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2020 Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics

Published March 21, 2020

For the second straight year, Matrix hosted a two-day workshop focused on the economics of climate change.

On January 31-February 1, Social Science Matrix was honored to host the Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics, which was co-sponsored with support from Sara Miller McCune. This two-day conference brought together leading scholars from universities around the world — including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford — for a series of presentations and discussions focused on applying the tools of micro- and macroeconomics to understand and tackle the challenge of climate change.

Over the course of the two days, the scholars discussed and debated such topics as whether the government should rebate carbon tax revenue; dynamic responses to carbon pricing in the electricity sector; the climate and ocean in the social cost of carbon; whether environmental markets cause environmental justice; and commodity price volatility under anticipated climate change.

The goal of the workshop was to explore recent advances in climate economics, with an emphasis on the linkage between empirical and numerical modeling methods. A major stated goal of the workshop was to bring junior and senior researchers together. The program consisted of presentations from an outstanding group of invited leading senior researchers, as well as a select group of junior researchers (PhD students and post-doctoral students).

“There’s been this realization that climate really is a problem that we need to solve — and we need to solve it now,” said James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. “Berkeley is actually the leading place right now for climate economics research. It’s playing a central role, it has great people, and it’s terrific to come here.”

The workshop was hosted by the Berkeley Climate Economics Group, which is led by David Anthoff, from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, Max Auffhammer, from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics & International Area Studies, and Solomon Hsiang, from the Goldman School of Public Policy. Social Science Matrix has supported the work of these researchers since 2015; they have convened a series of Matrix Research Teams focused on using economics to understand the potential impacts of climate change in the U.S. and around the world.

“Social Science Matrix really has been an invaluable support for us to get this from an idea that a couple of faculty had to get this to a regular, established place where climate economics can happen,” said Anthoff. “We’re really the only place that organizes a regular meeting that is focused on specifically targeting climate change economic questions.”

Watch a video about the workshop above or on YouTube.

Matrix Lecture

Alexandra Gillies, “Crude Intentions”

Published March 20, 2020

A video featuring a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, author of Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World.

Recorded on March 4, 2020, this video features a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, an expert on oil-sector corruption and author of the book “Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World.” This event was co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

About the Book

Billions of dollars stolen from citizens are circling the globe, enriching powerful individuals, altering political outcomes, and disadvantaging everyday people. News headlines provide glimpses of how this corruption works and why it matters: President Trump’s businesses struck deals with oligarchs and sold property to secretive shell companies; the Panama Papers leak triggered investigations in 79 countries; and corruption scandals toppled heads of state in Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea. But how do these pieces fit together? And if the corruption is so vast and so tied up with powerful interests, how do we begin to fight back?

To find answers, Crude Intentions examines the corruption crisis that erupted during the recent oil boom. From 2008 to 2014, oil prices shot through the roof. Motivated by more than nine trillion dollars in new oil money, corruption followed apace. Examining the oil boom is like placing a drop of dye in the circulatory system of global corruption, and watching as it reveals the system’s channels and pathways. Company bosses signed off on risky schemes to snap up choice oil blocks. Politicians in Brazil and Nigeria stole billions to build up their election war chests. Kleptocrats in Angola, Azerbaijan, and Russia seized upon the oil wealth to cement their hold on power. And an army of bankers, accountants, and lawyers lined up to help these corrupt actors stash their loot in the global system of shell companies and tax havens that serve today’s super-rich. The money then bought yachts, mansions, and even a few foreign politicians.

Drawing on information exposed by intrepid journalists, prosecutors, and whistle blowers, Crude Intentions tells jaw-dropping stories of corruption and asks what we can learn from them. The cases reveal common tactics, but also vulnerabilities in this web of fraud. These are the starting points for building a smarter fight against corruption, in the oil sector and well beyond.

About the Author

Alexandra Gillies is an expert on oil-sector corruption. Her other recent work has focused on the Nigerian oil sector, national oil companies, commodity trading, and promoting transparency standards including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). She has authored academic articles on related topics and co-edited the volume “Smart Aid for African Development” (Lynne Reiner, 2009). She is an advisor to the Natural Resource Governance Institute. Alexandra holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Cambridge, where she researched the political economy of the Nigerian oil sector. She spent 2008 in Nigeria as a Fulbright Fellow. Prior to joining NRGI, she consulted for the World Bank, DFID, USAID and several political risk firms. She served as assistant director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Alexandra also holds degrees from the University of Ghana and Emory University.

Other Events

Immigration and the American Ethos

Published March 16, 2020

A panel on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy and Matthew Wright.

Recorded on March 6, 2020, this panel discussion focused on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California, and Matthew Wright, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

Joining the authors as discussant was Nicholas Valentino, Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan. The panel chair was Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at UC Berkeley.

This event was co-sponsored by the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix.

Matrix On Point

Election Manipulation

Published March 10, 2020

Recorded on March 3, 2020, this Matrix On Point panel consider a wide range of issues related to the security and fairness of our elections. The panel featured Sarah Anzia, Michelle J. Schwartz Associate Professor of Public Policy & Associate Professor of Political Science; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor's Professor of Law; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair of Political Science. The event was co-sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

With the 2020 general elections fast approaching and the nominee of the Democratic Party still undecided, this election year is bound to be contentious and fraught with anxieties. Foreign interference, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the census, the purging of voter registration logs, fake ballots, the malfunction and hacking of voting machines — each of these issues poses a distinct threat to the fairness and security of our elections. Although the right to vote is not constitutionally conferred, it is one of the central ideals of representative democracy. Given the reality of low voter turn-out and the peculiarities of the electoral college, the coordination and galvanization of blocks of like-minded voters can prove decisive in shifting elections. As such, many worry that voting rights are threatened by by both foreign and domestic forces who seek to sway elections in their favor.

Recorded on March 3, 2020 — the day of the “Super Tuesday” primary — this panel discussion consider a wide range of issues related to the security and fairness of our elections. The panel was presented by UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix as part of the “Matrix On Point” discussion series, and was co-sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

The panel included Sarah Anzia, Michelle J. Schwartz Associate Professor of Public Policy & Associate Professor of Political Science; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor’s Professor of Law; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair of Political Science.

Watch the video of this event above or on YouTube.

Postcolonialism

Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial

Published March 10, 2020

In Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Duke University Press), Laura E. Pérez — Professor of Ethnic Studies and and Chair of the Latinx Research Center at UC Berkeley — explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity.

In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez’s screen-printed images, Pérez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Pérez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices—from the poetic to the scholarly—Pérez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.

Recorded on February 27, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” featured Professor Pérez in conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture, UC Berkeley; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of Art History, UC Berkeley.

About the Speakers

Laura E. Pérez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub, the Laitnx Research Center, formerly the Center for Latino Policy Research. She is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities while achiving the work of more than forty Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. She curated UC Berkeley’s first and only US Latina/o Performance Art series in 2001-02; co-curated, with Delilah Montoya, the multimedia exhibition “Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas” at 516 ARTS gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from January-March of 2009, and curated “Labor + a(r)t + orio: Bay Area Latin@ Arts Now” at the Richmond Art Center, CA (April-June 2011). She has published in numerous publications on feminism, Chicana/o, and hemispheric decolonial cultures. She is also co-editing a book on the multimedia artist, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, with Dr. Ann Marie Leimer.

Natalia Brizuela is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Imperio. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th Century photography in Brasil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (Rocco, 2014) is a study of contemporary literature in an expanded field, looking particularly at the relationship between current literary practices and photographic languages, techniques and materialities. She is also the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2015) on photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, and of a book of essays on experimental writer Osvaldo Lamborghini (2008). She is guest editing a Special Issue of Film Quarterly on Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (forthcoming Spring 2016). She is currently at work on two book length projects. The first looks at instances of contemporary photographic production which have moved beyond the medium and material historical conditions of photography. The second one is a study of time as critique in contemporary aesthetics.

Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art since 1960 in the US, Europe, and Latin America; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, performance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press, 2009, named a best book of the year by Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the 2018 Robert Motherwell Book Award). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of two special journal issues (“Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016). With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and is travelling to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and the ICA in Philadelphia. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson (under advanced contract with Yale University Press).

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Other Events

The California Primary and Super Tuesday

Published March 3, 2020

Recorded on February 28, 2020, a few days before the "Super Tuesday" primary, this panel focused on California's role in the 2020 presidential election. Speakers included: John Pérez: Chair, UC Board of Regents and Speaker Emeritus, California State Assembly; Mark DiCamillo, Director, IGS Survey; and David Lauter, Washington Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times. The panel was moderated by David Carrillo (Chair), Executive Director, California Constitution Center, Berkeley Law.

Recorded on February 28, 2020, a few days before the “Super Tuesday” primary, this panel focused on California’s role in the 2020 presidential election. Speakers included:

John Pérez, Chair, UC Board of Regents, Speaker Emeritus, California State Assembly
Mark DiCamillo, Director, IGS Survey
David Lauter, Washington Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times

The panel was moderated by David Carrillo (Chair), Executive Director, California Constitution Center, Berkeley Law.

This event was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Authors Meet Critics

They Were Her Property

Published February 12, 2020

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this "Authors Meets Critics" panel featured a discussion of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured a discussion of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. In discussing her book, Jones-Rogers engaged with two eminent colleagues: Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor in the Department of English, UC Berkeley; and Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley. (Learn more about the Authors Meet Critics series.)

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, They Were Her Property makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

They Were Her Property foregrounds the testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and puts their reflections into conversation with other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records in order to show how white women’s pecuniary investments in the institution shaped their gender identities and to situate them at the center of 19th century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. As a whole, this book offers more expansive and differently gendered understandings of American slavery, the trans-regional domestic slave trade, and nineteenth-century slave markets.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is associate professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the winner of the 2013 Lerner-Scott Prize for best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history. She is working on two new projects: “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law, examines the ways that West African customs and laws influenced English thinking about matrilineal descent and may have influenced their decisions to implement matrilineal descent laws in their North American colonies; and “A Country so dreadfull for a White Woman” reconstructs the lives of nearly 300 British women and girls who travelled to the African littoral on Royal African Company slave ships and settled in the company’s forts and castles before 1750. Jones-Rogers earned her PhD in History from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has interests in legal history and vernacular culture. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017). A book on The Wild Tchoupitoulas—a landmark album of processional call-and-response music arranged as electric funk—is forthcoming in the 33 1/3 Series from Bloomsbury. A critical edition, The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love, is forthcoming from LSU Press. A co-edited collection of essays, Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Current research includes a collaborative work, Slavery and Conspiracy in the Atlantic World.

Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women’s Studies, received her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality, and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories, analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Professor Salzinger is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and with the Designated Emphasis Program in Critical Theory.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Matrix Lecture

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Race for Profit

Published January 28, 2020

In a Matrix Distinguished Lecture, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained how banks and the real estate industry have undermined black homeownership.

On January 24, 2020, Social Science Matrix was honored to host Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor discussed her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press and has been longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Global Metropolitan Studies.

Taylor began her lecture by describing how, in the 1960s, rat infestations were common in Black poor and working-class communities. “In the aftermath of riots in Philadelphia in 1964, a city commissioned report found that one hundred percent of reported rat bites happened in segregated, Black majority neighborhoods,” she said. “Housing segregation—maintained through a vexing combination of white terroristic violence, public policy, and the exclusionary practices of the private sector—insured the dilapidated and substandard condition of Black housing. These were the evidence of exclusion and enclosure and they boiled over into the electricity of successive waves of uprisings across the country.”

Poor housing conditions, she explained, were a major driver of riots in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities throughout the 1960s, and led the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, to call for historic changes to American housing policies. This led to Lyndon Johnson’s Housing and Urban Development Act, which sought to promote single-family homeownership for the poor. “At the heart of the legislation,” Taylor said, “was a low-income homeownership plan that aimed to transform low-income renters into homeowners…. The terms of the new homeownership program were a low $200 down payment, 20 percent of a participant’s income as their mortgage regardless of the cost of the house, and an interest rates capped at one percent. The inclusion of federal mortgage insurance for the first time meant that in the worst-case scenario—foreclosure or abandonment—the federal government was obligated to pay back the mortgage to the lenders. These terms kept the price of the homes manageable for low-income and working-class people.”

Yet this program led to corrupt practices by the real estate industry and banks, Taylor explained, as “speculators and brokers bought up cheap, dilapidated properties hoping to then flip them for higher prices in sales to people who would qualify for the new programs. Not only could money be made by flipping cheap properties, but brokers found it easy to bribe poorly paid FHA appraisers to inflate the value of the houses in the new urban market. Bankers made money on the front end of the real estate deal by securing the loan, and then they made money on the back end with expensive closing costs associated with selling the property. Everyone made money—except the poor Black families that were disproportionately saddled with these broken homes in cities across the country…. In narrowing their focus to ‘access’ alone, racial liberals overlooked the racist practices embedded within those institutions. This was shockingly clear in the real estate industry. Banks and the real estate industry had played a central role in creating the urban housing crisis—exemplified by the persistent presence of rats in Black housing—so the sudden involvement of these same private sector forces was a recipe for disaster.”

The program failed to remedy racial segregation and income inequality, Taylor said, as many families purchased homes that were in disrepair and had little chance of gaining value over time. “Miserable and dangerous housing conditions in the existing urban market led people to walk away from the homes they had recently purchased, and the numbers of defaults, foreclosures, and FHA insurance payments began to rise,” she said. “Where white housing was seen as an asset developed through inclusion and the accruable possibilities of its surrounding property, Black housing was marked by its exclusion and isolation, where value was extracted, not imbued. These racialized narratives of families, communities, and their built environments reinforced and naturalized the segregative practices among real estate brokers, mortgage bankers, and the white public. Indeed, these perceptions of insurmountable difference steeped in the permanence of blood, race, and culture constituted the underwriting criteria that determined who was to be excluded and who should be included.”

Taylor noted that the trend continued in the 1990s and 2000s, as the rise of subprime lending — and the subsequent market collapse — led to unprecedented home losses for African Americans. “For more than fifty years now, the private sector has been viewed as most capable of ending the persisting urban housing crises,” Taylor explained. “And yet those crises have become even starker over time, creating even greater degrees of housing precariousness. This is especially true in the realm of homeownership…. The recurring perception of ‘risky’ Black buyers has opened pathways for the reemergence of naked, predatory practices in the real estate market. From rent-to-own schemes to the reappearance of LICs in lieu of conventional mortgages, real estate continues to pilfer African Americans in search of their American dream in the housing market. It is not history repeating itself. It is the predictable outcome when the home is a commodity and it continues to be promoted as the fulfillment and meaning of citizenship.”

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

Other Events

Who’s on First? The Democratic Race at the End of the Invisible Primary

Published December 18, 2019

Recorded on December 12, 2019, this video features a panel on the state of the presidential race heading into the 2020 primary season.

Recorded on December 12, 2019, this video features a panel entitled “Who’s on First? The Democratic Race at the End of the Invisible Primary,” in which experts weighed in on the state of the presidential race heading into the 2020 primary season.

The panel featured: Mark Barabak, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times; Terri Bimes, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley; John Zaller, Professor of Political Science at UCLA and author of The Party Decides; and Thomas Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution and Distinguished Resident Scholar at UC Berkeley.

This event was co-sponsored by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Authors Meet Critics

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

Published December 12, 2019

Watch our "Authors Meet Critics" panel on Professor Wendy Brown's In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West.

On December 5, 2019, the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” Series featured Professor Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West, in dialogue with Gillian Hart, Professor Emerita, Department of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Tianna Paschel, Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Sociology at UC Berkeley.

In her opening remarks, Brown explained that her book’s focus is “the deliberate, multi-pronged neoliberal assault on the institutions, venues, practices, and values of democracy.” She said that her book was animated by a variety of questions related to the connection between neoliberalism and anti-democratic forces.

“Neoliberalism generates extreme inequality of wealth and access through its stripped-down welfare state, privatization of public goods, regressive taxation, deregulation, union busting, and rapid deindustrialization,” she said. “But why does rebellion against this extreme inequality take such an anti-democratic form?… Why do we get a hard right instead of left response to extreme capitalist depredations and crises?”

Other questions motivating her book, she said, relate to the role of neoliberal reason in “generating the ethnonationalism and conservative family values within this anti-democratic retort,” as well as the question of how “the combination of neoliberal socioeconomic dethronement of the white working- and middle-classes conjoin with traditional values mobilization — and an ever intensifying nihilism — to turn or convert so-called conservative values into a more explicit project of attempting to re-secure white male supremacy, both at the state and civic levels, and restore it at the familial or cultural levels.”

Brown also said she sought to answer the question, “what is the relevance of the fact that, instead of a neoliberal utopia, what many of us in the trade have come to call ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ generated a political formation that the founding neo-liberals themselves would have abhorred.”

Her argument, she said, is that “neo-liberalism tilled the ground for an anti-democratic right wing revolt. And that argument is built both from an examination of the critiques of democracy by the original neo-liberals and through trying to think through how, in ‘actually existing neo-liberalism,’ their vision was significantly distorted by forces that they ignored or neglected, from political power to diseducation to the acceleration of nihilism in our time.”

Following Brown’s remarks was Professor Gillian Hart, who praised the book’s core premise, noting that “there actually are absolutely huge political stakes in how we think about neo-liberalism in relation to the attenuation of democracy.” In her comments—which included a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Brown’s book—Hart noted that “what has happened is the hopes for widespread social and economic justice are very systematically being inverted. And what we are left with is a sort of an outer shell of liberal democracy, a horrendously unequal, divided populace and massive growing popular anger that often takes the form of xenophobia and femicide.”

Professor Tianna Paschel also provided a critique of Brown’s book, describing it as a “timely piece of work…that will be discussed and debated for decades to come.” Paschel noted that the book focuses on the “archetype of the right-wing, white nationalist populace, which is the white, working-class and/or poor, rural midlander man who has in some way experienced the devastating impact of de-industrialization, the ‘race of the bottom,’ and other neoliberal economic reforms at the same time that they felt this kind of devaluation.”

“I understand the attention to this demographic, and I also appreciate the nuanced discussion of nihilism, futurity, and white men,” Paschel said. “However, I want to know if focusing too much attention on this specific demographic, or even on white evangelicals, if by doing so we miss whiteness’s more broad function under this current moment…. Marx famously talked about workers under capitalism having nothing left to bring to market but their labor power, right? Perhaps rather than white male privilege being dethroned or even wounded, I want to suggest that the stripping away of economic stability for some white workers and poor whites has actually left white men in this category to have nothing but their white maleness to bring to market or to politics, which under neoliberalism are such similar things.”

Watch the video of the panel above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

On IPCC, Climate Crisis

Published November 27, 2019

A "Matrix On Point" panel examined the climate crisis from diverse disciplinary perspectives.

On November 18, a “Matrix On Point” panel examined a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. The Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate paints a dire picture about the state of our planet’s ecological health, and calls for “ambitious and effective adaptation for sustainable development.”

The panel featured Daniel Kammen, Chair of the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley; James Bishop, Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science; Kathryn De Master, Assistant Professor of Agriculture, Society, and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM); and Alexander Arroyo, PhD Student in the Department of Geography. Matrix On Point panels are designed to “draw upon the extraordinary range of expertise on these issues that we have on the Berkeley campus,” said Michael Watts, Interim Director of Matrix, in his opening remarks.

The discussion began with an overview by Daniel Kammen, who has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various IPCC reports since 1999. (Kammen was among the scientists who, as part of the IPCC, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.) He provided an overview of how the IPCC’s reports have evolved over the past two decades as scientific consensus about the potential threats and impacts of climate change has grown. (Slides from Kammen’s presentation can be found here.)

In the first IPCC report, Kammen said, “the strongest statement that we could collectively say…was that unequivocal detection of climate change is not likely for a decade.” The second report concluded there was “discernible human influence” on climate change. And a subsequent report concluded that “warming is 90% likely due to humans” and that “warming will most strongly impact the global poor.” For this third report, Kammen noted that he helped produce a special report on renewable energy that showed how an 80% clean energy economy could be possible. “Philosophically, this was a transition point, in terms of actually baking in a list of what we could do,” he said.

Kammen explained that there has been little progress since the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, which sought to keep the rise of global temperatures below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. “The brilliance of the 1.5 degree report is that it highlights very clearly, sector by sector, how much of a difference to the planet it will make to meet the one and a half degree target as opposed to the two,” Kammen said.

But he noted that achieving the 1.5-degree limit “basically means doubling down on everything we know how to do well—energy efficiency, renewables—and also to do things we don’t do well—or we don’t do it all—like finding ways to price pollution and be much more aggressive, not just to invest in clean energy, but also to protect forests and wetlands and fragile ocean systems.”

“The progress has been exceedingly slow,” Kammen said. “Only one country is on pace to make its target…. Many very solid scientists and economists and engineers think even two degrees… is impossible because we’re not on path for it,” Kammen said. “We’ve already warmed by between one degree and 1.1 degrees, so there’s not a lot of head room left…. We need buy-in among decision makers. Meaningful industry participation has been absent. And of course, without that, government participation has been largely absent.”

Next to speak was James Bishop, who provided an overview of some of the impacts of climate change on the ocean, including the potential impacts on fisheries and marine and land productivity. Bishop explained that he studies the role of “fish poop” in capturing carbon. (Slides from Bishop’s presentation can be found here.)

“Ocean pH is going down everywhere and sea level is rising everywhere,” he explained. “And then there are the ecosystem impacts. The prospect from this report is quite bleak. Why is this a crisis? We are actually running out of time to do something in a meaningful way. When I started this in the 1970s, everyone was saying, well, global warming. But this is global crisis. The social science impacts are huge because a lot of communities live at sea level. And even if you go up to 1.5 degrees and stabilize the recovery of the ocean to preindustrial CO2 levels, it will take thousands of years to recover, because that’s the time scale of the overturning circulation of the ocean.”

“That’s the wake up call,” Bishop said. “We’ve changed the circulation of the ocean, the return of nutrients to the surface, and that’s going to feed back into ocean productivity and fisheries.”

Drawing on her expertise in the sociology of agriculture and food production, Kathryn De Master focused on possible levers of change that could help reduce the impacts of climate change. She noted that “it’s a very complicated problem that requires some really nuanced solutions,” particularly as a change in one area—e.g. people deciding to reduce their milk and meat consumption—can have other impacts, such as dairy farmers choosing to use their land for fracking or other industrial production.

“One thing I think the IPCC gets right is that they notice that equity is a critical part of actually solving the climate change puzzle,” she said. “And if we’re attending to some of the social problems like equity, like people’s livelihoods, then some of the scientific questions may in fact get a little easier.

The final presentation came from Alexander Arroyo, who described himself as a “critical geographer with a background in environmental planning and landscape architecture,” with a specific interest in the “digital ocean,” which he explained is “a slew of technologies that are being developed to sense, map, and model what’s happening in the ocean.”

“I’m really interested in [the IPCC report] as a kind of geographical story,” Arroyo said. “What is really being shown here? How do we analyze these changes? Clearly they’re temporal, they’re spatial, but they’re also relational.”

Arroyo provided an overview of potential impacts of shifting coastlines and ice caps, including how fishermen and other groups may realign themselves. “What kind of new solidarities does this enable?” Arroyo asked. “Thinking from the ocean actually allows you to enter into new spaces of solidarity and then figure out how that hits the land, how that hits very specific conditions, contexts, and communities. So rather than this being a kind of think globally act locally issue, this is actually thinking in a really deeply interconnected but specific way.”

The presentations were followed by a lively audience Q&A. For information about other upcoming Matrix On Point events, please see https://matrix.berkeley.edu/events.

Slides from Daniel Kammen’s Presentation

Slides from James Bishop’s Presentation

Matrix On Point

The Trump Impeachment

Published November 10, 2019

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Robert B. Reich discussed "The Trump Impeachment" at a recent Matrix On Point event.

Will Congress vote to impeach President Trump? What would his legal defense look like? If not impeachment, how else might this process play out?

These questions were at the heart of a recent “Matrix On Point” panel discussion featuring two prominent scholars: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the School of Law and an expert in constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction, and Robert B. Reich, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, who has served in three national administrations, including as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Over the course of 80 minutes, the two men engaged with audience members in discussion about an array of factors that could shape the prospects for President Trump’s impeachment. The event was co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Following an introduction by Michael Watts, Interim Director of Social Science Matrix and Emeritus “Class of 1963” Professor of Geography and Development Studies, Dean Chemerinsky kicked off the discussion with an overview of what the constitution says (and does not say) in regard to impeachment. He cited the historic examples of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, and noted that in addition to being removed through impeachment, a president can choose to resign, as Nixon did, or both houses of Congress can choose to censure a president, as happened to Andrew Johnson.

“There may be more talk about censure of Trump if there is a desire in both houses to do something,” Chemerinsky said. “There are no legal consequences to a censure; it’s an expression of displeasure toward the president.”

He noted that the Constitution says the President can be removed “for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdimeanaors,” and that last phrase could become prominent in the coming weeks and months. “The real focus is, what does it mean to say, ‘other high crimes and misdemeanors?’” Chemerinsky said. “A criminal violation is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to be a high crime and misdeameanor.”

Chemerinsky noted that, in the case of Trump’s statements, “there’s not a disupute over what was said: Trump said, ‘I need a favor,’ and none other than Mick Mulvaney said, ‘it was a quid pro quo, get over it’…. The fact-finding won’t be a important as it was with Nixon. It’s, is this a high crime and misdemeanor? And it will come to those who say, this is a serious abuse of power…and others will say, this is what presidents do, and it doesn’t rise to a high crime and misdemeanor.”

Chemerinsky also wondered whether the president’s violations of the emoluments clause will come into play. “Until January 2017, most people thought emoluments were just a skin cream,” he quipped. He commented that, because the Constitution “doesn’t say much” about impeachment, lawmakers could find ways to avoid the process. “What if the house writes Articles of Impeachment but Mitch McConnell says, that’s nice, we’re not going to hold a trial? There’s nothing we can do.”

In his remarks, Robert Reich said he has had close encounters with the impeachment process throughout his career, first by working for Robert Bork, who oversaw the Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon impeachment era, and later as a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet. He agreed with Chemerinsky that the Constitution says very little about impeachment. “This is all about politics and power,” Reich said. “As much as we would like to find answers in the constitution, they really are not there. We have to find answers in politics and power. It’s almost impossible that the Senate would come up with the 20 GOP votes to convict Trump of impeachment, even assuming every democratic senator votes for it—almost impossible, because we have a very different system of politics and allocation of power than we did with Nixon and Clinton.”

Reich explained that the current media landscape has been a major driver in this shift over the past 20 years. “Forty percent of Americans are entranced in a counternarrative about what is happening,” Reich said. “They do not believe Trump even engaged with Ukraine in any kind of negotiation, quid pro quo or not…. The thing that gets me most worried about where we are as a democracy is that, to maintain and sustain counternarratives, you have to have a counter-system of informing people, of shaping people’s brains around what is reality…. We have a president who lies like most people breathe. His lies reach 68 million people on Twitter every day, unfiltered. We’ve never had a system in which president lies that much – and in which those lies get to individuals without any filter…. The problem is not really Fox news. It’s lack of intermediation combined with a president who will say anything.”

Reich said the core problem is that too many Americans feel left out by a “rigged” system, and they are looking to candidates like Donald Trump and Robert Reich because they will “shake things up.”

“Donald Trump is the culmination of years of something happening in this country, and it is and would be inappropriate for me just to have a discussion about what is happening without talking about what led to what is happening,” Reich said. “The dilemmas, the anxieties many of us feel in this room, are a product in part of what has come over the last 30-40 years: the failure of the political system to respond effectively to the frustrations, anxieties, and eventually hopelessness of a large number of people in this country.”

Watch the full of the presentation above or on the UCTV Public Policy Channel. You can also see how the Daily Cal reported on this event.