White House Scientists Come to Flint

The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman delves into the role behavioral science can play in Flint.

A week after Donald Trump’s election, a thirty-year-old cognitive scientist named Maya Shankar purchased a plane ticket to Flint, Michigan. Shankar held one of the more unorthodox jobs in the Obama White House, running the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, also known as the President’s “nudge unit.” When she launched the team, in early 2014, it felt, Shankar recalls, “like a startup in my parents’ basement”—no budget, no mandate, no bona-fide employees. Within two years, the small group of scientists had become a staff of dozens—including an agricultural economist, an industrial psychologist, and “human-centered designers”—working with more than twenty federal agencies on seventy projects, from fixing gaps in veterans’ health care to relieving student debt. Usually, the initiatives had, at their core, one question: Could the growing body of knowledge about the quirks of the human brain be used to improve public policy? 

For months, Shankar had been thinking about how to bring behavioral science to bear on the problems in Flint, where a crisis stemming from lead contamination of the drinking water had stretched on for almost two years. She wondered if lessons from the beleaguered city could inform the Administration’s approach to the broader threat posed by lead across America—in pipes, in paint, in dust, and in soil. “Flint is not the only place poisoning kids,” Shankar said.

Read the rest here.

The Declining Popularity of Unions

Just how low has organized labor — a movement that shapes Flint's past, present and future — sunk in the court of public opinion?

James Surowiecki of The New Yorker reports that "more than seventy percent of those surveyed in a 1937 Gallup poll said they favored unions." My, how times have changed: "A 2010 Pew Research poll offered even worse numbers, with just forty-one percent of respondents saying they had a favorable view of unions, the lowest level of support in the history of that poll."

Surowiecki succinctly lays out the reasons for the decline, showing that many now view unions as "just another interest group," and paints a dire picture of the labor movement in the United States: "Labor, in other words, may be caught in a vicious cycle, becoming progressively less influential and more unpopular. The Great Depression invigorated the modern American labor movement. The Great Recession has crippled it."

UPDATE: Because this topic resonates with a lot of readers, I'll try to post some of the comments here as well as in the comment section:

William Weber writes:

I am from Flint. I will always believe in the positive outcomes that the union has achieved for workers (including the world famous sit down strike in 1936-1937). We are all better today because of what unions have accomplished. However, I do believe that what started out as a necessary grass roots movement to protect workers and ensure fair working conditions, has now transformed into a way for union leadership to make outrageous wages and screw the people they represent, the companies they operate in, and the general public. It's no longer about what is fair and just. It's now about how much can I get, how can I sue for breach of contract, and what's in it for me. Most of the people I know and speak with are very anti-union, and I live in California. If the current trend continues, and the leadership continues to operate in this way, well, let's just say that unions will mostly disappear. I feel sad about that because the workers will no longer have a voice or representation. I certainly don't buy into the theory that the recession has anything to do with it. I hope that all unions throw out their current leadership and align themselves with the reasons that unions were established. Regardless, I will always look for the "Union Label."

JWilly writes:

The general public's view of unions has been influenced by two patterns of behavior. These may be more common in recent decades than in earlier times, or maybe are just better publicized now:

1. Some unions have been more focused on the near-term gains of their current members than the ability of the companies with whom they're associated to compete effectively. Among other effects, this results in companies failing, and the US becoming uncompetitive internationally.

2. Some unions in sole-provider roles, such as those associated with essential governmental services, regulated utilities, sole commercial providers of essential quasi-governmental services, and socially essential commercial services have been willing to use their social leverage to extract increases in total compensation that are much greater than the average rate of inflation, thereby increasing their compensation relative to the rest of society while increasing the tax or cost burden on the rest of society.

Some of the general public see these behaviors as an abandonment of the original union concept of protect-the-workers-from-uncaring-management, and its replacement with raise-up-our-members-screw-everyone-else. Naturally, this perception results in pushback on the part of the screwees, who see such unionism as greedy and anti-patriotic.

In parts of the country where social duty and patriotism are regarded especially highly, i.e. southern and western states, it's become quite difficult to get workers to unionize even though the national union makes a strong argument that it would be able to achieve an increase in their compensation. My guess is that this problem for the union movement will continue until unions internalize that it's more important for the US and its individual companies to be economically competitive than for their members to have compensation increases, and that compensation increases at a rate greater than inflation in fact result in social harm.

Unclebuck writes:

My father was an organizer for John L. Lewis's coal miners union in the twenties when it was a very hazardous undertaking. The company goons made it difficult to hold meetings in church basements,civic halls or anywhere you could gather the workers to discuss the merits of unionizing. This was in Penn. and W.Virginia. I recall him once saying that one of their tactics was slipping a pistol cartridge into your coat pocket as a warning or causing some disruption to break up those meetings. He was young and mean and stuck with it because he was a believer in the union movement.

He came to Michigan and worked in the auto factories in Detroit when jobs were easy to get. Moved to Flint and became an employee of Consumers Power Co. after working at local auto factories. He used his organizing ability to unite the workers at the utility company, and to form the first union there under the "UAW" banner with the approval of the President of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Workers), which later became the UWUA (Utility Workers Union of America) this was in 1939-40.

He and four other organizers became regional directors and organized the rest of the United States. Region five included the state of Michigan which was his patch. Besides Consumers Powers, the rest of this state, including private utility companies was organized with the exception of Detroit Edison which was IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). After almost forty years of being local 101 President he retired from Consumers Power Company with thirteen years active seniority!

The many justified reasons for which unionism was based upon, and I can name a bunch, have morphed into some unreasonable demands and lack of leadership quality-elitism being one of them. My father was dismayed by the manner in which things had deteriorated before he passed on in the late eighties after being a pillar in this movement. He did his part for the betterment of the worker rights when his efforts were more appreciated. He is a member of "Who's Who in American Labor" and I'm very proud of his tenacity and achievement.

The G.M. Bailout: Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

Rick Wagoner and Steven Rattner. Which one really saved G.M.?

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent review of Overhaul, the chronicle of the G.M. and Chrysler bailouts by former Auto Czar Steven Rattner. But while Rattner views the bailout as a personal triumph, Gladwell finds an unlikely hero in G.M.'s resurgence — the oft-maligned Rick Wagoner. Gladwell writes:

Wagoner was not a perfect manager, by any means. Unlike Alan Mulally, the C.E.O. at Ford, he failed to build up cash reserves in anticipation of the economic downturn, which might have kept his company out of bankruptcy. He can be faulted for riding the S.U.V. wave too long, and for being too slow to develop a credible small-car alternative. But, especially given the mess that Wagoner inherited when he took over, in 2000—and the inherent difficulty of running a company that had to pay pension and medical benefits to half a million retirees—he accomplished a tremendous amount during his eight-year tenure. He cut the workforce from three hundred and ninety thousand to two hundred and seventeen thousand. He built a hugely profitable business in China almost from scratch: a G.M. joint venture is the leading automaker in what is now the world’s largest automobile market. In 1995, it took forty-six man-hours to build the typical G.M. car, versus twenty-nine hours for the typical Toyota. Under Wagoner’s watch, the productivity gap closed almost entirely.

Michigan Poetry

A Primer

By Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Reprinted from the May 19 edition of The New Yorker.

Housebound

Is home ownership increasing unemployment in states like Michigan? This week's New Yorker magazine suggests a link:

"Homeowners are much less likely to move than renters, especially during a downturn, when they aren’t willing (or can’t afford) to sell at market prices.
As a result, they often stay in towns even after the jobs leave. That may be why a study of several major developed economies between 1960 and 1996, by the British economist Andrew Oswald, found a strong relationship between increases in homeownership and increases in the unemployment rate; a ten-per-cent increase in homeownership correlated with a two-per-cent increase in unemployment. (In the U.S., it may be worth noting, the states that have the highest unemployment rates—states like Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi—are also among those with the highest homeownership rates.) And reluctance to move not only keeps unemployment high in struggling areas but makes it hard for businesses elsewhere to attract the workers they need to grow."