"Crisis"!

I've been thinking a lot recently about how frequently things are described as "crises" in today's political lexicon. We have a housing crisis, a financial crisis, a foreclosure crisis, a crisis of violence, an urban crisis, a suburban crisis....

A bunch of students and scholars at my fair university have just released a tool using Google Books data that analyzes the frequency with which certain words have been used in print over the past couple of centuries. Using 5.2 million books (the authors claim this is "~ 4% of all books ever published!"), they've set up a tool into which you can put a word or phrase and it shoots out a graph of the frequency of that word's use over time. The data comes out as a percentage of all words published in a given year or decade. You can read their article in Science describing the research here, and check out their website here.

I think the pure utility of this is limited because it takes the words entirely out of context, and to really understand the meaning of words we have to read them surrounded by other words the ways their authors intended, but I do think it can provide some interesting snapshots of cultural trends. As the researchers note: "you'll need to carefully interpret your results. Some effects are due to changes in the language we use to describe things ('The Great War' vs. World War I'). Others are due to actual changes in what interests us (note how 'slavery' peaks during the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement)."

So, here's the way the graph looks for the word "crisis" in English-language books from 1776 to 2000 (earlier and later data is sketchy).

Click here or on the graph to see a bigger version.

Despite the aforementioned limitations, I think there are some pretty interesting things about this graph. Note how the use of the word rose steadily thoughout the 1840s and 1850s, peaked in the early-mid 1860s, during the Civil War, and then fell sharply after the war. It then peaked again during World War I and the Great Depression, although intriguingly it declined during World War II.

But what I'm really interested in is the steady climb after 1960. I'm struck by the fact that we seem to have been perpetually in "crisis" from 1960 until 2000, and I would think it has continued in the past decade (although we don't have the data). I'm not totally sure what to make of this and would be interested to hear the thoughts of anyone who's reading the blog. It seems to me, though, that there are three basic possibilities:
1. Things have really been terrible for the past fifty years, and the word "crisis" appropriately describes a series of events/situations during that time period.
2. As the media has gotten louder and polarization has increased, it takes dramatic claims like one of "crisis" to get anyone to pay attention to a problem.
3. Or something in between (1) and (2).

Thoughts? I'm definitely inclined to believe it's either (2) or (3), and would like to make a strong push for reducing the drama with which we discuss problems in our society. Not everything is a crisis, and perhaps making everything sound like one just makes the political tension with which we're surrounded even worse. Or maybe I'm making a "crisis" out of nothing.

Good news!

There's so much terrible news out there, especially with this weekend's assassination attempt, that I've been hungry for some good, happy stuff - and now I found some. After a New Year’s Eve attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt killed 21 people, thousands of Egyptian Muslims came to Coptic Christian churches during their Christmas celebrations last week to provide a "human shield" against more violence. From an article in AhramOnline.com,  an Egyptian English-language news site:

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular Muslim televangelist and preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly Street. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

Sounds like Americans could learn a little something about solidarity, and support for minorities, from this story. 

Integrating the University of Georgia, 50 Years Ago

I'm spending the next two days at a conference so things will probably be a little quiet here, but I heard a great interview this morning and wanted to share. Charlene Hunter-Gault, who is now a well-known journalist, was one of the first two black students to attend the University of Georgia after winning a federal lawsuit in 1961. She talked about students rioting on campus, throwing a brick through her window, and offering her a quarter to make their beds for them - but also about a professor inviting her to tea and discussing Dostoevsky with her, and about getting to know Calvin Trillin because he offered to buy her a pastrami sandwich. Check it out at http://www.npr.org/news/U.S./132712913.

Is this what the Republican Majority Is Going to Look Like?

Now that the Republicans have claimed their majority in the House of Representatives, what do they plan to do with it? On their first day in office, they set about reading the Constitution on the floor of the House. (More on that to come.)  Their next order of business was to start the doomed process of trying to repeal last year's health care reform legislation (I just wrote about this). In a similar vein, some of them are also trying to repeal the 2010 financial overhaul, the Dodd-Frank Act, which enacted much-needed regulation of the banking industry, whose unregulated actions led us into the financial and housing crises. Like the health reform repeal, the Dodd-Frank repeal has no real chance of passing.

The Republicans are doing these things for the same reason they seem to be doing most things these days: to score political points so that the next time they run for re-election they can run ads saying that they "voted for the repeal of Obamacare" or "voted to make government smaller." It's too bad, for them but mostly for us, that there's actual work to be done governing the country in between elections. They seem much more interested in spending their time reading the Constitution aloud, working on legislation that will never pass, and holding hearings about the Obama Administration's actions than actually passing laws that might help their constitutents.

That’s partly because they’re having trouble coming up with real policy proposals. After loudly promising during the Congressional campaigns to immediately cut $100 billion in domestic spending from the budget, now that they’re in office they’re quickly scaling back those expectations. And even some of the loudest supporters of such dramatic spending cuts are unable to say what they would actually cut. As I wrote earlier, the problem is that there isn’t actually $100 billion, or anywhere near that much, of clearly wasted domestic spending in the budget. If anything, many welfare and social programs are desperately underfunded.

If this were a game, it would be sort of fun to sit back and watch the implosion of Republican campaign promises. But it’s not a game. This is real life, and there are real people whose futures depend on whether Congress can get it together to pass legislation that will create jobs, fund good education, invest in health care, provide basic services to the poor, and protect the environment. So I’m chuckling a little on the inside, but I’m also pretty scared about what the next few years are going to bring.

If Health Care Reform is Really "Job-Killing," It's Because Our System is Unsustainable

The Republicans who are newly in charge of the House of Representatives have decided to spend the first week of the 2011 Congress on a big waste of time: an effort to repeal last year's health care reform legislation, will pass the Republican-dominated House but be stopped by the Democratic majority in the Senate, and in any case would be vetoed by President Obama the second it hit his desk. So this effort is destined to fail, but they want to make a point.

They're calling this proposed legislation the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." Why is health care reform "job-killing," you might ask? Republican Congressman Peter Roskum will tell you: "the health care bill that's now the law is actually a job-killing health care bill," he said on All Things Considered last night. "And I've experienced that in my district where manufacturers have said, I'm not hiring new people," presumably because they can't afford health care insurance for their employees. This is now the Republican and conservative line on health care reform.

The thing is that this argument highlights the fact that our current health insurance system is totally and completely broken. We have a system of mostly private insurance, provided mostly through employers - but employers can't afford the cost of health insurance. More and more people are losing their employer-provided insurance coverage every year, but buying insurance on the individual market is almost impossibly expensive. As a result, we now have more than 50 million people in America without health insurance, or about 1 in 6 of us. Every one of those 50 million people is going to get sick or hurt eventually, at which point they will either show up at an emergency room or go to a doctor they can't afford. They won't be able to get health insurance then because they'll have a "pre-existing condition," and eventually they could go bankrupt from out-of-pocket health care costs. In 2005, researchers (including Elizabeth Warren, the current advisor to the President in charge of the new consumer protection bureau) estimated that half of all personal bankruptcies in America were tied to health care costs. Those numbers are surely different after the foreclosure crisis, but the numbers are still astonishing.

So what should we do? Well, for starters, let's fully fund the health reform law so that it actually has a chance to work. But most importantly, we have to keep up the national conversation about the corruption of the insurance industry and the need, ultimately, for a strong public option or Medicare-for-all program.

Obama Shows Some Fight

Maybe President Obama just likes being the underdog (as much as someone can be the underdog while President of the United States). His White House and Congressional Democrats are finally taking the offensive when it comes to the debate over the health care reform bill. The Dems are aggressively talking up the fact that the Republicans want to increase the number of uninsured people, allow insurance companies to set premiums in monopolized markets, and re-establish the Medicare donut hole. That is, Republicans are wasting time by trying to repeal the entire health care reform legislation, even though there's no chance that repeal will pass the Senate or get President Obama's signature, and the Dems are amping up their efforts to show the absurdity and danger of this effort.

My favorite move is that the Obama White House has purchased the Google search term "Obamacare," conservatives' appellation of choice for health care reform, so if you search for that word the first hit takes you to the Administration's website that explains the reality behind the health care law.

Finally the Dems are coming out swinging. It only took two years.

Welfare That Works

Tina Rosenberg has an interesting blog post about welfare programs in Brazil, Mexico, and other countries that make payments to poor mothers if they fulfill certain conditions like making sure their kids go to school and to the doctor. Worth a read, apropos of my post earlier today.