Harvard University Press Blog

A "Powerful Surveillance Program" Exposed

From Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age:

In the wake of the two grand jury decisions to refuse to indict police officers in the homicides of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, a protest was organized for Saturday, December 13, 2014, in New York City. The organizers of the Millions March set up a Facebook page, where, by the night before, more than 45,000 people had RSVPed. It was posted as a public event on Facebook, so everyone and anyone could see who had signed up to attend—providing everyone and anyone, including the social media unit of the New York City Police Department, a costless, pristine list of all the individuals who feel so strongly about the problem of police accountability that they are willing to identify themselves publicly.

It takes little imagination to think of the ways that such a list could be exploited: As a background check during a police-civilian encounter or stop-and-frisk. As a red flag for a customs search at the airport, or a secondary search at a random checkpoint. As part of a larger profile for constructing a no-fly list, or for attributing a lower priority to a 911 emergency call. For more aggressive misdemeanor arrests in neighborhoods that have higher concentrations of protesters. As part of a strategy to dampen voter turnout in certain precincts. For a cavity search in case of arrest. There are myriad creative ways to misuse the data; our imagination is the only limit. And with a single click, a prying eye can learn everything about each of the digital selves that signed up for the protest on Facebook; using a simple selector, an intelligence analyst could collect all of the digital information about any one of those signatories, read all their emails, attachments, wall posts, and comments, decipher their political opinions and engagements, scan their photos and texts, target their videochats, track them by cell phone location—in sum, follow their every movement and digital action throughout every moment of their day. Once we are identified, we can be relentlessly monitored across practically every dimension of our daily routine—by means of the GPS on our phones, our IP addresses and web surfing, our Gmail contacts, MetroCards, employee IDs, and social media posts.

From the Washington Post:

A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.

From the ACLU:

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

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• Instagram had provided Geofeedia access to the Instagram API, a stream of public Instagram user posts. This data feed included any location data associated with the posts by users. Instagram terminated this access on September 19, 2016.
• Facebook had provided Geofeedia with access to a data feed called the Topic Feed API, which is supposed to be a tool for media companies and brand purposes, and which allowed Geofeedia to obtain a ranked feed of public posts from Facebook that mention a specific topic, including hashtags, events, or specific places. Facebook terminated this access on September 19, 2016.
• Twitter did not provide access to its “Firehose,” but has an agreement, via a subsidiary, to provide Geofeedia with searchable access to its database of public tweets. In February, Twitter added additional contract terms to try to further safeguard against surveillance. But our records show that as recently as July 11th, Geofeedia was still touting its product as a tool to monitor protests. After learning of this, Twitter sent Geofeedia a cease and desist letter.

Because Geofeedia obtained this access to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as a developer, it could access a flow of data that would otherwise require an individual to “scrape” user data off of the services in an automated fashion that is prohibited by the terms of service (here and here). With this special access, Geofeedia could quickly access public user content and make it available to the 500 law enforcement and public safety clients claimed by the company.

Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color. Using Geofeedia’s analytics and search capabilities and following the recommendations in their marketing materials, law enforcement in places like Oakland, Denver, and Seattle could easily target neighborhoods where people of color live, monitor hashtags used by activists and allies, or target activist groups as “overt threats.” We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.

Social media companies and their executives have expressed support for activists, movements, and free speech. Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Black Lives Matter and expressed sympathy after Philando Castile’s killing, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went to Ferguson. Above all, the companies articulate their role as a home for free speech about important social or political issues.

Yet there is a severe disconnect between these positions and the data access they have provided.

From Exposed:

We face today, in advanced capitalist liberal democracies, a radically new form of power in a completely altered landscape of political and social possibilities.

Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

In the late 1950s Chuck Berry was defining rock and roll, but by the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable. What happened in the interim is the subject of Jack Hamilton’s Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. The book explains how, when, and why rock and roll music “became white,” and in doing so offers an interracial counter-history of Sixties music that rejects the ideals of racial authenticity, denies generic divisions between “rock” and “soul,” and “hears together” artists that have typically been separated by critical and commercial force.

We asked Hamilton to put together a playlist of some of the music threaded through the book. The songs he chose and his comments on their significance are below.

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Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”
Dylan’s 1963 composition, the melody of which is borrowed from a 19th-century anti-slavery song, became an anthem of the civil rights movement and arguably the most famous musical work of the 1960s folk revival.

Sam Cooke, “Bring it on Home to Me” (Live)
This electrifying live recording from Miami’s Harlem Square Club in 1963 finds Cooke in full-throated, gospel-infused showmanship.

Sam Cooke, “Blowin in the Wind” (Live)
This 1964 performance from Manhattan’s Copacabana, recorded and released just a few months before Cooke’s death, shows a completely different side of the singer’s versatility, as Cooke suavely reworks Dylan’s folksong into a gently swinging nightclub number.

Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come”
Cooke’s most famous composition and one of the most powerful musical works of the civil rights movement, “A Change is Gonna Come” was released in 1964 and directly inspired by both “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”
Widely regarded as one of the most important recordings in pop music history, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” became a smash hit in summer of 1965 and decisively marked the singer’s transition from folk revivalist to full-blown rock icon.

Lonnie Donegan, “Rock Island Line”
Donegan’s frenetic version of Leadbelly’s classic “Rock Island Line” shot up the British charts in early 1956 and sparked what would come to be known as the “Skiffle Craze,” a brief, intense musical happening that had drastic ramifications on the future of rock and roll in the UK.

The Rolling Stones, “Not Fade Away”
One of the Rolling Stones’ earliest hits came in the form of this pounding 1964 cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” which finds them reworking Holly’s composition in the style of Bo Diddley.

Barrett Strong, “Money (That’s What I Want)”
The first single ever released by what would soon be known as Motown Records, this unbelievably infectious paean to capitalism is the perfect musical microcosm of Berry Gordy’s upstart label.

The Beatles, “Money (That’s What I Want)”
The last track on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles (1963), this snarling, punk-ish cover version of Strong’s hit offers an early indication of the massive impact of Gordy’s label on the Fab Four (the fourteen tracks on With the Beatles included three Motown covers).

The Beatles, “Rain”
Paul McCartney’s bass playing on this extraordinary 1966 b-side to “Paperback Writer” shows the remarkable influence of Motown session bass player James Jamerson on the Beatles’ mid-1960s music.

Marvin Gaye, “Yesterday”
Gaye’s stunning 1970 cover of one of the Beatles’ most famous compositions came at the cusp of a major turning point in the singer’s career; just a year later he would release his masterpiece, What’s Going On, the last major Motown album recorded in Detroit.

Stevie Wonder, “We Can Work It Out”
Similar to Gaye’s “Yesterday,” Wonder’s 1970 recording of the Beatles’ 1965 hit completely reimagines the original song and foreshadows Wonder’s own emergence as arguably the most influential recording artist of the 1970s.

Aretha Franklin, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)”
The Queen of Soul, in all her splendor: Franklin’s breakthrough hit for Atlantic Records in 1967 heralded the arrival of a transformational talent onto the landscape of 1960s pop.

Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Piece of My Heart”
Joplin’s incendiary version of “Piece of My Heart,” a song originally recorded by Aretha Franklin’s sister Erma in 1967 and remade by Joplin in 1968, was one of Joplin’s biggest hits and remains one of her most iconic performances.

Dusty Springfield, “Son of a Preacher Man”
The British “blue-eyed soul” star Springfield’s evocative rendition of John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins’ composition, the biggest hit from her classic 1968 album Dusty in Memphis, is one of the more beguiling and beautiful recordings of late-60s R&B.

Aretha Franklin, “Son of a Preacher Man”
Hurley and Wilkins had originally written “Son of a Preacher Man” for Franklin, who turned it down; after Springfield had a hit with it, in 1970 Aretha recorded it herself in a churning, gospel-infused style.

Aretha Franklin, “Eleanor Rigby”
Franklin’s 1970 recording of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” transforms the song from an elegiac, string-octet dirge into a rollicking, bluesy statement of feminist resilience.

Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower”
Hendrix’s 1968 recording of Bob Dylan’s composition is one of the guitarist’s most famous performances and one of the most iconic musical markers of Vietnam-era tumult and dread.

Jimi Hendrix, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”
A dazzling display of instrumental and studio virtuosity and the closing track on Hendrix’s 1968 masterpiece Electric Ladyland, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” is an apocalyptic blues that showcases the nearly unfathomable dimensions of Hendrix’s musical abilities.

Jimi Hendrix, “Machine Gun”
Recorded live at Madison Square Garden on the very cusp of the 1970s, “Machine Gun” is one of Hendrix’s most explicitly political compositions and one of the more powerful pieces of anti-war music to emerge from the Vietnam era.

The Rolling Stones, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
After an ill-fated flirtation with psychedelia, 1968’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” breathed new life into the Rolling Stones, and remains one of the most influential rock and roll singles of all time.

The Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man”
One of the standout tracks on the Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet, “Street Fighting Man” transports Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 classic “Dancing in the Street” into the global unrest of the summer of 1968.

The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter”
This 1969 duet between Mick Jagger and the great black female vocalist Merry Clayton is one of the most visceral depictions of war and terror in all of popular music.

The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar”
The critic Robert Christgau once described this 1971 hit as “a rocker so compelling it discourages exegesis”; stunning, wild, and outlandishly offensive, it is perhaps the quintessential song of the Rolling Stones’ long and complicated career.

Why Wages Are Stuck

In 2014’s What Unions No Longer Do, sociologist Jake Rosenfeld outlined the broad and transformative consequences of the steep decline in American labor union membership across recent decades. In documenting what organized labor once did to lessen inequality and empower workers, Rosenfeld made clear that unions were indeed a tide that lifted all boats, benefitting members and non-members alike. He offered evidence suggesting that the wages of nonunion workers had been positively influenced by unions in their heyday, but cautioned against inferring direct cause and effect within the multivariate analyses of wage trends then available.

Now, though, in a new Economic Policy Institute study receiving coverage from the Atlantic, Marketplace, the American Prospect, and Salon, among others, Rosenfeld and colleagues Patrick Denice and Jennifer Laird are able to more affirmatively claim that the decline of unions has lowered wages for nonunion workers.

From the Executive Summary of their report:

Pay for private-sector workers has barely budged over the past three and a half decades. In fact, for men in the private sector who lack a college degree and do not belong to a labor union, real wages today are substantially lower than they were in the late 1970s.

In the debates over the causes of wage stagnation, the decline in union power has not received nearly as much attention as globalization, technological change, and the slowdown in Americans’ educational attainment. Unions, especially in industries and regions where they are strong, help boost the wages of all workers by establishing pay and benefit standards that many nonunion firms adopt. But this union boost to nonunion pay has weakened as the share of private-sector workers in a union has fallen from 1 in 3 in the 1950s to about 1 in 20 today.

While we avoid strict causal claims about wage determination, the analytical approaches summarized in this report enable us to assess the independent effects of union decline on wages and lend confidence to our core contention that private-sector union decline since the late 1970s has contributed to substantial wage losses among workers who do not belong to a union. This is especially true for men. And most hurt by the decades-long decline in the nation’s labor movement are those nonunion men who did not complete college, or go beyond high school—groups with the largest erosion of union membership over the last few decades.

[…]

Nonunion workers benefit from a strong union presence in their labor market in many ways. Strong unions set pay and benefits standards that nonunion employers follow. Those employers may raise pay for some workers to forestall an organizing drive, which leads to an upward adjustment in wages of workers above them, to maintain relative pay differentials (similar to the effects of minimum-wage increases).

Even absent organizing activities in their spheres, nonunion employers may also follow the standards that unions help establish through politicking for labor-friendly policies, instituting informal and formal rules governing labor conditions, and generally serving as a cultural force arguing for a “fairer share” for working men and women. (For example, highly unionized states helped lift minimum wages above the levels of states where labor was comparatively weak.) Higher pay in organized establishments increases competition for labor so that nonunion firms lift wages to prevent their employees from leaving for higher, union wages. And in setting wages, new market entrants often look to what industry leaders are doing; when organized labor was strong, many of these leaders were unionized.

Rebuilding our system of collective bargaining is an important tool available for fueling wage growth for both low- and middle-wage workers and ending the era of persistent wage stagnation.

The overall effects of American labor’s decline in standing are enormous. As Rosenfeld told Marketplace, “we’re talking about over $100 billion a year in lost wages.” As the U.S. eases towards Labor Day, it would seem that Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird have given all of us further cause both to celebrate the achievements and to mourn the decline of the American labor movement.

Why Read yet Another Book on Higher Education?

Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College begins with the observation that college doesn’t just start one day during orientation week and then end ceremonially some years later. Instead, argue authors Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle, college is “a liminal space and place in which students make lots of decisions that serve as practice for the many more they will make as older adults.” The case they make for the enduring value of liberal education is novel and unconventional, but—as they acknowledge early on—their book enters a not-uncrowded space. So why read yet another book on higher education? In the brief excerpt below, they address the question head-on.

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Over the past twenty years, many thoughtful, insightful, and field-changing books have been published on virtually every aspect of the college experience. While we have learned much from these and use them throughout to contextualize our own analysis, we believe that our research makes a number of unique contributions to the field of higher education that will interest parents, students, faculty, administrators, and researchers. Our analysis is based on narratives of the student experience that we constructed from repeated interviews with a diverse group of over 200 students who thrived, struggled, or stalled at various points during their college years. Because we interviewed students every semester while they were in college, we were able to gather enormously rich and detailed information about student decision-making. Why did you choose this course, this major, this advisor? Why did you choose to live with these friends, join these organizations, or study abroad? What is most on your mind as you start the school year? And because we asked these questions (and many others) in “real time,” we believe that the answers students gave constitute a valid account of their college experience.

Although you will hear from over one hundred students in this book, you will get to know a much smaller number—around twenty—fairly well. The longer narratives we have written about this group demonstrate that students find engaging academic experiences, advisors, friends, balance, or a sense of home in different places and via different routes. They also demonstrate that students’ academic engagement, friendships, advisor relationships, experience of time and balance, or sense of home often change over time. We chose some of these students because their narratives were similar to those of many of their peers. We chose others because they were in many respects outliers. Regardless of their typical or atypical nature, each of these students’ college experiences offers something instructive about the process of becoming liberally educated.

“We Have to Insist That Our Political Leaders Start Dealing With the History of Our Present”

“The debate we’ve been having about police reform, about body cameras, about black lives mattering, seems not to have fundamentally changed the calculation when a black motorist or pedestrian is stopped on the street.” So said historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad in a conversation with NPR’s Code Switch team after the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the horrifying attack on police officers in Dallas.

Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, spoke of the need to continue working towards more just policing even as events threaten to jeopardize public sympathy. “We have to insist,” he said, “that our political leaders start dealing with the history of our present—which is a history of sustained policing in black communities that is wholly and fundamentally different than it is in the rest of America. That’s a fact.”

When asked by Code Switch how today’s organizers might spur something like the late-1960s sequence that saw urban unrest lead to President Johnson’s formation of a federal commission that ultimately pointed to the failure of housing, education, and social-service policies, Muhammad suggested that the terms of that exchange can no longer be accepted.

The strategy of the civil rights movement was a strategy of compromise, to some extent, and that compromise was a form of respectability politics that essentially said “we’re going to be perfectly articulate, we’re going to be perfectly dressed, we’re going to be nonviolent, and we’re going to fit a model of exceptionalism, such that you will then say ‘how could we not let them eat at our table, how could we not let them live in our neighborhood, how could we not let them into our schools?’” And that’s not the full measure of humanity. We cannot—or can no longer—say to black people “you have to be twice as good to have half the measure of freedom in this country.” You should be able to be poor, you should be able to be doing something illegal that is not violent, and live to be able to face a day in court. That should be able to happen in this country.

In further considering the prevailing culture of policing today, Muhammad drew the line to mass incarceration:

I think that police officers function today in a way that has systematically mass-criminalized black and brown populations. That’s just a fact. You can’t get to the problem of mass incarceration without the problem of hot spots, CompStat policing, the war on drugs, all of it. And I think many people would agree that mass incarceration is a step in the wrong direction. Seven million people under some form of criminal justice supervision is a step in the wrong direction in a moment where we’re supposed to be two generations removed from the civil rights movement. And policing is at the center of that, they are the starting point. If there’s no arrest, then there’s no mass incarceration.

Listen to the full conversation below, starting around the 11:10 mark.

Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

In The Naked Blogger of Cairo, Marwan Kraidy builds on his decades of experience researching and writing about Arab media, culture, and politics to consider the ways in which people create rebellious art, attract public attention, and conjure new political imaginaries. At the heart of these processes Kraidy finds the human body, employed as tool, medium, symbol, and metaphor, tying the revolutionary activism we associate with the Arab uprisings of recent years to those of a longer past.

The book develops the notion of “creative insurgency” to explore the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression, turning to the work of dozens of sloganeers, graffiti artists, puppeteers, videographers, cartoonists, satirists, and bloggers to explore a series of cross-disciplinary questions about practices of rebellion:

How does creative insurgency emerge and thrive? What kinds of artistic practices does it spur? What debates does it foment? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places? What do self-immolations in 1963 Saigon and 1969 Prague reveal about Bouazizi’s in 2010 Sidi Bouzid? How does Mubarak’s switching off the Internet in 2011 resonate with the British ban on theater in 1919 Cairo? What historical perspective can we gain by revisiting the French Revolution? Can the aesthetic sensibility of Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le peuple help us grasp the Naked Blogger of Cairo? What can we learn about political street art in 2010 Arab capitals from civil war–era stencil graffiti in 1970s Beirut? How do loaf-brandishing revolutionaries and the superhero Captain Khobza in 2010 Tunis echo past bread riots? How does Top Goon—Diaries of a Little Dictator recast ancient puppetry traditions for the digital era? Is revolutionary graffiti mere political messaging or is it art? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places?

Kraidy gives a more complete sense of his project in the video below.

 

Wealth Managers and the One Percent

World leaders have fallen in the days since the massive “Panama Papers” leak, but, as Brooke Harrington explains in a piece for the Atlantic, most of the activity detailed in those documents is perfectly legal. And Brooke Harrington would know. A sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School, Harrington spent two years training to join the ranks of the world’s elite wealth managers, all purpose financial fixers who do the work behind Mossack Fonseca’s spilled secrets. She tells their stories and details the ways of offshore banks, shell corporations, and trusts in Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, coming this fall.

As she writes in the Atlantic, the world’s richest people pay wealth managers to help them hide money and defeat the purpose of laws and policies without strictly breaking them:

What Mossack Fonseca and its counterparts all over the world really provide is the expertise that allows their clients to stay just on the right side of the law—or far enough into the legal grey zones that the clients have a real chance to prevail if they end up in court. That’s why many of the people who have seemingly been exposed by this leak will likely never face charges of any kind… When the firm writes that “we have a strong compliance record” and “we are responsible members of the global financial and business community,” they are not lying through their teeth, as some might suspect. Keeping clients out of legal trouble is a core element of their business model: that is how they earn their money. If they, or firms like them, were to lose their reputations for keeping clients on the right side of the law, the clients would take their business elsewhere.

And there’s always an elsewhere to take it—the wealth management industry’s main professional society has roughly 20,000 members. Indeed, despite the sheer volume of the Mossack Fonseca leak, what’s there is the work of just one company in just one place. In the course of her study, Harrington conducted interviews with sixty-five practitioners in eighteen countries. While many wealth managers may project a buttoned-down, old school sensibility—the better with which to woo old money—a quaint scene this is not.

Wealth managers take full advantage of the decades of work done removing restrictions on the international flow of capital, but one of their most valuable services is ensuring the free movement of their clients themselves, through the world and even, in a sense, through time. Here’s Harrington in a piece from last year:

Tax avoidance—the perfectly legal practice of minimizing one’s tax obligations—is really the least of the wonders that wealth managers achieve for their clients. They can also help clients swap nationalities when holding the passport of a particular country means submitting to undesirable requirements. Remember when the Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship for a Singaporean passport? Classic wealth-management strategy. And thanks to the expanding number of practitioners, U.S. citizenship renunciations are at an all-time high, and growing. Finally, wealth managers can give their clients a kind of financial immortality, in the form of inheritances tied to the performance of certain duties by the heirs, such as going into the family business or producing grandchildren.

The underlying point to Harrington’s work is that the massive accumulation of wealth, rising inequality, the reign of global plutocrats—these things don’t just happen on their own. They require work, and they require workers. Those workers and their clients are now catching some sunshine through the haze of the Panama Papers. Harrington’s work may leave some burnt.

What Works for Our Shared Shelf

On January 6^th the actor and activist Emma Watson tweeted her desire to start a feminist book club.

Hi Team, ❤️ I want to start a feminist book club but so far have only brainstormed ‘Feminist Book Club’ and ‘Emma Watson Book Club’.

— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) January 6, 2016

By January 7^th the group had a name, “Our Shared Shelf,” and its first selection, Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road. On the group’s Goodreads page, Watson outlines the idea:

As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading as many books and essays about equality as I can get my hands on. There is so much amazing stuff out there! Funny, inspiring, sad, thought-provoking, empowering! I’ve been discovering so much that, at times, I’ve felt like my head was about to explode… I decided to start a Feminist book club, as I want to share what I’m learning and hear your thoughts too.

The plan is to select and read a book every month, then discuss the work during the month’s last week (to give everyone time to read it!). I will post some questions/quotes to get things started, but I would love for this to grow into an open discussion with and between you all. Whenever possible I hope to have the author, or another prominent voice on the subject, join the conversation.

If you fancy it, please join up and participate. Everyone is welcome. I would be honoured!

The page for the group, which is already approaching 100,000 members, also hosts an active discussion board, where tens of thousands of people have suggested books to turn to next. Here at HUP we’re soon to publish a title we hope they’ll consider.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design, is by Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program. As research has repeatedly shown, and as resources like Project Implicit help to demonstrate, humans have biases related to characteristic like race, gender, and sexual orientation that the best of training and the purest of intentions can’t easily override. With What Works, Bohnet presents a relentlessly practical but determinedly optimistic guide to straightforward behavioral interventions that overcome gender bias by limiting opportunities for its intrusion.

Bohnet often introduces the notion of designing for gender equality by pointing to the simple but illustrative case of orchestras. From the book:

As late as 1970, only 5 percent of musicians performing in the top five orchestras in the United States were women. Today, women compose more than 35 percent of the most acclaimed orchestras, and they play great music. This did not happen by chance. Rather, it required the introduction of blind auditions. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was the first to ask musicians to audition behind a screen, and in the 1970s and 1980s most other major orchestras followed suit. When they did so, usually in preliminary rounds, it raised the likelihood that a female musician would advance by 50 percent and substantially increased the proportion of women hired.

Addressing the disparity, as Bohnet writes, required only “awareness, a curtain, and a decision. Or, more precisely, a design decision.” The blind assessment practiced by orchestras isn’t always feasible, but the approach—a focus on de-biasing systems rather than people—is an enormously useful tool for moving the needle towards equality.

What’s critical to recognize in the orchestra example is that the result isn’t just more female musicians: it’s also better music. Even if the gatekeepers and string-pullers of the world can’t be made to prioritize gender equality, rare are those who’d ignore proven strategies for improved performance. And yet, even as Bohnet emphasizes the business benefits of designing around biases, those gains cannot be the foundation for the changes we need:

While the macro- and the micro-evidence hold the promise of a business case, gender equality is not a magic bullet automatically leading to economic progress. This is why, at the end of the day, the case of gender equality must rest on a moral argument. It just is the right thing to do. Full stop. We cannot afford to get it wrong.

Certainly wonkier than a Gloria Steinem memoir, but What Works explains how, using behavioral insights, we can collapse gender inequality within our lifetime. A fitting book for Our Shared Shelf.

The End Game

The American social safety net is aimed primarily at three groups: children, the disabled, and the aged. Of these demographic groups, it’s generally taken for granted that efforts on behalf of the aged have been the most successful, with Medicare and Social Security assuring a baseline quality of life and care for the elderly. Though it’d be folly to assume that the inequalities that so structure our earlier lives are fully leveled in our later years, there’s been little research into the actual effects that our social stratifications have on aging. Sociologist Corey Abramson’s The End Game presents a study designed to address that gap in our understanding of inequality; he introduces the project in the brief excerpt below.

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On a brisk October afternoon in 2010, Bernard and I were listening to a radio broadcast of the San Francisco Giants game. The commentary blared out over a cheap plastic radio in the musty backroom of a senior center in Rockport, a predominantly poor, multiethnic, urban neighborhood in the greater San Francisco Bay area. Small groups of African American men were listening to the radio while playing pool, chess, and dominoes. Although Bernard was only in his early sixties, he could no longer stand up long enough to play a game of pool. The self-proclaimed former hustler was also consistently frustrated by the way his chess game had gone downhill. He felt he was now too “fuzzy-headed” to hang with the other guys in the senior center, so he mostly resigned himself to dominoes. On this particular day, however, Big B (as Bernard was known to his friends) was fixated on the baseball game. Like many of the other seniors involved in my ethnographic study of how American inequality shapes later life, Big B was a huge baseball fan. He took slow sips from a small Styrofoam cup containing sugar, cream, and a bit of coffee, while patiently trying to explain the nuances of baseball to me. He pointed out that it wasn’t just the athletic movements that made the game gripping, but also the connections between the players, team dynamics, rules, strategies, and individual backstories. I nodded. The truth, though, is that while I understood each of these parts in isolation, I had only a superficial understanding of the game. What I eventually learned from Big B and the other seniors in my study is that explaining how inequality shapes our final years, like understanding baseball, requires understanding how the pieces fit together. It necessitates charting the larger underlying connections that constitute what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the “logic of the game.” The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years explains what I found.

The End Game shows that while seniors from across the social spectrum face a set of common challenges associated with growing old, they do not do so on equal footing. It will quickly become apparent that the disparities that structure our lives from our first breath onward do not end with the promise of Medicare and a Social Security check. When the challenges of “old age” present themselves to us, what they mean and how we can respond are contingent on inequalities both past and present. Some of us ultimately confront common difficulties in later life—such as increasing physical problems or watching friends and loved ones perish—with access to substantial wealth, social support, and education. Others will face the same problems, but do so alone with few resources. The larger implication is that how we grow old, and the options available to us as we do, often depend on whether we are rich or poor, male or female, black or white. In other words, aging is a stratified process.

Throughout the book, I extend the analogy of the game to help explain how inequality shapes later life. The comparison is analytically useful, because social life, like games, consists of active players, organizing mechanics, temporal phases (e.g., innings, periods, quarters) and different styles and strategies of approaching challenges. Further, games quite often thrive on the illusion of being fair even when they are not. In a similar vein, some mistakenly equate the shared experiences of old age with the dissolution of other social divisions. While looking at the presence of certain shared experiences in later life is essential to understanding the end game an increasing number of us will play, the reality is that the score does not revert to zero, nor do the inequalities that existed throughout the game vanish. Socioeconomic, racial, and gender divides still determine who steps onto the field, the equipment they bring with them, the score they start with, and the strategies they can ultimately deploy.

The goal of The End Game is to show how key mechanisms of social stratification—such as, health disparities, structural inequality, culture, and networks—structure everyday life in old age, and, conversely, how the unique practical and symbolic aspects of old age make it an important axis of American inequality. In doing so, the book explains why the opportunities and outcomes of the end game remain stratified, and what its players and rules tell us about inequality more generally.

The Political Economy of Thalidomide

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, who became famous for withholding Food and Drug Administration approval for Thalidomide in the early 1960s, died last week at 101. Notice of her death has been accompanied by retellings of the FDA’s early days, and of Kelsey’s heroic stand against the morning sickness drug later linked to terrible birth defects in other parts of the world. Rather than merely a story of one dogged researcher’s triumph, though, sociologist Monica Prasad sees the Thalidomide case as clear evidence against the notion of a laissez-faire United States government. Indeed, in The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty, excerpted below, Prasad offers the episode as an entry point for considering the weak U.S. welfare state as the product not of an unbridled free market but of a unique and remarkable system of American regulatory institutions.

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Doctors began to notice the first cases of the strange disease in 1959. Thousands of babies with stunted limbs and other severe birth defects were being born all over Germany, Britain, Sweden, Australia, dozens of countries. Many died from their deformities at birth. Others would experience difficulties as they grew, including heart disease and spina bifida. Through 1960 and into 1961, all around the world, the number of cases mounted.

In 1961 two doctors traced the problems to a sedative called Contergan that had been developed in Germany and marketed worldwide under other names. Contergan was prescribed for insomnia and for nausea. It did not seem to have side effects and was not toxic in overdose, and it became so popular that it was called “West Germany’s baby sitter.” But as the incidents rose, pediatricians began to suspect and then to document an extremely strong association between the birth defects and Contergan taken in the first trimester of pregnancy. It was withdrawn from the market in 1961, and eventually conclusive evidence emerged of how the drug caused the malformations. By then it had already affected over 10,000 children in “one of the greatest medical disasters of modern times.”¹

Amid the calamity, a stunning and justly celebrated act of resistance came to light: under the name Thalidomide, the drug had been kept off the American market by Frances Kelsey, a researcher at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with a hunch and a streak of self-confidence that led her to delay approval again and again, until the truth was finally known. Kelsey was well prepared for the task. She had done her graduate work in pharmacology at the University of Chicago (she was admitted on the assumption that “Frances” was a male name) in the lab that had identified the toxicity of an over-the-counter drug that had killed 107 people in 1937. The lab’s work led to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. During the war, Kelsey’s work on pregnant rabbits had shown her that drugs can cross the placental barrier and that pregnancy can change the body’s response to a drug.