Originally Published by Z as open source. Feel free to share. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-challenge-of-our-time/

“Forums for a Future” are a means for personally and socially confronting the challenge of our time: Finding ways to live peacefully and sustainably on a crowded planet in the 21^st Century.

 The Challenge of Our Time 

Edward Renner

Rapid technological and social change is a powerfully disruptive force – a wave of creative destruction -- leaving in its wake a residue of vulnerable people. People are losing a sense of control over their life. They are becoming insecure about how to retain their place and purpose. These creative disruptions of change are not about liberal or conservative political ideologies; rather, they are deeply felt personal psychological issues.

“Forums for a Future” are a personal and social process for restoring civic discussion and reducing divisive political polarization. The substance of the Forums – the significant social issues of our time – only appear to be intractable because they are complex and because there are no simple solutions. The changes that must be made to live in the future all have political, economic, and social elements which need to be reconciled with each other. To move beyond our current political polarization, the requirement is to account for the complex interplay between these three elements: they are interactive, simultaneous, and interdependent. They are not independent, hierarchical, and sequential.

Most people, from all walks of life, and all educational levels, will need to discover new ways of thinking to restore a sense of purpose and direction to living, and to retain a personal identity suitable for an uncertain future. This paper describes a tested methodology that can serve as an example of how we can begin the process of thinking about the future as disruptive events that are defining a new reality – not about competing political ideologies.

Format for Forums for a Future

Forums for a Future are for use with any established group of people -- such as students in a high school or college class, a discussion club, or any established group who share a common connection. They have general applicability to a wide range of divisive social issues. The Forums are not debates over who is right or wrong, nor are they designed to reach a group consensus. Rather, to identify different perspectives and the fundamental beliefs and values on which they are they based.

For each discussion the participants read an essay on a specific topic to provide a common reference point and to establish a factual focus for the discussion. The moderator is responsible for ensuring that a situation does not unfold where some participants are basing their perspective on one set of facts, and others as if the opposite is true. If essential facts are unknown, there is no reasonable discussion to be had.

Before starting any discussion, each participant fills out an opinion questionnaire by selecting either strongly agree, agree, mildly agree, mildly disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree with an assertion about the topic of the forum (e.g., “A person should have the right to choose whether to receive the COVID vaccine, versus government authorized vaccine mandates”). Those who agree sit on one side of the room, facing those who disagree.

Another task of the moderator is to facilitate the order of speakers. After a person has spoken, they cannot speak again when anyone else is waiting their turn; this is necessary to avoid two-way dialogues.  When there is full participation and when one person cannot dominate, individuals become thoughtful before taking their turn to speak.

 There are no arguments. If a person on the other side says something that one disagrees with, the only permittable response is to say, “l think about it differently, for these reasons….” The goal is to learn how others are thinking about the question, and why. Listening to another’s explanation offers the opportunity for self-reflection and self-directed change. Each person owns their own identity.

I have moderated many such Forums. It is a rewarding experience to observe a diverse group of people sort through clusters of competing personal values to come to broader individual perspectives. From session to session, the two sides keep reconstituting themselves; the person sitting beside you this time was on the opposite side of the room the last time. Participants see each as more complex rather than simply “them” and “us.”

Forums do not result in absolute answers – a product -- on what living in the foreseeable future should or would be like. Rather, each Forum is a unique process; different people reach thoughtful and respectful conclusions at different times, on different issues, in personal ways. In part, this is a psychological process that helps an individual to develop a personal identity.

An Illustrative Forum on: “The Challenge of our Time”

My illustrative Forum on “The Challenge of Our Time” -- of living peacefully and sustainably on a crowded planet in the 21^st Century – asks three questions:

1.      How to Establish and Maintain a Peaceful and Cooperative World Order

2.      How to Live Sustainably, Inclusively, and Equitably on a Diverse and Crowed Planet

3.      How to use the power of 21^st Century Science, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence to Advance Human Well Being and Social Progress.

 Each of three questions for discovering how to live in the future requires the simultaneous integration of four elements into a coherent sense of direction and common purpose. Each of the four are inter-dependent and simultaneous; they are not hierarchical or sequential:

1.      The Political

2.      The Social

3.      The Economic

4.      The Psychological (i.e., Personal)

The three questions and the four perspectives create a 12-cell discussion matrix for a single “Forums for a Future.” There are multiple examples of specific current disruptions that fit in each of the 12 cells; thus, there are an infinite number of possible Forums, each with 12 sessions to complete a full series on a given topic, as illustrated in the template below:

The Challenges of our Time	A  Political Elements	B  Social Elements	C Economic Elements	D Psychological Elements
I.  How to Establish and Maintain a Peaceful and Cooperative World Order	I.  A	I.  B	I.  C	I.  D
II.  How to Live Sustainably, Inclusively, and Equitably on a Diverse and Crowed Planet	II.  A	II.  B	II.  C	II.  D
III. How to use the power of 21st Century Science, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence to Advance Human Well Being and Social Progress	III.  A	III.  B	III.  C	III.  D

 Each of the cells has a link to a reading that defines a perspective on a specific issue. After reading the reference piece, each participant (a) rates on a six -point scale whether they agree or disagree with an assertion about the issue, (b) writes and shares with the group an explanation of their thinking and reasoning, (c) considers and discusses the explanations written by others, and (d) then arrives at a thoughtful and respectful written final personal conclusion and repeats the six-point rating scale.

The six-point rating scale provides a quantitative, before and after, empirical metric for identifying where changes of thinking occurred, and the content of the individual material provides the basis for a qualitative analysis. At the end of the 12-week series, the individual task is to better understand their personal cognitive changes and the principles of the process.  At the national level, we need to discover new roles and methods for life-long learning. Ideally, misinformation and conspiracy theories are best corrected through personal civic engagement, not through content regulation of social media or educational institutions.

For my illustrative example on The Challenge of Our Time, I have created a sample matrix with suggested readings for each discussion, that can be freely used or revised. As a generalized methodology, the matrix can be modified to address other divisive topics – such as reproductive rights or transgender issues as examples – by redefining the rows and selecting appropriate reference material for the cells of the matrix. I have 100s of potential reference articles in my Forums for a Future Library for alternative matrixes. Suitable material is not hard to find.

We need to focus on the disruptions of technological and social change, and on the future – rather than political ideologies – as one antidote to the polarizing effect of selective news and social media channels.

____________________________________________________________________________

Edward Renner is a retired Professor of Psychology who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, and the University of South Florida.

 

 

Originally published in Z as open source. Feel free to share. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/managing-the-disruptions-of-change-in-the-foreseeable-future/

“Powerless in the hands of disruptive change – informational technologies, environmental collapse, breakdown of international order, global waves of migration -- we stand at future’s gate, uncertain of our fate.”

 Managing the Disruptions of Change

In the Foreseeable Future 

Edward Renner

When my grandfather was born there were neither cars, airplanes, nor phones. Yet, before he died, man had walked on the moon. We now live in the Post-Modern World, with technological progress happening at an even faster rate.

 Rapid change is a powerfully disruptive force – a wave of creative destruction -- leaving in its wake a residue of vulnerable people. Illustrated by a strategy celebrated in the film “Money Ball,” a machine and a statistician can do a better job of making baseball decisions than a scout or manager. Now, a beginning surgeon can practice on an image, rather than a live patient. There are autonomous taxis to drive us and autonomous weapons to protect us, both without human intervention. They are all examples of human progress, of an emerging era of Artificial Intelligence which discards human roles and occupations, and with them, the personal identity of the individuals.

 People are losing a sense of control over their life. They are becoming insecure about how to retain their place and purpose. These creative disruptions of change are not about liberal or conservative political ideologies; they are deeply felt personal psychological issues.

Disruptive Changes

The magnitude and nature of change has dramatically shifted through history. For 5,000 years people lived in the past tense. Yesterday was the best predictor of their tomorrow. For the next 500 years – the Modern Era of science and technology, roughly from 1500 to 2000 – people lived in the present tense. Today could be whatever we wanted it to be. Now, for the next 50 years – roughly 2000 to 2050 – we must learn to live in the future tense. We must learn how to live today as if it were tomorrow, or there will not be a tomorrow worth living.

The rate of change is now so fast that individuals must make the transition from one historical era – the present to the autonomous future -- all within one lifetime. The magnitude of change we are facing has never been experienced before in the history of human existence. These are uncharted times that require adopting new ways of thinking.

In the distant the past, most of the events that impacted a person’s life were physically and temporally close at hand; but today the effects of change are increasingly external and arbitrary, and their mechanisms are largely distant and invisible. Our neighborhood is no longer the families on our block, or those on the other side of our town, city or even region. Our neighborhood now includes nations and people on the other side of the globe – who we have never seen nor spoken to – but who’s actions, beliefs, and values affect our daily lives in essential ways.

When people lose their personal sense of place, purpose, and control over their own fate, they become vulnerable to exploitation by opportunists offering solutions that promise to restore their lost identity.

The Opportunist

Opportunists give the vulnerable someone to be angry at. In the US today it is often immigrants or the 1%. “Us” versus “them” restores an identity, albeit a dysfunctional one. Human displacements and global migrations are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and the 1% are not going to relinquish their wealth and power within the current political and economic structures. In such situations, there is no middle ground between “us” and “them.” Both Conservatives and Progressives have propositions, with opposing alternatives, that are unacceptable to the other and unattainable.

In her book, There Is Nothing for You Here (2021), Fiona Hill, who is a specialist in Russian affairs and was an adviser to Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama, and Presidents Trump’s assistant on the National Security Council for Russian affairs, suggested that the political, social and economic situations in the US are becoming so severe – “there is nothing for you here” -- that they are undermining the foundations of our democracy, making us, similar to Russia, vulnerable to authoritarian appeals, which are responsible for our political divide between the left and the right.

The personal challenge today for the vulnerable – who will soon be the majority -- is to resist the opportunist who offers the simple political ideological solutions of left versus right. It is our mind that allows us to be fooled by the opportunist who plays on our fears of vulnerability – the loss of personal identity. Most people, from all walks of life, and all educational levels, will need to discover new ways of thinking to restore a sense of purpose and direction to living, to retain a personal identity suitable for an uncertain future.

The End of Living in the Present Tense

The Modern Era gave us a sense of certainty. Science and knowledge advanced to such a degree that facts replaced faith and fate from the past, as the basis for daily living. We know that the heavens and the earth were not created in seven days, that humans evolved over thousands of years, and that space and the stars are an unknown infinite expanse. Because we understand causal relationships, events, such as the weather, have become largely predictable. Socially, we can reliably communicate with others at any time or place. Politically, we know about every nation on the planet and the people who live there. Economically we have the financial means and transportation necessary for global commerce.

 Science and technology have now taken us to the limits of the Modern Era. As our clearest example, we have the power to understand we are killing the very planet we need to sustain ourselves. History books are full of accounts of previous societies that collapsed because they depleted their local natural resources. Science has shown us that we are consuming our global resources faster than the earth can regenerate them, and that our consumption rate is increasing. By living as we do in the present tense, we are in the process of extinguishing ourselves. 

Collectively, humankind has no choice but to drastically change some of our most fundamental beliefs and values or become the authors of our own demise within our own lifetime. The future can no longer be an extension of the present; rather, the foreseeable future must now dictate the present.

 Living in the Future Tense

 At this moment, the most important challenge we face as individuals – making the transition from one historical era to the next, all within one lifetime – is a unique human experience. There are no guidelines for learning how to live today (the present tense) as if it were tomorrow (the future tense). Yet, if we are to have a worthwhile future for ourselves, we must create it ourselves in how we live today, in the present.

Living in the future tense means renegotiating our present values and behaviors to purposefully create a future we would consider worth living for. It will require a process of embracing complexity and adopting a perspective of time.

Embracing Complexity. Using singular political ideological perspectives – as we are now doing -- oversimplifies the complexity of our current social issues, resulting in seemingly irreconcilable differences. A recent example was the politicization of COVID management. To reject a mandatory mask or vaccine mandate because it is an infringement on personal freedom is a singular political perspective that over-rides the social and economic elements of the pandemic and fails to identify the most appropriate comprehensive set of management practices when all three elements are simultaneously considered. Likewise with the current stalemate in response to climate change, the political, social, and economic elements are interactive and must be reconciled with each other simultaneously.

These objective, definable “social issues” only appear to be intractable because they are complex and because there are no simple solutions. The changes that must made to live in the future tense all have political, economic, and social elements which need to be reconciled with each other. The new role for our individual perspectives is to account for the complex interplay between these three elements; they are interactive, simultaneous, and interdependent.

The singular political ideology of conservative vs liberal has divided the nation and paralyzed our transition from the Present Era to the New Post-Modern Future we must create within our lifetime. The immutable flow of the creative destructions of scientific and technological change does not follow the dictates of our political ideologies. It is time to get off the left versus right ideological merry-go-around, which is going nowhere in the present, and to get on the bullet train of time into the future. Time is the principal axis, and our political, social, and economic ideologies are simply perspectives and tools for adapting to (not degerming) the disruptions of change from scientific and technological innovations.

Adopting the Perspective of Time. We need to understand our current social issues through the comparative mental perspectives of distinguishing between thinking in the past, present, and future tense. For example, long in the past, severe weather was seen as the wrath of the Gods. Later, knowledge of the mechanics of the weather allowed us to predict and track hurricanes. Now, with a geological understanding of climate change we know that our children’s life will not be sustainable without significant disruptions to our current ways of thinking and living.

Just as the statues erected in the past to appease the anger of the Gods were ineffective in tempering the weather, so too are the institutions of today ineffective for solving the disruptive challenges we can anticipate. Complex issues rest on political, social, and economic values which at any moment are in a natural state of tension – they are dependent on each other, interactive and simultaneous. When a significant number of people can be persuaded that any one of the three – such a political ideology -- is an overarching hierarchical value, it is a prescription for falling into the “intractable problem” trap: Cheap fossil fuel will support economic growth, until we suffocate; a pandemic will subside only when enough people have developed a natural or vaccine-based immunity.

Only the passage of time tells the full story. Time is the water-like process that dissolves (resolves) the competing political, economic, and social values of any issue into a final all-inclusive solution (resolution). We need to personally reject appeals to any singular overarching value and embrace the complex disruptions of change over time as our primary perspective. The future used to be about other people’s fate, now it is about our own.

If we believe building our future is an ongoing, collaborative, and participatory process, then embracing complexity and adopting a perspective of time to solve our current and pressing issues is a difficult but not impossible challenge. In some ways, it’s like taking a trip, except instead of downloading maps or packing our bags, our preparation must be psychological and personal. We know what our destination is, but we don’t know exactly what will happen or who we will meet along the way. Shifting our collective mindset from the past and present tenses into Living in the Future Tense is to begin a wide-eyed, open-end adventure. What an exciting – and challenging -- time to be alive!

Living in the future tense is an essential, ongoing, interpersonal, cooperative, and self-reflective process. No one knows the answers. No one has ever been in this situation before. As individuals we cannot afford to relinquish our identity to opportunists; we need to own our personal coherent sense of the foreseeable future to shape our present behaviors. To do otherwise is to be powerless in the hands of disruptive change, standing at future’s gate, uncertain of our fate.

 ______________________________________________________________________

Edward Renner is a retired Professor of Psychology who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, and the University of South Florida.

 Random Acts of Kindness

Edward Renner 

When I listen to a Presidential Candidate answer a media question, I asked myself “What would I say?” to provide a personal basis for comparison.

 hat would do you on your first day in office?

I would issue an Executive Order establishing a National Week for Committing Random Acts of Kindness. I would ask every person to make a personal promise over the next week to commit at least one random act of kindness each day. The act could be as simple as standing in line with a cart full of stuff and noticing the person behind you had two items and saying, “go in front of me.”

I would also say: “We as a nation, more than anything else, need to pause our current political divisiveness long enough to experience what it feels like to live cooperatively with each other. Our vitality and freedom as a democracy, above all else, is a collective responsibility, one in which we can entrust our government to nurture the collaborative process.”

The inevitable disruptions of technological innovation, environmental collapse, breakdown of international order, and global waves of human migration that we are currently experiencing require collaborative problem solving. Ready or not, our modern challenge is how to live cooperatively, peacefully, and sustainably in our neighborhood – a crowded planet.

The age of science allowed us, falsely, to believe that we could make the present, and implicitly our national future, be whatever we desired. Now, precisely because of the predictive power of science, the future is foreseeable, and that knowledge must dictate the present if we are to have a future worth living. No one before has ever been in a position of such foresight.

The modern challenge of adapting to this predictable future is no small task. Dividing ourselves into adversaries of Democrats versus Republicans is destroying our capacity as a nation to collectively meet the nonideological external challenges of technological innovation, environmental collapse, breakdown of international order, and global waves of human migration which are real and eminent. If the United States is to be a model of a functional democracy, as the path to the future we would all hope to have, we need to demonstrate, first to ourselves, the power of collaboration, perhaps starting with something as simple as a National Week for Committing Random Acts of Kindness.

The recent hurricanes of Helene and Milton allowed many of us to experience the power of looking out for each other.

What 'Critical Theory' Is Actually All About

 

This is a copy of an essay which appeared in the Perspective Section of the Oct. 23 Sunday Edition of the Tampa Bay Times.

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2022/10/20/what-critical-theory-is-actually-all-about-column/

 

What ‘Critical Theory’ Is Actually All About 

It is a method of seeking answers when the purported solution is actually part of the problem

Edward Renner, PhD

And

LaSonya Moore, EdD

“Critical theory” is a straightforward but important area of study that is often misunderstood and maligned. And yet, it’s pretty simple: It studies how reforms are necessary when a government agency or function (the courts or criminal justice process and the like), or an academic discipline (for example, law or history) contribute in major ways to the very problem that they are intended to solve.

 

Here’s an example. Critical law theory emerged as a specific sub-field more than 50 years ago in the United States when feminist scholars documented how women who reported their rape to the police were further victimized by the legal process. The result was revisions to the criminal code to eliminate those barriers and to create a new understanding of “sexual assault.” In short, the goal was to prosecute the perpetrator and not blame or further traumatize the victim. Nothing controversial in that.

Currently, the discipline of history is questioning whether commonly accepted accounts of the past may actually be contributing to the persistence of racism, requiring reconsideration from the perspective of the present. Designating lynching locations in the south as National Historical Sites is an example of re-focusing that history.

When the specific focus of critical theory is about racial issues, it is a sub-area of study known as “critical race theory,” whether it is about a civic process, such as how the justice system functions, or within the structure of academic disciplines such as history. Simply put, racism is structural, not just personal.

Many states, including Florida, have passed laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory in their colleges and universities. The legislative purpose of these laws is to restrict the teaching of critical race theory and other topics that lawmakers have labeled as “divisive concepts.” When Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the “Stop Woke” Act, he had his picture taken behind a sign that read “Freedom From Indoctrination.”

But “critical theory” — whether it’s critical law theory or critical race theory or something else — isn’t intended to indoctrinate. It simply investigates why systems fail at the very problem they’re supposed to solve.

For example, in the United States today, one of the most prominent racial areas of national concern is the large number of failing, largely minority, urban schools. The Pinellas County school system provides a classic case study of such failing schools resulting in discipline and achievement gaps between Black and white students.

In 2015 the Tampa Bay Times identified five elementary schools in predominately Black neighborhoods of St. Petersburg that went from successful, partially desegregated schools in 2006, to racially segregated, failing schools a decade later. As a result of their investigative reporting, Pinellas County schools undertook a 10-year, wide-ranging reform effort called “Bridging the Gap.” While the outcome assessments are ongoing, the annual reports have been positive.

How does critical race theory help to study this problem? From the perspective of critical race theory, a common misperception of our schools is that there is a hierarchically organized set of independent elements that proceed in a circular sequential order: A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. For example:

When students do not behave, teachers cannot teach. When teachers cannot teach students do not learn. When students do not learn, the schools fail. When schools fail students do not behave.

When a school system becomes segregated — as in urban, largely minority, failing public schools, illustrated by the five Pinellas schools — then these vicious circles are about minority students and their parents, and the situation becomes a racial issue. In this case, the behavior and achievement of the Black students becomes the focus of attention.

However, vicious circles have neither definite starting nor end points. One starting point focuses on the students and their parents, and implicitly blames them. A second starting point implicitly blames the teachers. And a third implicitly blames the schools.

When none of the three are prepared to accept responsibility for the failure of the other two, no solution is obvious, and the problem appears intractable.

How to break the circle? That is the problem to be solved. Should we train the teachers in classroom management or give them diversity training? Should we discipline or use positive behavioral modification procedures with the students? Should we modify institutional and situational factors that result in largely minority schools? Which of the elements is broken and who should be held responsible to break the chain?

Critical race theory provides an alternative perspective on how to approach these issues. Specifically, that the success of any school is a function of the teacher/student relationship, that the success of the teacher is a function of the school/student relationship, and that the success of the student is a function of the school/teacher relationship.

Simply put, no one of the three sets of relationships can succeed without the other two sets of relationships also being successful. Each is dependent on the other two. They are interactive and not organized hierarchically. They are simultaneous, not sequential.

To empirically evaluate the critical race theory perspective, we have used three public databases for the 2013-14 academic year (the semi-annual Civil Rights Data Collection series, the Pinellas County Schools’ website, and the Florida Department of Education accountability reports). This is the last set of public data before the investigative reporting by Tampa Bay Times resulted in the reform efforts now in progress by the Pinellas School District.

In these five schools, from 2006 through 2015, the level of segregation increased from 51% to 80% Black, and the schools declined from a state-issued letter grade of B- to F. Teachers had transferred out of the schools, or resigned from the system, resulting in new, inexperienced teachers at the beginning of each school year.

 By 2015, 59.9% of the students failed to meet grade-level academic standards, and the schools received a failing grade of F. When students did not learn, there was lack of parental support; only 11.1% of the teachers felt they received positive parental support. When there was a lack of parental support, there was a high rate of teacher turnover, resulting in 45% of new, inexperienced teachers. Schools with new, inexperienced teachers had more classroom management problems, resulting in 390 formal disciplinary actions. When classroom management was an issue, only 14.4% of the students were seen as well behaved. When students misbehaved, there were many referrals (2,165) for staff and administrative support. When there was no school history of administrative support, only 57.2% of the teachers looked forward to coming to school each day. When teachers did not want to come to work, morale was low, with only 44% reporting positive morale. Schools with low morale had a failing grade of F. In failing schools, only 8.3% of the teachers felt parents were involved.

Three sets of dysfunctional relationships. Every negative element made every other element worse. It was a vicious circle, spiraling downward ever faster.

For the comparison, we selected five of the most successful elementary schools, which had remained integrated over the same period, 2006 through 2015, but had a stable white majority (70% to 66%).

In these schools, 84.8% of the students met high academic standards, and the schools received a Grade of A. When students learned, 100% of the teachers experienced strong positive parental support. When there was parental support, there was a low rate of teacher turnover with only 5% of new, inexperienced teachers. Schools with experienced teachers had no serious problems which resulted in formal disciplinary actions. When classroom management was not an issue, 100% of the teachers felt their students were well behaved. When students were well behaved, there were only 8 referrals requiring staff and administrative support. In the schools with a history of a stable experienced staff working together as a team, 96.8% of the teachers looked forward to coming to school each day. When teachers wanted to come to work 86% reported having positive morale. Schools with high morale were successful (earning the schools an A grade). In the successful schools, 100% of the teachers felt the parents were involved.

At the end of this successful continuum, there was a clear, positive, mutually reinforcing climate. Happy teachers, with cooperative students and parents, had a high-performing school. A school with happy and stable staff had manageable classrooms. And a successful school with cooperative parents had stable and happy teachers.

Traditionally, educational research has focused separately on schools (for example, comparative achievement, quality of facilities), teachers (for example, retention rates, credentials, personal characteristics) and students (for example, preparedness, achievement gap, head start) as if they were independent issues, each with their own independent solutions.

From the perspective of critical race theory, one cannot blame the teachers, the students, or the failing schools themselves. None alone can fix the problem. Instead, one must blame the process that binds the three together in a specific way, at a specific time and place, as illustrated by our case study of 10 elementary schools in Pinellas County.

Critical race theory is the necessary perspective for informing “Bridging the Gap” of its specific obligations to the five failing schools in Pinellas County. It is a well-established area of scholarship that identifies how the specific issues at a particular time and place are actually contributing to the problems for which they are the intended solution. In no way is this being “woke,” as critics would dismissively claim.

A broader and more sophisticated understanding of both our physical and social worlds is the engine of change we recognize as human progress. Change always has been and always will be disruptive to someone’s comfort level. Clearly, this has been the case for critical race theory with some elected officials who would prefer not to have their current political agendas disrupted in this way.

We did not need to be “protected” from knowing about five failing schools in St. Petersburg or the location of historical lynching sites in Florida. A healthy and thriving democracy depends on this type of uncensored scholarship. It is something that needs to be cherished, supported, and protected.

 Critical race theory is not an indoctrination of individuals, it is the foundation for creating improvements and lasting change toward eliminating racism in the United States. It is the political censorship of critical race theory that is a dangerous form of indoctrination.

Edward Renner is a retired University Professor who has been a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois. He has served as an Adjunct instructor at the University of South Florida. LaSonya Moore is an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg.

 

The Long Term Financial Impact of COVID 19

 The rationale for the early opening of the country was economic: Our national economy could not afford to stay locked down. The actual truth is the exact opposite: Our national economy could not afford to open early.

Edward Renner

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the US in 2019 was 21.747 trillion dollars. It was projected to grow by 2.2% in 2020 to 22.2 trillion dollars. That was before the economic impact of COVID 19 and the “stay at home” orders issued in March and April.

What Happened Then?

By the end of the second quarter of 2020 (June) the GDP has fallen to 19.408 trillion dollars, a direct loss of 2.4 trillion dollars to the economy, as officially compiled quarterly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the US Government.

To put these numbers in perspective, the total budget for the Federal Government for the 2019-2020 fiscal year was about 4 trillion dollars. The expected revenue was about 3 trillion dollars, resulting in an anticipated deficit of about 1 trillion dollars to be added to the national debt.

The actual dollar costs of COVID to date can be estimated by adding the 3 trillion dollars stimulus to the 2.4 trillion reduction to the GDP, for a total economic cost of 5.4 trillion dollars from January to the end of June 2020.

What cannot be determined is the cost of each of the components of COVID 19 and the economic benefits of partially lifting restrictions in May and June. These impacts are imbedded in source data and could not be separately identified by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

What we do know is the daily number of new cases occurring in the US in comparison to other countries of the world. The US chose to start reopening the economy much sooner than Canada, Europe and Asia, contrary to the criteria established by the Center for Disease Control based on scientific knowledge.

As a result, the number of new cases by the end of July swelled to the point where they are roughly double what the numbers were in May/June. The number of new cases then started to decline again once new mitigation measure were adopted in some states.

In contrast, other nations, such as Germany, stayed closed-down longer, brought the number of new cases under manageable control through mitigation measures, testing, and contact tracing. As a result, they are in the process of successfully re-opening their economies. 

 

Source: New York Times data base. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-coronavirus&region=TOP_BANNER&context=storylines_menu

What Are the Financial Consequences of Re-opening too Soon?

The financial cost of COVID to the US economy before starting to reopen was about 500 billion dollars of lost GDP (CBO) and 2.5 trillion dollars of stimulus money, for a conservative estimate of 3 trillion dollars due to the first wave of new cases.

Using the costs of the first wave (3 trillion dollars) as an estimate, the surge of at least twice as many new cases after partial reopening would require a 6 trillion dollars stimulus to offset the loss of GDP, and to hopefully return us by Sept/Oct to where we were when we first started to re-open back in May/June.

However, since we started to reopen too soon, some additional amounts of costs and time would be required to stay closed down long enough to reduce the number of new cases to a manageable level to be able to safely open-up, like Europe, Canada and Asia countries have done.

The United States, at the very least, has made a 6 trillion-dollar mistake if we act immediately to bring the virus under manageable control. If we fail to do so, the cumulative costs will continue to grow. These are unnecessary, but real, cost that could have been avoided by following the scientific advice of health experts, like the other developed nations.

What Will Be the Long-term Effects of This Mistake?

 Before the virus, the Federal Government was expected to have a 1 trillion-dollar budget deficit for this fiscal year. However, with the 3 trillion stimulus the annual deficit for this finical year will be 4 trillion dollars, raising our total national debt to 101% of our GDP.

 If we add an additional 6 trillion-dollars new stimulus money to the annual deficit, the ratio of debt to GDP will be 127%. This is not sustainable, and it would require sever austerity measures that would likely push the economy into a recession.

 But, not containing the virus also has economic costs. The GDP of the US lost a record breaking 9.4% in the second quarter of 2020 (BEA). Unfortunately, as the price for our bungling, we have given our economic competitors who prevented a protracted COVID 19 impact – such as China and Germany -- a significant advantage for years to come.

 This is the unequivocal financial message we should be receiving from our Federal Government.

 Yet, beyond the unnecessary financial costs, the continued disruptions to our social and personal lives, and our deeply diminished position in the world, there are a still an undetermined number of needless deaths – perhaps in the 100’s of thousands – for our moral conscience to bear.

Our response to COVID 19 has been a collective national disgrace.

 Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis: Table 1.1.5 Gross Domestic Product (page 5) https://apps.bea.gov/national/pdf/SNTables.pdf;  Gross Domestic Product, Second Quarter 2020 https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/gdp2q20_adv_0.pdf; The Federal Budget 2020 https://www.thebalance.com/fy-2020-federal-budget-summary-of-revenue-and-spending-4797868

Excessive Use of Force by the Police

Police Reform Is Not an Intractable Problem

Edward Renner and Thom Moore

The killing of George Floyd filled the streets with protesters. Unfortunately, the nation has been here many times since the 1960s. Perhaps an example from then can provide an illustration of how to do better now.

A member of the Black Coalition challenged us “An ambush is being planned, and if it happens, more Black people than police officers will end up getting killed. What are you going to do about it?”

Thom and I were professors at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. At the time, there was outrage in the Black community. A small child was left alone in the house when Mrs. B, a Black mother, was arrested on her front porch for assaulting a police officer who had asked to talk with her son.

As we learned later, whenever the police use force, they will often charge the person they had harmed with assaulting a police officer or resisting arrest. The Prosecution would then drop those charges in exchange for a guilty plea of disorderly contact, and any complaint against the officer was officially resolved with no recourse. That was the case with Mrs. B, and was the reason prompting the visit from the member of the Black Coalition.

Clearly, there were racial issues with policing in our city. Then, no less than now, the challenge of “What are you going to do about it,” required at least a personal commitment and an honest answer.

The ambush – if it was ever considered -- never happened. In response to the challenge, Thom and I examined the previous four years of court records to identify every instance of assaulting or resisting a police officer and the name of the charging officer. If assaulting or resisting was an action initiated by the citizen, then every police officer should have had an equal chance of being the one dispatched to the scene. We went to the police department to obtain the data on patrol assignments that was necessary to calculate the probability statistics. It took over one year and required going through open hearings at meetings of the City Council.

When we crunched the numbers we found that the officer on Mrs. Bs porch was involved in so many of the cases where the arrested person “assaulted” a police officer or “resisted arrest” that the odds were one in a million that it could have happened that way by chance. Two other officers had one chance in 10,000 of encountering so many citizens who assaulted or resisted. (The results of this methodology were later published in The Journal of Police Science and Administration in 1975.)

We presented our finding privately to the Command of the Police Department. The Lieutenant in charge of records said “They have identified the three people we know are our problem officers, and we have not done anything about it. I think we should cooperate with the research.” The Chief agreed: “What records do you want?”

We replied, “If you give us access to the records, and we give you the results, you will be in exactly the same position you are now in with the three officers in question. You will know there is an issue, but if you attempt to deal with it, it will put you in an adversarial position with the front-line officers and the union, and you will be unlikely to do anything with the new information.” We suggested an alternative:

“Let us describe the results of our study to all the officers at the change of shift briefings. We will give each officer a confidential code number where they can see where they stand on the use of force in the probability distribution.”

Clearly, if the If the ambush had occurred, each officer could have been the one dispatched. They carry each other’s grief. That was no empty possibility. On one occasion the police had responded to a call in the north end and were fired upon. A photo of the patrol car, with the bullet holes, was on display in the police briefing room as a daily reminder

It is in each individual officer's best interests to find a solution to the problem. They collectively own the issue and must come to assume responsibility for it themselves. We agreed to work with the officers to help resolve community relations issues, provided the Command would create an internal culture to make that ownership possible.

The officers formed a community relations group to meet and work with us and our students. One of the projects was to have each officer interviewed by a student at the end of their shift to record any incident where the citizen did not behave in the way the officer anticipated. The collection of “critical incidents” provided a data base for categorization, analysis and public discussions about actual sources of potential conflict. One of the incidents would be handed out at each shift change for the officers to discuss with each other. One day, I was walking across the street while an officer was engaged with a citizen. He looked up and hollered: “Hey Renner, I have one for us here,” meaning an incident for the file.

The Command never knew the name of any individual officer on any data collection, but every individual officer personally knew where they stood. With this internal climate, the officers were assuming responsibility for their collective ownership of their relationships with the community. 

It seems strange – and perhaps unforgivable – for the need to be revisiting this story from fifty years ago. What we described was a project that involved the police, the university, and the community in a transparent, data driven exercise of discovery and change.

We submit that this is one example of what collaborative relationships can look like. These relationships are not only possible, especially with today’s data collection and communication capacities, but essential for both police agencies and their communities.

The simple conclusion of our project, published jointly with the Command in The Police Chief in 1976, was: Police Community Relations Is a Continuous Ongoing Process, Not a Product.

Edward Renner is a retired professor living in Hendersonville, NC., and Thom Moore is a retired professor living in Urbana, IL.

Build the Wall: A distraction from debt

“Build the Wall!” A distraction from debt

Edward Renner

The biggest threat to our national security is borrowing against the future, not the southern border. The Federal debt and the future economic security of the country should be the context for the debate over building the wall.

The current Federal debt is $22 trillion, and over the term of President Trump, expenses will exceed revenue by $866 billion per year based on current projections (see Box). The recently proposed 2019 budget would increase this amount to over $1 trillion per year.

 

 

An individual has no reference point for such amounts of money. So, let’s turn those amounts into a personal example which parallels the current debate about funding the wall.

Suppose your uncle – let’s call him Sam – has an income of $50,000 a year with a no cash reserves. He is due for a $500 raise at the end of year. His current debt is $52,000 (104% of his income). This means he has been borrowing money every year to cover several thousand dollars of excess living expenses. Now, he wants to borrow a relative small amount of additional money to purchase something that has no commercial value – say a portrait of himself.

Suppose further that, instead of the $500 raise, an anticipated market correction (10%) occurs, and his actual earnings drop to $45,000. When that happens, he will have to borrow $7,000 to stay even, for just for the first year. His total debt will jump to 120% of his reduced income.

Under these conditions, why would Sam want to buy the portrait in the first place, and why would anyone lend him any more money? Sam may soon need to default on his house mortgage, as did many people in 2008, and move back home to live with his parents.

 Borrowing money to build the wall is the same as Sam borrowing money for his portrait. Like Sam, the current Federal debt is 104% of the national income which is measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This debt will increase to 108% under the current budget of the US Government (see Figure).

 

 When the Federal debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – which is now the case -- and interest rates are larger than economic growth – which is now possible – then the entire national debt becomes more expensive. This situation requires even greater borrowing and/or a reduction of government services. Both can restrict growth, widen the gap with the cost of borrowing, and trigger a downward spiral of accelerating debt and additional austerity measures. As a result the nation gets poorer each year.

 

But, the big catastrophe occurs when the next recession comes -- as many expect in near future. When the GDP drops, the nation is caught in the same trap as Sam when his income fell by 10 percent. That is what happened to Greece. No cash, big expenses and no way to borrow more, which would only have made the situation worse. The parallel, with Sam moving back home, is significant reductions in social programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, and other big budget areas, such as the Department of Defense. 

The economic stimulus required to reverse the recession of 2008, was possible only because the national debt had been reduced to manageable levels as a result of the “peace dividend” during the Clinton years. The stimulus spending over the Obama era produced a period of steady economic growth, but at the cost of a huge increase in the national debt (104% of GDP) to a level that is not sustainable.

The current projections are for economic growth to slow in the future. Without growth, similar to Sam’s anticipated $500 raise, the ratio of debt to GDP increases wildly, as it did over the G W Bush era as the result of annual budget deficits, the recession and reduced revenue from a tax cut. Any reoccurrence of these events, all of which are currently on the table, will crash the economy again. But, this time there is no capacity for additional borrowing by the Government to stimulate a recovery -- just as Sam has no capacity to come up with an extra $7,000 per year.

Building the wall doesn’t provide national security, it is not an immigration policy, and it does not serve the body politic. It only fulfills a campaign promise akin to Sam purchasing his portrait. Building the wall is a distraction, while a real storm, the growing national debt, is gathering on the political and economic horizon – a distraction that puts at risk everything that defines the American Way of Life.

 

The real Uncle Sam would never do this.

 

Data Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget, compiled at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ and https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/. See also http://www.usdebtclock.org/.