphine?

Zahra Hayat: That’s a great question. So some of the things that I’m going to say will be specific to morphine, but many of them will not. And they’ll be representative of the larger pharmaceutical landscape.

In fact, you know, ironically, just two days ago, one of my interlocutors at the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan, which one can see as the counterpart of the US FDA, sent me an article in one of the leading national dailies, talking about how patients with cancer, including children, and they were a large focus of that piece, are suffering horrifically because of the pain of end-stage cancer and how it’s just impossible to get morphine.

And there were senior oncologists who had been interviewed for that piece, who spoke about how the entire bureaucratic regime that governs, controlled substances, of which morphine is one, because of the addictive potential, that regime is so complicated and so lengthy that the companies that are trying to supply morphine sometimes have to wait months and months in order to get an approval for a quota of morphine.

So I’ll give you a very specific example of one of, maybe, the two companies that are still supplying morphine in Pakistan. So that in itself is scandalous. We have to 20 million people. We have over 800 registered pharmaceutical companies. And only two of them are actually selling morphine. And there are reasons for this, and there are twofold.

One has to do with pricing, and one has to do with what I’m calling bureaucracy. So I’ll talk about the bureaucracy piece first. I spoke with the CEO of this company in a lot of detail, and she explained to me just how excruciating the process is for them. So they import their morphine from Switzerland because the technology that they need, modified or slow release, they’re not able to make locally.

So it’s imported from Switzerland. Before they can put in an order for import, they have to apply to the drug regulatory authority and a constellation of other bureaucratic agencies, including the anti-narcotics force, for permission. And this permission is not something that’s granted to them as a blanket permission.

You get it once, and then they know that you’re supplying morphine, and that’s it. Every time they want to place an order for morphine, they have to secure this permission. The biggest roadblock here is before they can submit an application for a new stock, their existing stock has to finish. So this seems like such a simple sort of timing-related glitch to fix.

But it has not been fixed for years and years because it’s not just a simple bureaucratic glitch. And this is, I think, what I’m trying to get at as well that these things do not have easy quick techno fixes. So as this person explained to me, she said once we are down to zero for our quota of morphine, that’s when we’re able to submit an application.

Now that application can take anywhere from three months to six months to approve. Once it gets approved, you can place an order with your supplier in Switzerland, and there’s a lead time for that order as well. The consequence of this is that for about six months of the year, this company has no morphine to supply to hospitals. And hospitals simply don’t have morphine.

And so what they end up doing with patients is either just turning them away or saying that heroin, which is the illicit counterpart of morphine, they derive from the same opium poppy plant– or telling them that you can try and go to one of the– they’re called “addas” in Urdu, which is basically a figure of speech, but it sort of refers to– it’s a trope for where drug addicts tend to huddle.

That’s the trope. It’s a caricature. Go to those street corners, go to those drug addicts, try to get heroin from them. Now this undertaking itself is impossible for a lot of people. Sometimes in desperation, they do do this. They do go to addas and get morphine. And I have heard of people who’ve done this. But then, they talk about how you don’t know what you’re getting.

You absolutely have no sense of the purity or the quality of it. But at that point, I think the need is so dire that you’re not even thinking about questions, such as, what is the quality of this material? Anything that will relieve the pain is what will do.

So the second piece that I want to quickly talk about has to do with price. And this is a much broader problem. The bureaucratic control issue is specific to morphine and other controlled substances. And I just want to mention very quickly on that– this is not a Pakistan-specific problem. So across the Global South, access to morphine is a huge issue.

Julie Livingston’s work on cancer in Botswana mentions the same thing. And if you compare the statistics for consumption of morphine per capita in a country like the US and a country like Pakistan, the difference is literally thousands of per cents. And of course, advanced cancer is much more common in places like Pakistan because of late diagnosis. So the need and availability are just completely disjunct.

On the price question, this is a much larger issue that has a very central connection to access and problems of access in Pakistan, and that has to do with state regulation of pricing. And I can talk more about that later. But just very quickly, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan sets the maximum retail price for every drug that can be sold in the country.

And these price ceilings that they set are unviably low for a lot of corporations. And this is not just something the corporations are saying to me, and I’m taking them at their word. But this is actually from having looked at their detailed cost data.

A lot of my fieldwork was in these pricing meetings of the drug regulatory authority, which was accessed, that I was very lucky to get and to actually see that a lot of these companies are supplying products at a loss. And morphine was actually one of them. And the reasons for the drug regulatory authority being so hesitant to grant price increases has very fraught political reasons.

And we can talk more about the pricing question later. But the disincentive basically for companies to supply medicines is that you’re not going to be making much of a profit. And this doesn’t apply to all drugs, but specifically to morphine, and to many other simple, very cheap drugs. And given that it’s so complicated to get these approvals and quotas, most companies simply don’t want to get into this.

I mean, the CEO of this one company that still does it on a humanitarian basis, in their words, because it’s making a loss for them, was that you’d have to be crazy to get into this business because what are you really getting. So I’ll stop here now. But we can chat more about pricing.

Julia Sizek: Yeah. So I think one of the things, especially in the US, that people think about is that access to pharmaceuticals is limited by ability to pay. We hear conversations about the price of insulin, for example. And this is entirely about people being priced out of buying drugs that they need.

But what you’re describing here is actually a case where low prices are prohibiting access. Can you explain how that’s working, and how that works against how we sort of normally think about this situation?

Zahra Hayat: Absolutely, I mean, that for me was perhaps the biggest surprise of fieldwork. I actually had no idea about this before I started fieldwork. And then literally every person that I met in the pharmaceutical industry would begin our conversation by talking about the problem of prices being too low, and that being the reason for so many drugs not being available on the market.

So it is absolutely a very counterintuitive kind of relationship between price and access here. I just want to make a little caveat and say that there are drugs that are in fact, in absolute terms, too expensive for most people in Pakistan to afford, and these include especially anti-cancer drugs.

However, from the point of view of pharmaceutical companies, the price ceiling that is set for most drugs is unviable. And now that, of course, is a subjective term, for some the complaint is that the profit that we’re making is simply too low for us to be able to continue supplying this drug. For some, as I mentioned in the case of morphine, they might actually be supplying the drug at a loss.

So why is this happening? What is this sort of very rigid regime of price controls that is actually pushing a lot of drugs out of the market? They are pushing drugs out of the market, and then also a diversion of drugs as– in company-speak, which is basically that take the example of something as simple as a thyroid drug, levothyroxine, Synthroid.

It’s one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US. In Pakistan, it is perpetually out of stock at pharmacies. And one of the reasons is that it’s an extremely cheap drug. It costs a few rupees for a pack. And as soon as it hits the market, a lot of it gets bought up by these middlemen, as they are called, and diverted to black markets, or gray markets, as a lot of my interlocutors refer to them.

They will either be taken out of Pakistan, sort of sometimes at a small scale on a flight in somebody’s personal luggage, or they’ll be sold on the “black market,” quote unquote. So the drug regulatory authority under a federal law, the drugs act, is authorized to set the price of every medicine in the country.

The rationale, the purported rationale, for setting the prices that they do is that this is a country with a very poor and a very sick population. And in order to give them access to medicines, we have to keep the prices low. That’s the logic that the free market cannot be allowed to run amok in a country like this.

That logic is theoretically sound because we have seen what happens when the free market, quote unquote, “takes over,” and astronomical drug prices in the US being an instance, where the government is really constrained because of the pharmaceutical lobby from controlling or lowering drug prices. But in Pakistan, what seems to have happened is that this has been taken too far in some cases.

And there is so much rigidity even over the granting of a small price increase that might make a product viable for a pharma company. That companies sometimes simply do not want to deal with the hassle, and the months and months of negotiation that they need to do with the regulatory authorities. And they simply withdraw the drugs from the market.

Now I want to say a couple of things about this, one from the point of view of the regulators, and the second from the point of view of the companies. What the regulatory authorities– once you really start sort of probing, you actually find a lot of people who agree that this entire regime is fundamentally not working.

They agree that drug prices should be granted. But they operate under a lot of constraint. And the constraint comes from very unexpected sources. That have absolutely nothing to do with the economics of supply and demand. And one of the biggest sources of this constraint is political pressure. So medicines are a hot button issue in the country because of a large sick population.

And it is something that a propagandist media likes to really hone in on. So any time that a price increase is granted by the Drug Regulatory Authority– for instance, the price of very cheap medicine was raised from 2 rupees, which is some decimal points of a cent, to 4 rupees– that’s just 2 rupees increase in absolute terms.

It was presented as prices of many essential medications increased by 100%, and the national newspapers will carry that news. The drug regulators and the politicians who ultimately are the ones who have to sign off on these price increases– so these price increases are recommended by the regulators, and then they have to go to the legislature for approval.

And I’ve been told by official after official that the legislators will simply not sign off on the price increase because they’re scared of bad publicity, of being the people who approved the price increase.

So we’re dealing again with a very complex constellation of democratic politics in a country that’s also controlled to a very large extent by the military, but where a propagandist media does have a lot of power, I think, to scare people.

And then the second piece of this that actually relates directly to scandal is a history of an anti-corruption agency in the country called the National Accountability Bureau, which is a very activist sort of government department. It is controlled by the military to an extent. Many people think of it as an instrument of political scapegoating.

There was an actual scandal several years ago where price increases were granted to pharmaceutical companies. But then a NAB investigation was begun against those companies and against many officials on the grounds that they must have been– they must have accepted bribes from these companies in order to grant them the price increase.

And that history really, I think, reverberates among regulatory officials even today and acts as a huge constraint. And so there is just a lot of fear among those responsible for granting price increases to actually go ahead and grant them. So this, again, is one piece of a very complex set of issues.

But to me, this was just all completely new and made me realize that demand and supply and economics doesn’t have very much to do with what’s going on with pricing in Pakistan.

Julia Sizek: Yeah. And so I think another big component of what you’re thinking about in your research in addition to this issue of pricing is that of the intellectual property regime. So let’s dive into that a little bit. Let’s say if you’re an American company and you have made this drug, how does a Pakistani company get that ability to process that same drug under intellectual property law?

Zahra Hayat: Yeah. So I guess the first thing that I’ll say is just to set the stage for this is the trade-related aspects of property agreement, TRIPS, which is the instrument of the World Trade Organization that governs intellectual property across most of the world. And the purported aim of which is to harmonize, quote unquote, “intellectual property laws” among all signatory states.

Now there is obviously a very robust body of work that is critical of TRIPS, and that really challenges this euphemism of harmonization as it basically being an instrument of neoliberal control because a lot of pharmaceutical innovation, “innovation” in quotes, but a lot of the new drugs, or the cutting-edge drugs, or especially biologicals are being developed in the West because of the huge resources required for R&D, and clinical trials, and so on.

And what these companies really are wanting is not just to make profits in the Global South, but also to control markets in the Global South. And here I want to point to something, I think, that’s really fundamentally important to understand about how intellectual property works that– and I can do this through the example of a series of very high-profile patent battles that have taken place in India, for instance.

And this is relevant for the case of Pakistan as well. One of the most well known cases was the case of Novartis, leukemia drug GLEEVEC, which Novartis had a patent for abroad, and it was trying to get a patent in India. So one of the most important things to know about TRIPS is that you need to apply separately in every country for a patent.

Novartis went into India and tried to assert its patent. A lot of companies that were already making generic versions of GLEEVEC and selling them for thousands of dollars less and making this life-saving cancer drug accessible to a very poor Indian population, opposed the application for a patent as did many nonprofits and patient advocate groups.

And Novartis really fought hard. And there are scholars like Kaushik Sundarajan, who’ve done very meticulous work on this precise case actually. And what’s really interesting, I think, in– and also, just very revelatory about how intellectual property works is that Novartis was not trying to get the generics companies to stop making copies, as they call them, of the drug because they wanted to be the suppliers to the Indian population, instead, and thus make a profit.

And the reason for this is that even the lowest price that Novartis would be able to charge for GLEEVEC in India would be something that most Indians would not be able to pay. And Novartis was– while it was fighting this case– also giving away a lot of GLEEVEC for free.

And what it said actually as part of its litigation and as part of the public relations fiasco that was happening around this case was that if our patent is not upheld in India, we will withdraw this free GLEEVEC program that we have in place. And so scholars have really asked this question.

They were like, why is Novartis so insistent on protecting its intellectual property, even when it is not making a profit on this drug and cannot make a profit on this drug. And there are two reasons for this, and I think they’re really important to understand because they really tell us how IP now, especially in the pharma realm, works in the Global South.

One reason is that a lowering of the price, which would be represented by generic manufacture, would stir up and has stirred up actually criticism among Novartis’s consumers in America and Europe as to why they are being charged astronomically high prices when people in India can get the drug for a few thousand rupees.

So there’s, of course, the possibility of arbitrage, the drug being smuggled into the West. But apart from this concrete possibility, there are also the optics of a drug that people in the West are really also struggling to be able to afford, as you mentioned earlier, being available so cheaply.

So it is to protect its international scaffolding of prices that Novartis would deprive Indian patients of the drug, even though it’s not going to make a profit there. And a second very important reason is how pharma companies use intellectual property, not just to make profit in that particular country, but as a means of controlling certain markets.

And again here, the Indian example is very instructive because it contrasts radically with Pakistan. India is one of the world’s largest generics manufacturers as we know. And so what Novartis and a lot of other pharmaceutical multinationals fear is that if generic versions of their drugs are made in India, they will then be exported, because these Indian companies are large exporters, to markets, especially in Latin America, which these companies are very interested in actually making profits in.

So what they’re trying to do by preventing generics manufacture in India is not so much preserve their monopoly in India and be able to sell to Indian patients, but to preserve their monopoly in other markets. So we also see how intellectual property– even though normative law says patents are only national in scope.

It basically works as part of this very tangled global web, which has repercussions for patients in the Global South. And Pakistan very quickly falls into this calculus in– I think the clearest way to articulate is that Pakistan does not matter to most pharmaceutical companies. And many of my interlocutors have told me in very evocative language.

They’ve said Pakistan is a decimal point correction in the profits of pharmaceutical multinationals, or the only value Pakistan has for pharma MNCs is its nuisance value. And what they’re trying to get at again is the poverty of the Pakistani population and their inability to afford many of these drugs.

But a crucial difference between a place like Pakistan and India is that big pharma also isn’t particularly interested in preventing generics manufacture in Pakistan because Pakistani companies are not big exporters at all. So it’s not like big pharma’s other markets are under threat from Pakistan.

And so what ends up happening is when a new drug is developed in, say, the US or Switzerland, it will, in most cases, simply not make its way to Pakistan at all. So the pharmaceutical company is not going to go in or even bother applying for a patent on the drug because it knows that it doesn’t really have anything to gain either from selling in this market or from preventing generics manufacture in this market.

And so countries like Pakistan basically tend to get bypassed. And so we end up in this paradoxical kind of situation where, yes, it’s not actually patents on these new drugs that are preventing the population’s access. It’s just that the companies are not even motivated to apply for patents in the country.

And so you see what we have in the case of Pakistan is very, very different from the more standard big pharma versus local generics standoff that has been extensively researched and written about. India being one of the main sites for this because of its generics industry.

But places like Pakistan are just left out of both that narrative and also of, I think, these particular flows of global pharmaceutical capital by just not mattering enough.

Julia Sizek: Yeah. I think it’s both very enlightening and very depressing to think about this intersection of the capital, impulse of these companies to try to make more money, and then at the same time, it’s just not worth it either to protect their intellectual property in a place like Pakistan or to apply to be part of that.

And I think one of the interesting ways that this shows up, and that you analyze in your research, is actually the case of hepatitis C because hepatitis C is something that is quite prevalent in Pakistan. So can you tell us a little bit about hep C specifically and what that looks like?

Zahra Hayat: Absolutely. And hep C is a great example also because the drug for hep C, Sovaldi, is a very, very rare exception to the trend of the newest Western drugs not coming to Pakistan. And I’ll talk about how it made its way to Pakistan. So first of all, yes, the incidence of hep C in Pakistan is extremely high. Unofficial figures put it at as high as 10%, perhaps, but it could be higher.

And before 2015, the treatment for hep C, anywhere, not just in Pakistan, was basically the way that you would treat a chronic disease that you couldn’t really cure. And there were interferon injections. It was an exhausting, and long, and very, very expensive kind of process. And there was a lot of suffering actually in Pakistan because of hepatitis C.

And the spread of hepatitis C is actually also something that is an issue. It’s what a lot of the narrative sort of in the global health landscape tends to focus on, I think, as it does of the population behaviors in the Global South. And there’s obviously a critique of that because it is, I think, redirection of focus from a big pharmaceutical capital and how it works to patient behavior.

And we have obviously seen a trend in anthropology and medical anthropology from directing our attention elsewhere to these larger structures of exploitation and inequality, instead of just talking about how patients or how people have issues with hygiene or compliance, and so on. That said, as part of this structural landscape, there is, for instance, a lot of sharing of syringes among drug users.

And there aren’t any safety protocols in place for them. And so that tends to be a demographic where hep C is very high. But there’s an actual fear among people in Pakistan of contracting hepatitis, if you go to a dentist, or if you go– and have your hair cut. And these are legitimate fears because there have been instances of many, many people contracting hep C in these ways.

And because it is so prevalent in the population, and it can remain latent for a while, chances of getting infected are actually very high. So and at this point, Pakistan actually has, if I’m not mistaken, the highest rate of hep C in the world. Egypt used to be at the top, and then Egypt has largely eradicated the disease.

And that brings me to the story of Sovaldi, which is a drug, and it was hailed by everybody as this path-breaking, paradigm-shifting drug, brought to market by Gilead, which is actually based close to us in Foster City, California.

And it was considered such a transformative kind of drug for hep C, rendering it from a chronic condition to a completely curable condition with a course, I think, of four weeks of taking a pill a day. And there’s obviously much more. It’s more complicated like there are combination therapies, and so on.

But I think with Sovaldi, this shift from chronic management to cure happened very definitively and continues to be the case. And this came out in 2016 the US, if I’m not mistaken, thereabouts. And the FDA actually granted expedited review as it does for really breakthrough therapies, which it knows are also in urgent need.

And it came to the US market and really created a sort of a PR storm in part because of the revolutionary nature of the drug, but also because of the staggering price tag that the drug came with. And this is something that, I think, has become etched in people’s minds, anybody who’s sort of in the pharmaceutical world, that the price of a course of Sovaldi was $84,000.

And of course, when you look at how structures of payment work in America, it’s not that the final patient would be paying this money out of pocket, but somebody would have to pay it. So insurers were hesitant to even authorize this drug. So the $84,000 price tag, and the sticker shock that came with it was a big– it actually stirred a lot of conversation in the US on drug prices getting out of control.

And if you look at the public filings of Gilead, and you look at some of the information about how they actually set this price, which they had to make public because there was actually a congressional inquiry into how the price of Sovaldi was set in the US, you get this insight into how pharmaceutical companies think about pricing, and how radically different this is from the case of Pakistan.

You’re not thinking about what the government will allow. The kinds of things that you’re thinking about are what can we get away without inciting an uproar. And it’s literally couched in language like that. So they did price it. It incited an uproar to an extent, but they also made huge profits. The company made huge profits.

And this is where I think that Gilead also deserves credit. I am trying, even as I write about this, is to not take this very simple black and white– big pharma is evil, or big pharma as sort of this beneficent force in the world– kind of binary because it’s obviously much more complicated than that.

And the case of Gilead really illustrates that because what Gilead did, while it was making these astronomical profits in America and Europe, it also started what is called a Gilead Access Program, and it took Sovaldi to countries like Egypt, to countries like Pakistan, which had very high incidences of the disease, and which could not pay even hundreds of the price that Gilead was charging for Sovaldi abroad.

And in Pakistan, in particular, Gilead entered into a collaboration with a very well-reputed and well-respected Pakistani company called Ferozsons, and they developed this working relationship, a very strong relationship over the years. And they, through this local company, agreed to sell Sovaldi in Pakistan at 2% of the price that they were charging in the US.

They were not going to make a profit with this price in Pakistan, but they were still breaking even, which gives you a sense of their profit margin in the US at the prices that they were charging. And the reason they wanted to do this break-even kind of strategy, and as they pitched their Global Access Program is that this is not corporate social responsibility, this is not philanthropy.

What we want is for a sustainable model whereby drugs can make their way to people who need them the most and can’t pay for them in a way that the company can also sustain. So there is I think good sense to that logic. And so this drug comes to Pakistan. It’s priced as I said at 2% of its US price.

It costs around rupees 55,000 for a course, which now would be something like a little less than $500, I think, if I’m getting my math right, which was still unaffordable for the large majority of people, but still much more so than what the original price was. And then the really interesting thing that happened, has to do with intellectual property.

So Sovaldi then, Gilead then entered into a license with its local partner, Ferozsons, giving Ferozsons permission to make a copy of Sovaldi locally. They gave them the technical know-how, and they basically helped them manufacture this copy, which was much more affordable.

And as part of this license, there were certain stipulations that Ferozsons had to buy the raw material from companies that Gilead had approved. And some of these approved companies were in India. So Ferozsons was able to source the raw material from there, make much more affordable versions, and start selling them in Pakistan.

And then something really interesting happened. Once people– local pharmaceutical companies caught on– and they had already been on top of all of this, they knew that Sovaldi had come out in America, they knew that something huge had happened– they all wanted to jump on the bandwagon. And they applied to the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan for registration and said, we want to make copies, too.

And the Drug Regulatory Authority granted this registration to, I think, about 15 or so local companies. And so what this did was that the price of a course of hep C medicine dropped down to something like a few thousand rupees.

In all of this, Gilead had an option. Gilead could have prevented this. But what did they need to do to prevent this. They, first of all, needed to apply for a patent on Sovaldi in Pakistan. If they were granted that patent, they would then have to go to court and assert that patent, and say, all of these local companies that don’t have a license with us are just making unauthorized copies.

And this is a violation of our intellectual property. And the only company that should be allowed is the company that we’re actually partnering with, i.e. Ferozsons. Gilead did not do this.

And this is something– the next point I think is really crucial to appreciate because what a lot of people say about Gilead is that Gilead chose to relinquish its intellectual property and give this drug for free to people in Pakistan. Now that’s partially correct. And without taking away from Gilead’s initiative– because they didn’t actually have to do this.

So that part is also important to understand. They could simply have sidestepped Pakistan altogether. But another reason, and another way that we can think of this relinquishment, so-called, of Gilead’s intellectual property is the thing that I said earlier, which is that, what incentive does Gilead have to apply for a patent in Pakistan and to follow it through?

And interestingly– I dug around a little bit and found that there was actually an application that was filed but never really followed up. And when you speak with people at Gilead, they just have conflicting stories of why they didn’t apply for a patent in Pakistan. But the upshot of all those stories, honestly, is that it wasn’t in their interest to apply for a patent in Pakistan.

There was no way that they could make a profit on Sovaldi in Pakistan. They couldn’t charge a price high enough to enable them to do that. And they don’t really see any Pakistani company as a threat to them. So this one company that they entered a license with Ferozsons is actually constrained from exporting the local version that it’s making.

But Ferozsons really values their relationship with Gilead, and it is a very important relationship. So they wouldn’t really go against Gilead and try to flout their authority and try to compete with them anyway. So in a way, Gilead is accomplishing the sort of control that it wanted by having this license with the one company that it considers high quality.

And it is bothered by this plethora of local copies. And there is a lot of criticism coming from their end about how we don’t have any idea of the quality of these drugs because we have no control. We don’t know where they’re sourcing their API and so on. But again, they’re not pushed enough to stop any of this because it’s not really affecting their profit numbers.

So I think what this case really illustrates is, again, how intellectual property can bypass certain places. A relinquishment of intellectual property can be seen as an act of great largess. But it can also be seen as a very pragmatic calculation instead of capitalist profit-driven logics. And I think that holding space for both of these is important.

It would be wonderful if more companies did what Gilead did because Sovaldi is one of the very, very rare instances of a brand new drug that is just released in the West coming to Pakistan within a year. This rarely happens. So far, nobody has really jumped on this bandwagon and tried to do this with another drug. But that is the hope that this continues to happen.

But I think while we laud these efforts and while we try to have more of this, it’s just also important to be perhaps clearer on the intellectual property dynamics and what is really at play.

Julia Sizek: Yeah. Well, that is just so fascinating to really think about the intersection of both the profit-making impulse of these companies and then how it intersects with intellectual property and so. With that, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Zahra Hayat: Thank you. This is wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Migration and Reform in Early America: An Interview with J.T. Jamieson

Published October 25, 2022

What role did American social and moral reformers play in managing human migrations? J.T. Jamieson, a Phd Candidate in UC Berkeley’s History Department, examines how social reformers in the first half of the 19th century sought to control migration and insert their own understandings of morality, social benevolence, and humanitarianism into the lives and experiences of migrants. In so doing, he argues, their reforms frequently perpetuated racial supremacy, religious supremacy, and Christian expansionism. In other words, they sought to determine who belongs in America — and who doesn’t.

Jamieson’s dissertation, “A Mere Change of Location: Migration and Reform in America, 1787-1857,” integrates the histories of religion, immigration, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and Western expansion to argue that 19th-century social and moral reformers attempted to control the mass migrations of various peoples: African Americans, Indigenous peoples, European immigrants, and American settlers. A forthcoming journal article, “Home Work: Religious Nationalism and the American Home Missionary Society,” will appear in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 2023.

Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Jamieson about his research. Listen to the interview below, or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts. (A transcript of the conversation is included below, edited for length and clarity.)

Q: We’re familiar with migration as being a very hotly contested moral and political debate, but your research investigates this topic during a time period that is less familiar. What were the big debates about migration during the 18th century?

You’re right that it is a major hot button topic in political discourse and cultural politics today. And it has been for most of the United States’ history, including in the late 18th century and throughout the first half of the 19th century. There are many different political debates about citizenship, about migration, about different ways to control migration, usually on a local, municipal, or state level. But the debates I’m most interested in my research have less to do with policy and law, and more to do with cultural and social debates about morality and migration, and what the consequences were of different kinds of people moving from one place to another, either within the United States or beyond its borders, for the moral character of American society in general.

I look at different kinds of moral and social reformers from the late 18th century up to the Civil War, and the way that they debated whether or not they should control the mobility of different kinds of people in different ways, and how they thought that one’s moral character could be influenced by a change of location. I look at how reformers who are interested in European immigration, reformers interested in expelling and removing and deporting Black and Indigenous peoples, and reformers who were interested in the movements and the fate of European and Anglo-Americans who were settling in the American West. I look at how, in all these different contexts, different moral and social reformers developed ideas about moral character, and what they thought it meant for one big group of people to move from one place to another, and how that became a kind of mechanism for them to manage inclusion and exclusion in the body politic.

Who were the migrants coming to the United States during this time?

That’s a good question. There was a large number of enslaved people coming to North America during the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century; the international slave trade technically then stopped, but it went on illegally. And then a lot of the people coming later were Europeans. During the Gold Rush era, you saw transpacific migrations, from other parts of North America, Central America, and South America.

But I’m interested in not only people moving into the United States, but also moving within it and moving out of it. To take the example of slavery, one of the main case studies in my dissertation is the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS was a national voluntary organization that advocated for the deportation of enslaved and free Black Americans to Africa. And it was really a wide-ranging movement with lots of different splinter organizations, and attracted lots of different people with various degrees of racism and various motivations for wanting to expel free and enslaved Black people.

I look at that organization from the from the perspective of moral and social reform and the people who thought of themselves as humanitarians, and argued that the moral thing to do was to expel Black people and keep the United States as basically a White republic. They thought this was moral for a couple of reasons. They thought it would help Black people achieve a sense of moral uplift or improvement in their moral character if they were removed from White people. They thought that they could utilize colonies of Black Americans in Africa to serve as missionaries and evangelists to Indigenous Africans. There were different ways that they said, “If we deport and expel and uphold a racially exclusionary population, we’re actually doing something good and humane and humanitarian.”

There’s this logic that social benevolence is good, that they’re doing something good for these people. But the effect is that they are claiming that they [Black Americans] did not belong in the United States. There was this weird logic in the social benevolence that ultimately upheld racism and racial exclusion. But in their minds, they were drawing on arguments about moral uplift, evangelical regeneration, and exporting Christianity through the world.

Q: One of the things that’s interesting about this group of White people proposing that Black Americans should move back to Africa is that it contained the idea that segregation is good, and that they had learned something in the US that they could take back with them as missionaries. How did they portray that aspect of this supposedly moral work?

It came down to a lot of propaganda. Often it was a fiction, especially when other White missionaries are seeing these colonies in action and how mismanaged they were, and how much these Black colonists were suffering and the conflicts that they endured with Indigenous Africans.

It fell on a colonizationists, and especially colonists, to think of themselves as reformers and as humanitarians, and to create this image in the United States of Black people who are willing to do these things that they may not actually be willing to do, and saying they were ready to embrace their new life as voluntary emigrants in some other land. They did a lot of propagandistic work to create this fiction of the excited, willing emigrant who is, in reality, often being forcefully removed from the United States.

There’s an image on a membership card for the Pennsylvania Colonization Society that depicts a scene of White men delivering Black colonists to Liberia. And it’s a scene of total jubilation, as if they have found their true proper home, and White people can take some kind of pleasure in having effected this transatlantic migration back to Africa.

So in many cases it was a total fiction that depended on the propagandistic work of colonizationists, in their publications sermonizing to their congregations, about how good and right this actually was, without recognizing the inherent racism and violence in this form of what they think of as social benevolence.

Q: As a historian, how did you approach the archives of printed materials and separate propaganda from fact?

It’s definitely hard to distinguish the two; often it is a challenge to try to figure out when people were speaking genuinely or it was intended to cover up their true motives. For historians, it often comes down to judgment calls and trying to fill out the worldviews of the of the people that you are examining, to try to figure out if their public and private writing seem to align, or if they seem to be genuinely thinking, I’m doing some kind of humanitarian work here, or if they’re really just using this idea of charity, benevolence, and philanthropy as a cover for more sinister motives. It depends on taking lots of different sources into account — public sources that were published and meant for public consumption, as well as private writings — and trying to reconstruct a worldview that in many cases seems alien and weird to us today. It’s about trying to situate that within the logic of the historical moment that it existed in.

Q: What were some of the archives you used for this research?

I used some archival collections from here in Berkeley from the Graduate Theological Union, particularly for a chapter about domestic missionaries who were concerned with the migration of settlers to the American West. Some missionaries or missionary organizations feared the depopulation of their congregations as people moved west, and they tried to complain and do something to stop and control it. Meanwhile, others were celebrating the migration of people to the American West as a means to expand Christianity. The papers of this organization, the American Home Missionary Society, are in the Graduate Theological Union, with lots of other great stuff. I also looked at materials in Kansas related to Kansas settlers, and people who were involved in trying to remove Indigenous people from east of the Mississippi. There were also archives in the Northeast, where a lot of these organizations and this culture of social reform and benevolence was mainly rooted — in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and places like that.

Q: One of the points you raised is that a lot of these organizations or groups were associated with religious groups. What was the structure of these societies at this time, and where did they fall in relation to the major religious movements in the US?

The sort of reform culture that I’m speaking about came out of what was a very broad culture of philanthropy and charity and social benevolence that emerged in the first half of the 19th century, as more wealthy people and an emerging middle class developed a kind of humanitarian attitude. It was very wide ranging, and there were lots of conflicts within it. People were interested in prisons and education as well as slavery, but a lot of people were also interested in missions. Many people who subscribed to this culture of benevolence and reform in the 19th century tended to be Protestants and have a cultural Protestant ethic that inspired their views on social benevolence. But the really overtly religious stuff came in the form of missions or movements to found and organize Sunday schools.

Some of the major missionary organizations that I looked at include the American Home Missionary Society, which was often concerned with White and American and European settlers moving to the American West. There was also a foreign counterpart to that, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which was a large national society working beyond the borders of the United States, and also with Indigenous people in some cases. Some of these of the missionaries associated with this organization, or organizations of other religious denominations, either supported or tried to argue against the deportation of Indigenous peoples, and they made various moral arguments, similar to how people made arguments about the removal of Black Americans to Africa or elsewhere. But religion played a big role as an undercurrent for a lot of these movements and these attitudes about benevolence and reform. There were also missionary organizations that turned into like very big national missionary organizations, which tended to be either Presbyterian or Congregationalists, though the Baptists have some and the Episcopalians have some. These missionary organizations were very visible in this culture of benevolence and and reform.

Q: You noted that the missionaries were working domestically within the United States and also outside of the United States. Where were they operating primarily?

The ABCFM was working among Indigenous peoples in what we would now consider the boundaries of the United States, as well as places like Hawaii, Burma, or Africa — places all over all over the world. But the domestic missionaries were much more concerned with ideas about migration, more so than the foreign missionaries, who were actually moving farther from the United States. The domestic missionaries were concerned with the migration of European and Anglo-Americans throughout the West, and with the depopulation of churches in the U.S. They were also concerned with immigration.

They often viewed the world as collapsing in upon the United States. In part, they had ideas that were very rooted in nativism, specifically in anti-Catholic nativism, where there’s a fear of mainly European immigrants coming into the United States. There were lots of conspiracies about Catholic European immigrants coming under the thumb of insidious papal forces that would then destroy American democracy. There was a lot of nativistic fear of immigrants, and especially of Catholics.

They had come to think that God had purposefully designed the world and had himself inspired migrations from abroad to come into the United States, whether from China or from Europe. They saw an almost millennialist promise in the migration of other people into the United States, because God is bringing them to us to convert them. So there is this kind of pessimism, and this fear and anxiety about immigrants coming into the United States from the perspective of domestic missionaries.

There’s also a great hope and optimism about it, because they think that God is making the world collapse into the United States, and it’s in the religious theater of the United States that they will be converted. It’s almost like they were converting the world with foreign missionary work, but within the territorial boundaries of the United States. Interestingly, it was really these domestic missionaries, working within the bounds of the United States, who were much more concerned with migratory flows of various kinds, whether within the United States or coming into the United States from other countries. It’s the domestic missionaries that that seem to really be thinking about the meaning of migration, more so than the foreign missionaries.

Q: One of the cases that you look at is sort of the famous case of Bleeding Kansas. What was Bleeding Kansas, and how was it significant for the migration debate?

Bleeding Kansas, as probably many Americans know, refers to a series of violent episodes in Kansas Territory in the mid-1850s. It’s one of these things that precipitated the sectionalism of the Civil War. The violence erupted over debates about whether or not Kansas would be established as a free state or a slave state. It was up to the residents to vote about whether or not they wanted their state to be a free state or not. The effect this had is that a lot of pro- and anti-slavery people started talking about sending or supporting migrants who were going to Kansas with this presumption that those populations who are sympathetic to either slavery or anti-slavery will then vote to make Kansas a free state or a slave state. That would have major political repercussions at this time, and so there was lots of violence and political and cultural debate about the destiny of Kansas.

I look at it through the lens of of emigrant aid societies. The big one is something called the New England Emigrant Aid Company, or NEEAC, which was a formed by a bunch of people in Massachusetts, both religious reformers as well as wealthy philanthropists, who supported this. Their idea is that they would help “Free-Soil” (or anti-slavery) settlers on their journey to Kansas, by pumping capital into settlements in Kansas.

This is important to my story in two ways. One is that these organizations — the NEEAC and other other organizations that wanted to support Free-Soil and anti-slavery Kansas settlers — viewed migration as a kind of tool to solve the problem of slavery in the United States. They thought they could just support the migration of a large number of people, but they turned out to actually not support that many people, which was the case with a lot of my case studies. They have very grandiose ideas, and they actually don’t work out all the time.

But anyway, the idea of the of the NEEAC is that, by moving a certain population with particular religious or economic or political affiliations from one place to another, they can influence the destiny of slavery in the United States, and they hoped to help end slavery in the United States, not in any kind of radical abolitionist way. They’re all pretty conservative, but they were anti-slavery. So they think of it as a tool to solve a major social problem.

They also think about how migration to the West has been, in their view, a humanitarian problem for White and American European settlers. They say, often when people migrate to the West as settlers, they face innumerable challenges, and tend to suffer a lot and experience destitution and suffering of various kinds. But, they say, if we organize this migration and support their settlements economically, if we help transplant communities of similar people, that will go a very long way to ease the suffering or abuse of Western migrants.

So they’re thinking about supporting and helping migrants both to address this larger social problem, the problem of slavery, and they’re also thinking about migration itself as as a problem that requires some kind of benevolent intervention. They say, “the settlers, in our view, have been suffering. But if we support and organize them migrate, they won’t suffer anymore.” They saw emigration as a tool to solve a problem, and they think of migration as a problem in and of itself that they need to intervene in, and in some way regulate or control. Those two views of migration are really where the bulk of my argument throughout my dissertation hinges around.

Q: One of the big figures in the history of the American West was the “land speculator,” who was often accused of promoting disorganized settlement by sending someone off with their little parcel of land in a somewhat amoral, or perhaps entirely immoral way. How did they view themselves relative to these land speculators?

Land speculation is a big part of my story, from the beginning , when I talk about European immigrants coming in the late 18th century, to the end, when I talk about immigrants going to the west and to Kansas in the 1850s. I don’t really look so much at speculation activities, but more the idea of the land speculator, as you say, as a sort of amoral person intent on deceiving poor people to come settle their lands, when they don’t actually care about them at all. These people end up suffering in all kinds of ways. And the speculator just wants to make their dollar.

At the beginning of my story, when I look at European immigration, there was a transatlantic fear about American land speculators in the late 18th century. You had people in England and in France vocally trying to demonize American land speculators, because they said, we will both lose our population and we will end up suffering. It’s our job to warn people about these kind of speculative projects. You had land speculators saying, “Oh, great things wait for you, if you come to America.” Europeans think, “it’s our job to tell people the truth.” And in telling them the truth about how they will suffer at the hands of these land speculators, then they won’t migrate. It’s a kind of informal tool to regulate migration.

The same thing happened in the West. In Kansas, there was a long history throughout the 19th century. They have this same kind of fear of the figure of the speculator who’s only interested in deceiving people. And these reformers, people interested in social benevolence, think it’s their job to tell people the truth, and say, “Don’t trust these land speculators – believe the information that we give you.” And in doing that, we will in some way have a hand in controlling or regulating the movements of migrants and of settlers with the NEEAC, the New England Emigrant Aid Company in Kansas. They’re very aware of this. And so they go to great lengths to say, “Oh, we’re really only interested in giving out correct information.” There’s a big emphasis on trustworthy, correct advice being given to prospective settlers and migrants. And then they also come under attack by pro-slavery enemies of the NEEAC, who say, “Actually, you are deceptive land speculators only interested in yourselves.”

This kind of debate reached into Congress, as Congressman from the North and the South were debating emigrant aid companies to Kansas, saying, “you are guilty of this inhumane abuse of settlers.” The land speculator again figures in my story in all these kinds of ways. It’s more against the idea of the land speculator, as someone who is intent on abusing or creating suffering for migrants and settlers. And lots of people take it upon themselves to accuse someone else of being a speculator, but with the interest of wanting to influence whether or not a person is going to move to a particular place. Insofar as it figures into my story about reform and benevolence, calling out land speculators as a tool to regulate or limit or control whether or not people are going to make a decision to migrate plays an important part.

Q: That’s interesting because it suggests a 19th-century version of what people today might call the spreading of misinformation. So what ended up happening around Bleeding Kansas and the debates about emigration?

Ultimately, Kansas did become a free state as the Civil War was about to happen. But the people related to emigrant aid, the charitable organizations that I talked about, did not have the best track record. There were lots of settlers in Kansas who said, “Actually, this organization ended up not doing very much for us.” Practically, they figured into the political debate about migration to the West in the 1850s. But after the end of the 1850s, a lot of these guys — and they were mostly guys — started to look beyond Kansas, and they tried to take ideology of what they called “organized immigration” and apply it to other places. Some people associated with it were now looking at developing some kind of migration project to Texas, to Oregon, to Florida, or even to Nicaragua. And none of these really works out in any kind of real way. They all fail or don’t work out in different ways and for different reasons.

But what it shows, right up to the end of the pre-Civil War period, is the belief that it’s possible to colonize and organize the migration of people through these avenues of philanthropy and moral reform, and that the outcome will be that we’re making the world a better place for whatever reason, whether we’re spreading what they would think of as an Anglo-American civilization, or supporting migrants who they think might otherwise be suffering, if they were to settle somewhere else on their own without some kind of charitable support. It shows that, despite their failures, [migration supporters] believed this is still possible. In theory, it’s within the realm of possibility to regulate and control and support large movements of people from one place to another.

In many of my case studies, not that many people actually ended up moving under the auspices of these different organizations, but what it did is cultivate this middle-class social politics of humanitarianism, where supporting all kinds of different people moving becomes significant, and people start to make a connection between large groups of people moving from one place to the other, and a sort of social transformation on both an individual level and a larger national or community level. Even though in many cases, these projects don’t work out, it demonstrates the way that people were thinking about migration, and trying to embed some kind of humanitarian language into debates about migration, and trying to use philanthropy and social benevolence as a tool to control or regulate where different people are moving.

Ultimately, in their minds, that determines who belongs in the United States and who doesn’t; what religious, national, ethnonational, racial, or economic political groups belong here, and which don’t. Relying on philanthropy and social benevolence as a means to determine that is something that emerged in this period, and is something that has generally been understudied by historians, who are otherwise interested in looking at ideas about citizenship and policy and the work of the state in controlling and regulating migration.

I’m arguing that there were other ways that Americans thought they could influence and regulate migratory flows of people. And one of those ways was through participating in philanthropy and charity and social benevolence.

Podcast

Reconsidering the Achievement Gap: An Interview with Monica Ellwood-Lowe

Published October 11, 2022

Monica Ellwood-Lowe is a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology whose research focuses on differences between outcomes for students of different socioeconomic status, as well as the societal barriers that might hinder student success. Ellwood-Lowe tries to answer such questions as, what skills do children develop when they come from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes, even in the face of societal barriers to success? Do children’s brains simply adapt to their respective environments?

Ellwood-Lowe is co-mentored by Professors Mahesh Srinivasan and Silvia Bunge. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. Monica’s work is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, and the Greater Good Science Center.

For this episode of the Matrix podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Ellwood-Lowe about her recent research on the topic of children’s cognitive performance, and how we might think about removing barriers to children’s success.

Listen to the podcast below, or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts. More episodes of the Matrix Podcast can be found on this page.

A transcript of the interview is included below (edited for length and clarity).

What is the achievement gap, and how has it typically been studied in psychology?

The idea of an “achievement gap” is the idea that kids who grow up in higher socioeconomic status homes, where their parents are more highly educated or have higher incomes, tend to do better in school than kids who grow up in lower socioeconomic status homes. I look at the achievement gap in terms of socioeconomic status (SES), but people also study it in terms of racial and ethnic differences. But it’s the idea that kids’ test scores, even by the time they enter kindergarten, are higher when they come from higher SES backgrounds.

What kinds of tests do researchers use to evaluate children’s cognitive performance?

Even before kindergarten, lots of researchers measure children’s vocabulary. They look at how many words kids understand and produce; starting as early as 18 months, you can get some indices of the number of words kids know. But one thing I really want to emphasize is that vocabulary doesn’t have to mean the same thing as achievement. One of the things that I think psychology does not do well, compared to other disciplines, is that when we think about these big issues like school performance or outcomes, we’re really focused on individual-level metrics, like vocabulary. When you think about how significant and longstanding these issues are, it’s really important to zoom out and think about the structural factors that are playing into all of this.

Beyond vocabulary, what are some of the other ways researchers can measure children’s cognitive function or school performance?

There are lots of different tests that measure children’s “executive function,” which is supposed to be an unbiased measure of children’s cognitive abilities. It’s gotten a lot of flack for not being unbiased for all sorts of different reasons. Typically, the people who have created it are white, upper-middle-class researchers, who have a certain idea of what cognitive performance looks like.

But normally, it ends up looking like kids playing games designed to tell us something about their cognition. They might be doing some kind of matching game, or there’s a measure where they see different sets of patterns, and they’re asked to fill in the missing set, as in, what completes this pattern? That’s called the matrix reasoning task. Those are the kinds of tests that we usually use.

What are the methods that psychologists use to explain the differences in cognitive function among the kids as they take these tests?

That’s been something psychologists have been really interested in. We administer these tests, and we find differences between kids from different backgrounds, and then psychologists come in and they want to know, why do we see these differences? When they’re happening even before school, it seems like it’s something that might be happening in the home.

One of the things many researchers have looked at is the amount of language that parents are directing toward their children. They’ll look at the very specific form of speech where parents are talking directly to their kid. This doesn’t include speech like parents talking to other siblings, or parents talking to other adults. That’s one of the things we have found really correlates with how many words kids end up knowing. But one of the things that’s really limiting about this is that children are perfectly capable of learning from those other forms of speech. We just think that kind of learning might be happening later, rather than earlier.

This is what people popularly call the “word gap.” You worked on a study about this concept and what it does for how we think about children’s performance. What did you learn in that study?

The concept of the “word gap” was popularized in 1995 by Hart and Risley, and they did a large study that led them to conclude that, by the time they are three years old, kids from higher SES homes have heard 30 million more words than kids from lower SES homes.

There are a lot of issues with this metric, and it has definitely come under fire. For one thing, we know that the gap can’t possibly be that big from more recent measures. For another thing, these were just numbers that were extrapolated from hours-long recordings in the home, and we now have better ways of quantifying kids’ all-day language environments. Third, this was again only looking at that very specific type of child-directed speech. When you zoom out and look at the entire language environment, that gap totally disappears.

That said, the general idea that higher SES parents talk more to their kids than lower SES parents has been replicated a lot. A lot of different researchers, even all around the world, have found this general phenomenon. That really led us to wonder why this is such a stable phenomenon. Lots of researchers have looked at individual-level mechanisms that might be promoting this. For example, maybe higher SES parents have more parenting knowledge, whatever that is, and that [knowledge] leads them to talk to their kids more. So maybe the solution is: let’s go into the home and train lower SES parents to talk more to their kids. But when you think about just how broad this problem is — it’s been documented since the 1950s in the US, it’s been documented all over the world, and in rural areas and urban areas — it doesn’t seem like these individual-level explanations can carry that much weight.

We were interested in zooming out to think about, structurally, what does it mean to be lower SES? When you think about socioeconomic status, it’s not a characteristic of an individual, but rather it has to do with their access to societal resources. So this was a first pass at looking at how structural barriers that lower SES parents are facing actually influence the amount that they can talk to their kid. We focus specifically for this study on financial strain, that is, maybe just having to think about their finances is actually quite taxing and leads parents to talk to their child less.

How did you go about measuring parents’ financial stress and how that might play into how they talk to their kids?

This was kind of a sneaky study on our part. What we were interested in is whether just the experience of being reminded of recent financial strain, or not having enough resources, would lead parents to talk less to their kids, regardless of their SES. We actually brought higher SES families into the lab, because these are the families that researchers in the past have said have the “parenting knowledge” to talk more to their kids, or they have whatever individual-level characteristics might lead them to talk more to their kid. We assigned half of these parents to fill out a survey about times when they didn’t have enough resources during the last week, or when resources were scarce. Some of them did talk about finances, but they talked about a range of things. And then we assigned the other half to fill out a control survey where they just reported on things they did in the last week.

After they filled out this survey, we left them in a room alone with their kid for 10 minutes under the guise of getting a second survey for them to fill out. We would say, we just realized the survey isn’t loaded, we’re going have to go to the other room and load it. So we would leave the parent and child alone in a room together for 10 minutes. And we gave them a fun puzzle box toy for the kid to play with, so the parents had the opportunity to engage in speech with their kid. They could narrate what was happening with the puzzle box toy, they could explain certain pieces of it. Or they could just sit quietly and sit on their phone and let the child play. We were interested in whether parents who had been thinking about their own experiences of scarcity would talk less during those 10 minutes than parents who just thought about things they had done over the last week.

How many people did you bring into the lab to ask these questions, and what did you find?

We brought in about 70 people to the lab. It’s a small sample, and it was our first pass at running the study, so I would call these very preliminary results. But what we found in general is that parents who thought about financial scarcity in particular talked less to their kid than parents who thought about all other forms of scarcity. And these parents didn’t differ in their income or in their education. They were all the same on these kinds of individual characteristics. But something about reflecting on financial scarcity might have led them to talk less to their kids.

How might one measure this outside of the lab setting?

There are a lot of different tools researchers have used to measure this. One is called a LENA recording device. It’s just a tiny little recording device, it sits in kids’ front pockets, and you turn it on at the start of the day, and then it records the entire day for 16 hours. For that full 16-hour recording, it quantifies the number of adult words spoken near the child, the number of child vocalizations, and the amount of back and forth between the adult and the child — what we call “conversational turns,” where maybe the kid says something and the adult responds.

Using LENA, how would you measure whether financial stress might be affecting the amount of language a child hears?

That’s what we were really interested in doing to follow up on this lab study. You can imagine that just bringing families into the lab and saying, “Okay, think about scarcity,” isn’t the most externally valid, meaning it doesn’t necessarily hold up in the real world.

What we really wanted to do next was make use of already available data and see if we could find any evidence for this phenomenon in the wild, so to speak. We used data from these LENA recording devices that other researchers around the country had already collected, and we used a few datasets where families had completed these LENA recorders multiple times over the course of a period of time. They ended up varying randomly in where in the month they fell. Some families recorded a couple times at the beginning of the month, and a couple times at the end of the month, in random order.

The reason we cared about that is because there’s a fair amount of research in economics showing that families feel more financial strain at the end of the month compared to the rest of the month. We thought that, if this was a real phenomenon, we should see dips in parents’ speech to their children at the end of the month, when they’re likely to be experiencing the most financial strain. What was really cool about this is that, because we had these multiple recordings for a single family, rather than comparing families to one another, we could really look within a family and see, do families talk less at times of the month that they’re experiencing more financial strain?

That’s a really amazing tool to have at your disposal. What did you find?

Again, I would call this pretty preliminary evidence. But we found some possible evidence that parents do indeed talk less to their kids at the end of the month. It looked like what was really affected was this specific form of child-directed speech or conversational turns. There were fewer conversational turns back and forth, vocalizations between parent and child, at the end of the month for a lot of these families. But things like the overall number of words adults were saying didn’t change. It seemed like it might be specific to child-directed speech.

They might be having conversations with other members of the family, but they aren’t thinking about talking to their kid.

Exactly. And I should say that many of the kids in this study, and in all of the studies that we’ve done, are really young. Think about kids in the first couple years of their lives. They’re not the most fun conversational partners, right? They don’t have that much to say. So it can take a bit more cognitive effort and energy to engage kids at that age.

And if you’re stressed out, that’s exactly the sort of thing that you wouldn’t have the capacity to do. This connects to the broader research you’ve been doing on other aspects of socioeconomic status and how it might affect children’s cognition. You conducted a study that uses fMRI imaging to look at how kids’ brains are working when we ask them questions. Tell us a bit about the methods used in that work.

We took the finding that there are some structural reasons why we see differences in kids’ early environments. We wanted to know how kids in lower SES environments then thrive. Because you’ll hear in the media that kids need to hear a certain number of words, or kids need to be exposed to lots of child-directed speech in the first three years of life. But really, when it comes to language development, that’s not actually true. We’re capable of learning new words throughout our lifetimes. Anybody who’s ever started a new job can identify times that they’ve learned words in later life. So we don’t think these kids are messed up if they’re not hearing lots of speech, but we want to know, what are the ways that they’re then succeeding? Because it might not be through the same mechanisms as higher SES kids.

So for the next study, we turned to the brain, using what’s called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. We use resting state fMRI, which means kids sat in the scanner, and they didn’t do anything. They were instructed to look at a [neutral image] and do nothing else. And the brain never stops working. So during that time, the brain is activating; things are happening. We use what is happening in the brain during that time to make an inference about what their typical thought patterns are. What fMRI allows us to do is to look at what regions in the brain are activating in synchrony with one another. Where are neurons firing in the brain? And where are neurons typically firing at the same time as one another?

What are some of the ways that researchers typically have thought about how the neurons are firing in relation to having higher cognitive function?

One of the things we’ve learned about the brain is that there are a lot of different regions in the brain that perform really diverse tasks, but regions work together frequently. We have something called brain networks, which are made up of a whole bunch of regions that typically work together to carry out certain tasks.

One example of that is something called the frontoparietal brain network. This is a set of brain regions in the frontal and parietal parts of the brain, as the word would suggest; those regions are mostly along the forehead and the top of your head. These are regions that typically work together when we’re doing these externally demanding cognitive tasks. If you were filling out some kind of reasoning test, you would typically see a lot of activation from these regions in the frontoparietal brain network. That’s one that we look to a lot.

Another one that we think about is a different set of brain regions, which we call the “default mode network.” This is a set of brain regions that really work together at rest, so people thought maybe this was a default brain pattern, so that when you’re not doing anything, these are the regions that are activating. But we now know, they’re really involved in thinking about yourself, or thinking about things outside of the here and now, anything that’s really not external, but more internal. These are the brain regions that will typically work together to do those kinds of thinking patterns. These are the two brain networks, that frontal parietal network and the default mode network, that we investigated in our next study.

If we think about a child having more executive function, or cognitive ability, which parts of the brain do we think are doing that?

A pretty common finding in the literature is that as kids grow up, the connection between the frontal parietal network and the default mode network gets smaller. What this means is, say you are doing a really cognitively demanding task with intense reasoning, lots of researchers think you want the default mode network to shut down. You want thoughts about yourself to be really quiet, you want thoughts that have nothing to do with what’s going on to be as distant as possible. So you want less of a connection between the frontoparietal network and the default mode network. And so researchers have indeed found that a lack of connection develops with age. When kids are younger, the two networks work together more, and as they get older, they tend to separate more. They found that, at least among higher SES kids, the more separate those brain networks are, the better they do on cognitive tests. They found that all the way into adulthood.

Your research focused on the potential connection between these two networks that we wouldn’t expect for cognitively high performing kids. What was that connection?

What we were interested in is what’s going on for the kids in poverty who are doing really well on cognitive tests. When we think about things like the achievement gap, or kids’ test performance, we end up grouping kids off and saying “higher SES kids” and “lower SES kids.” But there are lots of lower SES kids who are living in poverty, and are still performing really highly on these cognitive tests. So we thought it would be interesting to see what’s going on for them. Are they achieving this high performance through the same mechanisms as higher SES kids? We went in looking at the connection between these two brain networks — the frontoparietal network and the default mode network. And we expected, based on all of the research that we had seen, that less of a connection between these two networks would be good for kids in poverty. We thought, maybe those kids in poverty who are doing really well have a lack of connection between these two networks. And what surprised us, and what we think is so cool, is that we actually found the opposite. We found this expected negative association for the higher SES kids, which all of the literature had shown before. But for the lower SES kids, we actually found that the kids whose two brain networks were more connected to each other were doing better.

Why might that be?

We don’t know yet. We’re still trying to figure out what the mechanism might be. But one of the things that we know is that those two brain networks, even in adults, do sometimes work together. They definitely work together for things like creative thinking. There are certain kinds of thinking where you want to be both engaging a lot of cognitive control, and thinking about things that are outside of the here and now.

You can think about designing something new. That’s the time when those two brain regions would be activated together. They would also be activated together if you were planning for the future. The future is not right in front of you, but you are planning it. We think that maybe the kids in poverty who are doing better on these cognitive tests are doing so because they’ve really had to adapt to a set of structural constraints that haven’t been set up for them to succeed. And maybe one of the ways that they’re doing that is by thinking outside of the box about how they can succeed, or planning for the future.

We actually found that this effect was strongest for kids who were living in more dangerous neighborhoods. It was strongest for kids who are Black relative to White. And we think that both of these things are evidence of structural barriers to success. It really points to kids having to adapt in creative ways to do well on these tests.

What do you think are the implications of this research, and what are the possibilities for future research in the same realm?

Whenever you read studies about brain development, it’s pretty likely that they were done with kids who are higher SES. If you have ever been in an MRI before, it’s a giant magnet. It’s not the most inviting machine. It requires a lot of time and patience. And it requires a lot of trust that the person who’s running the machine is not going to hurt you.

It just happens that higher SES families know more about this kind of research, and they’re more willing to participate, and they have more time to volunteer, whereas lower SES families don’t, often for good reasons. Typically, this ends up correlating with race and ethnicity. They don’t have a lot of trust in the research system to take care of them or to accurately report what’s going on for them. So a lot of our studies, and a lot of what we know about brain development, has come from this very specific set of kids whose parents are highly educated, wealthier, live near universities, and are excited about the idea of participating in research. And it has really limited the broader understanding of what healthy brain development really is.

That healthy brain development may not be one set of things. We can’t use universal measures to predict what is happening in someone’s resting brain state with how they’re going to perform on this cognitive test.

One thing we know for sure about the brain is that it’s really plastic, and it changes a lot throughout childhood. But it also continues to change in adulthood. And it’s built to adapt. Humans have lived in all sorts of different contexts and cultures very successfully for a very long time. We really think that one of the things that allows us to do that is the flexibility of the brain.

What do you think are the implications for thinking about the brain’s development beyond children and into adolescence and adulthood?

This last study was with 10 year olds, who are just entering adolescence. Adolescence is a really cool time. We think that some sensitive periods — times where the brain is very sensitive to certain kinds of environmental input — happen during adolescence. That might be a time when these kids are super receptive to new kinds of information. When you think about potential implications, if we were to make schools for adolescents and redesign them in a way that used the skill sets they already had, that’s one way of thinking about it. But it’s really just taking a broader view on what it means to be successful and how society can be restructured, and how it has been structured in the past.

One of the great potential applications for this research seems to be about that intersection of psychology and other disciplines. Have you made plans on how to work with other disciplines on this kind of research?

We have been working with economists right here at Berkeley. One of the things we’re doing, thinking back about the first study, is that we are going to give some families unconditional cash, and see whether that affects their speech to their kids. One very direct application is just giving parents more money, enough to change their behavior. There’s a big national study going on in that realm called the “Baby’s First Years” project. It’s an unconditional cash transfer study, as well. That’s one future direction.

I think it would be really cool to pair up with educators and people who are in the schools to think about what kinds of skills kids are developing from all different contexts — and how we can best measure and support that.

Listen to more episodes on the Matrix Podcast page, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

Article

The Rise of Mass Incarceration: An Interview with Chris Muller and Alex Roehrkasse

Published September 30, 2022

On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley scholars whose work focuses on explaining how mass incarceration has changed over the last 30 years.

Alex Roehrkasse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. He studies the production of racial, class, and gender inequality in the United States through violence and social control. He was previously a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University.

Christopher Muller is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. He is particularly interested in how agricultural labor markets, migration, and struggles over land and labor have affected incarceration and racial and class inequality in incarceration. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, and Science.

Listen to the podcast below, or on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts.

Excerpts from the interview are included below (edited for length and content).

Q: Let’s start by talking about the main topic at the center of your collaborative research, which is how mass incarceration has changed over the last 30 years. What motivated you to take on this topic?

Muller: It’s useful to step back and try to define mass incarceration. There isn’t complete agreement about how to define mass incarceration, but I think the most influential definition comes from the sociologist David Garland, who argues that mass incarceration is defined by two main features. The first is a scale of incarceration that’s unusual in both historical and comparative terms. This fits the US case because its incarceration rate is so extreme, both in comparison to similar countries and in comparison to its past. From 1970 to 2010, the US imprisonment rate rose from roughly 100 per 100,000 people to roughly 500 per 100,000 people. If you count people in jails, that number gets even higher, to about 700 per 100,000 people. That makes the US a vast outlier with respect to comparable countries.

The second feature of mass incarceration that Garland focuses on is what he calls the social concentration of incarceration. In the US, what he’s referring to is mainly the incarceration rate of young Black men. If you look at the most recent estimates, roughly a quarter of Black men can expect to be imprisoned at some point in their lives. When you zoom in to look at Black men who dropped out of high school, that number jumps to over two-thirds. These are really astonishing numbers, and are part of what has inspired people to try to understand how we got here over time.

One of the main motivations of this project with Alex has been the emergence of a recent debate around this last point – about the relationship between racial inequality and incarceration on the one hand, and mass incarceration on the other. On the one side of the debate, we have a book like The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This is probably the most widely read book on mass incarceration, and it focuses mainly on its disproportionate impact on Black Americans, due in part to the War on Drugs, and due in part to the concentration of police in poor, predominantly Black neighborhoods.

On the other side, you have scholars like James Forman, Jr. and Marie Gottschalk, who are sympathetic to Alexander’s account, but who argue that it’s incomplete. In particular, they focus on the fact that mass incarceration has negatively affected many groups beyond just Black Americans, and that it’s particularly concentrated among the poor.

My read of the debate is that it’s been quite civil and collegial. But as it has spun out into wider public arenas, it’s gotten more heated. As I’ve encountered this debate, I’ve had a sense that people have been talking past each other. And so one of the main goals for me in working on this project with Alex was to try to establish a more comprehensive and up-to-date empirical foundation for the debate. I had a hunch that this foundation would help us to see why both positions actually look quite reasonable depending on how you look at the question — depending on whether you’re looking at the direct experience of incarceration, or whether you’re looking at its indirect effects.

What we tried to do in the project was two main things. The first thing was to update previous estimates of racial and class inequality in prison admissions. They hadn’t been calculated since 2002. You would think this would be a relatively straightforward thing to do, but as I’m sure we’ll discuss, there are all kinds of complicated issues related to how you actually estimate these quantities. One of the main reasons we wanted to do this was based on research that’s come out in recent years showing that there’s been a huge shift in the fortunes of people without a college degree. One of the most famous examples of this is the work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who’ve shown that there’s been a marked rise in the mortality rates particularly of White people without a bachelor’s degree. We had a hunch that this shift might also be visible in prison admissions.

The second thing we wanted to do in the paper was to look beyond the direct experience of incarceration and look at the indirect experience. This includes looking at people’s likelihood of having a family member imprisoned, and looking at people’s likelihood of living in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate. The reason we wanted to do this was because of a whole body of sociological research that has shown how, because of Black-White wealth gaps, for example, middle-class Black people are much more likely than middle-class White people to be the offshoots from poor family trees. That means they’re much more likely to have family members who are poor than similar White people.

We were also inspired by a lot of research, much of it coming out of sociology, showing how segregation has meant that middle-class Black people are more likely than middle-class White people to live in poor neighborhoods. If you think incarceration and poverty are becoming increasingly associated over time, these dynamics are going to influence differences in the relative direct and indirect experiences of incarceration.

Together, we thought these facts suggested that it was possible that racial and class inequality in people’s risk of having a family member imprisoned — and racial and class inequality in their risk of living in a high imprisonment neighborhood — could seriously differ from racial and class inequality in their risk of being imprisoned themselves.

Q: That points to the two challenges of studying mass incarceration: the question of the class and race factors that make one more at risk of being in prison, and the question of the people who are in direct or indirect contact with the prison system. What were your findings when you put these two different parts of mass incarceration together?

Roehrkasse: Corresponding to these two parts that you’re describing, we really have two main sets of findings. The first is that we show that there have been really significant shifts in the contours of inequality in prison admissions in the 21st century. On the one hand, Black-White disparities have pretty meaningfully declined since the late 20th century. For example, at peak levels of racial inequality in the early 1990s, Black people were somewhere between six and eight times more likely to enter prison than similarly educated White people. That’s just an astonishing level of inequality.

To be frank, you don’t often see racial disparities that large in social science. This is not reducible to any underlying educational differences, because we’re comparing like to like here. By 2015, though, the Black-White ratio of prison admissions had fallen to something more like two or three. That’s a pretty significant decline, but it’s important to say that’s still a really big disparity.

On the other hand, inequality between people who had attained different levels of education skyrocketed over the same period. So again, in the early 1990s, people who hadn’t attended college were roughly five to six times more likely to go to prison than people who had attended college. But by 2015, when our analysis ends, people without college were 20 to 25 times more likely to go to prison than people who had been to college before.

Our second set of findings adds some nuance to this picture. In two separate analyses, we examined people’s likelihood of having a family member in prison, or of living in a neighborhood where a high proportion of residents in that neighborhood go to prison. In both of these cases, we find that Black people with the highest levels of education or income are actually more likely to experience indirect contact with the prison system than White people with the lowest levels of education, or the lowest levels of income.

Ultimately, what we find is that while class inequality in prison admissions now appears to dominate racial inequality, it’s racial inequality that still predominates in other aspects of the lived experience of mass incarceration. Depending on whether we look at these direct or indirect experiences of the prison system, we’ll come to different conclusions about whether race or class matters more. Rather than trying to decide which is absolutely more important, we’ve become much more interested in trying to understand how racial and class inequality interact, and even how these interactions could create opportunities for new alliances to combat mass incarceration.

Q: Can you talk more about how you decided to use education as a proxy for socioeconomic class status?

Muller: The main reason is just data limitations. When people are admitted to prison, they’re not asked about their income, and so we’re forced to use their level of education. We use education as a proxy for class. This is clearly an imperfect measure, and there are all kinds of quibbles you could have with it. But on the other hand, the work of Case and Deaton shows that having a college education is an increasingly important determinant of people’s life chances in the United States. And there are even Marxist sociologists — who you’d expect would have the most issue with this proxy — who’ve come around to the importance of the college divide.

In the first analysis, we were looking at racial and class inequality in prison admission. Here, we only have measures of education; we don’t have measures of income. But in the second two analyses — of people’s likelihood of having a family member imprisoned and people’s likelihood of living in a high imprisonment neighborhood — we had both education and income. And the results were almost identical. And so in this particular case we’re not especially concerned about using education as a proxy for a class, even though we acknowledge that the two concepts are different.

Q: One of the problems you have in doing this research is not only trying to figure out what serves as a useful proxy, but how to extract the information from whatever data you’re getting from the prisons or other systems. How did you manage this giant data sample that you had?

Roehrkasse: There are three key quantities that we’re trying to measure in this study, and we use three different datasets to measure each of those. Each of those datasets has its own unique value, and some serious limitations.

The first quantity we’re interested in is the likelihood that people enter prison. You might think that’s a really straightforward thing to measure. But it turns out that there’s actually no national data that are publicly available that disaggregate rates of entrance into prison by people’s race and ethnicity or their educational attainment. And so for people who are interested in these kinds of inequalities, a really useful and common resource is what’s called the National Corrections Reporting Program. Unfortunately, this resource is restricted in access, because it involves individual-level records of imprisoned people, so the data are pretty sensitive. But for those people who are interested in these kinds of questions, this is really the most important resource available. These are administrative data, and, unfortunately, they represent the voluntary contributions of different state prison systems to this overall program. In any given year, the NCRP doesn’t actually include all state prison admissions. So an important assumption of our study is that the contributing states in the years we examine are more or less representative of the country more broadly. It’s also important to say that the NCRP no longer includes federal prison admissions. Federal prisons make up a small proportion of the total prison population in the United States, but it is by no means a trivial proportion.

A second quantity that we’re trying to understand is the likelihood that someone has had a family member go to prison. And people can use any number of different resources to do this. People have used the Fragile Families study before or the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We use a new survey that’s designed specifically to measure this quantity. It’s called the Family History of Incarceration Survey, or FamHIS.

The third quantity we’re interested in measuring is the likelihood that people live in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate. This is really challenging, because people aren’t usually imprisoned in the neighborhoods where they were living before they went to prison, and geo-locating prisoners back to the neighborhoods where they came from with any detail can actually be quite difficult. To do this, we use a resource that’s actually pretty underutilized, called the Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Corrections. This is another administrative dataset that compiles information from about 20 states, and it allows us to geolocate people in state prisons back to the specific census tract where they resided before they were imprisoned. We use census tracts, which on average have about 4000 residents, as a proxy for neighborhoods. And we use these data to calculate imprisonment rates for census tracts in these 20 states. Then we use census data to put people of different races and ethnicities and educational groups into neighborhoods to understand their likelihood of living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood. Then for all three of these experiences—prison admissions, family member incarceration, and neighborhood incarceration—we calculate the rates at which people of different ethnoracial groups and educational groups have these experiences. And then to measure inequality, we look at the ratio of these different rates across different groups.

Q: Another aspect of the complicated nature of this research is the temporality problem you have. When you’re looking at prison admissions, these are people who are entering the system. This is not representative of the body of people who are currently imprisoned as a whole. But then you’re asking people about the experience over their lifetimes, whether they’ve known someone who is incarcerated. How do you disentangle these different temporal aspects in this research?

Roehrkasse: This is a really important point. Our study is focused on prison admissions, specifically the rate at which people in the population enter prison in any given year. And this is a pretty different quantity from the proportion of the population that’s imprisoned at any given point in time. Generally speaking, prison admissions are much more volatile than prison populations, because they’re going to be more responsive to economic, social, and political changes. For example, a policy that diverts people away from the criminal justice system would have a pretty immediate impact on prison admission rates, but only delayed effects on the prison population, because that population reflects not only that recent policy, but the cumulative history of decades of previous policies, rates of imprisonment, sentencing, corrections, etc. What that means is that if we were to redo our study examining prison populations, instead of prison admission rates, some of the changes in inequality that we document would probably be a bit more muted. But what that also means is that if the trends we document in our study continue, we should expect to see similar changes in the prison population over time. There other aspects of our data—like the fact that the FamHIS survey captures whether a person’s family member has ever been imprisoned—that incorporate this whole cumulative history of incarceration over the last several decades, that we’re just limited in our ability to deal with.

Q: That points us back to one of the key topics people talk about with mass incarceration, which is the War on Drugs. How did the War on Drugs become so central to the conversation around mass incarceration, and how did your research complicate this story?

Muller: The paper itself is not directly about the War on Drugs, but the War on Drugs has become a key part of debate over mass incarceration. On the one hand, if you look at a point in time, the number of people who are in prison strictly for drug offenses is actually quite small. People often are critical of the argument that the War on Drugs was a key part of mass incarceration, given the small proportion of people who are in prison for drug offenses.

On the other hand, if you have people going into prison for relatively short sentences, that is going to mean that for people’s experience of having ever gone to prison, the relative importance of the War on Drugs is likely to be quite a bit larger. So, the temporal aspects we’re talking about have a particular relationship to the War on Drugs.

Alex pointed to these extreme disparities in incarceration during the mid-1990s, even within educational groups. I haven’t seen a study that’s nailed this down, but I think it’s unlikely that some part of that spike does not have anything to do with the War on Drugs. Some of the spike in the racial disparity in the prison admission rate in the 90s almost certainly was related to the War on Drugs. And so the War on Drugs is quite clearly is an important part of the story. How important it is really depends on which aspects of mass incarceration you’re trying to look at — whether you’re looking at the number of people in prison and the proportion of them who are in for drug offenses, whether you’re looking at people who’ve cycled through prison, and how many of them have been imprisoned for drug offenses, and whether you’re looking at racial disparity. I think you’re going to get a slightly different story, depending on which of those quantities you’re focused on.

Q: You’ve also done research on how factors like the labor market play a central role in how we explain rises in imprisonment and mass incarceration. Can you tell us more about this relationship?

Muller: First let me step back and talk about the previous state of the literature on the causes of mass incarceration, then I’ll talk about my own research. To be honest, I’ve been working on this topic for a while, and the longer I’ve worked on it, the more complex the answers have gotten about what the sources of mass incarceration are.

The broad contours are set out in a book by a sociologist named Bruce Western called Punishment and Inequality in America, which came out in 2006. Those main causes are still pretty widely accepted, even though there’s been a lot of important work to appear since that book was published. Western focuses mainly on economic and political causes, things like the collapse of urban labor markets, the related rise in crime, the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and then the politicization of crime that increased the chance that all of these changes would receive a punitive response. In the following years, we saw sentences increase, and we saw a greater willingness among prosecutors to pursue incarceration in cases where they might not have in the past. That’s an oversimplified summary, but it captures the main currents, and though people will disagree about the relative weight to place on any one of those causes, very few would say they’re wholly unimportant.

To give broader context, one of the main motivations for my work on incarceration — and for my work in other areas — has been the idea that, in my view, too often in sociology we begin our studies of racial inequality in the 1960s, and that leaves out a lot of really important historical context. We forget, for example, that for much of US history, Black Americans worked primarily in agriculture, not just during slavery, but for almost a century after the Civil War. Once you recognize this fact, a lot of otherwise puzzling features about long-run patterns in the Black incarceration rate begin to make more sense.

To take one example, there’s a popular argument that after the Civil War, incarceration became a kind of functional replacement for slavery. This is different from the argument that the form that incarceration took closely resembled slavery, which is an argument that has a lot of support, especially if you’re looking at the convict lease system, chain gangs, or things like that. But if you’re looking at the functional replacement argument, it’s hard to square with the fact that the Black incarceration rate in the years after Reconstruction was actually lowest in the counties that had depended most on enslaved labor before the Civil War. A lot of people are surprised when they hear this fact. But it becomes less surprising once you recognize that slavery and sharecropping were systems of economic exploitation, in addition to systems of racial domination. Both slaveholders before the Civil War and planters after the Civil War depended heavily on Black Americans’ labor. What that means is that, unless they could use the labor of people in prison, they had strong reasons to try to keep workers out of prison rather than in it. One of the key underappreciated ways that they did this is that planters often would go to courthouses, and they would offer to pay the fines of any people who had been convicted. The person then had to pay off the “debt” by working on their land. This system of peonage allowed planters to reestablish a coerced labor force after the Civil War. But it also had the side effect of lowering the Black incarceration rate in the Cotton Belt. So rather than see a relatively low Black incarceration rate in the Cotton Belt in those counties where slavery had been most prevalent after Reconstruction as a sign of the region’s mercy, we should instead see it as a sign of Black Americans’ continuing unfreedom outside of the prison in the years after the Civil War.

There’s an additional puzzle that this way of looking at things helps to solve. Often, critics of the functional replacement argument — critics of the idea that incarceration was a replacement for slavery — will say, “Well, if slavery and mass incarceration are connected, why does mass incarceration take off a century after slavery ends?” For me, a key part of the answer to that question is that cotton harvesting was almost fully mechanized between 1950 and 1970 — the two decades that precede the start of the prison boom. A lot of work has focused on the effects of deindustrialization, but there’s been much less of an emphasis on the collapse of agricultural employment. This is particularly important because the effects of the collapse in agricultural employment on Black men’s labor force participation were much larger than the effects of deindustrialization.

Q: That’s fascinating because it points us to this question of the relationship between these different labor markets and ties it into other historical phenomena that we might be familiar with, like the Great Migrations. As we switch towards the 1970s, how was the labor market shift related to the rise of mass incarceration?

Muller: There are three main ways we could think about this. Here I’m more synthesizing previous work, rather than drawing on my own, but we had a massive collapse in the share of young Black men who were working in agriculture. In 1940, about a third of young Black men worked in agriculture. By 1970, it was lower than three percent. It was a dramatic shift. I don’t know of any research looking directly at the effects of this mechanization of cotton harvesting on both changes in crime and changes in imprisonment, but there’s a lot of work looking at other shocks to the labor market and showing quite clearly that those are related both to rates of crime and to rates of imprisonment. That’s actually something I’m working on right now.

Secondly, one of the main responses to the mechanization of cotton harvesting was the second Great Migration. There was a huge political backlash to this migration. Ellora Derenoncourt, an economist who was at Berkeley until very recently, has shown how the second Great Migration led to increases in police spending, in homicide rates, in the Black incarceration rate, and in reductions in spending and other types of public goods. Ellora’s work shows clearly how this second Great Migration was related to the onset of mass incarceration.

Thirdly, there have been economic historians who have argued that the mechanization of cotton harvesting and the second Great Migration created a material foundation for the rise and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, a lot of the literature on mass incarceration discusses how there was a political backlash to this movement and focuses on this as a key component of the politicization of crime — one of the key ingredients in the rise of mass incarceration.

So, it’s through a bunch of different paths, but I do think many of these causes that other scholars have focused on are related to this massive decline in agricultural employment that happened mid-century in the United States.

Q: What can scholars and policymakers learn from your research on the complicated relationship between race and class?

Roehrkasse: Part of our analysis is aimed at decomposing racial and class inequality: overall, racial inequality in mass incarceration appears in part to reflect some underlying disparities in educational attainment. That’s an important fact to understand.

But one of the main goals of our study, and I think one of its main successes, is to show that racial and class inequality cannot be disentangled. And that’s because they’re mutually constitutive. That can sound kind of hand-wavy, but we make our best effort to measure this as concretely as we can. We show that, irrespective of one’s education or income, Black people are much more likely to have family members or neighbors imprisoned. This can seem somewhat at odds with the fact that we’re simultaneously documenting that there’s been this shift toward much greater educational inequality in prison admissions.

We think, though, that a really important factor that can reconcile these two seemingly contradictory facts is that, as a result of racial segregation and racial discrimination, an important feature of being Black in America today is that, irrespective of your class position, you’re much more closely connected to poor people. What that means is that the scale of racial inequality really can’t be fully appreciated without reference to the ways that social networks and social environments translate these growing class disparities into racial disparities.

Rather than being competing forms of inequality, race and class are really intersecting dimensions of domination. And for researchers, for activists, and for policymakers, the more we can do to understand that, the more successful we’ll be in our efforts to combat mass incarceration.

Article

The Materiality of the Telegraph Revolution: A Visual Interview with Sophie FitzMaurice

Published September 22, 2022

How did the telegraph change the environment? While scholars have typically examined how the telegraph changed communication, Sophie FitzMaurice, a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of History, argues that the telegraph was both dependent upon and constrained by the material world during its heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her research reveals the flip side of US imperial expansion by showing how this novel technology reshaped the environment.

In this visual interview (an interview accompanied by images related to a scholar’s research), we spoke with FitzMaurice about a specific aspect of the telegraph’s materiality: how poles were produced, and how woodpeckers responded to the concomitant disappearance of forests and the rise of telegraph lines.

Q: This image provides us with a rare shot of a woodpecker in action — that is, pecking on a telephone pole. At the time, what did scientists think about woodpeckers and their impacts on human industries, and how did they track them?

woodpecker on a telephone pole — Caption: California Woodpecker – on telephone pole – showing holes. Locality: Ash Mountain, Sequoia National Park. Negative #5864. Joseph S. Dixon/National Park Service, 1935.

Nineteenth- and early 20th-century scientists thought of birds as part of the balance of nature, which was conceptually divorced from the world of technology and human industry. The balance of nature paradigm held that every species had a unique, perhaps divinely ordained role that did not change over time. Although scientists believed that humans could throw nature out of harmony, nature itself (including birds and insects) had no capacity to affect human industry or technology.

Scientists who studied birds therefore mostly focused on birds’ role in agriculture, and lacked a conceptual framework to analyze woodpeckers’ impact on technology. The core methodology at the Bureau of Biological Survey (today’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) was stomach content analysis; this method was used to determine which birds were “injurious” to agriculture and which were “beneficial.” On the basis of these findings, scientists made recommendations to farmers and local authorities on which species to encourage and which to discourage or kill. Since woodpeckers ate pest insects, they were considered “beneficial” species, but the damage they caused to utility poles challenged the notion that stomach content analysis alone could be used to determine the economic impacts of birds. Wood does not show up in woodpeckers’ stomachs, since woodpeckers do not eat wood; they drill holes in wood to access insects or to build nests, but they do not eat the wood itself.

This image is dated to 1935, so it was taken at the tail end of economic ornithology, when ecological theory was on the rise. Scientists were beginning to look beyond feeding habits to think about how birds fit into a broader organic community.

How did these attempts to track woodpeckers fail, and how did you try to find these woodpeckers in the archives, where they may not leave a trace?

Before the rise of ecological theory, scientists lacked a conceptual framework to understand how habitat change (including deforestation, to which telegraph construction contributed) might impact woodpecker behavior. At first, very few scientists recognized the correlation between habitat change and woodpeckers’ use of telegraph poles. Over time, they did begin to recognize that woodpecker damage to poles was a problem, and one that could not be understood through stomach analysis. By pecking into and structurally weakening poles, woodpeckers demonstrated conclusively that the nonhuman world could impact human technology and the built environment, and this realization helped drive changes in scientific methodology and government policy.

Woodpeckers don’t tend to show up in the traditional sources of technology history, such as business records and legal contracts. In my research, woodpeckers show up in the archives via the observations of people who worked with utility poles — such as telegraph linemen, superintendents, and pole suppliers — as well as in the publications of scientists and government officials who were called on to address the problem of woodpecker damage.

By integrating non-traditional, vernacular, and scientific sources into the study of technology, I hope to bridge the boundaries between sub-disciplines and shine light on previously overlooked aspects of the telegraph’s materiality. We can also draw inferences about woodpeckers’ historic impact on telegraph poles by looking at how woodpeckers interact with utility poles in the present day. Here in California, you don’t have to look far to see an acorn woodpecker working away at a utility pole. By foregrounding woodpeckers in my research, I show that technology does not operate in a vacuum devoid of animals and insects, and that non-human animals have long been actors in the human world.

Let’s backtrack from woodpeckers’ impacts on finished telegraph poles to understand what the telegraph was and what it represented in the late 19th century. How did people think about the telegraph, and how did it revolutionize communications?

Before the invention of the electric telegraph, information could travel only as fast as people could move (though there were a few exceptions, such as smoke signals and semaphore). In 1860, before there was a telegraph line across the continent, the fastest a message could travel from Missouri to California was ten days, and it took over two weeks to send a message across the Atlantic. The telegraph changed all of that. It was now possible to send messages across thousands of miles in a fraction of a second.

In addition to this, communication was no longer directly dependent on movement. Historians have described this as a “quantum leap” in communications. I accept that characterization to an extent, but concentrating on the speed of sending a message has caused historians to overlook the huge amount of labor, materials, and energy that went into making this apparently instantaneous and disembodied communication possible. Such broad characterizations of the telegraph also erase the fact that its expense made it inaccessible to most Americans. It was a “quantum leap,” but only for the wealthy.

a team of horses — Horse team, date unknown (1900s-1920s). Weyerhaeuser Company Records.

Let’s start at the beginning of pole production: logging. What did logging camps look like for workers in this era?

Much of the labor of producing utility poles was performed onsite at the logging camps where wood was felled by seasonal laborers. Here, labor was divided between a superintendent, foremen, teamsters, loaders, swampers, sawyers, office staff, timekeepers, and a cook. These were overwhelmingly male spaces, which makes the presence of children in this image intriguing; perhaps this image captures a rare family visit to a logging camp.

This image also shows that a lot of the human labor at logging camps was organized around the work of horses, who were used to haul cut logs to transportation points — either rivers, whose motive power was harnessed to float logs downstream at no cost, or train cars. Poles were then transported to pole yards, where much of the finishing work was done.

Historians of telecommunications have tended to focus on the desk work or customer-facing service work of telegraph operators and messengers, but my research instead foregrounds the labor of constructing and maintaining telegraph infrastructure. Behind every telegram delivered lay a history of strenuous, and often dangerous, human and animal labor.

loading logs — “Loading Western Red Cedar Poles at a Camp in Western Washington.” Joseph Burke Knapp and Alexander Grant Johnson, Western Red Cedar in the Pacific Northwest, USDA Forest Service (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914).

Your research reveals how telegraphs were intimately related to the material world. What did it take to make telegraph poles from start to finish?

For the most part, the very first telegraph lines were built with wood taken from near the site of construction along the right of way. For many telegraph companies, it was more important in the immediate term to establish a right of way than it was to build a durable network. So telegraph construction crews simply chopped down and used whatever wood was available, even if this wood was not particularly fit for the purpose.

Over time, as networks expanded and as companies introduced pole specifications and standards, an entire industry emerged to supply utility companies with poles. The Western Union Telegraph Company, which was the largest telegraph corporation in the 19th century, operated its own pole yards in Michigan and Tennessee, but smaller-scale utility companies acquired their poles from independent suppliers. These suppliers purchased poles from logging companies and stockpiled them in pole yards. From there, they were transported to construction sites via railroads. But pole yards were more than just distribution points; they were also sites of labor, where the logs were finished by being stripped of their bark and cut to standard dimensions. Later, when utility companies began to demand their poles be preserved, chemical treatment facilities were installed at pole yards.

Where were the pole yards located, and how did they relate to railroad and other transportation networks?

Although historians have made much of the fact that the telegraph divorced communication from transportation, a focus on the pole supply shows that the telegraph relied on transportation networks. Some of the largest pole yards were located in Chicago and Michigan, at the meeting point of water and rail transportation routes. Poles were transported across the Great Lakes from logging camps to pole yards via rafts and steamships, and then from pole yards to construction sites via rail. In addition to this, Western Union had a large pole yard in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was a distribution point for southern pine poles.

By concentrating on the physical infrastructure of telegraphs, my research demonstrates that electricity relied on steam; long-distance electrical communication was inconceivable without colossal amounts of organic materials like wood and coal.

Telegraph and telephone pole supply was big business. Many of the largest suppliers were in the Midwest (Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois). Source: Telephony vol. 19, no. 1 (1910).

In these advertisements from Telephony, an industry trade magazine, we can see how pole producers promoted their poles. What kinds of trees were typically used for poles, and where did they come from?

The preferred species of wood for telegraph and telephone poles was cedar, because cedar is both durable and light, meaning it is relatively cheap to transport and handle. (The same quality that makes cedar suitable for telegraph poles — its lightness — is what made it attractive to woodpeckers; the softer the wood, the less energy has to be expended in excavating nest holes). Other favored species of wood included pine and chestnut, although chestnut blight wiped out much of the chestnut supply at the turn of the 20th century. In the West, douglas fir and western red cedar were widely used. Most of the poles used in the eastern United States came from Canada and the Upper Midwest — specifically, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. By the turn of the century, there was a burgeoning international trade in poles; poles were imported from Canada to the US and exported from the US to Egypt, Greece, Chile, and many other locations across the globe.

stacks of logs — One of the Three Alleys in the Big Chicago Pole Yard of the Naugle Company, Telephony vol. 64 (1913).

In this image, we can see the massive scale of telegraph and telephone pole production. What were the ecological impacts of these practices?

Telegraph and telephone line construction contributed to massive deforestation and habitat destruction, but this ecological impact was largely invisible to people who used the technology. After telegraph poles were stripped of bark, cut to standard dimensions, and spread out over great distances, they lost a lot of their apparent treeness. The location of logging camps and pole yards also meant that most of the environmental impacts of telegraph construction were geographically displaced; building a telegraph line in Arizona might mean cutting down thousands of trees in Wisconsin, for example.

Importantly, some of the environmental impacts of telegraph construction could have been mitigated had utility companies paid for their poles to be treated with preservatives. While expensive and time consuming, chemical treatment could extend the lifespan of a pole by many years, thus lessening the need for replacement poles. In the 1900s and 1910s, the U.S. Forest Service, driven by the conservation ideal, urged telegraph and telephone companies to treat their poles. But these efforts met with little success; it was simply more cost-effective, at least in the short term, for companies to replace poles than proactively to treat them. This began to change in the 1920s, when the increased cost of replacement poles started to reflect the dwindling supply of wood.

This photograph brings us back to the woodpeckers and their impact on the growing telecommunications industry. How do woodpeckers help us tell the history of telecommunications in a new way, and how have historians told the story of the telegraph?

In this image, we see animal traces (woodpecker holes) side-by-side with traces left by humans, who have carved their initials into the wood. This is a perfect metaphor for how the historical record contains both human and nonhuman traces, a concept beautifully explored by the historian Etienne Benson. For 19th-century Americans, telegraph poles may have represented the triumph of science and technology over nature, but for woodpeckers, they represented something far more prosaic: potential nesting sites. The image is also suggestive of how our physical surroundings, which both reflect and make possible commercial and economic life, are co-created by humans and nonhuman animals. Finally, woodpeckers remind us that the story of the telegraph is inescapably a story about wood. Rather than transcending the organic world, the telegraph was very much embedded in it.