Atelier Kraemer

Posted on: 07.14.2014

The New Enclosure (Part II)

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Environmental Policy, Intellectual Property, Open Systems, Science and Engineering in the Law, Science and Policy, Technology in US Politics, Uncategorized

The notion that the things we create belong to us is not new; it dates back at least to 560, when Ireland’s King Diarrmait ruled against the monk Colmcille, who had secretly copied his mentor Finnian’s psalter.  (Legend records Diarmait’s judgment as “To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy.”)

But that is not how President Andrew Jackson’s appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice John McLean applied the principle in his majority opinion in Wheaton v. Peters (1834).  Scholars can debate whether ownership of one’s own original works is in fact a natural or common law right, as King Diarmait supposed, or whether it is a privilege granted by the sovereign.[i] But Justice McLean could find in the United States no common law right to the exclusive use of one’s creations.

At issue was whether Henry Wheaton enjoyed a common law copyright in the annotated  reports, with opinions, of the Supreme Court that he had prepared and published, a copyright that Richard Peters had violated when he published cheaper, abridged editions of  Wheaton’s reports.

Two lower courts had held, as McLean would affirm, that:

“It is clear there can be no common law of the United States. The federal    government is composed of twenty-four sovereign and independent states, each of which may have its local usages, customs, and common law. There is no principle which pervades the union and has the authority of law that is not embodied in the Constitution or laws of the union.”[ii]

Only the Congress, by virtue of section eight of the first article of the Constitution, has the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times, to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”  “Congress,” wrote McLean, “by the act of 1790, instead of sanctioning an existing perpetual right in an author in his works, created the right, secured for a limited time, by the provisions of that law.”[iii]

And then, at the end of his majority opinion, McLean added:

“It may be proper to remark that the Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right.”

Thus it was that the U.S. Supreme Court established, almost as an afterthought, that the information generated by those in whom the “People of the United States” have vested their  legislative, executive, and judicial powers, belongs to the people of the United States, and that any proprietary right in that information can be granted only by the Congress, as provided in Article I, Section 8.

In the modern world intellectual capital is the purest coin of any realm.  No less than the metallic coin of economics, its greatest social benefits accrue from widespread accumulation and circulation.  Before World War II the largest accumulation of intellectual capital owned by the federal government took the form of census data, information gathered by regulatory agencies, and scientific and technical information collected by the departments of Agriculture, Interior, the US navy, army, and coast guard.  Of comparable value for the continuation of democracy was the growing body of  interrelated reports prepared by the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government and their administrative agencies.

World War II and the Cold War resulted in the unprecedented expansion of publicly directed and funded research. Federal investments in research and development (R&D) increased at over twice the rate of the total federal budget between 1940 and 1980.  This research produced new ideas and knowledge—information necessary for effective understanding and action—of inestimable value.

Most of those federal dollars—which grew from $186 million in 1940 to over $72 billion in 2000—flowed as contracts and grants  through the procurement offices of the departments of defense and energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.   Those dollars then began to substantially support the budgets of an expanding aerospace and healthcare industry, as well as research universities. The accumulated skills of these private sector institutions at obtaining federal grants and contracts, and their lobbying to sustain the federal research and development programs that produced them, ensured that they would receive the lion’s share of the public’s R&D investment for decades to come.

At the start of the 21st century three fourths or more of the R&D budgets at each of the principal federal research and development agencies[iv] went to a relatively small group of corporations that included such familiar heavy-hitters as Lockheed-Martin, Boeing (which absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997), Raytheon, Bechtel, TRW, and Science Applications International.  Beneficiaries among academic institutions included the universities of California, Michigan and Washington, Columbia, Stanford, and the Johns Hopkins University.

Before the 1980s, once a sponsoring agency obtained information from a recipient of one of its research grants or contracts,  members of the public could, in turn, request that information under the federal Freedom of Information Act or FOIA (subject to the usual privacy or national security exemptions).  Most agencies, however, settled for research reports, accepting their contractors’ or grantees’ claims that data must be withheld from the public in order to protect the identity of human research subjects, sequester data prior to its publication in peer-reviewed research journals, or to protect the data’s potential proprietary value.

Waiving delivery of research data as a matter of policy received the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980, when it ruled (in Forsham v. Harris) that if a federal agency did not actually create or obtain research data itself, such data could not be considered federal records and subject to the FOIA.  Forsham was a boon to academic research institutions that had wandered from their ideological moorings of disinterested science into the sporty waters of high-technology business, a process well-captured in Daniel S. Greenberg’s Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (2007).

Then, critics of the national air quality standards released by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1997 during the Clinton administration, led by Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), complained that not only would the standards burden industry with ruinously high compliance costs, but several studies of toxic effects of air and water pollutants had later proven faulty.  Thus, given their serious policy consequences, data collected by the EPA for setting its standards should be available for public inspection.  Shelby attached to the Omnibus Appropriations Act for fiscal year (FY) 1999 an amendment requiring federal agencies to disclose “all data produced under a [federally funded research] award.”  The scientific community arose in alarm.[v]

Led by the National Academy of Sciences, the scientific establishment persuaded the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB, which oversees the writing of regulatory language implementing federal statutes) to define research data subject to public disclosure in a way that would serve its expanding proprietary interests.  The OMB ultimately excluded from research data subject to FOIA disclosure any data supporting regulations having an impact of less than $100 million, and “materials necessary to be held confidential by a researcher until they are published, or similar information which is protected under law” (e.g., intellectual property.)  The Shelby amendment, once it emerged from OMB’s process, had a lethal weakness: What constituted research “data” under OMB’s ‘clarifying’ definitions could be determined only by those who held it, viz., the same research scientists wanting to retain the data for their own uses.[vi]

Just how important public access to the results of its own investment in intellectual capital had become was evident with the completion in 2000 of the joint U.S. and British Human Genome Project.  Prime Minister Tony Blair’s and President Bill Clinton’s joint statement that “the genome should be made freely available to scientists everywhere” sent bio-technology stocks plummeting.  Investors had concluded that the federal government would oppose patenting human genomic data.  In a hasty effort at damage control, the White House urged the securities markets to read the leaders’ joint statement more carefully, where they would find: “Intellectual property protection for gene-based inventions will also play an important role in stimulating the development of important new health care products.”[vii] (To continue reading about the proprietary capture of public intellectual capital, see The New Enclosure-Part III).

 

[i] Adam Mossoff, “Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought about Patents?  Reevaluating the Patent ‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,”  Cornell Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 953 (2007).

[ii] U.S. Supreme Court, Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834).

[iii] U.S. Supreme Court, Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834).

[iv] Departments of Defense and Energy, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

[v] National Research Council, Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 1997).

[vi] Sylvia Kraemer, Science and Technology Policy in the United States: Open Systems in Action (Rutgers Univesity Press, 2006, pp. 102-108.

[vii] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “Joint Statement by President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair of the U.K.,” March 14, 2000.  Alex Berenson and Nicholas Wade, “The Markets: Stocks & Bonds; A Call for Sharing of Research Causes Gene Stocks to Plunge,” The New York Times (March 15, 2000).

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Posted on: 07.14.2014

The New Enclosure (Part III)

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Current History, Intellectual Property, Open Systems, Science and Engineering in the Law, Science and Policy, Technology in US Politics

 

Discussions of patent policy in the United States and elsewhere often overlook the fact that the original intent of issuing patents (not to be confused with sovereign-granted commercial privileges) was to encourage the disclosure and spread of novel devices to stimulate manufacturing and trade.  The earliest patents (such as those awarded by the Republic of Venice in the 15th century) were designed for this purpose.

Patents issued to the U.S. government were comparatively few before World War II.  (Military contractors typically retained patent rights by default.)  By the height of U.S. involvement in World War II, research in federal laboratories, along with industry contracts with the military services, had contributed to a ten-fold increase in federal government patents.

Until the 1980s federal policy treated most of the intellectual property produced by research funded with public dollars as presumptive public property.  Using royalty-free licenses issued by federal research agencies, the private sector could develop and market products incorporating information contained in federally owned patents.

When Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1946, the national security ramifications of the AEC’s work meant that the federal government would remain the owner of inventions produced by the AEC’s private sector contractors as well as in its own government operated laboratories.  Four years later, the first uniform federal government-wide patent policy, issued by President Truman, extended the AEC’s patent policy to any invention made by a federal employee, “on government time,” or with federal dollars.

Neither then, nor now, has anyone seriously argued that the federal government is equipped to compete with the business sector, nor that it should, by itself, attempt to commercialize the innovative products that could result from federally funded research.  But as the tensions of the Cold War began to subside, fewer and fewer members of Congress questioned whether taxpayers should have to pay twice for marketable innovations based on public intellectual property.

The pro-business Republican ideology that carried Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980 embraced the notion that taxpayers could pay for the research that produced innovations, and then pay again for those innovations when they appeared in the marketplace.  Meanwhile, corporate interests that did indeed finance the risk of product development and marketing, complained that government contributed nothing but impediments to American technological progress.  And so a moral barrier between private lucre and public good began to weaken against political pressure to “commercialize” the public’s intellectual capital.

Most economists agreed with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach when he told the Senate Small Business Committee in 1965 that he knew of no “data, studies, or facts of any kind at all which could possibly support” the notion that giving patent rights to federal contractors would “foster the prompt working of inventions.”[i]

Notwithstanding the conclusions of numerous economists and his own Attorney General, when President Kennedy issued patent policy guidelines to executive branch agencies, buried in the policy language was a subtle transfer of the public’s presumptive intellectual property rights to the private sector.  Kennedy’s policy directed that if two or more potential government contractors offered otherwise competitive proposals, “the willingness to grant the government principal or exclusive rights in resulting inventions will be an additional factor in the evaluation of proposals.”[ii] Thus might the public obtain what it had previously owned.  The die was cast.

A bi-partisan consensus emerged (and persists) supporting the enclosure by the private sector of publicly generated intellectual capital in the unsubstantiated belief that commercializing all scientific discoveries is in the public interest, and that patents singularly motivate the development and marketing of innovative products.  This consensus enabled the Nixon administration to allow government agencies to grant exclusive licenses to commercial developers of inventions covered by federal patents, patent applications, or government contracts (subject to a loose array of criteria likely to be met by anyone seeking such a license).  Also enjoying bi-partisan support were the 1980 “Bayh-Dole” amendments to the patent and trademark laws, which invited non-profit organizations and small businesses to “elect to retain title” to inventions made under a federal contract or grant.

The credulity of the Congress and the White House in allowing the steady enclosure—or proprietary capture—of the public’s intellectual property created through research and development funded by the federal government was rationalized in two ways.  First was the argument that the private sector was better suited to commercializing marketable innovations, an argument that could have been met through licensing rather than transfers of patent ownership.  Second was the expectation that patent ownership would ensure public disclosure and dissemination of the knowledge embedded in a newly patented invention.

However, suppose the recipient of a right to patent fails to patent the invention, instead concealing the invention as a trade secret?  Then the intellectual capital is irretrievably lost from the public ‘commons’ as well as public ownership.  Its absence is unknowable, and its loss invisible.  By the end of the 20th century, concluded the Government Accounting Office, the principal federal research agencies (DOD, NSF, NIH, NASA and the DOE) were unable to account for over two thirds of the more than 1,700 patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office as government-originated inventions.  Nor had NASA and DOE effectively tracked the outcomes of patent rights waived to their contractors and grantees.[iii]

Economists have been unable to isolate a singularly significant causal relationship between patent ownership and the successful commercialization of innovations.  Effective capitalization, systems integration, exploitation of tacit knowledge, and mastery of production and marketing strategies, along with the ability to pursue incremental product improvements, matter as much if not more than patent ownership.  The most promising business model may require universal adoption, rather than monopoly control, of system components—consider the open system VHS videocassette recorder, or the USB (universal serial bus) that standardized the market for all kinds of computer peripherals.

Far from promoting technological innovation, intellectual property itself can be the basis of an income stream of license fees or royalties, secure corporate debt, or deployed to “corner the market” with patent pools that capture for investors monopoly control over the critical technologies in an industry as well as known alternatives.  “Patents have recently become hot property,” noted Forbes in 2005, enabling small companies “armed with patents but little or no product” to fill their coffers with the fruits of their victories in patent infringement suits against “large business.”[iv]

Indeed, an ‘explosion’ of patenting since the early 1980‘s could be doing more harm than good.[v] Michael Heller’s The Gridlock Economy:  How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (Basic Books, 2008) contributes to the growing disenchantment with the lucre-driven private sector lionized by Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan.  The financial crisis of 2008 showed that the private sector cannot even manage its own greed.

The Congress’s decades long conversion of publicly generated intellectual capital into the private sector’s intangible assets has accomplished something only a few might have intended: the engorgement of investment portfolios with a ‘wealth’ of mysterious, if not vaporous, intellectual property.  Securities, analogous to bundled mortgages, promise revenue streams from intangible assets, e.g., royalties for the use of copyrighted materials and licenses for the use of patented technologies.[vi] Notwithstanding the enormous challenge of valuing securities that bundle patents or patent rights (a challenge that has spawned yet another new field of financial acrobatics, ‘intangible property valuation.’[vii]), intellectual property has grown as a significant component of the asset base of the S&P 500.

Successful democracies combine the most critical intangible asset any society can offer—the free flow of ideas—with the assurance that their citizens will share equitably in the material fruits of their enterprise.  The incremental proprietary capture of the public sphere that we have seen since the 1960’s threatens the free flow of ideas and citizen prosperity in perilous ways for all of us.  The failure of our policy makers—inadequately prodded by our citizens—to ensure an Open Internet may be one of the final nails in the coffin of an authentic American democracy.  (See also post for February 16, 2013, National Public Wi-Fi: Why it Matters to You.)

 

[i] Katzenbach quoted in The Washington Post, July 30, 1965.

[ii] Federal Register, 28 (200), “John F. Kennedy, Memorandum and Statement on Government Patent Policy,” (October 12, 1963), pp. 10943-46.  Federal inventions with national security significance continue to be presumptively ‘titled’ to the government, typically in the cases of the Department of Energy and NASA, which can, however, waive its patent rights.

[iii] General Accounting Office, “Technology Transfer: Reporting Requirements for Federally Sponsored Inventions Need Revisions,” GAO/RCED-99-242 (August 1999).  Sylvia Kraemer, “Federal Intellectual Property Policy and the History of Technology: The Case of NASA Patents,” History and Technology, Vol. 17 (2001).

[iv] Chad Huston, “Survey of IP Monetization Techniques,” IP Today, Vol. 11, No. 10 (October 2004); Margaret M. Blair, Steven M.H. Wallman, Unseen Wealth: Report of the Brookings Task Force on Intangibles, Brookings Institution Press, 2001; Juergen H. Daum, Intangible Assets and Value Creation (John Wiley and Sons, 2002).  Licensing income from intellectual property grew from $18 million in 1990 to an estimated $500 billion in 2005.

[v] Giovanni Dosi, Luigi Marengo, Corrado Pasquali, “How Much Should Society Fuel the Greed of Innovators: On the Relations Between Appropriability, Opportunities and Rates of Innovation,” LEM [Laboratory of Economics and Management, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies] Working Papers, 17 (July 2006); Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenbery, “Can Patents Deter Innovation?  The Anti-commons in Biomedical Research,” Science, Vol.280 (May 1, 1998); Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents (Princeton, 2004); Don E. Kash and William Kingston, “Patents in a World of Complex Technologies,”  Science and Public Policy (February 2001); David Mowery, Richard Nelson, Bhaven N. Sampat, and Arvids A. Ziedonis, “The Growth of Patenting and Licensing by U.S. Universities: An Assessment of the Effects of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980,”  Research Policy, Vol. 30 (2001); James Surowiecki, “The Open Secret of Success,”  The New Yorker (Mayb12, 2008).

[vi] Karen Richardson, “Bankers Hope for a Reprise of ‘Bowie Bonds,’” The Wall Street Journal (August 23, 2005).

[vii] Stephen Bennett, “The IP Asset Class: Protecting and Unlocking Inherent Value,” Vol. 5, The John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law (2006).

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Posted on: 01.23.2014

Why The Liberal Arts?

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Art and Culture, Colleges and Universities, Education, History of Ideas, Uncategorized

 

It’s difficult to hear a discussion of education in the United States without being reminded of the urgency of increasing students’ proficiency in ‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines.  This, we learn, is necessary to secure their competitiveness in a technology-driven job market.  What is too rarely pointed out is that a primary purpose of technological innovation is to reduce labor costs, i.e., reduce jobs.  “New” technologies do not necessarily do an adequate job of replacing the jobs lost from obsolete industries.

We have been here before.  During the 1950s and 1960s, besting the Soviet Union in the “space race” required thousands of well-trained engineers.  That we had such individuals was a result not of STEM education campaigns, but GI-bill education benefits designed to soften the impact on unemployment by demobilized service men and women.

The National Defense Education Act of 1958 boosted college attendance from 15% to 40% in all disciplines, with results that are as interesting to social historians as to presidents of colleges and universities who have struggled to sustain the rapid campus expansions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Then, in the early 1980s, we were once again consumed by fears of national decline when faced with growing industrial powerhouses in formerly ‘foreign’ places, e.g., Japan—a fear well documented by David Halberstam’s The Reckoning (1986).  The Reagan administration, only a few months into its first term, appointed a National Commission on Excellence in Education which, in August of 1981, released “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.”

The report begins: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.”  Less well remembered is the report’s emphasis on disciplines other than STEM, disciplines that lie at the heart of a liberal arts education:

“Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. . . .  For our country to function, citizens must be able to reach some common understandings on complex issues, often on short notice and on the basis of conflicting or incomplete evidence. . . .  Indicators of the risk [include] . . . About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate [while] nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material;  only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay.”

And now we have the results of a study, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, released this week, of the education and occupation of 3 million US residents between the ages of 21 and 65.  Comparing the “earnings trajectories and career pathways” of majors in the liberal arts with those from STEM and professional or pre-professional fields, the study found that not only does a college degree matter, but that “at peak earnings ages (56-60)” liberal arts majors earn on average more than those who majored in the other fields.  What’s more, unemployment is lower among mature workers who were liberal arts majors.

This study, based on 2010-2011 census data, confirms what many of us have learned from experience: ordinary social skills and technical preparation may get a young adult through the gate, but they will not equip him or her to stay the course.  That is because a lifetime of work and living is full of change—personal and historical.  Success in living and working requires a well-furnished imagination; empathy for the many different ‘others’ with whom we will need to cooperate;  a grasp of the power of aesthetic pleasure of all kinds;  and a full command of at least one language enabling us to be articulate in a complete and accurate way.

These attributes come primarily from immersion in the liberal arts, a microcosm of a universe where syntax and a rich vocabulary matter not because of “correct form,” but because they build meaning, and meaning matters.  A few years out of a lifetime spent in the study of good writing, be it fiction or expository prose;  of social and political philosophies and systems;  of aesthetics made manifest in the arts; and, most of all, of the rich storehouse of human experience captured in our history, has been demonstrated, once again, to be time well spent.

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Posted on: 02.16.2013

National Public Wi-Fi: Why it Matters to You

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in History of Ideas, Open Systems, Politics, Science and Engineering in the Law, Technology in US Politics, Uncategorized

 

A recent proposal by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Julius Genachowski, would recover some of the country’s little used radio and TV broadcast radio spectrum in order to create a national public wireless (WiFi) network.  Telecommunications companies, which make money selling data plans to enable smart phone and Wi-Fi computer users to access the Internet, are lobbying against the proposal.

Such a network would, of course, be a boon for countless small businesses and Internet-linked technology developers, not to mention the rest of us.  But Chairman Gnachowski’s  proposal also rests on sound historical and policy precedents.

By international law the federal government is responsible for the private as well as public use within the U.S. of the global radio spectrum—which does not “belong” to anyone any more than the sky or the oceans belong to anyone, not even to “job creators” in the telecom industry.

The digital electronic impulses that bring text and images to the screens of our smart phones and Wi-Fi enabled computers are similar to the analog electromagnetic impulses that Samuel Morse tapped out to send the first telegraph in 1844.  Today those digital electronic information “packets” can travel beyond the wires and cables around and above us, carried into remote places by the invisible radio wave spectrum that encircles our globe.

The need for public regulation of the use of radio waves first became obvious in 1912, when radio communications following the Titanic’s distress signals on the night of April 14 were confused, if not unintelligible, thanks to the swarm of amateur radio operators busily working the airwaves.   Within a year the Congress had established (with the Radio Act of 1912) that the federal government would regulate both wire-line and wire-less communications, a principle which has stood firm for over a century of statutory action and judicial decision-making.

Those of us who do not yet use the Internet with mobile devices may be tempted to dismiss these increasingly ubiquitous gadgets as fads, high-end toys for grown-ups and over-indulged children.  But there is little that we do today that does not at some point involve the use of devices relying on the radio spectrum, from automatic garage door openers to cell phones to the remote controls for our television sets.

More importantly, radio waves provide the essential ‘highways’ to every location for the transmission of news, information, electronic libraries, educational programming, remote medical and research data, and only lastly entertainment.  Once upon a time radio waves sent the news to listeners gathered around brown bakelite boxes.  Millions more now receive over the air the electronic data that produce text and graphics on their touch screens.  And as the technology gets cheaper millions more will join the touch screen world.  The telecommunications industry—AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and others—knows this.

But so does the FCC.  The Internet was built with public funds, for the use of all Americans.  Unless all Americans are able to use it, the open public forum that has served democracy by offering a platform and audience for free speech will become enclosed by proprietary technological and monetary barriers.

The Internet is not intellectually inert.  Each webpage contains information and images selected for it by its website ‘builders,’ people who also decide which links to further—and possibly contrary or controversial—information will be included, or not.  Our best assurance of an Internet that disseminates a continual conversation of new as well as old voices, rather than an ongoing chorus of the like-minded, is a genuinely publicly accessible Wi-Fi network.

Like the operators of all public utilities, Wi-Fi operators will need to receive reasonable compensation as incentives for efficiency and innovation.  But you and I, not industry CEOs, should decide what is reasonable.

The big telecommunications companies will be spending bundles of money to persuade us—and lawmakers—that Wi-Fi is a commercial service coupled to their commercial products, access to which should be priced in the marketplace.  And they will be wrong.

 

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Posted on: 01.07.2013

Lessons From Our Table

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Art and Culture, Uncategorized

One of the blessings of the past holiday for this Maine parent was the return of adult children home for Christmas.  Humorists console some of us with tales of dysfunctional families to help dispel the mixed emotions conjured up by the holidays.  A largely functional family is also a blessing.

Ours has slogged its way through rough patches, and survived with humor and love intact, and more intelligence than when we started.   My three ’30-something’ children appear happy, have graduated from good universities, and are well on their way in their chosen professions—which might help to pay a few jaw-dropping student loans.

For their travels they were rewarded with a white Christmas (and New Year’s), not to mention the Portland Stage’s splendid performance of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol.’  ‘Wow!’ said one of the three at the end, as he replaced the tissue furtively dug from a pocket to vanish the tear that no one noticed but his Mother.

The greatest pleasures were the conversations while dining with family and friends, and this year conversation often returned to those things that combine to form an education.   What transpires in Maine’s many varied K-12 schools will occasion a good bit of heat in 2013 (as it does every year) and, often more heat than light.  So, here is what attentive guests at our holiday meals might have taken away from our chatter:

‘Schooling’ is useful, but over-rated, whether one is schooling at home, or in a classroom.  Basic literacy and numeracy are essential, of course, but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that when the little ones traipse off to school—or we put away the breakfast dishes and haul out the ‘do it yourself’ teaching materials—that we are educating our children in the fullest sense of the term.

We learn less by instruction or persuasion, than by example.  Children regularly exposed to curiosity and wisdom in the adults who surround them will learn to recognize curiosity and wisdom not only in others, but as something to emulate in themselves.

With the possible exception of the ‘STEM’ subjects [science, technology, engineering and math], which by their nature require extensive systematic preparation to master, there are other vital qualities we invoke when we talk about education—qualities which, like the Christmas ghosts who escorted Mr. Scrooge on his painful journey—cannot be conjured up  from lesson plans.

“Critical thinking skills” and “creativity” —these important concepts have become the overused and under-examined bromides of our education debates, offered in contrast to the rigid accountability of standardized testing.  But neither critical thinking nor enduring creativity can emerge from vaporous language or vacuous minds.

The minds of children and the young need furnishing.  Woe to the child whose mind is furnished by the gargantuan marketing machine we call the ‘entertainment industry.’  The best furnishing comes through direct experience—broadened, deepened, and examined through reading.

It will be said that many children do not come from families where books and reading are a fact of daily life.   That may be so; but it is not insurmountable.  One of my children’s favorite memories is of Mrs. Zuidama, a warm and wise woman at their day-care center, who set aside an hour every day for story time.

Even earlier, as soon as the youngest could sit up in a stroller, we went several times a week to the children’s corner of the Bangor Public Library to paw through the shelves for our ‘take home’ books.  We rarely missed a weekly morning story time led by one of the librarians.

Read to children until they insist on reading for themselves.  What to read?  Ask your school or public librarian—who will appreciate the question.  Browse through the books yourself.   At our dinner table, the titles tumbled out, beginning with “Pat the Bunny” and “Goodnight, Moon.”  We have our favorites, but children are entitled to discover theirs.

E-readers and tablets?  They are no substitute for a child’s beloved jam-encrusted, page torn, spine frayed, and bed cover-buried book.  When the e-reader has run out of battery and we can’t find the dang charger, Charlotte will still be spinning her web.

 

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Posted on: 12.04.2012

Senator Rubio’s Mistake

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Art and Culture, Current History, History of Ideas, Politics, Science and Policy, Uncategorized

An astronomer writing in Slate recently takes Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to task for being unable (or unwilling?) to give the astronomers’ answer to a reporter’s question, posed during a press interview, about the age of the Earth.  After noting that the question has nothing to do with the proper subject of the interview, Rubio responds that the Earth’s age is a “mystery,” and that some believe the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation.

Not only is the hapless Senator a member of the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Technology Committee (and therefore he should have basic scientific facts on the tip of his tongue), but as a member of Congress he should know the age of the Earth because “all of our industry, all of our technology, everything that keeps our country functioning at all can be traced back to scientific research and a scientific understanding of the universe.”

Set aside the question of whether the astronomer has, on the tip of his tongue, the number identifying the next Congress (which will also be of great import to the nation, and the number is 113-1).  His argument is such a caricature of the rhetoric the science establishment trots out to appeal for funding increases that he does the cause of public support for scientific research a disservice.

Being able to remember a number (especially out of context) is hardly a sign of intelligence, character, wisdom or civic virtue, as Albert Einstein was not the first to remind us.  What’s more, beyond such accumulated physical facts as the contents of the periodic table or the boiling point of water, any scientific knowledge that cannot be replicated under laboratory conditions is dependent on the circumstances of its discovery.

Historians and philosophers of science, at least since Karl Popper, have convincingly demonstrated the contingency of most scientific “truths.”  Nor has the total reliance  of the economy and technological growth on scientific research been substantiated by decades of research in economic growth and business history.  Indeed, there have been instances when scientific research depended upon technological innovation, as in the cases of optics and computational machinery.  The relationship between science and technology is iterative, while much of technological innovation is due as much to economic “pull” as to scientific “push.”

While I am no fan of Sen. Rubio, the notion that science is the only form of “intelligence” worth our pursuit or admiration represents an appalling poverty of learning.   Those who believe that the Bible contains a literally true history of our world lack the gift of metaphor, and for that they are to be pitied more than ridiculed.

A starry sky on a clear winter Maine night is a wondrous thing to behold; so also is an infant’s first true smile.  If forced to choose, we should chose the smile.

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Posted on: 10.27.2012

Ten Tips for the 53%

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Current History, Politics, Science and Policy, Technology in US Politics, Uncategorized

In a recent letter to the editor of the local newspaper a reader supports Mr. Romney’s assertion that 47% of the American public depends on federal benefits, and therefore undeserving of the presidential candidate’s concern.  The letter writer then shares with us his pride at being part of the other 53%,

Without mentioning national defense or Medicare, here are ten tips to help those who agree with Mr. Romney to earn and keep their membership in his 53%, the self-reliant and stalwart individuals who think they don’t depend upon federal benefits:

1) Put away the car keys.  Not only were Maine’s I-95, I-195, I-295, and I-395 built with federal dollars,  but the fuel mileage of your vehicle would be much worse without the periodically updated CAFE* fuel efficiency standards Uncle Sam has been setting for the auto industry since 1975.  The gas is heavily subsidized by taxpayers with oil company leases (often royalty free) on public land, as well as preferential tax treatment such as oil depletion allowances). (*Corporate Average Fuel Economy)

2) Oil up that bicycle in the garage.  Oops!  No can do.  The commercial lubricant you’d use has been manufactured to viscosity standards set by the federally funded National Institute of Standards and Technology.

3) Instead, put on those sturdy Maine-made hiking shoes and head out for a nice nature walk.  But be careful that you don’t walk on a trail blazed with the aid of topographical maps based on the federally funded geodetic surveys.

4) Surely the hardworking 53% can look forward to a boat trip along Maine’s glorious coast.  But take along plenty of your own rescue gear, so you won’t need to compromise your principles by calling on the U.S. Coast Guard if you capsize.  Also prepare for foul weather, since you won’t depend on the federally developed and funded  satellites that bring you the weather news.  Be sure to leave behind those nautical charts based on coastal surveys paid for by the federal government.

5) Get on a plane and go visit the folks?  No high-in-the sky for you.  The aircraft you’d fly in was built to designs drawn from federally funded aeronautical research.  The air routes and navigation aids were also provided by the federal government.

6)  Ah, home, sweet home!  But lock up your firearms.  Much of the research and development that make those firearms effective was paid for by the Uncle Sam.  Colt and Remington would have never gotten off the ground without war department contracts and research done at federal armories such as Springfield and Harper’s Ferry armories, in Massachusetts and  West Virginia.

7) Better lock up that medicine cabinet containing those prescription drugs.  The majority of them were developed from federally funded research overseen by the National Institutes of Health.

8)  Hide the TV remote under the sofa cushions.  TV relies on swathes of global radio spectrum obtained on your behalf by the Federal Communications Commission, which assures that every American citizen has access to radio and television broadcasts, as well as wireless data transmission.  And that includes the Internet, developed with federal dollars.  Now’s a good time to donate that cell phone to a soldier or veteran.

9) At least you can be sure of your membership in Mr. Romney’s 53 percent because you earn all your own income yourself.  Or do you?  Are you sure that your job is not supported indirectly by a federal grant or contract?  To find out, go to the public library, wait for a free Internet computer terminal, and do a search of www.fpds.gov (the federal procurement data system).

10)  Stuff that hard earned money into your mattress, since you won’t want to depend on Uncle Sam’s $250,000 insurance per depositor account.  But if you have that much money, you’ll be happy that Social Security is privatized, so you can entrust your savings to the tender mercies of a deregulated Wall Street.

But be sure your dollars are not invested in companies benefiting from corporate federal welfare!   Corporate welfare takes many forms, among them:  Oil depletion allowances; reduced taxes on income from capital gains; private sector gold, silver, and uranium extracted from royalty-free leases on public land; federal payments to farmers; and import and tariff rate quotas protecting U.S. produced watch parts, anchovies, brooms, ethyl alcohol, milk and cream products, olives, tuna, upland cotton, wheat gluten, wire rod and line pipe, and sugar–to name a few.

As the late night comedian quipped:  “Bro’, we’re all in this together.”

~~~

 

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Posted on: 10.17.2012

Maine: The Costs of “Political Speech”

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Current History, Open Systems, Politics, Uncategorized

In its article on forced ‘disappearance’ to eliminate political opposition, Wikipedia lists no less than 22 countries where ruling parties have resorted to this practice.  Among the better known are Argentina and Chile, under the regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla (1976-1981) and Augusto Pinochet (1976-1981), respectively.

As a means of eliminating unwelcome political speech, ‘disappearing’ has the advantage of denying the opposition a locus of protest. One day, someone or some thing is simply no longer there.  Who was it? What was it?  No longer noticing, how long before we forget?

We in Maine have also had a small exposure to the (mercifully bloodless) ‘disappearing’ of political speech.  U.S. District Court Chief Justice John A. Woodcock ruled in Newton v. LePage (March 23, 2012) that a mural in the Maine Department of Labor building depicting the history of Maine’s working people, and summarily ‘disappeared’ by Governor Paul LePage, is political (or government) speech:

“…the parties agree and the Court takes as a given that the labor mural projects a message and that that message is speech.” [p. 65] Thus the resolution of the issue of the governor’s removal  of the mural  “rests not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion.”

If our governor’s political speech were merely “blunt,” as he maintains, we might do no more than roll our eyes and move on.  But the most notorious of his one-liners are striking for their tacit violence.  What’s more, the resort to violence to end–rather than resolve–disputes appears normal among some of his supporters.

According to a manager in a Route 1 convenience store, “we like him because he says what we really think.”  Another supporter writing to the Press Herald advises that a columnist critical of LePage would have been “seen … as a smart aleck twit and I think he’d have frequently gotten beat up at school.  And he’d have deserved it.” [Charles Todorich, PPH, July 21, 2012].

The true cost of our governor’s preferred political speech is not the heartburn it surely gives to the Prius and Birkenstock set.  It is that it peremptorily forecloses meaningful and creative efforts to resolve policy disputes with the largest number of our citizens possible.

In business school they call it negotiating a “win-win” solution to a conflict of interests.  In public administration they call it getting “buy-in from as many stakeholders as possible.”  The most important reason to work for consensus is not so we can all feel good about ourselves.  It is so that whatever resolution is ultimately achieved will endure.  Otherwise enough people able to undermine a policy will always be waiting for the chance to do so.  Achieving a “win-win” solution is ‘realpolitik’ at its finest.

For example, Maine has before it two important opportunities to improve and modernize its infrastructure, opportunities critical to our long-term economic vitality.  These are an east-west highway across the state, and universal access to broadband Internet, now possible thanks to the completion of Maine’s first high-speed fiber-optic telecommunications network.

The weight of historical evidence shows that robust transportation and communications networks have been essential to this country’s economic prosperity and political cohesion.  A map of railroad routes built across the U.S. in the 1860’s, routes which headed west, rather than south, reveals a chief reason the southern states failed to benefit from an emerging vigorous national economy and evolved an insular culture and politics that persist in its rural areas to this day.

An east-west highway across Maine would do much to relieve the rural isolation–attractive to some, impoverishing to many–of its northern and western counties.  Some creative mediation by a responsible state government would ensure that the right questions are asked and answered, and the legitimate concerns of the opposition accommodated.

Similarly, Press Herald columnist Charles Lawton has recently written of the challenge facing those who support the extension of broadband throughout Maine.  Too few Mainers appreciate what a computer and broadband Internet access can contribute to their lives (for example, telemedicine), and too few Maine businesses recognize the need today for an active on-line presence to survive–much less grow.  The failure of Maine’s businesses to exploit this essential component of our commercial infrastructure begs for constructive state government involvement, including financial incentives.

But these opportunities–and others of comparable importance–are likely to be lost with this governor, fallen prey to the unfortunate tenor of his political speech.

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Posted on: 07.21.2012

Maine Votes – 2012 *

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Current History, Politics

If we’re not too dismayed by the nature of our politics when November 6 rolls around, we may be able to summon enough hope to go to the polls to elect candidates equipped to tackle today’s complex policy issues.   What to do about the “creative destruction” of work for a huge sector of our job market, especially for the young; universal access to health care, the deficit—these issues (like most others) consist of many moving parts.  It’s no mean feat to engage all those moving parts as we try to design inevitably imperfect and ideologically impure solutions.

The ability to imagine and navigate such solutions has been the strength of the best public servants Maine has sent to Washington, among them:  Margaret Chase Smith,  Edmund S. Muskie, William S. Cohen,  George J. Mitchell, Jr., Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins.  What has set these individuals apart is their willingness to place thoughtful and informed deliberation above partisan posturing.

Lincolnville native Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble (2011) warns against the mental self-isolation of those of us who rely on “favorite” Internet sites for our windows on the world.  Even ostensibly neutral Google and Facebook  use information gathered from our Internet travels to show us first what we want to see and read (and might want to buy, which is how they make their money).  The result is a starved imagination, ill equipped to find and adopt diverse elements of political compromise.

Thoughtful and informed people get that way through regular use of our natural capacity for asking questions.  Here are a few questions that we might ask as we ponder what to expect from candidates for Maine’s seats in the U.S. Congress:

Reduce Taxes: How do we know whether our taxes are too high?  By comparing our tax rates with those of other countries like ours?   By comparing our own federal tax burden with those who have larger (or smaller) incomes?  By comparing Maine’s federal tax payments with the dollar value of what we get back from Uncle Sam?

For every dollar Mainers sent to Washington in 2010 ($5.9 billion in all), we received 61 cents back in federal assistance programs for state and local governments, and another 27 cents in federal procurements for work performed in Maine’s private sector–roughly a third of which went to our small businesses.*

Add Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans benefits and the total return in 2010  was $2.47, or a net profit of $1.47 on each Maine federal tax dollar.  Reduce taxes?  What are we willing to give up, and why?

Reduce Government: The size of the civilian federal workforce grew to its largest levels during the 1980s.  It has declined steadily since then, varying about 5% over the last 20 years, and is now what it was at the end of the 1990s.

Thanks to the “privatization” of the federal government by every president since Ronald Reagan, the real growth of the government has been the five-fold increase since 1980 of dollars spent on private sector workers and facilities supported by federal contracts.

Thus to shrink the size of the federal footprint in Maine we would have to reduce significantly the $1.6 billion in federal dollars spent in 2010 alone for work contracted to Maine’s private sector.  One can do an easy search in the federal procurement database [www.fpds.org] of  Maine’s private sector contractors along with the federal programs that support them.  Whose business or job would you offer up to federal budget cutters, and why?

Patriotism: All federal workers (including members of congress and the judiciary), military service members, and naturalized citizens have sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  And the rest of us? Most of us know that the U.S. Constitution specifies the structure of our government, with its separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights.  But the constitution also requires that the government of the American people  “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

What does ‘the general welfare’ mean?  Does it include a population protected from the ravages of disease or debilitating accidents?   If the Blessings of liberty include the right to reap the profits of business risks, do they also include fair and sustainable wages?

Only when those who appeal for our votes between now and November honestly tackle questions such as these can we begin to decide who deserves to represent Maine in Washington.

*(This essay first appeared in the Portland Press Herald for July 13, 2012)

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* Sources: http://www.census.gov/govs/statetax/,  http://www.opm.gov/feddata/HistoricalTables,  http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/fas-10.pdf, https://www.fpds.gov/Reports/manage/jsp/myReportsController.jsp.

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Posted on: 04.11.2012

Why Dieting is Hard for Uncle Sam

by Sylvia Kraemer
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Posted in Current History, History of Ideas, Politics

Whether devout or passionate, “severe” conservatives (as republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney styled himself), assert a belief that the private sector should command all economic activity, while the public sector is reduced to as close to nothing as possible.  Here is Mr. Romney on his rival Rick Santorum: “Sen. Santorum is a nice guy, but he’s never had a job in the private sector.”

The federal government has been the target of conservative politicians since before the public sector’s rapid growth after World War II. The wonder is that after six post-war republican presidents, four of whom were reelected for a second term, the campaign against government has been so unsuccessful that republican candidates today still invoke it as proof of their ideological identity and resolve.

But we should not wonder: There is no more reality behind the rhetorical campaign against the public sector than there is behind one campaign enthusiast’s warning that “the government had better keep its hands off of my Medicare.”  Were it not for the federal government, numerous companies, forced to depend on the private sector’s ‘free market,’ would become mere shadows of their former selves.

Since the 1960s federal policy–supported by both parties–has required all federal agencies to procure their necessary goods and services from the private sector.  The result has been an “iron triangle:” The flow of federal procurement dollars from (a) executive branch agencies through contracts and grants to (b) private sector firms and organizations is protected by (c) members of congress, whose bill writing chores are alleviated by corporate lobbyists–many of whom were once members of congress themselves.  To observe the iron triangle at work, spend a few evenings with the on-line Federal Procurement Data System (https://www.fpds.gov) and OpenSecrets.org, which tracks money in politics.

Nine state congressional delegations sent more than two members to join the newly formed Tea Party Caucus in 2010: California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.  If these states’ delegations were able to satisfy their Tea Party constituents by dramatically shrinking the federal government, what would happen?  All of them would probably come to regret it, because their constituents typically receive more dollars from the federal government than they pay to it in federal taxes.

In 2009 all of these states received at least than 20% more than they paid Uncle Sam in taxes the following year. South Carolina received the most, or169% more. Of all the Tea Party states Texas, for all its patriotism, received the smallest percentage of federal dollars in 2009 in excess of what it paid in 2010 (20%).

What was all that money spent on?  The largest amount of federal funds distributed among the states consisted of procurements and grants.  Federal contracts and grants in 2009 amounted to $1.3 trillion pumped back into the private sector.

Among the Tea Party caucus states, California’s private sector benefited from over $64 billion in contracts. Texas received slightly over half that much in federal contracts ($35 billion), while $17.5 billion went to Florida.  Missouri and Tennessee received more than $10 billion each.  The private sector in the remaining Tea Party caucus states (South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Kansas)  received between $8 billion and $2.5 billion in federal contracts each.  (Maine received $1.4 billion in 2009.)

When members of congress play by the rules laid out in the Pendleton Act (1883) and the Procurement Integrity Act (1988), they do not lobby for individual businesses.  But there is another way they can ensure that public sector dollars help support the private sector at home: Maintain or increase appropriations to those federal programs that award contracts to their constituents’ businesses.

So, vote to shrink the federal government if that makes you feel good.  But once our victorious candidates learn how and where our tax dollars get spent, their energies wander to other urgent national concerns, returning to the size of government only when the TV cameras reappear.

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