Book Review: "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime" by Elizabeth Hinton

I've recently read the book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton. This book is a history of the progression through the titular subjects in the US, starting with the Kennedy presidency and ending with the Reagan presidency. It shows how while some problems associated with the war on poverty did come from good but conflicting intentions when implementing social welfare programs, many more problems came from halfhearted implementation of social welfare programs with the intent & through the lens of fighting crime leading ultimately to replacement of those programs with more explicit expansions of policing to fight crime especially in response to high-profile riots in large cities in the 1960s & 1970s.

The introduction makes clear that the war on crime started with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and arguably even earlier with the Kennedy administration's efforts to combat juvenile delinquency, so the association of the war on crime primarily with the presidencies Nixon, Ford, and Reagan (as Carter is often left out of popular discussions about this despite being equally responsible in these ways) is because those presidents (and Carter) cut funding for social welfare programs that Johnson initially saw as integral to the success of programs combating crime but began to back away from by the end of his presidency, increased funding for policing, and shifted focus to arrests & imprisonments as ways to prevent future crimes. The author discusses how law enforcement agencies started to develop biased metrics for crime & collect data in biased ways to justify racist theories about the supposedly inherent pathologies of black Americans in cities, even as some politicians at that time wondered if law enforcement agencies should be collecting crime statistics given the conflict of interest. The author emphasizes the bipartisan white American political consensus about crime after 1960 to show that it wasn't just Reagan or other Republicans in the 1980s who focused on punishment through veiled racism. The author also discusses how black American community leaders in & after the 1960s wanted to partner with law enforcement agencies to develop effective strategies together to deal with local problems at the root of local crimes, but conservative politicians (from both parties) deliberately moved away from such partnerships toward the federal block grant funding model that would incentivize states to conduct law enforcement in the most heavy-handed & punitive way possible especially in urban black neighborhoods, which led many black Americans to stop trusting law enforcement. My only criticism specifically about the introduction (that doesn't have to do with the rest of the book) is that the author's language about conditional probabilities is quite sloppy, which is problematic in the context of discussions about biases in data collection & statistical analysis by law enforcement agencies about crime.

The rest of the book simply goes through the history in detail. In the introduction, I wasn't sure who the target audience of the book was supposed to be given frequent references to gaps in academic literature in the main text, but the narrative became more clear through the rest of the book.

There are a few points that I credit the book for. These are as follows.

First, the author repeats points effectively to reinforce the narrative. This makes the narrative easy to follow, and the narrative is clearly well-sourced.

Second, I didn't know that the war on crime dated back to the Kennedy administration. I can claim to have learned that from this book.

Third, I didn't know that close federal cooperation directly with local governments also dated back to the Kennedy administration at the latest. I can claim to have learned that from this book. This is an issue that has been on my mind for a while in the context of empowering cities whose political views oppose those of their state governments which want to disempower them (because while there is a clear federal relationship among the federal, state, and tribal governments in the US Constitution, the US Constitution doesn't govern states' internal affairs, and many states treat their constituent cities as fully subordinate to state governments in all matters).

Fourth, in my view, the author correctly recognizes that policies to combat crime should be evaluated for effectiveness several years afterwards, as there are no quick fixes. The author therefore evaluates whether different parts of the war on crime had effects on crime 10-20 years later instead of just a year later, as the latter would have been a political cheap shot.

Fifth, I appreciate the author's recognition that the US made the same mistakes in both military & social welfare strategies domestically as in invasions of other countries. The author makes clear that many politicians at that time recognized this in the context of wars in Southeast Asia. This adds another dimension to arguments from the book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything by Rosa Brooks (which I have reviewed on this blog [LINK]) which, from what I remember, focused a little more on more recent invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq.

However, there are many more points in the book which I find problematic. These are as follows.

First, at several points, the author claims that news media & politicians often overstated the prevalence of violent crime, but the author's claims that federal law enforcement statistics about crime were less biased before the 1960s are undercut by the author's acknowledgment that such statistics were collected much more sparsely and in a more ad hoc way before the 1960s. Even leaving aside this point, the author doesn't (in the main text, leaving out the endnotes) name or cite enough specific sources to effectively argue against the dominant narrative of that time, which the book simply restates while feebly arguing against, or intuitively explain why certain crime statistics may initially look alarming but may actually imply rarity of such incidents in practice for an individual. For example, it could be argued that a certain homicide rate given in homicides per million people per year could look big at first but could be argued to imply that an individual has a very low chance of being killed by another person on a given day. (I don't know enough about crime statistics to know what specific number could plausibly fit this description.)

Second, at several points, the author basically wags a finger against what the federal government did, but in some cases where solutions are longer-term and therefore more obvious like investments in unleaded plumbing, better street lighting, or better sidewalks, the author barely identifies these, and in other cases where issues like imminent or continuing riots are spiraling out of control, the author doesn't convincingly argue in favor of specific alternatives except in perhaps 1 or 2 isolated cases. Part of the problem, as becomes clear in the epilogue, may be that the federal government prematurely dismissed such alternatives before seriously trying them, but then the author should have spent more space arguing for such programs on their own potential specific merits instead of giving most of the space to the arguments of contemporary politicians that, by dominating the narrative, may unintentionally seem more convincing than the author may have wanted.

Third, the author argues at some points that poor black Americans should have been empowered from the bottom-up but at other points that they should have gotten similar top-down federal assistance as poor white Americans (which did happen in the war on poverty, albeit at much less monetary amounts per person). This seems incoherent, and the author makes no attempt to explain why these views are compatible with each other.

Fourth, the author ignores the issues of continued slum clearance, urban highway construction, and the dynamics of white flight from urban cores in much of the narrative. I've read in many other places how critical these concerns were in the context of urban crime, so it is surprising to see no mention of these concerns in the book.

Fifth, the author seems to unduly dismiss the challenges that the Carter administration faced in rebuilding damaged urban neighborhoods in the face of high interest rates & high inflation in the 1970s. Perhaps the argument would have been stronger if the author could have found examples of the Carter administration spending scarce resources on less dire issues.

Sixth, in the introduction, the author claims that the war on crime specifically wasn't a reincarnation of the Jim Crow era, but later in the book, the author at many points implies & comes close to explicitly saying exactly that. This seems inconsistent, though to be fair, it was obvious to me that the author would ultimately argue that the war on crime was related to the Jim Crow era, so this inconsistency only threw me off in the introduction.

Seventh, I found it interesting that the author used scare quotes around the term "evil empire" and called the Cold War "Reagan's Cold War". It could be argued that the latter was a more specific reference to how the Reagan administration waged the Cold War in the 1980s as a smaller part of the broader conflict over decades, but based on the author's other stated & implied views through the book, I see it more likely as evidence of the author having far left-wing sympathies, because the latter term in the broader context of the author's views through the book sounds like the author believes the Reagan administration was too bellicose toward the USSR and was too taken by American propaganda over decades to admit that some parts of Soviet propaganda especially about race relations could be true (which is debatable in the context of internal affairs in the USSR).

Eighth, the author seems to argue that the implementation of the ban of handguns but not shotguns was racist because it failed to separate bans on weapons (which should mostly be about destroying those weapons and removing sources of weapons production, though perhaps some further consequences could be appropriate for repeat offenders) from the harsh punishment of offenders. I agree with this in the context of having excessive punishments and in the sense that, even now, it is clear in the US that white Americans are much more often than black Americans given the benefit of the doubt with respect to usage of firearms in self-defense or the possession of firearms per the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Moreover, it is worth remembering that while courts of law in the US didn't start to systematically recognize an individual right to bear arms until the 2000s (many decades after the 1960s), that doesn't mean that everyone was prosecuted equally for bearing firearms before the 2000s; it is much more plausible that there were racial disparities in enforcement of such laws. However, I think the author doesn't do a good job of acknowledging how the much greater difficulty in using a shotgun to commit violent crimes in urban settings compared to using a handgun for the same purpose makes a handgun ban more sensible without such a ban (separate from the consequences to humans who violate such bans) necessarily being racist per se.

Ninth, at several points, the author seems to go beyond merely describing large-scale riots led by black Americans as a predictable consequence of oppression to being an apologist for such riots. I do at least acknowledge the merit in describing such predictable consequences from a sociological perspective. Also, I admit that it took me a while to understand the author's point that the problem with claiming in the 1960s & later that black Americans are culturally pathological is that such claims were coming from white American politicians who wanted to claim that such cultural pathology was the root of poverty & crime (and not the other way around). Finally, while I still believe that any human culture can have pathological elements in which some elements come from a history of being oppressed & therefore traumatized while other elements may be evidence of being a privileged or oppressive group (so there is no such thing as being a purely "good" or "oppressed" group or a purely "bad" or "oppressive" group), I can understand the author's desire to call white American racism as the dominant group in the US something closer to "cultural pathology" and the cultural pathologies that may result directly from centuries of oppression "trauma" as qualitatively distinct things within the context of US history. Having said those things, I don't think the author did a good enough job of acknowledging that even if some ideal form of reparations for these harms could be formulated & implemented overnight, the lasting effects of these traumas could continue to have negative consequences for different localities & the US as a whole for many decades, and especially now with the US having so many residents & citizens who come from other places & don't identify as white or black, I'm not sure how many Americans would have the patience to wait decades for those things to resolve even if they are much more understanding & supportive of the need for reparations than most white Americans would have been in the 1960s (as the author shows how white Americans in the 1960s wanted quick fixes to the eruptions of violence in response to oppression, which led to further oppression through brutal crackdowns by law enforcement).

Overall, I still recommend this book because the basic historical narrative is well-written & well-sourced; I do feel like I learned a little bit and I had a lot to think about. I just think that readers should be aware of the author's biases as I've discussed above.

Reflection: Starting a Shift to a New Career in Transportation Policy

This post is the second in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university"). As a write this, I am still technically a PhD student enrolled full-time in the university, working on topics in nanophotonics & fluctuational electromagnetics. Next fall (assuming the current public health crisis abates to an extent that it is safe for me to do so — please note that I am not a public health expert or epidemiologist, so I am not making predictions in this regard), however, I will start a postdoctoral research position in the University of California Davis analyzing transportation policy, with a particular eye toward the effects of such current & future policies on the mobility and resulting socioeconomic opportunities for those who have been marginalized by current transportation systems, including people who are poor or have disabilities (like myself). This is a fairly drastic, and arguably surprising, change of career; I have told many friends and relatives about this, but not all of them, so I'd like to use this space to explain my thought process over the years leading up to this decision. Follow the jump to see more.

My Time at the 2018 SHPE Convention

About 4 weeks ago, I got an email asking me to help Princeton University's School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS, of which my department, the Department of Electrical Engineering, is a constituent) recruit undergraduate students attending the 2018 Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Convention to apply for graduate school in SEAS; that convention happened the previous weekend in Cleveland, Ohio. I first thought it was a little strange that I should get this email, given that it was somewhat short notice and especially given that I am not Hispanic nor have I done anything with SHPE in the past. However, after clarifying these details, I decided to go, because I do care about increasing representation of people from marginalized & underrepresented backgrounds in graduate education & academia, especially given my disability (as disability is just another aspect of diversity and too often leads to societal marginalization).
I had a lot of fun at the convention. I went with our SEAS diversity chair, a postdoctoral researcher in my department, and 13 undergraduate students; the former two people and I were there primarily to recruit, while the undergraduate students were there for their own benefit to meet corporate or academic recruiters and learn about (and hopefully secure) positions after graduation. It was definitely nice to see so many enthusiastic undergraduate students from all over the country coming with so many questions about graduate school, and I enjoyed getting to know those in my travel group more, such that I didn't feel left out even though I was essentially the only one among them who hadn't previously done anything with SHPE. There were some events that may have been more relevant to me that I missed due to the travel schedule, and I didn't find that many companies of interest to me when I explored the giant career fair (the focal point of the convention) on my own, but I did take solace in finding a few. Plus, it was nice to get out of Princeton and briefly explore a city that I hadn't really seen before (barring a short trip when I was very young, which I barely remember). Overall, I'm glad I went, and hope to have similar opportunities in the future.

Book Review: "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil

I've recently read Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. It is a short but dense exposition into the various ways that computer algorithms can determine the courses of people's lives and exacerbate existing societal inequities and biases/prejudices, in areas like education, civic engagement, education, health at the workplace, and many others. It argues that while many algorithms used in big data can be used for good, many instead widen inequalities and reinforce various cycles of poverty because of their opacity, lack of accountability, poor use of statistics, and lack of critical examination by those in charge (who instead use results and predictions generated by such algorithms to fire workers, deny opportunities to potential employees, financially prey on poor people, and so on, making such predictions self-fulfilling prophecies as only confirmatory data is fed back in); in particular, many of these algorithms and models use questionable proxies to predict certain attributes or behaviors (especially when the desired attributes are hard to quantify but the proxies are easy), these models are rarely transparent in what inputs are collected and how they are manipulated to produce outputs, and further research and fine-tuning are rarely performed to correct models that most humans would recognize produce incorrect results (but which computers would miss). It concludes that extensions of existing regulations on use of health and financial data are needed to curtail the misuse of such algorithms, and that simultaneously data scientists need to be scrupulous about the ways that their work is used and developed.

I rather enjoyed reading this book: it's pretty fast-paced, yet gives many detailed examples of the abuse of these algorithms to form a compelling narrative. Additionally, it in many ways follows the book The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (which I have previously reviewed), because as that book shows the various ways that companies collect and sell customer data, this book shows the various ways that data can be used for the benefit of those companies (even if that works against some of those customers). There are only two issues that I have with this book. One is that the few times that politics comes up, the author's political bias (in favor of liberals in the US) is obvious; perhaps this is just due to the nature of the author's passionate crusade against abuse of algorithms and for institutional action uplifting poor and marginalized people, as that would necessitate regulation of such mathematical instruments, which would be (and has been) loudly opposed by large corporations maintaining their short-term profits and long-term status quo through these algorithms as well as the conservative politicians that they support. The other is that there aren't too many examples of big data and related algorithms truly working toward greater socioeconomic equity, especially when such algorithms are finding patterns that wouldn't be found by humans; while I get that the author is trying to build a brief but dense narrative warning against the excesses and abuses of such algorithms (as she professes herself to not be a big data evangelist), I would have liked to see more nuanced examples of proper uses of big data, because as this book stands, it seems just as one-sided/polemical as uncritical big data evangelism. Overall, I certainly feel like I got a better sense of the potential dangers of unchecked and uncritical use of algorithms to shape the economy and society. Plus, now that I'm about halfway through my PhD, I've started to think more about the sorts of jobs that I'd like to take after I finish. I've decided that I don't want to go into finance because (as mentioned in this book too) I'm not comfortable with playing with other people's money, as it is too easy to be seduced by mathematical simplicity and elegance into doing questionable things. That said, one thing (among the many) that has caught my fancy has been studies of policy problems (especially as related to STEM fields, but as they affect ordinary people); however, the story in this book about the role of the Mathematica Policy Research company in developing the arbitrary and statistically unsound metrics for evaluating teachers in DC public schools has made me realize that I'll need to make sure if I end up joining a policy research organization/consultancy/think tank that the organization that I join is responsible and transparent about the data that it collects and processes as much as possible.

Book Review: "More Than Just Race" by William Julius Wilson

The book that I've been able to read most recently has been More Than Just Race by William Julius Wilson. It is essentially a collection of 3 essays (each as a chapter) concerning various issues of the black experience (especially in cities) in the US, separately considering the conditions of black ghettos, the socioeconomic problems of poor black males, and the breakdown of poor black familial structures. These chapters are bookended by introductory and concluding chapters summarizing and further expounding on these issues. The main purpose of the book is to analyze, through various studies from the social sciences, the complementary roles of structure and culture in explaining why blacks in the US, especially in inner cities, are worse of by many metrics than their suburban counterparts and than people of other races/ethnicities in the US.

It is a relatively recent book (2009), but it isn't recent enough to have touched upon issues of police brutality and exploitation in urban black communities or issues of socioeconomic decay in poor white communities in cities as well as in rural areas (characterized by structural joblessness, opioid addiction, et cetera). The book itself is short, but the main three essays themselves are a bit dry. In particular, the essays are essentially separate from each other and can be read as such, but there aren't many attempts to form an overarching narrative (beyond the idea that structure and culture combine to explain the issues that many black Americans face), and the few attempts that do exist feel somewhat forced; perhaps the issue is that these issues are simply too nuanced to be described in a single broad brushstroke, but while that is clear from the details of the book, it would have been nice to see such a thesis made a little more explicit. Additionally, there are a few arguments that get rather muddled, and some ideas that aren't touched upon much after their introduction, perhaps because they don't fit the local narrative quite as well; I'll discuss these and other issues after the jump. Overall, while the discussion of structural issues seemed to be in line with a lot of what I've read in articles in newspapers and magazines in the last few years (probably because the author is an academic heavyweight in these areas anyway), the discussion of which cultural factors seem more (or less) plausible is relatively new to me, and their combination is much more nuanced than any of the broad stereotypes of individuals or institutions that I have seen previously; I rather appreciate this book for providing that perspective.

Book Review: "Identity and Violence" by Amartya Sen

I've recently been able to read the book Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen. It's a relatively shorter book, taking me ~3 hours to finish. The author focuses broadly on how personal identity is neither singular nor static, but is multifaceted, context-dependent, and dynamically evolving over time based on the choices people make. He further argues that a lot of sectarian strife (whatever identity the sect may encompass) occurs because people can be led to make one facet of their identity encompass their entire identity and to then act in destructive ways based on that. Additionally, he provides numerous examples of how facets that tend to be associated with individual cultures (whether ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other), with such shoehorning leading to detrimental stereotyping and unsupportable cultural fatalism, have in fact emerged over many such cultures across continents at various points in time, sometimes independently, while other times due to cultural contact and diffusion. With this, he suggests that a lot of the well-meaning efforts to integrate religious minorities into Western society, as well as efforts to reconcile religious or ethnic factions that have been at war in other countries, are misguided due to their single-minded focus on the same sorts of categorization that have led to such conflicts in the first place, and that instead, such efforts should appeal to the broad variety of identities that people hold dear to them and that make them feel whole.

Overall, I generally agree with the thrust of this book (further justifying the notion that Amartya Sen seems to capture my lay ideas about economics and society in a systematic and scholarly manner), and the numerous historical examples of cultural interaction, cultural diffusion, and the development of ideas such as democratic political participation and the protection of human rights across continents and across time periods of course jibes with things that I've learned in history classes in school and elsewhere. The book is a pretty solid read (despite a couple of minor typos that can easily be overlooked), and it brings forth many interesting ideas. I'm glad that I read it recently, given that issues of privilege, identity politics, and communal violence have been in the news lately; I would perhaps like to think that the author may have articulated ideas of privilege and "intersectionality" before those terms came into vogue in the last few years for people interested in social justice, but something the book makes clear is that these ideas of intersectionality, if not the particular jargon, are probably much older than just a few decades. Despite all of that, I do feel like there may be a few things missing in the discussion, and my question about those issues come after the jump.

Reflection: Is the National Honors Society still about Honor?

After talking with a few friends and fellow students, I think I have fully (in my mind) fleshed out an opinion on our school's chapter of the National Honors Society. This, however, will solely focus on the recent cookie dough sale.
[Note]: Some of the things in this post may strike you as too controversial or offensive, and for that, I sincerely apologize. Though I have many grievances against the organization, (a) its core intentions are good and (b) it's not worth leaving when I only have a few months of school left so I am staying in the organization.
Furthermore, I want to say to those NHS officers who may be reading this that this is in no way meant as an attack on your person or character. This is meant to just be my thoughts about the organization as a whole, and if you find this offensive, I sincerely apologize. [/Note]
Other people in this organization (who also don't like the organization's current modus operandi) have said that the current state of affairs has only been true for the last year or 2. Before, the NHS was much more dedicated to actual community service, though they did not participate in as many events overall. Fundraising was not a priority.
Now, members must sell (under the threat of revocation of membership or other penalty) 4 tubs of cookie dough at $15.00 each (for those NHS graduates reading this, they raised the price by $1/tub). This is true for the fall and spring cookie dough sales. The fall one is understandable as the proceeds go to helping villages in Kenya. The spring one, though: do we really need that much money to continue operating? Or is Ms. Cresham just wasting a lot of money on who-knows-what?
Furthermore, why must members sell 4 tubs of cookie dough? I think it's perfectly fair to ask 15 hours of service each year towards NHS. This is the kind of service the organization should focus on. By contrast, selling requires people to want to buy cookie dough; this also requires finding buyers.
I know this may seem a little odd or offensive, but I just can't help but notice a cultural difference in selling cookie dough. Almost all of the "big sellers" that Ms. Cresham touts are Caucasian; props to them for their great sales. Yet, almost all of the people who complain about not being able to sell cookie dough are not Caucasian. From my own experience, cookie dough is not a hot seller with Indian families; yes, families might buy a tub, but it will last a very long time. By contrast, families here will buy a lot because they can finish that much by the time the next cookie dough sale comes around. My emphasis is not on how much one can eat but on how much a Caucasian American family vs. an immigrant Asian family actually wants the food. That said, I'm not trying to disparage Indian people - quite the opposite: maybe the NHS should try selling dough used for making samosas. Even then, though, there's a lot more emphasis (as far as I've seen) on cooking fresh food from scratch in Indian families (and presumably other Asian families as well), whereas here, families are a lot more receptive to premade foods like cookie dough. Even my cousin who bakes often makes her own dough; she doesn't use stuff like premade cookie dough.
Another thing to point out, as Ms. Cresham herself points out at the beginning of this cookie dough sale, is that the people who sell crazy amounts of dough do so because their parents have huge connections. This is perfectly fine with me; that said, not everyone is so well connected to people who would be so willing to fund an enterprise like the NHS.
Because of the issues of ethnicity (and the resulting affinity or revulsion towards premade cookie dough) and business connections (and the resulting success or failure to sell large amounts of cookie dough), why must students sell 4 tubs of dough? Many of the people who I talked to who were complaining about this minimum genuinely could not sell 4 tubs - they had to buy some (or all) themselves, and then they have to finish those tubs (without being able to cook them as no one in the house knows how); I was also in the position of having to buy a tub of cookie dough for myself (though the stuff is actually good, so this reason is only partially true to the argument).
I think it's fine that the organization is doing the cookie dough sale; I just think forcing members to sell a minimum number of tubs is too fraught with problems. I think the NHS should mandate members to participate in other activities for hours. I'm fine with them requiring members to do the Miniwalk (though I'm still not OK with the mandatory $15 for the (invariably oversized) shirt and donation). More such actual service requirements would be much greater appreciated (at least from my end).