Recap Archives - Page 10 of 13 - Social Science Matrix

Disaster and Displacement – Inequalities in Climate Migration

Published December 22, 2020

Recorded on Dec. 11, 2020, this "Matrix on Point" panel addressed the consequences of climate migration.

Within the next 30 years, slow-onset climate change may impel as many as 143 million people living in the Global South to relocate within their countries of origin. Longer-range forecasts predict that by 2070 rising temperatures may render one-fifth of the earth’s landmasses uninhabitable, forcing international migration on a massive scale. Among the displaced, low-income populations will be particularly vulnerable, and cities in the Global North may have to absorb and provide services for these immigrants. Given the politicization of migration in recent years, and the lack of international policies to protect climate refugees, climate change is anticipated to reinforce global inequalities.

Recorded on December 11, 2020, a Matrix On Point panel discussion brought together a group of esteemed scholars to discuss the humanitarian, ecological, and geopolitical impacts of climate migration, along with forward-looking policies that can help mitigate displacement, address global inequalities, and support refugees forced to leave their homelands due to extreme weather, devastated ecosystems, and other climate-related issues. This event was presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix (as part of the “Matrix on Point” series), and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Center for Effective Global Action, and Human Rights Center.

Panelists included Kanta Kumari Rigaud, Lead Environmental Specialist at the World Bank; Daniel Kammen, Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair; the Goldman School of Public Policy, where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy; and the Department of Nuclear Engineering; Elizabeth Fussell, Associate Professor of Population Studies and Environmental Studies at Brown University; and Teevrat Garg, Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. The panel was moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley, and Founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Watch the video above or on YouTube

Matrix On Point

The Economic Consequences of COVID-19

Published December 6, 2020

A panel of scholars weighed in on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented shutdown of the global economy. Governments (mostly in advanced economies) responded with an array of programs, from increased unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, small business assistance loans, and broad monetary support. In spite of these unprecedented interventions, all financed by a rapid expansion of public debt, the economic outlook continues to be very uncertain nearly nine months into the pandemic. What are the likely near- and long-term consequences of the pandemic for the global economy? Which populations have been most affected? Which industries are likely to recover, and which will not? How should we evaluate the success of economic measures taken by governments in the U.S. and around the world?

Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy, and presented as part of the Berkeley Haas “New Thinking in a Pandemic” series, this “Matrix on Point” panel discussion — recorded on December 3, 2020 — brought together a panel of scholars to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panelists were Mitu Gulati, Professor of Law at Duke University; Hilary Hoynes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at UC Berkeley; Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan, the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Maryland; and Maurice Obstfeld, the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at Berkeley and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The panel was moderated by Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Professor of Economics in the UC Berkeley Department of Economics; and S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Haas School of Business.

Watch the panel above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

The New Authoritarians

Published December 5, 2020

A "Matrix on Point" panel discussion focused on the rise of right-wing autocrats around the world.

A new generation of authoritarians has risen to power in democracies around the world. Since coming to office, these rulers have manipulated laws and reconfigured state bureaucracies, undermining civil liberties, flouting representative institutions, attacking the free press, and subverting international law. Figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Mihály Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States have all attained office by embracing, and in some instances co-opting, conservative populist movements.

Recorded on November 30, 2020, this Matrix On Point panel considered not only the illiberal tactics these right-wing autocrats have used to consolidate power and further their objectives, but also what it will take to undo the damage they have inflicted upon democratic institutions.

Panelists included Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University; Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; Lena Lavinas, Professor of Welfare Economics at the Institute of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Senior Researcher at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPQ); and Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. The panel was moderated by Paul Pierson (moderator) is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

2020 Election Post-Mortem: Why It Happened and the Implications for American Democracy.

Published November 30, 2020

Recorded on November 12, 2020, this panel was presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Recorded on November 12, 2020, this video features a “post-mortem” analysis of the 2020 election — and what the implications are for the future. The panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix.

Panelists included: Peter Hart, Founder of Hart Research; Lyn Vavreck, the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA; and Nathan Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. The panel was moderated by Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Learn more about the Citrin Center at https://citrincenter.berkeley.edu.

Authors Meet Critics

The Future of Nuclear Waste

Published November 13, 2020

A Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" panel asked, how can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future?

Recorded on Nov. 5, 2020, this online “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured Rosemary Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, discussing her book, The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material. Professor Joyce was joined in conversation by Cathryn Carson, Professor of History, and Kate O’Neill, Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.

At the heart of Joyce’s book is the question, how can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would satisfy demands from the Environmental Protection Agency for a marker system that would be effective long into the future. Expert consultants proposed two very different designs: one based on archaeological sites recognized as cultural heritage monuments; the other proposing that certain forms invoke universal feelings.

The Department of Energy opted for a design based on archaeological ruins, cited as proof human-made markers could last and communicate warnings for thousands of years. This book explores the common sense assumptions the experts made about their archaeological models, and shows how they are contradicted by what archaeologists understand about these places and things. The book alternates between discussions of archaeological marker designs and reflections on the alternative proposal based on archetypes intended to arouse universal responses. Recognizing these archetype designs as similar in scale and form to Land Art projects, it compares the way government experts proposed their designs would work with views of modern artists and critics. Drawing on views of indigenous people who disproportionately are asked to accommodate such projects, the book explores concessions within the project that only oral transmission is likely to ensure such sites remain identifiable long into the future.

“It may seem surprising to have an archaeologist writing a book about the handling of nuclear waste,” Joyce said. “The scope of work has led me to ask questions about long-term temporalities, about how ongoing understandings of futures by people in the past could be conceived by those of us who are in their future, and for whom, what happened, is now a past.”

Joyce explained that her interest in the project began in 1999, when she saw an article in Time magazine describing how the government was working with artists to propose plans to mark nuclear waste sites so that they would not be violated for 10,000 years. “That was precisely the kind of long-term thinking I was interested in,” Joyce said. “As Time characterized it, the artists were drawing on universal features that would repel people, such as the use of sharp pointed metal, of red and of jaggedness. And immediately, as an anthropologist, I was attracted to the idea…because that goes against one of our central understandings, which is that there’s very little that can be assumed to be universal.”

Joyce’s book explores how different materials and symbols were considered to be markers, and how other methods — such as oral history — could be used to convey where the poisonous materials were buried. “Ultimately I’ve come to understand that what’s at stake here is something larger,” she said. “All of my attempts to explain the book tended to have recourse to poetry, to art, to fiction. And this is part of what I think is a broader challenge for those of us in the social sciences, whose work sometimes does not have the impact it should have in the world…. We need to remind ourselves of the ability of a poetic language to convey the impact, the meaning, and the implications of things.”

Watch the full panel discussion — including the responses by Kate O’Neil and Cathryn Carson — above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

2020 Citrin Center Award: Robert Putnam

Published October 25, 2020

Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, on his book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

Recorded on October 20, 2020, this video features a lecture by Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University.

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion, named after Jack Citrin, the Citrin Award annual event recognizes the career of an individual who has made significant contributions to the study and understanding of public opinion. The 2020 Award celebrates the achievements of Robert Putnam, one of the most distinguished political scientists in the country, whose work has been an indispensable guide to understanding the underpinnings of democracy and community in America and elsewhere.

Raised in a small town in Ohio, he was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities, for “deepening our understanding of community in America.”

Putnam has written fifteen books, translated into twenty languages, including Making Democracy Work: Civic Transitions in Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, both among the most cited social science works in the last half-century.

In this lecture, Professor Putnam presents his latest book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

Authors Meet Critics

Let Them Eat Tweets

Published October 16, 2020

An "Authors Meet Critics" panel on "Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality," by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker

Recorded on October 13, 2020, this online panel focused on the book, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, co-authored by Paul Pierson, the John Gross Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Jacob Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. This book explores how the modern Republican Party has come to be defined by “plutocratic pluralism,” which combines an elite-benefiting economic agenda with populist appeals.

Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and Christopher Parker, Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, responded as “critics” of the book. Both Skocpol and Parker have authored books on topics directly relevant to today’s GOP — including the Tea Party. “I think these are the authors of the two best books on the Tea Party, which I think is critical for understanding how we got to where we are,” Pierson said.

Moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, the lively dialogue began with an introductory overview by the two authors. Pierson explained that the book was a response to the fact that the “dramatic shift in the distribution of economic resources in the United States was not being sufficiently considered in in the discussion of where Donald Trump comes from and how he came to occupy the position in American politics that he did.” Pierson pointed out that wealth inequality is far greater in the United States than in Europe. “There is a tendency to lump what’s happening in the United States together with the explosion of right-wing populism that you see in various countries in Western Europe — and of course, there are important similarities — but this suggests that there are also very dramatic differences.”

Let Them Eat Tweets illustrates how the rise in inequality in the U.S. poses challenges for democratic politics. “As inequality grows, there’s likely to be more of a divergence of preferences and interest between the wealthy and everyone else — so the things that are going to benefit ordinary citizens in the economic sphere are not going to be beneficial to those economic elites,” Pierson explained. “Economic elites are likely to become more suspicious of democracy, and they’re going to work harder to make sure that voters are not going to use their numbers to overcome and possibly redistribute the economic resources that are increasingly concentrated at the top.”

In his comments, Hacker stressed the vital role that organizations have played in shaping the modern Republican Party, as groups like the NRA and various Christian Right organizations have become entwined with the party’s platform. “This is another respect in which the American landscape is distinctive,” Hacker said. “We have this ecosystem of right wing media that is willing and capable of deploying highly racialized, anti-government themes in a way that turns out to be mobilizing for a core group of voters.”

In her response, Skocpol largely praised the authors for showing how the GOP has evolved since the 1980s by “using all the levers available in the U.S. constitutional and federal system to further narrow majoritarian governing agendas.” However, she noted that the book would have benefited from a more clearly articulated causal argument. “I’d like to have seen a lot more precision about the various organizational networks that are in play in and around the Republican Party,” she said, adding that she would have also liked to see an analysis of the Democratic Party’s own role in allowing the rise of the modern GOP.

In his comments, Christopher Parker posed a series of questions to the authors, including what they think is different about the role of race today compared to earlier eras. “In the early part of the 20th century, during the Gilded Era, we saw massive amounts of inequality,” Parker said. “But we didn’t see any sort of racial conflict at the behest of other plutocrats…. If your theory is correct, we should have seen plutocrats try to stoke racial division, but we didn’t.”

The ninety-minute panel covered a wide range of topics, including similarities and differences between the U.S. and Europe, as well as the dynamic relationships between political economy and demographics. In his closing remarks, Hacker encouraged the audience to read the book and assess it for themselves. “I want to encourage people to read the book and decide whether I’m right that this book helps us understand 2016 to 2020,” Hacker said. “I think the argument is correct that, unless we address the extreme inequality that we have, some of the same particular strains that we’re talking about are going to keep recurring and threaten our democracy.”

Watch the full video of the event above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

Published October 16, 2020

Recorded on October 7, 2020, this video features Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley, discussing her book Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, with Nikki Jones, Professor of African American Studies.

On October 7, 2020, Social Science Matrix hosted an online discussion focused on Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, a book authored by Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley. In her book, Summers documents Washington, D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting the economic and racial developments of H Street, one of the city’s main commercial corridors. Thompson’s book offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital.

Dr. Summers discussed Black in Place with Nikki Jones, Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, as part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series, which features critically engaged discussions about recently published books by social scientists at UC Berkeley.

Jones noted at the outset, however, that “Authors Meet Critics” was an inappropriate title for the conversation. “[Authors meet critics] is standard fare in the academy, we know that,” Jones said. “But it represents a particular way of producing and consuming knowledge, and it doesn’t always align with the Black feminist politics that I like to bring into the space or even Black feminist modes of critique…. I show up in this space not as a critic of what has been thoughtfully and carefully produced, but as a co-constructor of knowledge, as a person who has engaged with your work and your ideas, and is poised to engage with you around those ideas, and others who are able to join us today, to also learn from that conversation.”

Summers began the discussion by providing an overview of her book’s central focus. “I’m really describing this changing historical role of Blackness and its interaction with processes of gentrification,” she explained. “I’m using this small space — H Street, this commercial corridor — to tell a much wider story about cultural change, about racial conflict, and also about capital flows and governance…. I wanted to take this hyperlocal focus because I think you’re better able to see the the nuances and the patterns that hold narratives together. And you can better see the inner workings of power when you look at a small geography, and unpack various elements that contribute to the production and the management of space.”

“It perfectly illustrates this problem that emerges when Black areas are essentially primed for revitalization,” she added. “I’m using Blackness as this central analytic to really understand how racism shapes Black life and, and how these liberal proclamations of ‘race neutrality’ or these calls for diversity only serve to marginalize and ultimately displace Black people.”

Summers explained that she coined the term “Black aesthetic emplacement” (BAE) as a way to think about how Blackness is “deployed to fortify public order and organize landscapes literally, as well as foster capital. This happens through this hegemonic capitalist structuring and a signifying of ideas about Blackness to really increase the desirability of coming to a particular neighborhood, or coming to the city. I don’t mean Black aesthetics as in Black cultural production. I’m thinking about Black aesthetics separately, where Blackness operates as an aesthetic that’s essential to gentrification as an urbanizing process, and can really be seen clearly in institutions that provide daily life or daily service.”

“The urban landscape is being produced in ways that necessitate the visibility of Blackness, but also operate alongside the displacement of Black people and those enterprises that cater to poor and working-class Black residents,” Summers said. “In the book, I’m trying to document these these everyday expressions of the symbolic takeover of Blackness…. The transformation of H street really exemplifies this dismantling of the Black city. It’s this disappearing mode of social and cultural life that’s been revised and and remade by this aesthetic infrastructure.”

The book shows us how a city becomes cool through Blackness, even as the population of Black people in the city declines.

In her comments, Jones praised how Summers uses the transformation of the H Street corridor to expose the story of race and gentrification, and noted that, as a sociologist, she likely would have taken a different approach. “I appreciate the way that space is the main character, the key respondent in this book,” Jones said. “I focus on on interpersonal interaction, so I simply would not would not have done the thing you do here quite masterfully, which is to make spatial relationships — the relationship between space and capital, and in turn the relationship between space, Blackness, and capital — a main point of entry into the story of H Street.”

“Sociologists can take space for granted,” Jones said. “In not taking space for granted, you create a way of seeing relationships — structural, economic, and social — that exist but aren’t accessible solely through the tools or training of social science generally. And in doing so, you provide a model not for the one way to see Blackness in the city, but a multiplicity of ways to see Blackness, and to see Black people in spaces where they are necessary, yet unseen.”

“Blackness is made to be seen in the city in ways that are increasingly untethered from the visual presence of actual Black people, untethered from Black life as it is lived, as you argue, in a place where blackness operates on the level of aesthetics.

Jones pointed to one of the examples described in Summers’ book — Chocolate City Beer, a (now defunct) craft brewery owned by two White men that used the Black power fist in its logo — to highlight “how ‘Blackness shows up in the city — Blackness as taste, Blackness as struggle, Blackness as nostalgia. Blackness acts as an engine of profit. Blackness is ‘the illusion of inclusion within the culture of modern capital’…. The book is a history of how post-racial discourse in neoliberal urban development converts Blackness into a prized aesthetic. The book shows us how a city becomes cool through Blackness, even as the population of Black people in the city declines.”

Watch the video of the discussion above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: The Struggle for Hong Kong

Published October 13, 2020

“Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times.” These words, appearing in English and Chinese on the signs of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, appeal for action, recognition, and solidarity. Such utterances are now prohibited, after the Beijing government passed a new national security law on June 30th. Chinese authorities maintain that this recent legislation is intended to prevent foreign intervention and separatist sedition, but critics in and beyond Hong Kong have argued that the new law grants Beijing unprecedented powers and that it will lead to the curtailment of civil liberties and free speech. Western commentators have sometimes described Hong Kong as a canary in a coal mine, a bellwether for democracy in Asia. Yet for China, it is the concept of “one country, two systems” that best captures the enduring and complex bond that links Hong Kong to the mainland.

On October 1, 2021, Social Science Matrix hosted a “Matrix on Point,” co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, that considered both the history and future of Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Panelists included Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Alex Chow, a doctoral student in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography; and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. Thomas Gold, Professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel.

The panel was presented as part of the Matrix Solidarity Series, which features talks and panels that explore—and critique—the ethical foundations, concrete implementations, and prospective designs that foster connectedness, inclusiveness, tolerance, and equality. These conversations are meant to serve as an argument on behalf of the premises and practices of solidarity, and an exposition on the potential of the social sciences to contribute to it.

Panelists

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on global and comparative issues, globalization, political sociology, and other areas, with a regional focus in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa. She has published three award-winning monographs on China, and has co-edited the volume: Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Alex Chow is a social activist from Hong Kong and current doctoral student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a former secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and a former Vice-President (External) of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union. Chow was an organiser of the 2014 Occupy Central with Love and Peace campaign, a non-violent civil disobedience campaign aimed at promoting democracy in Hong Kong. He served time in jail for storming the government’s headquarters before the 2014 Occupy protests began. Chow earned his master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds courtesy positions in Law and in Literary Journalism. A cultural historian with a strong interest in connecting China’s past to its present and placing both into global perspective, his publications include Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2018). He received his PhD from Berkeley (History, 1989).

Thomas B. Gold (moderator) is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught in the Sociology Department from 1981 to 2018. From 2000-2016 he served as Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP), a consortium of North American universities that administers an advanced Chinese language program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has also served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies, founding Director of the Berkeley China Initiative and Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies. Professor Gold’s research focuses on many aspects of the societies of East Asia, primarily China and Taiwan. His co-edited (with Sebastian Veg) volume, Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong, will be published later this year by the Institute of East Asian Studies Press.

Matrix Lecture

The Code of Capital

Published September 29, 2020

A Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Katharina Pistor provided an overview of her book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.

On September 21, Social Science Matrix was honored to co-sponsor a virtual Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University and Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation.

In her lecture, Pistor discussed her book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, which argues that the law selectively “codes” certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. The book was lauded as one of the Financial Times‘ Best Books of 2019 in the field of economics and one of the Financial Times‘ Readers’ Best Books of 2019.

The event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Network for a New Political Economy and introduced by Steven K. Vogel, Chair of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

“One of the core questions that the book addresses is the question of, what is capital?” Pistor explained. “What I’m basically arguing in the book is that capital is a wealth-generating asset. And what we have to understand is the legal DNA, if you want to call it that, or the ‘code of capital.’ We have to understand what kinds of features create assets that are really wealth-generating.”

As an example, Pistor noted how a piece of land is only considered to be “capital” when it is classified as such by the law. “If you take land, it’s just a piece of dirt,” she said. “If you want to monetize land, you have to graft certain legal protections for the holder of land rights onto that land. That’s not natural. It’s a social decision. One of the critical questions is, who makes this decision on behalf of whom, and who has access to or control over the decision-makers? Let me just take away the punch line: lawyers are really important here, including private transactional lawyers who work mostly in private offices behind closed doors.”

Pistor explained that different legal frameworks work together to “code” capital, including property law, trust and corporate law, bankruptcy law, and contract law. She said that all capital has certain shared characteristics, including priority, with the law determining who has rights to assets, with some rights stronger than others; and durability, the ability “to extend rights that we bestow on asset holders over time and to protect these rights from too many other competing claimants.”

Another defining attribute of capital, Pistor said, is universality, which ensures that the priority and durability rights are protected not only between two people who entered into transaction with one another, but are “actually enforced against the world,” Pistor said. “The state comes in here because it will enforce these titles, not only against parties to the transaction, but against anybody” Another defining trait is convertibility, the ability to convert assets into other assets, such as cash. “Three out of those four, and then you have something that I would call capital,” Pistor said.

Pistor emphasized that the subtitle of her book, “How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality,” relates to how the law is “a representation of the centralized means of coercion… As lay people, we may think of law as a relationship between the citizen and the state by which the state governs its citizens. And we might also think about civil and political rights, or human rights more generally, and realize that actually, citizens can also use the law, which is a creature of the state, against the state itself, in order to protect their own individual, civil, and political rights. And then there’s this third dimension, which is really what my book is all about, which is that citizens can harness the centralized means of coercion of the state for their own means when they want to organize their relationship with other citizens. It is this horizontal relationship between citizens — or actors that don’t have to be citizens — who want to harness the law to avail themselves of the coercive powers of the state to organize their private rights.”

The beauty of digital code is that it is highly scalable. We don’t even have to rely on a centralized state power at the territorial nation-state level, but we can create digital relations across national boundaries.

Pistor drew upon legal history to explain how, starting with land, the same “core modules” have been used “time and again” to code capital. “We can see a lot of capital creation and a lot of also skill development for how to code capital,” she said. “Once lawyers and their clients understood the mechanism, they realized that the same legal coding techniques could be applied to different types of assets.”

“One of the questions I asked myself in the towards the end of the book is whether the legal code might be replaced at some point or is already being replaced by the digital code,” Pistor said. “The beauty of digital code is that it is highly scalable. We don’t even have to rely on a centralized state power at the territorial nation-state level, but we can create digital relations across national boundaries. In the book, I come out with the question, is this a new kind of code, and will it replace the legal code? Or is it more complementary, where the legal code will encode the digital code, rather than the other way around? I think that question is still open.”

Pistor argued that the processes through which capital is “coded” through legal mechanisms need to be reformed to reduce wealth inequality. “We have to get at the system,” Pistor said. “It’s not enough to chop off a head of a ruler, what you really have to do is get at the system. The system, of course, is resistant. So you have to use an approach I call “strategic incrementalism….” It’s basically taking a page out of the script that lawyers and capital holders have used over centuries to say, okay, how did you do this, and what did you need to accomplish this? And how much do we have to take back to so that we can make sure that we can cherish our democratic values and get the upper hand in governance again?”

Watch the lecture and Q&A above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Homelessness and the Bay Area Housing Crisis

Published September 28, 2020

On September 21, 2020, a panel of researchers, advocates, and medical practitioners joined a "Matrix on Point" discussion focused on homelessness and the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing crisis.

What are the institutional barriers contributing to homelessness in California, and what can be done to alleviate them? What are the consequences of the criminalization of the homeless, and what are these residents’ rights and civil liberties? These questions were at the heart of a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion recorded on September 21, 2020, which brought together researchers, advocates, and medical practitioners panel to explore the Bay Area’s housing crisis and homelessness.

Panelists for the 90-minute presentation included Chris Herring, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University; Margot Kushel, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations; and Tomiquia Moss, Founder and CEO of All Home, a new organization dedicated to finding regional solutions to the homelessness and housing crisis in the Bay Area.

“The three people here have probably done more than anybody to help us understand the causes of homelessness in the Bay Area,” said the panel’s moderator, Carolina Reid, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning and the Faculty Research Advisor for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

During the panel, each speaker gave a roughly ten-minute presentation; these were followed by a Q&A, with questions asked by Reid and submitted by members of the audience. The speakers reinforced that homelessness is not an unsolvable problem, but that its root causes are often ignored. In her comments, for example, Kushel noted that the primary driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing for “extremely low-income” (ELI) residents. “Homelessness is not caused by mental health and substance use problems,” Kushel emphasized. “The more we blame this problem on highly stigmatized medical conditions, the more it lets us off the hook for solving the fundamental problems that have brought us to this point. We have an extraordinary shortage of…housing that is available and affordable to people who make less than 30% of the area median income.”

Kushel also stressed the major contributing impact of structural racism, noting that a disproportionately large percentage of homeless people in the Bay Area are people of color. “There’s no way we can have an honest conversation about homelessness without talking about the ongoing effects of structural racism,” Kushel said. “We are still very much living with the downstream effects of redlining and other forms of discrimination.”

In her comments, Tomiquia Moss agreed that structural racism is a root cause that must be addressed, but she also noted that an improved regional approach is necessary to help cities find a common solution. “The Bay Area counties are doing incredible work on the ground, trying to support people experiencing homelessness every day, but they’re doing it all in in silos,” Moss said. “Our cities are scrambling, trying to figure out what to do…. We have this very fractious system by which we are trying to solve one of the most fundamental social problems of our time…. When we think about regional approaches to homelessness, the first thing we have to think about is the region actually has to operate as one place.”

Moss said that much of the work of her organization, All Home, is to “try to figure out, how do we bring stakeholders together to look at best practice and borrow lessons-learned and to strategize around resource-sharing, and to assess what assets need to be brought to the table in order for us to do a much better job across geographies in order to address the homelessness and housing crisis…. People talk regionally, but they act very locally. Land-use decisions and zoning changes are held at the local level, and we don’t really have a lot of regional, state, or federal governance that forces us to work as a region.”

Addressing income inequality should be another priority, Moss said. “People are simply unable to afford the rents that we demand in the Bay Area,” Moss said. “And then we blame them for being poor…. We haven’t actually solved the fundamental math problems of wealth inequality.”

In his remarks, Chris Herring presented research he had conducted while earning his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley; his enthnography-based dissertation focused on the impacts of anti-homeless laws, such as laws banning panhandling, camping, or lying on sidewalks. “These are laws that prohibit life-sustaining activities that homeless people have no choice but to undertake in public,” Herring said. “These laws have been spreading nationwide and have been growing at the fastest rate in their history over the last 10 years.”

Herring said that the increased criminalization of homelessness was driven in part by “urban development in areas where used to folks used to be able to camp without receiving complaints.” Gentrification, he said, has led to a “different type demographic of folk moving to the city, who are more likely to call the police.” Accompanying this has been the proliferation of “business Improvement districts” through which groups of property owners, merchants, and esidents hire private security firms who call the police when homeless residents refuse to move.

The criminalization of homelessness is a major issue, Herring said, because it perpetuates the cycle of poverty. “One of the things that folks feared most was the destruction of their property,” Herring said. “In fact, they feared the destruction of their property more than arrest. And what I saw happening was that arrests were actually used as a means to dispossess people of their property.” Herring said he is continuing to work on reforms, such as reforming the dispatch so that police officers are not first responders to homeless-related ordinances.

Ultimately the panelists agreed that, while homelessness is a complex issue, there are solutions available that must be adopted from all levels of government. “We are at a precipice in our time where we don’t have the luxury of not figuring out what the foundational challenges are to actually ending homelessness in the Bay Area,” Moss said. “Homelessness is solvable. It’s not just about finding someone housing. It is about figuring out how we bring our most vulnerable residents inside and helping them not just subsist in our communities, but to thrive.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

Race and Public Opinion: Today in Historical Context

Published September 21, 2020

An online panel discussion — presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix — focused on the history of race and public opinion.

Recorded on September 10, 2020, this online panel discussion – presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix – focused on the history of race and public opinion.

The panelists included: Desmond Ang, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government;

Hannah Walker, Assistant Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin;

Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor of Politics, Princeton; and

Angela X. Ocampo, Assistant Professor of Political Science, LSA Collegiate Fellow, University of Michigan. The event was moderated by Amy Lerman, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley; and David Brookman, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

For more about Social Science Matrix, visit https://matrix.berkeley.edu. For more about the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, see https://citrincenter.berkeley.edu/.