New Vision

Dispatch from Uttarakhand, India

This week, India celebrates 60 years of independence. There is much to celebrate: rapid economic growth, an increasingly muscular foreign policy, expanding cultural influence, and 60 years of nearly uninterrupted democratic praxis in a part of the world long hostile to democracy. But there is also much that needs to change in India. Independence Day is an appropriate time to reflect on the greatness of a country, as well as what it must do to remain great. It is in that spirit that I file this Minority Report.

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There is currently a religious festival, known as the Kanwar Mela, underway in the holy city of Haridwar in Northern India, not far from where I am based. The festival entails what the Hindustan Times characterizes as “a sea of humanity” descending on the Ganges river to collect small bottles of holy water in containers known as kanwars. Pilgrims then return to their villages and put the holy water in their local temples to honor the Hindu god Shiva.

In the same Hindustan Times article describing the festival, the author tries to summarize the pros and cons of the affair from the perspective of local residents. On the “pro” side, he notes that the influx of pilgrims has led to a boom in business for local traders. This makes sense, as do further claims, on the “con” side, about the increasing noise and congestion resulting from the sudden influx of pilgrims.

And then, suddenly, there is this surprising claim, not by a resident, but by the journalist himself: “a large number of those making kanwars are Muslims so that the Mela can be seen as an excellent example of the secular character of our society.” Now, there are many things one could say about this sentence. To start, someone coming from the American tradition of “objective” news reporting would find it difficult to understand how an editorial comment of this type could be considered “news.”

Hear that distant whir traveling across the sky at 500 miles per hour? Can’t see anything? Convinced it’s a UFO? Do you live in Missouri, the South Pacific, or maybe on an atoll in the Indian Ocean? Perhaps what you’re hearing is one of our very own stealth bombers, relic of the cold war and torchbearer of our nuclear triad (bombers and subs and silos, oh, my!). It’s worth more than twice its weight in gold. Our air force boasts 21. When we moved two of them from the U.S. to our base in Diego Garcia, it was as if the economies of Niger and Rwanda were hurling invisibly through the air. Well, not completely invisibly – maybe with the radar signature of a sparrow. Not bad for a plane with a wingspan of 170 feet and a bomb payload of over 20 tons.

And now, we want to replace or, rather, augment it. The latest issue of the Journal of the Air Force Association reports that the B-2’s purported inability to “prosecute critical daytime targets” led the Defense Department to propose in its Quadrennial Defense Review a “2018 bomber.” Apparently, our assortment of B-1’s, refurbished B-52’s, F-15’s, F-22’s, cruise missiles, and yes, B-2’s will not be able to meet the QDR’s call for an increase in “long-range strike capabilities” of 50% by the year 2025.

But why all of this? At its core, policymaking is about two things: choice under constraint and opportunity cost. Agendas are set, and those in a position to fashion an array of choices wield a considerable amount of power. Programs begin as fantasy, and quickly move to artists’ renditions, constituencies in multiple states, and, soon enough, line items that persist over time. Currently, much of our focus is on the cost and missed opportunities of the war in Iraq. But progressives should keep a watchful eye on the rest of the defense budget and the opportunity costs that it represents. After all, research and production costs for the B-2 were equivalent to the current gross national product of Pakistan, a comparison that if made of our annual expenditures in Iraq would undoubtedly have progressives up in arms. Ironically, as suggested by Robert Kaplan in a forthcoming Atlantic Monthly article, the thinking behind the B-2 was that “the pressure to counteract such a stealthy and powerful nuclear bomber would lure the Soviets into further wrecking their economy.” As we ponder our own economic future, and detect a distant clamoring for the “2018 bomber,” it would serve us well to hearken back to the birth of the B-2.

Last week, the American magazine Business Week selected Mayawati, the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, as one of the 50 most powerful people in India. How did the equivalent of a state Governor from one of India’s most backward states make it onto this list?

Uttar Pradesh (UP) is India’s largest state. Approximately 170 million people live there, 1/6 of the Indian population, and a substantial proportion of the world’s poor. Most of India’s prime ministers have come from U. P. and the state is also at the center of the important transformation of caste politics in India in the last two decades.

Mayawati is indeed the most powerful Dalit (the group formerly known as “untouchable,”) leader in India today. This is her fourth stint as Chief Minister, but it is the first time that she commands a stable majority in the state legislature. In fact, her recently inaugurated government is the first majority government in U. P. in about 15 years. Unstable coalitions have been blamed for U. P.’s notoriously inefficient and corrupt government, so, if the analysts are right, we should expect big things from a stable majority.

“Solidarity”? After years of disdain, the concept may be gaining new life in the US. In July, a group of progressive organizers and academics launched the US Solidarity Economy Network (SEN-US), and its ambitions stretch well beyond picket-line chants. Founded at the US Social Forum in Atlanta, SEN-US aims to develop economic frameworks and practices based on democracy, equity, and sustainability. Examples include cooperatives (worker, producer, consumer, housing, financial), land trusts, fair trade, community supported agriculture (CSA), worker-controlled pension funds, and participatory budgeting.

Sound idealistic? Maybe it is, but solidarity economy networks have already seen results. Canada’s network leveraged $132 million in government funds for investment, research and training, for a comprehensive national policy framework. In countries such as Brazil and Argentina, solidarity economy advocates have developed national legislation and municipal policies that promote cooperatives.

The US may not be so far off. Organizations on the SEN-US Coordinating Committee, such as The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Grassroots Economic Organizing, The Center for Labor and Community Research, and The Center for Popular Economics, have already been fostering more democratic economic practices and enterprises. SEN-US aims to raise the visibility of these efforts, link them together through a broader economic framework and vision, develop common resources, and promote supportive public policies. After all that, solidarity might even become fashionable in the least likely of places…

Now that the Bush administration has failed to prevent Congress from passing an expansion of the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Bush has decided to pursue his agenda through executive order instead. The new plan is to forbid states, which have been at the forefront of expanding the program beyond the ranks of the absolute poor, to cover families above 200% of the poverty line, unless they have covered 95% of families below that level. As of today, no state has achieved this kind of coverage through CHIP.

This new Bush strategy brings up a number of important issues. In the first place, and as I have written before, we do face a tragedy across the country of eligible families failing to enroll their children. Since the average enrollment across states for eligible children is somewhere between 70 and 80%, a non-negligible number of poor kids continue to go without insurance, even though we have decided as a society to provide it to them. There is no question that something should be done about this, and that “something” could include incentives to get states to be more creative about enrollment.

The second point is that it is reasonable to ask whether a government program to provide health insurance to children should be a universal entitlement or not. Should we only provide health care to poor kids, or do we as a society believe that all kids have a right to health insurance, guaranteed by the government (though not for free; non-poor enrollees do pay premiums)? Certainly, the latter view motivates the expansion of CHIP in a place like New York to families at 400% of the poverty line. In this sense, the Bush administration is correct to pose expansions of CHIP in ideological terms: it really is about what we believe the government’s role should be in ensuring health care for American children.

It is ironic, however, that the Bush administration is effectively threatening to undermine the capacity of states to decide for themselves who deserves health insurance coverage. After all, conservatives are usually the ones pushing “states’ rights” and arguing for “subsidiarity,” the idea that people at the local level know what’s best. But it turns out that when the states’ view of what’s best is different from the president’s, he would prefer to centralize.

This is a tendency that liberals should support. The biggest problem with the American healthcare system is its severe degree of decentralization. Ultimately, the decision to set the true poverty line at 100, 200, 300, or even 400% of the federal line, is an arbitrary one, and we can agree to disagree about the exact cut off. We should not allow, however, the basic right to health care to be arbitrarily granted to citizens in some states, but not in others.

That, however, is exactly what we currently do. Contrary to popular belief, there is no national program which guarantees health care to the poor. Medicaid does not do this, because eligibility rules vary by state. In many states, just being poor is not enough to qualify for Medicaid. You must be both poor, and meet other restrictive criteria. Nor do we have a single HIV policy for the poor in America. Depending on your state of residence, you may have to wait years for ARV treatment. And CHIP only covers some kids, some of the time, in some places, leaving others, depending on the state, without any coverage at all.

In the case of CHIP, the fact is that the states have failed to enroll all of their eligible children, even though the federal government is footing a large part of the bill. What will it take to get the missing kids into CHIP? I doubt anyone can answer this question definitively. One reasonable hypothesis, however, is that the solution is a national program, backed by strong federal will, and a single, visible manager. The president’s plan, by contrast, relies on the current (broken) system to reform itself. It would simply prohibit states from doing anything new until they fix their current problems. But, in the decentralized health system we have, this will just create another theater for political gamesmanship. The feds can blame the states for not enrolling poor kids, and the states can blame the feds for prohibiting them from enrolling the near-poor. Meanwhile, nobody gets health care. An all-out effort to find and enroll children, coordinated at the national level under a single leader, would be more likely to create accountability and yield results.

The president’s strategy presents supporters of a universal guarantee of health care for children with a choice. They can use this as an issue to attack the president and hope that he eventually backs down, leaving us with an expanded version of the inefficient, patchwork system we have today. Or, they can call his bluff, push for greater centralization and create a national program to guarantee, finally, health insurance to every American child. Both strategies are political winners. The only question is: which strategy will lead to more kids getting health care?

According to the Washington Post, the cost of the war in Iraq now exceeds $3 billion a week. Amongst the multitude of other potential ways to use this money, imagine the following foreign policy alternative: pay every Iraqi resident seven times their average income.

Here’s the math: $3 billion divided by 27 million (Iraq’s population) is $111, per week. That’s $5,800 per year, seven times more than Iraq’s estimated per capita income of $800. Note that Iraq’s population and income estimates are very rough, considering the limited data and rapidly changing situation. Given the country’s stagnating economy, increasing death rate, and increasing out-migration, the population and income levels are likely lower. This means that the payoff could amount to even more than seven times per capita income.

A higher per capita income would likely decrease Iraqis’ desires to leave the country, help quell the anger and frustration that fuel violence, reduce poverty, and even generate the prosperity necessary to survive as a democracy.

Of course, the pundits might fear that just handing every Iraqi $111 a week would be an overly simplistic and politically unpopular policy, one that could spin out of control and lead to a whole new set of problems. (Not that such fears would deterthis White House…) As an alternative, the $3 billion could be transferred through more governable economic development programs: new public jobs, small business investments, food and health care credits, etc. Regardless, if our goal is to help build a more developed and democratic Iraq, could passing on funding for Iraq to Iraqis possibly do worse than the US government’s other strategies?

It should come as a surprise to no one that women bear more of the housekeeping burden than do the men with whom they share a bed. A new study from the Journal of Family Issues offers support for the conventional wisdom, but adds a new twist: married women report doing more household labor than do cohabiting women.

Feministing’s Jessica Valenti is “terrified” and “taken aback,” worrying that marriage somehow leads to an increased burden for wives. But,as Matt Yyglesias points out, she’s making a bad assumption here, as the study provides no evidence whatsoever to suggest that marriage actually causes (more) unequal divisions of labor.

First off, the study is a cross-sectional analysis, which means that it looks at people at one point in time. Given that the authors present a single snapshot of their respondents’ reported household duties, we’ve got no way of knowing whether there’s a causal link between wearing a wedding dress and pushing a broom around the kitchen. If we had before-and-after pictures of the same people, then we’d have something to work with since we’d be able to look at whether marriage fundamentally changed people’s housework burdens. But without this “before” period, all we’ve got is the “after.” And, as Matt implies, there are good reasons to believe that the “after” simply represents a selection effect — that is, couples who marry (as opposed to those who cohabit) are more likely to have “traditional” attitudes toward the gendered division of household labor.

Indeed, the study provides compelling reasons to believe that the difference between cohabiting and married women’s share of household labor stems from prior preferences. According to the authors’ analysis, married men and women are more likely than their cohabiting counterparts to hold “traditional” gender ideologies — e.g. more likely to agree that “A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family.” And, also unsurprisingly, the more traditional an individual’s gender ideology, the greater the burden of household labor borne by the female half of the couple. While it’s possible that gender ideologies change as a consequence of marriage, this seems like a stretch. More plausible is that, on average, folks who get married are simply a bit more conservative than cohabitors. Indeed, the same traditional attitudes that predict more housework for women may predict one’s likelihood of getting married (rather than living in sin). Of course, this is simply a hypothesis — to test it out would require before-and-after data of the sort I described above.

So: Jessica Valenti, fear not. Based on the newest data out there, you’ve got little reason to believe that marriage is going to turn you into a house-frau.