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Five fascinating questions physicists are seeking to answer

From Copernicus to Einstein, the field of Physics has changed drastically over time. With each new theory, further hypotheses appear that challenge conventional wisdom. Today, although topics such as the Big Bang Theory and General Relativity are well-established, there are still some debates that keep physicists up at night. What are your thoughts on the five of the biggest current debates in Physics?

What is dark matter?

With the emergence of a new picture of our expanding universe in the 1960s, the nature of dark energy became a top priority in fundamental physics. Another and related priority, of a somewhat older age, was to understand the nature of the dark matter that was known to dominate over the ordinary matter in a ratio of about 5:1. Already, around 1990, it was agreed that the major part of the mysterious dark matter was ‘cold’, meaning that it is made up of relatively slowly-moving particles unknown to experimenters but predicted by physical theory. The particles of cold dark matter (CDM) were collectively known as WIMPs—‘weakly interacting massive particles’. Several such hypothetical particles have been suggested as candidates for the exotic dark matter, and some are more popular than others, but the nature of the dark-matter component remains unknown.

Are there multiple universes?

Perhaps the most controversial of the modern cosmological hypotheses is the idea of numerous separate universes, or what is known as the ‘multiverse’—a term first used in a scientific context as late as 1998. Although speculations of other universes extend far back in time, the modern multiverse version is held to be quite different, and scientific in nature. The basic claim of the multiverse hypothesis is that there exists a huge number of other universes, causally separate and distinguished by different laws and parameters of physics. We happen to inhabit a very special universe, with laws and parameters of just such a kind that they allow the evolution of intelligent life-forms.

“Milky Way, Rocks, Night” by skeeze. Public Domain via Pixabay.

This general idea became popular among some physicists in the 1990s, primarily motivated by developments in inflation theory but also inspired by the anthropic principle and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The main reason why the multiverse is taken seriously by a growing number of physicists, however, is that it has received unexpected support from the fundamental theory of superstrings. Based on arguments from string theory, in 2003 the American theorist Leonard Susskind suggested that there exists an enormous ‘landscape’ of universes, each of them corresponding to a vacuum state described by the equations of string theory.

Why is graphene so important?

This unassuming material could change the future of electronics and engineering as we know it. Recent research has unearthed extraordinary properties, including graphene sheets being ten times tougher than steel and exceptionally effective electrical conductors. Amazingly, they are also transparent to visible light – meaning they can be used for conveying information between optical fibres. Although the theoretical study of graphene started in the 1950s, the experimental study of graphene had not been realized until the recent discovery and characterization of exfoliated graphene by Novoselov et al. (2004) and epitaxial graphene by Berger et al. (2004). Because of its fundamental importance in physics as a realization of a relativistic condensed-matter system (i.e. a non-quantum mechanical description of a system of particles), as well as its application potentials in next-generation electronics, research interest in graphene has been rising rapidly. Even though it might take a long time before graphene’s full application potentials can be fully realized, graphene is an incredibly intriguing system with a lot more to be explored.

Can we explain the direction of time?

“Clock, Wall Clock, Watch” by Monoar. Public Domain via Pixabay.

Many of the most debated topics in current physics cross over into the realm of philosophy, none more so than the nature of time. Although most of the fundamental physical laws are unchanged under time reversal, there are several classes of phenomena in nature that exhibit an arrow of time (i.e. a one-way direction). Because most subsystems in the universe cannot be considered as isolated, these various arrows of time all point in the same direction. The question then arises whether there exists a master arrow of time underlying all these arrows. The tentative answer is yes. Already Ludwig Boltzmann has speculated about a possible foundation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics from cosmology: it is the huge temperature gradient between the hot stars and the cold space which provides the entropy capacity (i.e. disorder and randomness in our expanding universe) which is necessary for the entropy to increase, instead of being already at its maximum.

What does the future hold?

Historically, the state of the universe was rarely a subject of scientific interest. As the British astrophysicist Malcolm Longair remarked in an address in 1985: “The future of our Universe is a splendid topic for after-dinner speculation”. What has been called “physical eschatology” only began in the 1970s with the work of Martin Rees, Jamal Islam, Freeman Dyson, and a few others. What these physicists did was to extrapolate the current state of the universe into the far future, conservatively assuming that the presently known laws of physics would remain valid. The favoured scenario in this kind of research was the open, continually expanding case, where the picture would typically start with the extinction of stars and their later transformation into neutron stars or black holes.

Some of the studies of the far-future universe included speculations on the survival of intelligent life—either humans, or their supposedly much more intelligent descendants (which might be self-reproducing robots rather than beings of flesh and blood). In a lecture entitled “Time Without End” in 1978, Dyson argued that in an open universe life might survive indefinitely. Ultimately, this is a topic that has never been definitively settled – and is still up for debate.

Featured image credit: “Water, Drop, Liquid” by qimono. Public Domain via Pixabay .  

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Rebuilding New York City

In the weeks following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, New York City’s position as the center of the financial world came into question. Now, 16-years after the day that could have permanently changed the course of New York’s history, downtown Manhattan rebuilt both its buildings and status of importance. Lynne B. Sagalyn examines the economic impact of the World Trade Center’s fall and rise in the following excerpt from Power at Ground Zero.

New Yorkers everywhere found themselves at a loss for words that could capture the physical magnitude and emotional trauma of what had transpired, of what hitherto was unbelievable but replayed in continuous loops on every conceivable medium until the incredulity of what had happened became too painfully real: the giant twins, unmistakable in their towering iconic presence on the skyline, seemingly invulnerable, now lay in ruin, smoldering—a profound graveyard for some twenty-eight hundred civilians who perished inside. The losses were incalculable. Everyone seemed to be in a state of shock and disbelief.

There are moments in time when cities become natural experiments and the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York provided one of them. Did corporations and businesses need to be in New York? Was Wall Street finished as the capital of international finance? Would the immediate trauma or anxiety about possible future attacks cause city residents to leave, move to places where terrorism seemed less of a threat? Fears of firms leaving the city in a mass exodus, fears of residents fleeing, fears of tourists staying away, fears of the end of skyscraper development and, by extension, the very self of the city were paramount, and news headlines in the weeks after 9/11 messaged the doubts: “In Wounded Financial Center, Trying to Head Off Defections,” “Reaching for the Sky, and Finding a Limit; Tall Buildings Face New Doubt as Symbols of Vulnerability,” “When the Towers Collapsed, So Did Their Desire to Live Here.”

“It was a time of desperate loss, yet also a time of distinct possibility.”

Like the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center shook New Yorkers’ confidence in the future of their city. Uncertainties existed across the five boroughs and beyond. Was New York still the resilient city that had overcome so many post–World War II crises—deindustrialization, disinvestment and property abandonment, racial and ethnic change, white suburban flight, social and cultural conflict, and a near brush with bankruptcy? Based on well founded and widespread fears prevalent at the time, no one was able to say for sure that the attack would not have a lasting negative economic impact on the city and the region. The city’s sense of invulnerability had been shattered, yet as historian Mike Wallace reminded readers in a special section of the Times that appeared within a week of the attack, “that sense always rested on a truncated reading of history. While the particular form of the attack was fiendishly novel, New York, over nearly four centuries, has repeatedly been the object of murderous intentions. Through a combination of luck and power, we have escaped many of the intended blows, but not all of them, and our forebears often feared that worse might yet befall them.”

On 9/11, however, New York City’s role as a symbolic target became too painfully apparent. The fantasies of urban destruction in popular culture, Wallace wrote, had been “horribly realized.” If the illusion of invulnerability had been shattered, not so the determination to rebound and reconstruct and emerge stronger and better than ever; that too was part of New York’s cultural history, part and parcel of its grit and ambition.

It was a time of desperate loss, yet also a time of distinct possibility. Tragedy delivered an exceptional opportunity and the promise of an extraordinary amount of dollars from Washington, D.C., with which to plan and rebuild lower Manhattan, its transportation and infrastructure, office inventory, housing supply, and open space amenities to match the new needs of the twenty-first century. At the same time, rebuilding could renew the district’s historic dynamic. Reinventing itself was part of lower Manhattan’s history. And since the Port Authority won the legal challenge to its development in November 1963, the original World Trade Center had shaped that history. Thirty-eight years later, the mission to rebuild these sixteen acres, emotionally raw and newly endowed with intense sensitivity for the families of those who died there, patriotic fervor for the nation at large, and profound meaning for the city’s future, history was in the making.

Featured image credit: ” A cityscape from Liberty Island in New York City, New York” by


Michael Barera  c. 2001.  CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Russia, sanctions, and the future of international law

The current geopolitical and military troubles between the West and the Russian Federation are simultaneously also international legal troubles.

One of the interesting aspects of the Western sanctions against Russia since 2014 has been that Moscow has criticized them as ‘illegal’. There are two elements in Moscow’s unexpected argument. On the one hand, Moscow denies any wrongdoing, from international legal perspective, in Ukraine. For most Western observers, the 2014 Russian military intervention in Crimea is an indisputable fact but it also remains a fact that in the context of international law, the Russian government denies any wrongdoing. Perhaps this much can be expected because governments who undertake these kinds of steps as Russia has carried out in Ukraine since 2014 are typically not eager to admit to their wrongdoings. Rather, they wait and see whether they can get away with them.

Furthermore, on a more principled level, the Russian government has advanced the argument that only the UN Security Council can decide on sanctions, and if it has not done so, any sanctions adopted would, by definition, be unilateral and illegal. However, to accept this argument would imply that there could never be legally adopted sanctions against a permanent member of the UN Security Council since their veto power would make sure that there could never be a collective decision of the SC (no one state can reasonably be expected to harm oneself, criticize oneself as ‘aggressor’, etc.).

“Kreml” by Laban66. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is difficult to say how seriously Moscow takes its own arguments on the issue of sanctions. It can also be that their main purpose is to confuse and distract the attention – let’s not discuss the illegality of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, let’s rather discuss the illegality of Western sanctions.

From the Western viewpoint, sanctions are legal and certainly legitimate countermeasures to the Russian military intervention against Ukraine, covered by the Articles on State Responsibility that were adopted in 2001. Moreover, the idea that UN Security Council members could in principle annex their neighbors’ territory with impunity – because they could by definition not commit aggression or no sanctions could legally be adopted against them – strikes one as utterly pre-modern, even slightly absurd, in the 21st century. The leadership and special rights of the UN SC permanent members must also imply their accountability; the P5 cannot be completely outside rules that international law stands for.

Thus, the paradox is that since 2014, Russia is two things at once: major violator of international law vis-s-vis Ukraine as well as still major stakeholder in international law, already since 1945. The Russian position reveals that global arrangements and consensus regarding international law, peace, and security are currently in a quite precarious position. The international legal order that the states agreed upon in 1945 when adopting the UN Charter, has been presented with a serious challenge. The USSR, the predecessor of the Russian Federation in the context of international law, was one of the architects of the legal order of 1945 and the arrangement with the veto power of permanent members of the Security Council has even been called the Yalta formula (since decided during the Yalta conference in Crimea in early 1945).

Moscow’s point on the ‘illegality’ of Western sanctions can also be seen as a tactical rhetorical maneuver in a much wider normative bid in which stakes are actually elsewhere. It is probable that Moscow would relatively easily abandon the argument of the ‘illegality’ of Western sanctions if her wider expectations regarding the future of international law would be met. Moscow’s broad normative goal is that the global international legal deal of 1945 would remain intact in its core elements, especially the part of the UN Security Council’s permanent members’ veto power. That much was already clear before 2014 when Moscow vocally criticized the West for Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya.

“Ukrflagblue” by Aleksej Leonov. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But the events in Ukraine since 2014 also reveal Moscow’s renewed claims for an extended sphere of influence. Moscow’s criticism that NATO should not extend to its borders is simultaneously a claim for a sphere of influence or at least military neutral zone. Needless to say, this view denies the right of immediate neighbors to make their own sovereign geopolitical choices – and in this sense, goes against the UN Charter principle of the sovereign equality of all states. Since 2014, Moscow has tried to undo and reverse certain elements of what was decided when the USSR disintegrated in 1991 and in the early 1990s, and to which Moscow earlier even if reluctantly acquiesced.

Thus, with Western sanctions and the policy of non-recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea, much more is at stake than the fate of Ukraine. It is a protracted debate on how the future of international law, at least in Eastern Europe, will look like. Should the message prevail that it is possible to accomplish things and gain geopolitical advantage with military force and annexation, it would not mean the restoration of Moscow’s geopolitical position of 1945 as it may dream, but rather a weakening of the arrangement that the UN Charter has been.

Featured image credit: “Saint Petersburg” by IgorShubin. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The value of money [excerpt]

Money. The root of all evil. It can’t buy you love, but it makes the world go round. Few people understood the vast complexities of currency better than Karl Marx. His book Capital, is seen by many as the authoritative theoretical text on economy, politics, and materialist philosophy. Its vast critiques have fostered new studies on capitalist practices relating to what exactly is ‘value’, many of which are still referenced today by countless economic experts. In this excerpt from Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, author David Harvey analyzes Marx’s thoughts on value as being more social than strictly finance based, and how it remains in motion while still not being able to completely sever its eternal tie with its old partner, money.

Most of Marx’s theoretical arguments throughout Capital are expressed in value terms. The economic data of the world and most of Marx’s actual examples are expressed in money terms. Are we to assume that money is an accurate and unproblematic representation of value? If not, why not: and with what consequences? Given the history of representational forms, is it possible that money is founded on systemic distortions of the value it is supposed to represent? Map projections are notorious for accurately representing some features of the earth’s surface while distorting others. Should we not worry about the possibility of similar distortions in the case of money in relation to value?

Value is a social relation. As such, it is ‘immaterial but objective.’ The ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of value arises because ‘not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values’. Their status as values contrasts with ‘the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value.’ The value of commodities is, like many other features of social life – such as power, reputation, status, influence or charisma – an immaterial but objective social relation that craves a material expression. In the case of value, this need is met through what Marx calls the ‘dazzling’ form of money.

Marx in Winter by @fhwrdh. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Marx is very careful with his language. He refers to money almost exclusively as the ‘form of expression’ or as the ‘representation’ of value. He scrupulously avoids the idea that money is value incarnate, or that it is an arbitrary symbol imposed by convention on exchange relations (which was a widespread view in the political economy of his time). Value cannot exist without money as its mode of expression. Conversely, however autonomous it may seem, money cannot cut the umbilical cord that ties it to what it represents. We should think of money and value as autonomous and independent of each other but dialectically intertwined. This kind of relationship has a long history.

Here is how Marx thinks of it:

It has become apparent in the course of our presentation that value, which appeared as an abstraction, is possible only … as soon as money is posited; this circulation of money in turn leads to capital, hence can be fully developed only on the foundation of capital; just as, generally, only on this foundation can circulation seize hold of all moments of production. This development, therefore, not only makes visible the historic character of forms, such as capital, which belong to a specific epoch of history; but also (in its course), categories such as value, which appear as purely abstract, show the historic foundation from which they are abstracted, and on whose basis alone they can appear … and categories which belong to more or less all epochs, such as e.g. money, show the historic modifications which they undergo.

For Marx, all the major categories in Capital, taken together, are abstractions grounded in the historical experience and practices of capitalism. ‘The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity … The concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy, since it is the most abstract expression of capital itself and the production resting on it.’ Categories that have a longer history, such as rent, interest and profit on merchant’s capital, become adapted over time to the requirements of a capitalist mode of production. This is the case with money. The problem is how to distinguish between those characteristics of money that are unique to capitalism and the various money forms (like cowrie shells or wampum beads) that pre-existed it. This question becomes doubly important when it comes to analyzing credit.

The constant continuity of the process (of circulation), the unobstructed and fluid transition of value from one form into the other, or from one phase of the process into the next, appears as a fundamental condition for production based on capital to a much greater degree than for all earlier forms of production… It thus appears as a matter of chance for production based on capital whether or not (this) essential condition … is actually brought about. The suspension of this chance element by capital itself is credit … Which is why credit in any developed form appears in no earlier mode of production. There was borrowing and lending in earlier situations as well, and usury is even the oldest of the antediluvian forms of capital. But borrowing and lending no more constitute credit than working constitutes industrial labor or free wage labor. And credit as an essential, developed relation of production appears historically only in circulation based on capital or on age labor. (Money itself is a form for suspending the unevenness of the times required in different branches of production, to the extent this obstructs exchange.)

The distinctive qualities of both money and credit within a capitalist mode of production are to ensure the continuity of movement of capital as value in motion. Conversely, the necessity to ensure continuity brings together the categories of money, credit and value into a specific historical configuration.

Featured Image: Money by @PicturesofMoney. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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The Asian financial crisis: lessons learned and unlearned

Governments no doubt draw lessons from financial crises and adopt measures to prevent their recurrence. However, these often address the causes of the last crisis but not the next one. More importantly, they can actually become the new sources of instability and crisis. This appears to be the case in Asia where the lessons drawn from the 1997 crisis and the measures implemented thereupon may be inadequate and even counterproductive in crisis prevention today because they entail deeper global financial integration.

An immediate step taken was to abandon currency pegs and move to flexible exchange rates in order to prevent one-way bets for speculators. However, under free capital mobility no regime can guarantee stable rates and crises can also occur under flexible rates. Floating at times of strong inflows can cause nominal appreciations and attract even more speculative inflows as seen in recent years.

Second, equity markets have been opened on the grounds that equity liabilities are less risky and more stable than external debt. Consequently non-resident holdings as a percent of market capitalization have reached unprecedented levels, ranging between 20 and 50 compared to 15% in the US. This has made them highly susceptible to instability in mature markets, particularly since most emerging markets lack a strong local investor base.

Third, they have sought to address currency mismatches and exchange rate risks by opening domestic bond markets to foreigners and borrowing in their own currencies. Consequently sovereign debt in many emerging economies is now internationalized to a greater extent than that in reserve-currency countries. Whereas about one-third of US treasuries are held by non-residents, this proportion is higher in many Asian economies. Unlike US treasuries this debt is not in the hands of foreign central banks but in the portfolios of fickle investors. A consequence is significant loss of autonomy over domestic bond rates and exposure to interest rate shocks from the US.

Fourth, corporations have been encouraged to become global players by borrowing and investing abroad, resulting in a massive accumulation of dollar debt since 2008, directly or through their foreign subsidiaries. Hence the reduction in currency mismatches is largely limited to the sovereign while corporations carry significant exchange rate risks.

Fifth, limits on the acquisition of foreign securities, real estate and deposits by residents have been raised or abolished. A main motive was to relieve upward pressures on currencies from the surge in capital inflows. Thus, liberalization of resident outflows was used as a substitute to restrictions over non-resident inflows. Although this has led to accumulation of private assets abroad, these would not be readily available at times of capital flight.

Sixth, banking regulations have been improved. However, banks now play a much less prominent role in the intermediation of international capital flows than in the 1990s compared to international bond issues and portfolio inflows to securities markets.

Stock trading financial by AhmadArdity. Public domain via Pixabay.

These steps have failed to prevent credit bubbles. Since 2007 corporate debt increased by 15-20 percentage points of GDP in Korea and Malaysia. At 90% of GDP Malaysia has the highest household debt in the developing world. In Korea the ratio of household debt to GDP is higher than that in the US.

Asian economies are commended for improving their external balances and building self-insurance by accumulating large amounts of reserves. However, whether these would be sufficient to provide adequate protection against a reversal of capital flows is contentious. After the Asian crisis external vulnerability came to be assessed in terms of adequacy of reserves to meet short-term external dollar debt. However, short-term debt is not always the most important source of drain on reserves. Currencies can come under stress if there is a significant foreign presence in domestic markets and the capital account is open for residents. A rapid exit could create significant turbulence even though losses from declines in assets and currencies fall on foreign investors and mitigate the drain of reserves.

In all four Asian countries directly hit by the 1997 crisis, international reserves now meet short-term external dollar debt. But they do not always leave much room to accommodate a sizeable and sustained exit of foreigners from domestic markets and capital flight by residents. This is particularly the case in Malaysia. The ringgit has been under constant pressure since mid-2014 due to flight from domestic securities. It is now below the lows seen during the turmoil in early 1998. In Indonesia the margin is large, but foreign holdings of securities are also substantial and the current account is in deficit. It was included among the Fragile 5 in 2013 for being too dependent on unreliable foreign investment to finance growth.

All emerging economies with strong international reserves and investment positions, including China, have been hit by external shocks on several occasions since 2007. The Lehman impact in 2008 was strong but short-lived because of the ultra-easy monetary policy introduced by the US. Subsequently they came under pressure again during the ‘taper tantrum’ in May 2013 and in October 2014 and late 2015 due to concerns, inter alia, about the hike in US interest rates. These bouts of instability did not inflict severe damage because they were temporary disturbances caused by shifts in market sentiments without any fundamental departure from the policy of easy money. But they give warnings for the kind of turmoil emerging economies could face in the event of a fundamental reversal of the US monetary policy.

Should self-insurance built-up prove inadequate, there are two options – seek assistance from the IMF or engineer an unorthodox response, bailing in international creditors and investors by introducing, inter alia, exchange restrictions and temporary debt standstills, and using selective controls in trade and finance to safeguard jobs. Asian countries, like many others, are determined not to go to the IMF again. But, serious obstacles may be encountered in implementing unilateral heterodox measures, including creditor litigation and sanctions by advanced economies. Deepening integration into the inherently unstable international financial system before attaining economic and financial maturity and without securing multilateral mechanisms for orderly and equitable resolution of external liquidity and debt crises could thus prove to be highly costly.

Featured image credit: Hong Kong Skyline by Skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.

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The dangerous stigma behind military suicides [excerpt]

Terms such as “Soldier’s Heart,”  “shell shock,” and “Combat Stress Reaction” have all been used to describe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the military. War and PTSD have a long history together, as does the stigma behind mental health within military culture. In the following excerpt from The Last and Greatest Battle,  John Bateson discusses the dangers of underreported PTSD and the steps we can take to help prevent military suicides.

One of the ironies of battle is that the bravest soldiers, by virtue of their willingness to place themselves in the most dangerous situations, tend to be exposed to the most trauma. This, in turn, makes them more likely to develop psychological problems. At the same time, anyone can develop these problems; no one is immune. Being tough has nothing to do with it. The challenge is that for people in the military, who are used to taking care of themselves, seeking help is contrary to how they operate. Just as it is considered “unmanly” for infantry soldiers to complain about fatigue or blisters, so is it con­sidered a sign of weakness for troops in any branch of the military to need mental health services.

According to a 2004 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, only 23 to 40 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who admitted that they suffered from mental health problems said that they sought care. For the majority, fear and stigma—fear of hurting their image and ruining their military careers, and stigma from being labeled mentally unfit—were too strong.

Things haven’t changed significantly in recent years. The existing code of military conduct emphasizes physical and mental toughness, and the admission by any individual soldier that he or she has lost heart or mind has negative repercussions. For this reason, the mili­tary must operate under the assumption that all troops, when they return home, are dealing with some form of posttraumatic stress. In many cases it’s less severe than diagnosable PTSD, but it’s rarely absent altogether. In a study of psychiatric stress among Allied troops who landed in Normandy during World War II, Roy L. Swank and Walter E. Marchand determined that after two months of continuous combat, 98 percent of surviving soldiers had psychiatric problems of some kind. The two percent who didn’t had “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”

Just as all patients in Henry Ford Behavioral Health Services are assessed for suicide, so should every service member be evaluated for suicidal risk. Instead of leaving it up to individuals to come for­ward on their own, the military should initiate treatment measures for all who serve—particularly members of the National Guard and Reserves, who often are less prepared than active-duty troops to deal with traumatic situations and receive the least support. Evaluations should focus less on written questionnaires and more on extensive, mandatory, one-on-one mental and physical examinations. These evaluations shouldn’t be limited to the service member, either; fam­ily members should be interviewed as well (separately and confiden­tially). In addition, the evaluations should be conducted every three months for three years following deployment in order to identify delayed responses to combat.

“The existing code of military conduct emphasizes physical and mental toughness, and the admission by any individual soldier that he or she has lost heart or mind has negative repercussions.”

Today, when a soldier’s tour of duty ends, he or she usually is required to spend time—several days or up to a week—at a special demobilization center before returning home. In addition to filling out paperwork, updating records, returning equipment, having any medical needs addressed, receiving information about military bene­fits and services, and being briefed by commanders, soldiers complete a Post Deployment Health Assessment, or PDHA. This two-page questionnaire assesses a person’s physical and mental well-being and aims to identify and help those individuals who may be suffer­ing from posttraumatic stress and other war-related problems but either don’t know it or are reluctant to admit it. Toward the end of the assessment, troops are asked questions such as, “Did you see anyone wounded, killed, or dead during this deployment? If so, was it a fel­low soldier, an enemy soldier, or a civilian (mark all that apply).” “Did you ever feel that you were in great danger of being killed?” “Over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems: little interest or pleasure in doing things; feeling down, depressed, or hopeless; thoughts that you would be better off dead?” “Are you currently interested in receiving help for a stress, emotional, alcohol, or family problem?”

The assessment is done just before a soldier comes home, however, and the only thing that service members want to do at this time is see their families. Thus, there is a tendency to answer questions quickly and mindlessly. Moreover, if soldiers admit to any problems, they believe—with sufficient justification—that it could delay their homecoming.

According to a 2008 study, troops are two to four times more likely to report depression, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, and interest in receiving care when they complete an anonymous survey than when then they fill out the PDHA. On the plus side, as a result of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, medical and behavioral health professionals are now required to conduct PDHA evaluations indi­vidually and face-to-face. Previously, written questionnaires were distributed to groups of soldiers who completed them in the presence of their peers.

The limited usefulness of the PDHA led the military to implement a follow-up screening called Post Deployment Health Re-Assessment (PDHRA). Administered three to six months after a soldier returns home, it assesses the person’s mental health at that time with the assumption that he or she will answer more truthfully than the first time.

The VA’s National Center for PTSD developed a simple and sen­sible PTSD screen to be used by doctors in primary care settings. Soldiers are asked if, in their lives, they have ever had an experience that was so frightening, horrible, or upsetting that, in the past month, they: 1) had nightmares about it or thought about it when they didn’t want to; 2) tried hard not to think about it or went out of their way to avoid situations that reminded them of it; 3) were constantly on guard, watchful, or easily startled; or 4) felt numb or detached from others, activities, or their surroundings. A “yes” answer to any of the questions doesn’t confirm a diagnosis of PTSD, but it indicates some probability.

Not every soldier needs treatment. Many are able to adjust to civilian life on their own. Every soldier needs help of some kind, though, to process feelings about his or her wartime experiences. By assuming that this is the case, and assessing each service member for suicide rather than expecting those in need to come forward on their own, the military can reduce the stigma associated with seeking help and keep more troops from killing themselves.

Featured image credit: U.S. Soldiers with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division stand at attention after receiving awards from Army Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the commander of U.S. Central Command, at Forward Operating Base Apache, Zabul province, Afghanistan, Nov. 29, 2013, by SGT Antony S. Lee. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Allen Ginsberg and Ann Coulter walk into an auditorium…

Ann Coulter, a controversial right-wing author and commentator, was tentatively scheduled to speak at University of California-Berkeley on 27 April until pre-speech protests turned into violent clashes, and her speech was canceled. In response, Coulter tweeted, “It’s sickening when a radical thuggish institution like Berkeley can so easily snuff out the cherished American right to free speech.”

Not long ago left-wing institutions such as Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement in the mid-sixties, were seen as bastions of free expression. At about the same time as Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, North Carolina conservatives passed the Speaker Ban Law to prohibit Communists and other questionable figures from speaking on state campuses. Jesse Helms evoked the Speaker Ban Law in 1968 when he charged that Stokely Carmichael ought not have been permitted to speak, citing “almost unanimous resentment among citizens of this state that Carmichael was given the respectability of a forum  at the taxpayers’ expense — on the campuses of the University of North Carolina.”

The debate continues over allowing purportedly offensive speakers on campus. Gail Collins, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times, noted her longtime support for free speech on college campuses. As an undergraduate student at Marquette University in 1967 she protested in the dean’s office, demanding that Allen Ginsberg be allowed to read his poems on the conservative Catholic campus. Ginsberg, who had unleashed his blistering poem “Howl” as an attack on the status quo in a renowned reading in 1955 in San Francisco, was not permitted to speak at Marquette despite Collins’ efforts.

Politically, Ann Coulter and Allen Ginsberg reside in opposing universes. She is a conservative who was raised by an FBI agent father and admires Joseph McCarthy; he was raised by Jewish parents with communist sympathies and celebrated marijuana, homosexuality, and Buddhism. Theirs are not names we might expect to find yoked in a common cause, yet they have in their own ways pushed themselves to the leading edges of freedom of speech issues.

Allen Ginsberg in 1979. Michiel Hendrycks, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Jesse Helms promoted FCC regulations that prevented Ginsberg, who was born on 3 June 1926, and died in 1997, from reading “Howl” — or even allowing stations to broadcast a recording of “Howl” — on the airwaves between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. That ban remains in effect to this day. Although “Howl” presents a litany of social condemnations, the FCC’s objection technically would come down to a handful of sexual references, among them “cock and endless balls,” “who blew and were blown,” and so on. The fiercest transgression exploded in a phrase that was undoubtedly more shocking in the 1950s than it is now: “fucked in the ass.” When Ginsberg wrote those words into an early draft, he reckoned their presence would prevent the poem’s publication. He did assume, though, that he would be able to recite the poem. Ginsberg went on to specialize in live readings and performance; he complained in a 1994 interview that due the FCC broadcast restrictions, he was effectively “banned from the marketplace of ideas in my own country.”

The print publication of “Howl” maintains legendary status in the history of free speech. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-owner of City Lights Books, published “Howl,” along with other Ginsberg poems, in 1956. After the first printing of Howl and Other Poems sold out quickly, Ferlinghetti negotiated a second printing via an inexpensive London printer. On 25 March 1957, U.S. Customs officers in San Francisco seized the shipment en route from the London printer, citing Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which bars “any obscene book” from importation. Ironically, the most shocking phrase did not appear in the printed book. The offensive words were replaced by asterisks: ****** in the ***. Although Customs released the book, city police officers arrested Ferlinghetti and his store clerk on 3 June 1957, for selling “obscenity.” Ferlinghetti maintained that Ginsberg’s ideas, more than his language, were responsible for the arrest.

The ensuing trial garnered coast-to-coast publicity. San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn admitted that although some members of society could deem certain words in “Howl” course and vulgar, for others these were simply everyday phrases. Since Horn was convinced of the poem’s social importance, he supported the notion that the First Amendment protected the expression of Ginsberg’s ideas, however unorthodox, controversial, and disturbing they might be. Ferlinghetti was free to sell the book, and Ginsberg, though reviled by many, emerged as a voice for freedom of expression and individuality.

For Ginsberg, the key to his poetry is neither the graphic language nor thematic matter per se, but simply straightforward honesty, a trait inspired by his reading of Walt Whitman. Speaking to a Playboy interviewer in 1969, Ginsberg complained, “[My] poems get misinterpreted as promotion of homosexuality. Actually, it’s more like promotion of frankness. . . . When a few people get frank about homosexuality in public, it breaks the ice; then anybody can be frank about anything. That’s socially useful.”

After the cancellation of Coulter’s Berkeley appearance, university professor and commentator Robert Reich shared a discussion with Coulter on ABC’s This Week. Reich stated that “if somebody says something that is offensive, well, that is not per se a violation of any kind of university norm.” Reich maintains that university students learn by talking with people whose views test their views. Ideally, he concluded, universities should host people with “views that some people find to be offensive.”

To many readers, evocation of outrage is the sole purpose of Coulter’s output; rather than promoting honesty via poetry, as Ginsberg aims to do, she provokes indignation in her guise as media-provocateur. Coulter may well owe her celebrity status to her outrageous statements, but even dissenters ought to concede that, like Ginsberg, she should be free to speak her mind. A particular venue is within its rights, though, to refuse to host her appearance. When Marquette refused to allow Ginsberg to appear on campus in 1967, he read his poems instead at nearby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, drawing an audience of thousands.

Featured Image credit: Ann Coulter speaking at the 2012 CPAC in Washington, D.C. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons .  

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Taxing multinationals – has the international tax system been fixed?

Over the last few years, concerns have been repeatedly voiced about the effectiveness of the international tax system. Much of the debate has focused on the rules which deal with the allocation of income within multinational groups of companies. These concerns are illustrated by several recent high-profile disputes relating to the use of tax haven vehicles which involve companies such as Google, Starbucks, Amazon, and Apple.

In response to these concerns, the G20 and OECD initiated a massive and unprecedented global project designed to fix the perceived shortcomings in the rules for the international taxation of multinationals. This is referred to as the “BEPS” (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) project. The bulk of the BEPS work on revamping the rules finished in late 2015. The output is currently being implemented across the globe, both in the domestic tax systems of individual states and in the tax treaties that deal with the interaction between those domestic tax systems.

A major part of this recent overhaul of international tax rules has concerned the rules dealing with the global allocation of income within multinational groups of companies. These rules are founded on the “arm’s length principle” (ALP) under which each group member is to be taxed as if it were a separate and independent entity, broadly required to deal with other related entities on the terms that third parties would have agreed to (hence, “arm’s length”).

The interpretation of the arm’s length principle has been controversial and has evolved continuously since its adoption in the 1920s. The immediate question now is whether these most recent reforms mean that we are on course to restore the integrity and effective operation of the ALP. Whilst the sponsors of the overhaul project, the G20 and OECD, might have little hesitation in proclaiming just that result, the reality is less straightforward. It is certainly true that some elements of the BEPS output represent a material advance. For example, tax authorities have always struggled with getting access to good quality and relevant information about the global activities of multinationals. A significant step in correcting this has been taken by the new BEPS transparency package, which involves a multi-pronged approach intended to ensure that a higher quality of information is provided by multinational groups to tax authorities. It is also true that the extensive new work dealing with intangibles (IP) should make it appreciably harder for multinational groups to magically shift their IP to tax haven jurisdictions, and claim that the significant profits associated with those intangibles belongs in those haven locations, even though the multinational groups involved may have little or no substantive presence in such jurisdictions.

Notwithstanding these successes, and the development and roll out of the revamped BEPS rules, major problems remain.

The goal of fixing the global income allocation rules […] within a matter of a few months was never going to be a realistic prospect.

First, some of the proposed fixes are likely to turn out as not being fixes at all. For example the new proposals on dealing with transactions that shift risks (and the financial rewards for bearing risk) among the members of a multinational corporate group seem to include certain conditions that would not be seen in agreements between unrelated parties, meaning they may well be contrary to the ALP standard itself.

A second set of problems is that some promised – and necessary – fixes have not materialized at all. The best example of this relates to the ability of multinationals to affect vast tax-driven capital shifts within the group. This was initially a high-profile target of the BEPS project, yet there have been no new rules directly confronting this issue in the output from the BEPS project.

Finally, the cost of the proposed cure is not negligible. The BEPS reform of the ALP rules has brought a tidal wave of complexity, and for many states – and taxpayers – it will be asking too much to ensure full compliance with all the new rules.

The chief lesson is that the goal of fixing the global income allocation rules (let alone the entire international tax system) within a matter of a few months was never going to be a realistic prospect. It is important that the realities of the situation are recognized. Going forward, obvious areas of difficulty still need to be pursued. It is also essential that some attention is given to the possibilities and options for longer-term strategic reform. The most damaging course now would be a politically-expedient posture that the BEPS project has been a complete success and the job is already done.

Featured image credit: ‘Photo’ by Anders Jildén . CCO Public Domain via Unsplash .

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A new view of authoritarianism and partisan polarization

Democrats and Republicans are increasingly polarized. Partisan strength is up, feelings toward the two parties are more extreme, and partisans are more intolerant of the other side. What gives rise to the partisan divide in American politics?

One prominent theory is that Democrats and Republicans are polarized today because they differ psychologically. In particular, research shows that over the past few decades Democrat and Republican partisans have become increasingly different with respect to their level of authoritarianism: Republicans have become more authoritarian and Democrats less so. As the parties are split in their level of authoritarianism, partisan rancor and vitriol has correspondingly increased.

However, other research shows that authoritarianism is associated with greater partisan polarization among both Republicans and Democrats. Rather than possessing diametrically opposed psychological characteristics, findings show that strong partisans on both sides are psychologically similar—sharing an authoritarian and group-centric worldview.

These findings show that authoritarians are not confined to the right-wing in American politics, but gravitate to both parties’ extremes. The findings also indicate that partisan polarization is not just about ideological disagreements. Instead, many strong partisans are group-centric, see politics primarily as a conflict between “us” and “them,” and are motivated by powerful but substantively vacuous needs to belong.

What is Authoritarianism?

Authoritarians differ from nonauthoritarians in a number of ways; for example, they value social uniformity more than diversity, they place a premium on strong authority figures, and they are especially averse to uncertainty. These characteristics of authoritarians lead them to naturally embrace conservative issues in the social and foreign policy domains of politics. It is partly for these reasons that Donald Trump appealed to highly authoritarian voters. But these characteristics also make authoritarians intolerant of outgroups, broadly conceived.

What is Partisanship?

One prominent theory of partisanship is that it, like other identities (e.g., religion), is a social identity; an attachment formed early in life that persists through adulthood and that provides the psychological benefits (i.e., certainty) of group attachment. One implication of this theory of partisanship as a social identity is that individuals who are predisposed to identify strongly with ingroups and derogate outgroups should exhibit the most extreme partisan identities and attitudes.

Are Democrats and Republicans psychologically different in their level of authoritarianism? Or is authoritarianism associated with strong partisanship in both parties?

Since authoritarians by definition possess a group-centric worldview, I hypothesized that authoritarians within both parties should be more polarized than nonauthoritarians. The research found that among both Republican and Democratic identifiers, strong partisans are more likely to be authoritarian than nonauthoritarian. In fact, authoritarianism is regularly a stronger predictor of partisan strength than other presumed causes of partisan intensity like issue preferences. To come to this conclusion, I analyzed data measuring both partisanship and authoritarianism. I analyzed data on partisan strength and party “feeling thermometers” (which measure how warmly or coldly respondents feel towards the two parties) from 1992 to 2012 in the American National Election Studies. I also examined data from an original survey fielded by Yougov. The measure of authoritarianism is a series of questions about child-rearing values: (1) Obedience or Self-reliance; (2) Independence or Respect for Elders; (3) Curiosity or Good Manners; (4) Being Considerate or Being Well Behaved. Obedience, respect for elders, good manners, and being well mannered were the authoritarian responses; and respondents who agreed with these to each question score highest on the authoritarianism scale. Figure 1 presents the main finding that emerge across analyses of the various data sources.

Figure 1 by Matthew D. Luttig. Used with permission.

In sum, among both Democrats and Republicans, authoritarians exhibit greater levels of polarization than nonauthoritarians. It is therefore not simply deep-seated personality differences that lead to America’s polarization; instead, polarization is rooted in a basic tendency that many Americans—both Democrat and Republican— possess to divide the world into ingroups and outgroups.

Featured image credit: capitol building washington by Olichel. Public domain via Pixabay.

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George Washington’s early love of literature [excerpt]

Unlike his contemporaries Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton — George Washington isn’t remembered as an intellectual. But for what he lacked in formal education, Washington made up for in enthusiasm for learning. His personal education began at an early age and continued throughout his adult life. In the following excerpt from George Washington: A Life in Books, historian Kevin J. Hayes gives insight into Washington’s early love of literature.

Cubbyholes are magical spaces. Store something in a cubbyhole, and it just might transform itself into something else. Well, that object doesn’t really change, but the times change, and so does the person who stored it there, either of which amounts to the same thing. Above the topmost bookshelves in his permanent library at Mount Vernon, George Washington had dozens of built-in cubbyholes, or pigeonholes, as they were called in his day, that is, before that word became a verb and took on pejorative connotations. In those dark compartments he stored many personal papers, some dating back to his adolescence. The manuscripts that Washington saved since his school days in the 1740s became something very different by the end of his life. They transformed themselves into a blueprint of his mind.

This set of miscellaneous manuscripts contains essential documents for reconstructing George Washington’s school days. Beyond the exercises that form the lion’s share of these early manuscripts, details of Washington’s education are sparse. In an unfinished biography, his aide-de-camp, personal secretary, friend, and confidante David Humphreys says that a “domestic tutor” took charge of Washington’s education.

Official Presidential portrait of George Washington  by Gilbert Stuart, circa 1797. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Humphreys’s precise language offers a good idea of the kind of teacher Washington had as a boy. Typically, affluent families alone could afford domestic tutors for their children. As the job title suggests, the domestic tutor was a live-in teacher who accepted room and board, along with a modest salary. Washington’s tutor taught grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry and higher mathematics, geography, history, and additional “studies which are not improperly termed ‘the humanities.’” The name of Washington’s domestic tutor has escaped history. Considering the eclectic nature of the surviving school exercises, his editors suggest that Washington had several teachers.

Further evidence shows that at one point in his education Washington did attend school with other boys. Friend and fellow patriot George Mason mentioned to him a man named David Piper, whom he described as “my Neighbour and Your old School-fellow.” Like Washington, Piper would turn to surveying once he left school, becoming surveyor of roads for Fairfax County. He was also something of a bad boy. Piper was repeatedly brought to court on various civil and criminal matters. Together Washington and Piper could have attended school at the Lower Church of Washington Parish, Westmoreland County, where Mattox Creek enters the Potomac River, but there is no saying for sure. The story of Washington’s education is shrouded in mystery.

His school exercises indicate what he studied inside the classroom and out. They show him mastering many different subjects, learning what he would need to make his way through colonial Virginia whether that way took him down a deer track or up Duke of Gloucester Street. Some of the exercises are dated, revealing that this set of school papers as a whole ranges from 1743 to 1748, that is, from the year Washington turned eleven to the year he turned sixteen. Other evidence demonstrates that he continued his studies beyond the latest exercises in the manuscript collection. Altogether the exercises and the books Washington read during his school days reveal his early literary interests, his fascination with mathematics, and the genesis of his career as a surveyor.

Washington became curious about poetry in his youth, as two manuscript poems that survive with the school exercises reveal. When he first read these poems, he transcribed them to create personal copies he could reread whenever he wished. His copies reveal Washington’s ambition to excel in penmanship, and their texts shed light on his state of mind at the end of adolescence.

One is titled “On Christmas Day.” Given its subject, the poem’s imagery is predictable. It is filled with happy shepherds and hymn-singing angels watching over the newborn savior. The speaker of the poem is female; she ends by reminding herself to remember Christmas always.

The bottom corner of the page containing Washington’s transcription is torn, so the last two lines of verse are damaged. His source supplies the missing words:

Oh never let my Soul this Day forget,

But pay in graitfull praise her Annual Debt

To him, whom ’tis my Trust, I shall [adore]

When Time, and Sin, and Deat[h, shall be no more!]

The picture of young Washington that emerges from his copy of this poem is that of a boy confident in his religious beliefs but pleased to have another confirm them. This Christmas poem is akin to a Christmas present, something to treasure for itself and for what it symbolizes. Washington recorded neither his source nor the poet’s name, but “On Christmas Day” comes from the February 1743 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The published poem is signed “Orinthia”—the pseudonym for Elizabeth Teft, a Lincolnshire poet. The transcription also reveals Washington’s fastidiousness. In the Gentleman’s Magazine, editor and publisher Edward Cave capitalized each line of the poem but avoided capitalizing other nouns. Copying the poem for himself, Washington capitalized the nouns Cave had left uncapitalized, giving the written text a more traditional look.

“True Happiness,” the other poem that survives among the manuscripts from Washington’s school days, also appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, though in a much earlier issue, that of February 1734. Taken together, the two poems create a vivid picture of Washington’s boyhood reading process. After enjoying “On Christmas Day” in a recent issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine, he wished to read more verse and searched whatever back issues were available. The magazines listed in his father’s estate inventory cannot be identified precisely, but they were most likely bound volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine, one of the few English periodicals available at the time. Each issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine contains a poetry column. After he encountered “On Christmas Day,” it seems, Washington read a number of back issues until he found another poem he liked, which he transcribed onto the opposite side of the leaf containing “On Christmas Day.”

Featured image credit: “book-old-vintage-chipped-table” by StockSnap. CC0 via Pixabay.

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