There hasn’t been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in this country for generations, so what, exactly, does “class warfare” really mean? Is it just an empty political catchphrase?
The American right has decided that returning the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans from what it was during the Bush years (which, incidentally, featured the slowest job growth under any president in our history, at 0.45 percent per year) to what they forked over during the Clinton years (when job growth happened to average 1.6 percent per year) is the epitome of class warfare. Sure, it would leave top earners with a tax rate 10 percentage points below what they were paying after Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, but that’s the conservative definition of “eating the rich” these days.
I recently offered a less Orwellian definition, arguing that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class.
But there’s another way of looking at “class war”: habitually vilifying the unfortunate; claiming that their plight is a manifestation of some personal flaw or cultural deficiency. Conservatives wage this form of class warfare virtually every day, consigning millions of people who are down on their luck to some subhuman underclass.
The belief that there exists a large pool of “undeserving poor” who suck the lifeblood out of the rest of society lies at the heart of the right’s demonstrably false “culture of poverty” narrative. It’s a narrative that runs through Ayn Rand’s works. It comes to us in bizarre spin that holds up the rich as “wealth producers” and “job creators.”
And it affects our public policies. In his classic book, “Why Americans Hate Welfare,” Martin Gilens found a striking disconnect: Significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that they wanted public spending to fight poverty to be increased at the same time that similar majorities said they were opposed to welfare. Gilens studied a number of different opinion polls and concluded that the disconnect was driven by a widespread belief that “most welfare recipients don’t really need it,” and by racial animus — “perceptions that welfare recipients are undeserving and blacks are lazy.”
That narrative ignores two simple and indisputable truths. First, contrary to popular belief, we don’t all start out with the same opportunities. The reality is that in the U.S. today, the best predictor of a newborn baby’s economic future is how much money his or her parents make.
It also ignores the fact that living in an individualistic, capitalist society carries inherent risk. You can do everything right — study hard, work diligently, keep your nose clean — but if you fall victim to a random workplace accident, you can nevertheless end up being disabled in the blink of an eye and find yourself in need of public assistance. You can end up bankrupt under a pile of healthcare bills or you could lose your job if you’re forced to take care of an ailing parent. Children — innocents who aren’t even old enough to work for themselves — are among the largest groups receiving various forms of public assistance.
Of course, there are always people who game the system, but they represent a tiny minority of recipients; a Massachusetts study found that fully 93 percent of all cases of “welfare fraud” were committed not by the “undeserving poor,” but by vendors — hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, etc.
Smearing those who face real structural barriers to achievement or who will inevitably face real and random misfortunes in a “dynamic,” capitalist society — that’s some real class warfare. Here are six excellent examples of the form.
1. Registering the Poor to Vote Is “Un-American”
Matthew Vadum is a very special wingnut. His current preoccupation is attacking Zombie ACORN — an organization that sane people know to have been killed off last year by James O’Keef’s selectively edited videos but which Vadum insists is alive and well and looking to undermine America by organizing poor communities.
Vadum recently wrote a very special column in the American Thinker, in which he railed against efforts to get poor people registered to vote. What made the column noteworthy is that Vadum skipped the usual conservative blather about “voter fraud” — a problem that’s virtually nonexistent — and offered a refreshingly honest take on the subject. The problem, according to Vadum, is that “the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.”
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
Rarely has so much wrongness been packed into so few words. Less than half of those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — the most significant anti-poverty program remaining in our welfare system after the Clinton-era “reforms” — are unemployed. About a quarter work jobs that earn poverty wages, and the rest aren’t in the workforce because they’re disabled, caring for a relative or their children. In fact, almost half (48.1 percent) of all TANF families receive benefits only for the kids, not the adults. It’s true that children are, in strictly economic terms, “nonproductive,” but they will be productive someday, and more so if they receive adequate nutrition, housing, healthcare and the like.
The other problem with this argument is the idea that the poor vote for “redistributionist politicians.” First, because all politicians are “redistributionist” — it’s what government does — and second, because, as Martin Gilens discovered, while Americans hate the word “welfare,” large majorities — 71 percent of Americans; not just the poor — believe that spending on anti-poverty programs should be increased (as long as you don’t call it welfare).
Contrary to Vadum’s beliefs, there is only a small number of true reactionaries who desire to live in a society that doesn’t care for the poor and disabled, and it is in fact they who are “profoundly antisocial.”
2. Unemployment Benefits Have Created a “Nation of Slackers”
Media Matters says, “It’s taken three years, but America has finally graduated from being
“a nation of whiners” in 2008 to “a nation of slackers” in 2011 — at least, that’s what Rep. Steve King (R-IA) believes we’ve accomplished.” King, a right-winger’s right-winger, took to the floor of the House to deliver this word-salad:
The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery, that you get a lot of bang for your buck when you pay people not to work, and they will go out and spend that money immediately, therefore we should pass out unemployment checks and stimulate the economy. That statement is ridiculous where I come from, Mr. Speaker. To pay people not to work, and somehow in that formula it stimulates the economy….
The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can’t have a nation of slackers … We’ve gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.
Here, too, we have a shining gem of wrongness. And a common one — the belief that unemployment benefits discourage people from working is widespread on the right.
Here’s a simple reality-check: There are no jobs! According to the Economic Policy Institute, “there are 6.9 million fewer jobs today than there were in December 2007.” Of course, the working-age population has grown by over 4 million in that same time. Do the math. As Mike Thornton noted on AlterNet, when you add people who are working a part-time gig but want a full-time job to the unemployed, you get 25.4 million workers vying for 3.2 million full-time job openings, “or 8 unemployed or underemployed workers per job.”
This is more of the same: King’s painting a picture of the undeserving poor living the good life on the tab of hardworking Americans. So it’s worth noting that among developed countries, the U.S. offers some of the stingiest unemployment benefits around — only two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) replaced a smaller share of a worker’s earnings than the U.S. in 2004, and only the Czech Republic offered unemployment coverage for a shorter time.
In 2008, those unemployed Americans who qualified for benefits got $293 per week, or about 35 percent of their lost income, and that’s why conservative spin that the jobless are living it up on their unemployment checks instead of trying to find work is so ludicrous. (There is, however, some evidence that this is actually true in places like Scandinavia, where people who lose their jobs still take in 70 percent or more of their income, and in some cases can do so for an unlimited amount of time.)
King drives his point home using a classic tactic: take big numbers out of context to distort reality. There are in fact 85 million “Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce,” and he would have you believe they’re all “slackers.” But that figure includes stay-at-home spouses, people who live off of investment income rather than a job, entrepreneurs, and of course the disabled and ill — people who can’t work. Back in January 2001, when the unemployment rate was just 4.2 percent, there were 69 million working-age adults who weren’t in the labor force. And the working-age population has grown by about 22 million since then.
And, of course, Nancy Pelosi was right that unemployment benefits have a huge amount of stimulus bang-for-the-buck — King is not only a brazen class warrior, he’s also economically illiterate.
3. You Can’t Really Be Poor if You Have a Color TV!
Is it not the height of class war to make a conscious effort to erase the poor from the public’s view? That has been a long-term project on the right, and one of the classic, if shopworn arguments goes like this: Back in the 1930s (or 1950s, or 1970s, depending on the speaker), most poor people didn’t own color TVs, but now 97 percent of them do! So the poor really should stop bitching — they’re living the high life!
Now, as of this writing, Craigslist offers the following items for free in the San Francisco Bay area: several TVs, multiple armchairs, a set of swivel bar stools, a stainless steel refrigerator, a Nordictrak elliptical trainer, a bunch of sofas and bed-sets — including a “like new” leather couch — a countertop grill, a “beautiful pine armoir” and some “Hydro Massage Soaking Tub and Sinks.” Those are just the listings posted in one morning. We create a lot of goods and people want the shiniest, newest things, so there are a ton of obsolete but still functional items like TVs and washer-dryers out there that one can get for nothing or next to nothing.
Perhaps my favorite example of the genre is the claim, accurate but divorced from context, that our poor have it good because they don’t necessarily live in shoe-boxes. As the Wall Street Journal was happy to point out, “The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.” Case closed! American-style capitalism for the win!
Well, not really. This is a simple matter of population density: In the EU-15, there are 120 people per square kilometer; in the United States, we only have 29 people per kilometer. And that average obviously includes people living in sparsely populated rural expanses. I live in a tightly packed U.S. city, and given that most middle-class people here can’t even dream of affording 1,200 square feet, I don’t think our poor folks can either.
4. Food-Stamps: “A Fossil That Repeats All the Errors of the War on Poverty”
Sometimes what passes for an “argument” is just stating a simple reality in an ominous tone. Consider this string of English words, offered by the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector:
“Some people like to camouflage this by calling it a nutrition program, but it’s really not different from cash welfare,” said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. “Food stamps is quasi money.”
There are strict limits on what can be purchased with food stamps, which isn’t true of money, but, yes, they do contribute to a household’s financial health in the same way that cash does. That doesn’t negate the fact that it is, indeed, a nutrition program. But Rector wasn’t done — it gets better:
Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. “The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty,” he said.
Perhaps this works in the same magical way that gay marriage “discourages marriage” — I don’t know. But what is clear is that, in the words of one anti-hunger activist, “Without food stamps, we’d have starvation.” According to the USDA, “14.5 percent of households were food insecure at least some time during” the past year, and “5.4 percent of households experienced food insecurity in the more severe range, described as very low food security.” It’s also the case that about a third of those who are eligible to receive nutritional assistance don’t, in part because of the stigma that people like Robert Rector has worked so hard to encourage.
These are real people experiencing very real problems making ends meet, yet Rector and his ilk would make it more difficult to get assistance because they’ve embraced the fact-free idea that the poor are plagued with a “culture of dependency.” That’s some serious class warfare.
5. “The Main Causes of Child Poverty Are Low Levels of Parental Work and the Absence of Fathers”
On Wednesday, the New York Yankees clinched the American League East title. On Thursday, it rained in New York. There is a correlation here, but only a fool would suggest that the Yanks’ victory caused it to rain the following day.
Yet, the Heritage Foundation (it happens to be Robert Rector again) sees a lot of poor, single-parent households, and would have you believe that “the main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and the absence of fathers.”
This gets the causal relationship wrong. The number of single-parent households exploded between the 1970s and the 1990s — more than doubling — yet the poverty rate remained relatively constant. In fact, before the crash of 2008, the poverty rate was lower than it had been in the 1970s. So, as the rate of single-parent households skyrocketed, poverty declined a little bit. Saying single-parent homes create poverty is therefore like claiming that the Yankees victory caused the sun to shine the next day.
As I noted recently, this is an essential piece of the “culture of poverty” narrative, and it is nonsense. Jean Hardisty, the author of “Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women,” cited a number of studies showing that poor women have the same dreams as everyone else: They “often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.” But low economic status leads to fewer marriages, not the other way around.
In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that 90 percent of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period. And here’s the key finding: for every dollar that a man’s hourly wages increased, the odds that he’d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000.
Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty itself “seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.” As one father in the survey put it, marriage means “not living from check to check.”
6. Taxing Working People Less Than the Rich Is “Perverse”
That half of Americans “pay no taxes” is a simple lie that will never die, regardless of how frequently it is debunked. It’s pure class war, feeding into the narrative of the parasitic poor feeding off the blood of the industrious. And it is totally divorced from reality — in the real world, the working poor and the wealthy have virtually the same tax rates.
Yet the belief that only a minority pay taxes is ubiquitous among conservatives. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said last month, “I don’t want to tax the truly poor, those who would help themselves if they could, but you can’t tell me that 51 percent of all households are the truly poor.” And here’s where the lie was created: “No matter what these Democrats tell you,” he said, “the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation’s tax burden and 51 percent pay absolutely nothing in income taxes.”
Note the sleight-of-hand. Federal income taxes make up only 18 percent of the taxes collected in this country. It also happens to be among the more progressive taxes, and with median wages stagnating for years, many people today don’t earn enough to have to pay them.
Hatch takes this fact, which again pertains to less than a fifth of the country’s total tax burden, and transforms it into “the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation’s tax burden” — completely and totally untrue. If we looked only at the regressive payroll tax, and dishonestly pretended that no other taxes exist, we could make a similarly twisted argument that the wealthy pay virtually nothing in taxes — billionaire investor Warren Buffett doesn’t pay a penny in payroll taxes.
When you include all taxes — not just those that erase working people’s contributions — you see that we really have something close to a flat tax. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, who found that when you add it all up — state and local taxes, federal taxes and excise fees — “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3 percent, the median tax rate is 41.8 percent, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40 percent, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”
Class War
All of these narratives are designed to protect a status quo that’s serving the interests of a rarefied elite, but is obviously not working well for the working majority in this country. All are intended to distract from the structural causes of poverty and inequality, or to ignore the fact that some people will always experience genuine misfortune — the myriad surprises in life that can happen to anyone — because they’d choose low taxes over caring for them.
But it’s also a narrative that denies the very existence of class differences in this country. As noted earlier, the United States is anything but a true meritocracy. What millions of white working-class Americans understand — intuitively, even if they can’t articulate it — is that class still matters. And by erasing the very idea of class, of structural barriers to getting ahead in this economy, they are left with a nagging sense of grievance against those they perceive to be bringing them down: foreign powers, immigrants, people of color and liberals, with their “job-killing” regulations and the like.
Ultimately, to deny the very existence of an entire class of citizens is to wage some very real warfare against them.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
3D printing is a hot topic right now, especially with reports of this incredible technology entering the consumer marketplace. The prices are dropping as more companies attempt consumer-grade machines. Is it time to start looking forward to a time when we all have a Star Trek-like replicator at home to produce everything we want, when we want it?
While the technology isn’t nearly as versatile or as user-friendly as the science fiction dream, the implications include the potential to provide the things we need in much greener, less-centralized, less resource-intensive way. But, as with any new technology, there are also potential negative effects to balance the scales. Over the long run, the human imagination will no doubt concoct new uses that appear grotesque to us now but may make sense as the technology becomes ubiquitous and famiiar.
In short: as with so many human inventions, the future of 3D printing includes the good, the bad and the grotesque.
The Good
3D printing actually refers to a range of different technologies for making a three-dimensional object from a digital file. First, the dimensions and details of the object must be drafted out in CAD (computer-aided design) software. The CAD file provides the directions by which the machine builds the object, laying down molecules layer by layer and line by line much like an inkjet printer. How the machine prints the object depends on the type of technology used by the manufacturer.
The first rapid prototyping machine using 3D printing technology went into commercial use in 1986. Since then, the machines have become ubiquitous in commercial manufacturing shops. At first, they enabled companies to more quickly produce plastic prototypes on site, but the real benefit has come from their expanded use as additive manufacturing machines—a product can be manufactured by adding resources rather than the conventional way of subtracting from a larger hunk of material by grinding, drilling, sanding, etc.
Thanks to the ability to build a product from the bottom up, 3D printers can print shapes that cannot be viably manufactured any other way. For example, Airbus is using 3D printers to make airplane parts lighter—allowing the plane to use less fuel—without sacrificing strength and safety. People with missing limbs can have custom prosthetics 3D printed to their personal shape, capability and style.
3D printing also means significantly less waste. Traditional forms of machining often leave up to 90 percent of a slab of metal on the machine shop floor, but additive manufacturing generates far less waste in the first place, and also makes it easier to reuse anything that’s left over. The machines are also the ultimate expression of “just-in-time” manufacturing: a company can manufacture a needed part instantly, right on the spot, rather than depend on the old system that required parts to be manufactured in mass quantities, stored in massive warehouses and shipped to far-flung locations.
To further lower the resource footprint on our products, some researchers are working on attaching recycling machines to allow manufacturers and hobbyists to reduce their ordering of raw injection materials which they have to order from somewhere else. When 3D printers are ready to saturate the home-use market, they may provide an almost fully self-contained system. When printed items break or need replacement, home users could simply recycle them into the machine, creating a cradle-to-cradle system—the Holy Grail for recycling advocates.
The primary costs are in the machine itself and in the consumables or injection materials. Which injection material your home machine uses depends on the company, the type of printer you have, and which material you want to make your item from. 3D printers are able to manufacture items from various plastics and metals as well as glass, wood, food and even living cells. Most of the cheaper machines are limited to plastic, but many will function with more than one type of plastic.
Consumers are also able to order 3D printed items online, and 3D printer shops similar to Kinkos are opening in local neighborhoods for a faster turnaround. You can find or buy the CAD file for your desired item on the Web, download it, send it to your local print shop, and then go pick up the item in a few hours. These companies grant consumers and small businesses all the benefit of custom additive manufacturing without the hassle of learning CAD (computer-aided design) and handling a machine that may pose potential dangers such as toxic fumes or exposed moving parts. Some of the cheaper machines rely on consumer wisdom — in the loosest sense of the word — to allow ventilation and to avoid touching exposed areas.
The range of items we can self-manufacture this way is as limitless as the ingenuity of the Web. Simply hop online, find an appropriate CAD design and print it from your printer—et voila, you have the means to make a lamp out of your grandmother’s old cane. Or print out a set of Legos for your kids, new food containers, custom iPhone covers, and any other practical plastic curiosity that your household needs.
If home-based 3D printing takes off and goes prime-time, online stores and large mass manufacturers will almost certainly find their business models threatened as digital technology again forces a massive change to retail business models. The mall and the factory — the cornerstones of American consumer culture — will both find themselves increasingly irrelevant.
The Bad
No matter how awesome the potential may be for any technology, a downside is always waiting to rear its ugly head. John Smart points out in his Fourth Law of Technology that the first generation of a new technology is almost always more dehumanizing than it is beneficial — and 3D printing is unlikely to be an exception. Never underestimate the ingenuity humans will bring to apply any new technology to their worst impulses. Consider how the Internet has served the causes of racism, sexism and kittie porn (those lol-cats drive me up the wall!).
The Internet liberated people to say things online that they would not say in public — and find like-minded people who confirmed those views. Now, all those same scary people isolated in their homes and addicted to trolling can make 3D objects of mischief in any size, shape and color their twisted imaginations can conjure.
Paramount Studios recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to someone who posted designs for a toy that was a licensed item based on one of the studio’s movies. Lawyers are going to get rich writing those letters in the near term, but in the longer term, it’s going to be hard to stop anyone from posting downloadable designs on the Internet for home 3D printers to create any novelty they choose. The same concerns over intellectual property the music industry has been whining about for more than a decade are now about to be visited on manufactured goods as well.
And some of those objects will be dangerous. Weapons like knives or clubs can be printed in any shape and practicable material. In some US states, every part of the AR-15, a popular firearm, can be purchased without a license except for the lower receiver. Recently the design for the lower receiver was posted on Thingiverse, a Web site where users share 3D printer design files. That last part can now be printed in the privacy of an individual’s home, license free. Some are arguing about whether the plastic lower receiver is good enough to be functional, but the larger point is clear: assuming the design works, any 3D printer that can handle metal or polymers can privately print out the necessary part for a functional, unregistered gun.
While homemade firearms are nothing new—and usually legal in most US states—3D printing could make it easier to create them, and thus ensure that we’ll have many, many more of them in circulation. Regardless of your views about the US Constitution and the right to bear arms, this could eventually place an arsenal of untraceable guns in the hands of people who would not be able to legally buy them. Plus, America’s gun violence will be easy to export—right over the Internet—to other countries that have stricter gun ownership regulations.
Printing items covered by intellectual property law poses legal and financial as well as security concerns. In Texas, a small band of thieves used a 3D printer to make an ATM card scanner which they installed in ATMs around their city. They then stole about $400,000 before being caught. Also, i.Materialise, an online 3D printing service, reports that a customer attempted to pass a design for an ATM scanner through their service. They say the design was rejected, but they still receive searches for ATM scanners on their Web site indicating that criminals are hoping to enter the black market enabled by 3D printing.
The Texas thieves paid for their crimes, but future criminals might not. A member of a German recreational lock-picking club designed a key to Dutch handcuffs just by looking at a photo he took of an officer’s key being worn by the police officer. (That’s right! He built a key just by looking at a photo.) He then printed a copy to prove it worked, and posted the new design online. Dutch police have not reported the use of a 3D printed key, but if a recreational club member can do it, certainly real criminals can too.
3D printing even has the potential to completely undermine the war on drugs. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a system that would print the necessary lab equipment to create pharmaceuticals. While this kind of technology has the potential to democratize the pharmaceutical industry, it might also enable people to print illegal narcotics from home in a way that’s far safer and less detectable than a garage-based meth lab. It also means that the drugs people buy could become more dangerous than they are now, with black marketeers experimenting constantly with new substances and treating their customers as guinea pigs.
The Grotesque
3D printing is about more than just making fake plastic trees. It represents a new paradigm, additive manufacturing, which is a complete revolution in thinking about how we create many of the common objects that surround us and support our lives.
For instance, researchers at Wake Forest University are using the technology to print new skin directly onto a burn wound. They scan a burn victim’s wound into a computer, which in turn creates a 3D image with the exact size and shape of the wound. The printer then prints new layers of cells—using skin instead of ink—directly onto the lesion. Developed for US troops in Afghanistan, the whole process takes only an hour.
3D bioprinting research could eventually lead to the printing of organs ready for implantation. That would mean no more waiting lists for organs and no more age restrictions on said organs. The organ donation system might be left to the lower classes as the wealthy take advantage of all kinds of new transhumanist life-extension techniques, replacing everything from faces to eyeballs to livers as they wear out due to age.
And here’s where it gets really weird. What if the long-term future for 3D bioprinting converged with some of the stranger aspects of transhumanism? Could additive manufacturing turn into additive biohacking? Instead of taking away from one body and giving it to another like organ transplants do, bioprinting new organs could change how society thinks about implants. The cyborg visions of using digital technology to enhance our bodies could become reality as people use bioprinted body parts—as well as other biological means—to heighten their existing abilities.
We’re already heading down this path: people are already implanting magnets in their wrists and RFIDs in their arms. Rahel Aima suggests that some people may eventually want an extra ear, or a second set of eyes placed on the sides of their heads to give them full 360-degree vision. If someone, for reasons we can’t fathom right now, decided they wanted a third eye on their forehead or a third arm growing from their back, they could have it. The ethics will be moot once 3D bioprinting can enable the creation of fresh body parts.
As with any cultural postulations about the future, the idea of bioprinting extra arms to implant them on a presumably sane person sounds ridiculous—until you look at the dozens of women who are already beautiful but who would prefer to look like circus freaks with abnormally plump lips, button noses and shiny skin. A quick glance in any celebrity tabloid will provide dozens of prime examples of men and women of almost any age who look like plastic mannequins. (And let’s not get into the whys and wheres and hows of people’s tattoo and piercing choices.) If you doubt whether anyone will be brave enough to attempt a grotesque fashion statement using 3D bioprinted body parts, just ask Cat Man, Dennis Avner, who has augmented his face to look like that of a tiger. However, unlike Cat Man’s augmentations, the implanted 3D printed body parts could actually be useful.
As robotics and automation increase over the years, more people may try to get an edge in the job market with specific augmentations that will enable them to perform certain unique tasks. If the human body can adjust to a third or fourth arm, data entry professionals could become more efficient by drinking water with their third hand while the other two continue typing. Lumberjacks could more easily climb trees with their tools in hand. Companies may even offer to pay for the operation if the employee is willing to sign a five- or 10-year contract. Plus, the military would likely be interested in enabling its soldiers to hold more guns or fight in hand-to-hand combat more effectively.
Society is certainly not ready for such extreme body modification yet, but it’s not hard to imagine people asking for some very bizarre cosmetic or utilitarian augmentations once doctors start implanting 3D printed organs.
3D printing has already revolutionized several industries from toys to airlines, and that revolution is now about to come home. Along with all the clear economic and environmental benefits this technology will bring, it also presents some very challenging implications for how we look at shopping, security, health, and just about everything else.
While the ramifications of any new technology can never be fully gamed out ahead of time, it’s time to get ready for the next wholesale technology shift that will upend our economy and reprint the basic order of our lives. As the technology improves and progresses, we might even see the shopaholics converge with hoarders, and we may then marvel at the tragic lives of the printerholics who live in a sandbox of 3D printed trinkets — and just can’t stop spending their days printing.
Dennis D. Draeger is a foresight researcher with AFR, and a freelance writer on technology and its social implications. Follow him at Ad Futura and at @dddraeger on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Here’s what happens when corporations begin to control education.
“When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer’s markets, the first one told me that ‘no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer’s markets were stocked with ‘black market vegetables’ that ‘are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.’ It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket.”
Unfortunately, she’s not alone. Conducting research requires funding, and today’s research follows the golden rule: The one with the gold makes the rules.
A report just released by Food and Water Watch examines the role of corporate funding of agricultural research at land grant universities, of which there are more than 100. “You hear again and again Congress and regulators clamoring for science-based rules, policies, regulations,” says Food and Water Watch researcher Tim
Schwab, explaining why he began investigating corporate influence in agricultural research. “So if the rules and regulations and policies are based on science that is industry-biased, then the fallout goes beyond academic articles. It really trickles down to farmer livelihoods and consumer choice.”
The report found that nearly one quarter of research funding at land grant universities now comes from corporations, compared to less than 15 percent from the USDA. Although corporate funding of research surpassed USDA funding at these universities in the mid-1990s, the gap is now larger than ever. What’s more, a broader look at all corporate agricultural research, $7.4 billion in 2006, dwarfs the mere $5.7 billion in all public funding of agricultural research spent the same year.
Influence does not end with research funding, however. In 2005, nearly one third of agricultural scientists reported consulting for private industry. Corporations endow professorships and donate money to universities in return for having buildings, labs and wings named for them. Purdue University’s Department of Nutrition Science blatantly offers corporate affiliates “corporate visibility with students and faculty” and “commitment by faculty and administration to address [corporate] members’ needs,” in return for the $6,000 each corporate affiliate pays annually.
In perhaps the most egregious cases, corporate boards and college leadership overlap. In 2009, South Dakota State’s president, for example, joined the board of directors of Monsanto, where he earns six figures each year. Bruce Rastetter is simultaneously the co-founder and managing director of a company called AgriSol Energy and a member of the Iowa Board of Regents. Under his influence, Iowa State joined AgriSol in a venture in Tanzania that would have forcefully removed 162,000 people from their land, but the university later pulled out of the project after public outcry.
What is the impact of the flood of corporate cash? “We know from a number of meta-analyses, that corporate funding leads to results that are favorable to the corporate funder,” says Schwab. For example, one peer-reviewed study found that corporate-funded nutrition research on soft drinks, juice and milk were four to eight times more likely to reach conclusions in line with the sponsors’ interests. And when a scrupulous scientist publishes research that is unfavorable to the study’s funder, he or she should be prepared to look for a new source of funding.
That’s what happened to a team of researchers at University of Illinois who were funded by a statewide fertilizer “checkoff” after they published a finding that nitrogen fertilizer depletes organic matter in the soil. Checkoffs are a common method used to market agricultural products, and they are funded by a small amount from each sale of a product – in this case, fertilizer. Richard Mulvaney, one of the U of I researchers, feels it is twisted that, in this way, farmers fund research intended to promote fertilizer use with their own fertilizer purchases.
But often the industry influence may be more subtle. Joyce Lok, a graduate student at Iowa State University, said, “If a corporation funds your research, they want you to look at certain research questions that they want answered. So if that happens it’s not like you can explore other things they don’t want you to look at… I think they direct the research in that way.”
John Henry Wells, who spent several decades as a student, professor and administrator at land grant universities sees it a different way. As an academic, he hopes that his research is relevant to real world problems that agriculture faces at the time. “When you ask the question, did I ever outline a research plan with the explicit notion of is this going to be fundable, I would say no. But I thought very deeply about whether my research plan was going to be relevant, and one of the indicators of relevancy would be if the ideas I put forward would get the attention of trade associations, private industry, benefactors, etc.”
If scientists use fundability as an important criteria of selecting research topics, research intended to serve the needs of the poor and the powerless will be at a disadvantage. However, Wells says that this is hardly a new phenomenon: land grants have existed to serve the elites since their creation in the 19th century.
“As its basis, the land-grant university was intended to cater to a narrow political interest of landowners and homesteaders – individuals who had the right to vote and participate in the political structure of a representative democracy.” he says. “Contemporarily, it is not so much that the land-grant university has been corrupted by modern agro-industrial influence, as it has been historically successful in focusing on its mission in the context of our Constitutional framework of governance. For the land-grant university, its greatest strength – a political collaboration spanning the top-to-bottom echelons of influence – has been its greatest weakness.”
Land grant universities and the USDA itself first came into being at a time when the academic view of agriculture was fundamentally changing – even if most farmers at the time ignored the advice of academics, dismissing them as “book farmers” who knew little about actually working the land. Will Allen writes about this period in his book ”The War on Bugs,” telling the story of Justus von Liebig, a prominent agricultural chemist in Germany.
“In the 1830s, Liebig began asserting that the most essential plant nutrients were nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. His theories fueled the development of chemical fertilizers and ushered in a new age of agricultural science and soil chemistry in the 1840s and 1850s. Though many of Liebig’s theories were wrong, he was the first great propagandist for chemistry and for chemical-industrial agriculture.” Perhaps the most significant of his mistakes was his belief that organic matter in the soil was unimportant.
Dozens of Americans studied under Liebig and returned to the U.S. to continue their work. Two of these students established labs at Harvard and Yale, and soon “all agricultural schools and experiment stations in the country followed their lead.” Thus, practically from the start, the elites in this country served the interests of those who peddled chemical fertilizers and other agricultural inputs – even if that wasn’t their intent. No doubt many were enticed by the prospect of founding a new, modern, scientific form of agriculture, as they felt they were doing.
The unholy trinity of industry, government and academics promoting industrial agriculture and de-emphasizing or dismissing sustainable methods has a long history and it continues today. In its report, Food and Water Watch advocates a return to robust federal funding of research at land grant universities. But government is hardly immune from serving the corporate agenda either.
Take, for example, Roger Beachy, the former head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the agency in the USDA that doles out research grants. Beachy spent much of his career as an academic, collaborating with Monsanto to produce the world’s first genetically engineered tomato. He later became the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Monsanto’s non-profit arm, before President Obama appointed him to lead NIFA.
As Schwab noted, policy is often based on research, but good policy requires a basis in unbiased, objective research. In a system in which corporations and government both fund research, but due to the revolving door, the same people switch between positions within industry, lobbying for industry, and within government, what is the solution?
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
On May 8, North Carolinians will vote on a constitutional amendment that defines a marriage between a man and a woman as the “only domestic legal union” the state will recognize — thereby barring LGBT marriage equality. The amendment would also ban civil unions and end domestic partner benefits like prescription drug and health care coverage for the partners and children of public employees. At its deepest level, this issue is about fairness for everyone under the law. But less mentioned is that it is also about science, and about what’s factually true.
Many voters who go to the polls to support Amendment One will do so believing outright falsehoods about same-sex marriages and civil unions. In particular, they hold the belief that such partnerships are damaging to the health and well-being of the children raised in them. That is, after all, one of the chief justifications for the amendment.
According to the pro-Amendment One group Vote for Marriage NC, for instance, “the overwhelming body of social science evidence establishes that children do best when raised by their married mother and father.” If marriage is defined as anything other than the union between man and woman, the group adds, we will see “a higher incidence of all the documented social ills associated with children being raised in a home without their married biological parents.”
“Overwhelming body of social science evidence”? “Documented social ills”? Is this really true? Are same-sex marriages and civil unions bad for kids?
Well, no. Indeed, as I report in my new book ”The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality,” the claim that the kids won’t be all right in same sex marriages or partnerships now rates up there with a number of other hoary old falsehoods about homosexuality: the assertion that people can “choose” whether to be gay; the notion that homosexuality is a type of disorder; and the wrong idea that it can be cured through “reparative” therapy. All of these claims are explicitly disavowed by the American Psychological Association (APA).
In a moment, I want to explore the underlying psychology behind how conservatives, especially religious ones, can believe such falsehoods. But first, let’s dismantle, on a substantive level, the idea that research shows that kids fare worse when raised by two parents who are of the same gender.
According to the APA, the relevant science shows nothing of the kind. “Beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents … have no empirical foundation,” concludes a recent publication from the organization. To the contrary, the association states, the “development, adjustment, and well-being of children with lesbian and gay parents do not differ markedly from that of children with heterosexual parents.”
So how can Christian conservatives possibly claim otherwise?
Well, one favored approach is literally citing the wrong studies. There is, after all, a vast amount of research on kids in heterosexual two-parent families, and mostly these kids do quite well — certainly better than kids in single-parent families (for obvious reasons). Christian conservatives cite these studies to argue that heterosexual families are best for kids, but there’s just one glaring problem. In the studies of heterosexual two-parent families where children fare well, the comparison group is families with one mother or one father — not two mothers or two fathers. So to leap from these studies to conclusions about same-sex parenting, explains University of Virginia social scientist Charlotte Patterson, is “what we call in the trade bad sampling techniques.”
But wait: Don’t Christian conservatives want to be factually right and to believe what’s true about the world? And shouldn’t a proper reading of this research actually come as a relief to them and help to assuage their concerns about dangerous social consequences of same-sex marriage or civil unions? If only it were that simple. We all want to be right and to believe that our views are based on the best available information. But in this case, Christian conservatives utterly fail to get past their emotions, which powerfully bias their reasoning. Indeed, science doesn’t just demonstrate that the kids are all right in same-sex unions. It also shows how and why some people reason poorly in highly politicized cases like this one — and, in the case of the anti-gay views of Christian conservatives, rely on their gut emotions to come up with wrong beliefs. Here’s how it works.
There are a small number of Christian right researchers and intellectuals who have tried to make a scientific case against same-sex marriages and unions by citing alleged harms to children. This stuff isn’t mainstream or scientifically accepted — witness the APA’s statements on the matter. But from the perspective of the Christian right, that doesn’t really matter. When people are looking for evidence to support their deeply held views, the science suggests that people engage in “motivated reasoning.” Their deep emotional convictions guide the retrieval of self-supporting information that they then use to argue with, and to prop themselves up. It isn’t about truth, it’s about feeling that you’re right — righteous, even.
And where, in turn, do these emotions come from? Well, there’s the crux. A growing body of research shows that liberals and conservatives, on average, have different moral intuitions, impulses that bias us in different directions before we’re even consciously thinking about situations or issues. Indeed, this research suggests that liberals and conservatives even have different bodily responses to stimuli, of a sort that they cannot control. And one of the strongest areas of difference involves one’s sensitivity to the feeling of disgust.
A recent study, for instance, found that “individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images.” In other words, there’s now data to back up what we’ve always kind of known: The average conservative, much more than the average liberal, is having visceral feelings of disgust toward same-sex marriage. And then, when these conservatives try to consciously reason about the matter, they seize on any information to support or justify their deep-seated and uncontrolled response — which pushes them in the direction of believing and embracing information that appears to justify and ratify the emotional impulse.
And voila. Suddenly same-sex marriages and civil unions are bad for kids. How’s that for the power of human reason?
All people engage in emotion-guided or -motivated reasoning, to be sure. But mounting evidence suggests that the Left and Right may do so differently. And they definitely do so for different reasons — as the present case so strongly demonstrates.
Does this mean we should be more tolerant of the intolerant, or less disgusted by those who may consider us disgusting? Maybe. After all, people may not have much control over these impulses. They may not even be aware of them. At the very least, such knowledge should increase our level of understanding of those who disagree with us.
In the end, however, facts are facts — and emotions and gut instincts are an utterly unreliable way of identifying them. We can try to be understanding of people different from us — even when they’re manifestly failing at the same task. But the latest research makes it more untenable than ever to base public policy on gut-driven misinformation.
(Credit: editrrix / CC BY 3.0) 
The open-source CandyFab 3-D printer.(Credit: Wikipedia) 
An Occupy Wall Street demonstrator chants during a march to celebrate the protest's sixth month, Saturday, March 17, 2012, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo) (Credit: AP) 
(Credit: PhotosbyAndy via Shutterstock) 
In a Thursday, May 10, 2012 photo, a farm worker prepares a tomato field near Oneonta, Ala. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) (Credit: AP) 
(Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki via Shutterstock) 
