Talk Policy To Me: Recent Episodes
Goldman School of Public Policy and Berkeley Institute for Young Americans
This is the story of one young person’s battle to transform tech policy for teens. Because while young people struggle with mental health on social media, big tech companies are profiting off their screen time. In this episode, meet Zamaan Qureshi, who got involved in tech policy as a teenager himself. Host Anjali Nambiar shares Zamaan’s journey from advocacy on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to a face-to-face confrontation with Mark Zuckerberg.
Follow Zamaan
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zamaan-qureshi/ X: https://x.com/@zamaan_qureshi Website: https://designitforus.org/
Home. It’s one of those ideas that is core to us. But what if your home was gentrifying — becoming less affordable and recognizable with each day? This episode tells the story of Treno Morton, a young person who has set off to safeguard home not just for himself, but for his historic Black community displaced by systemic racism. Learn how he became one of the youngest leaders championing community land trusts in Canada. And join host Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño to question whether collective ownership and community engagement can solve housing affordability.
Read more about Treno’s work
- https://www.thecoast.ca/news-opinion/this-haligonian-is-asking-the-city-to-right-its-historic-wrongs-32911787
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/halifax-renews-push-for-development-tool-to-address-historic-wrongs-in-black-communities-1.7198804
- https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/government/city-hall/african-nova-scotian-land-trust-wants-cogswell-housing-project-to-address-historical-inequities/
Follow Treno
- https://www.instagram.com/treno.morton/
- https://www.instagram.com/newrootsclt/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/treno-morton/
Find all episodes at talkpolicytome.org
Two recent college grads trying to address contaminated water in an isolated town. But what can two young people really do to help solve a 20-year-old problem embedded deep in the ground — and in local politics? We’re exploring water justice and public policy in California’s Central Valley and roadblocks on the state’s path to achieving the Human Right to Water. This episode is hosted by Sunny Singhal and tells the stories of Mateo Fernandez and Destiny Montes.
This is the origin story of a teen climate activist who made it to the White House. Host Ava Kargosha shares the journey of former youth climate activist Rose Strauss, who made headlines for confronting a state senator about the oil money lurking behind his climate change denial. Listen in to learn how Rose went from student activist to full-time climate policy-maker by the age of 24.
This episode takes us to India, where fake news on Whatsapp spreads like wildfire. Is addressing it a hopeless cause? Learn about solutions with Abhishek Anand, a Gen Z journalist who joined a Deli-based fact-checking team. Listen to discover the team’s techniques for battling an endless flow of falsehoods and how their efforts protect someone from becoming a “webqoof”. Hosted by Anjali Nambiar.
A bare plot of land. An innovative farming technique. And seemingly insurmountable challenges. This is the story of a 22-year-old farmer who crosses the country to help a small community facing food insecurity. Shamik Chandrachood moves from Kentucky to California to bring a technique called intercropping to a traditional farming town — and encounters unexpected roadblocks along the way. Hosted by Sunny Singhal.
Hear more from Shamik – read his blog post:
https://www.grizzlycorps.org/post/growing-solutions-food-waste-regenerative-agriculture-in-allensworth
Emily Nguyen started working in the government as a teenager. Can teenagers get taken seriously in San Francisco City Hall? And why does it matter that youth like Emily participate in civics? Welcome to the first episode of Season 6, a story about the joys, surprises, and struggles of being young in local government. This episode hosted by Avalon Bauman features a conversation with Berkeley Institute for Young Americans policy director Dr. Erin Heys.
- Youth Commission ‘23 Budget and Priorities Report
- Lowering the Voting Age Policy Brief
Professor Robert B. Reich was voted by the graduating students of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy to be their faculty speaker. Always a beloved teacher, this occasion was especially meaningful because it marked Professor Reich's retirement from teaching.
Robert Reich was introduced by Master of Public Policy student speaker Abraham Eli Bedoy.
See show notes and full transcript here: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/news/podcast/professor-robert-reich-speaks-at-goldman-school-commencement
Tennessee Representative Justin Jones addressed the graduates at the Goldman School of Public Policy's commencement on May 14, 2023.
Representative Jones came into the national spotlight when he was expelled from the Tennessee legislature for taking to the assembly floor to protest gun violence and the refusal of the legislature to take up this issue.
See show notes and full transcript here: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/news/podcast/bonus-episode-tennessee-representative-justin-jones-speaks-at-gspp-commencement
This year, researchers found that the last 22 years were the driest consecutive years in the North American southwest in over a millennium. The pace and scale of climate change is forcing states and counties to adapt rapidly. In California, one of the industries at the forefront of the adaptation predicament is agriculture. In today’s episode, reporter Elena Neale-Sacks speaks with resilience researcher Amélie Gaudin, Sacramento Valley farmer Scott Park, and water policy research fellow Caity Peterson to understand how farmers and growers are, and aren’t, building resilience to drought.
The annual number of anti-LGBTQ bills filed has skyrocketed over the past several years, from 41 in 2018 to 240 and counting in the first three months of this year. Half of these bills are targeting transgender people specifically. At the same time, surveys of the general public show over 70% say they support same-sex marriage and laws preventing discrimination across the LGBTQ community. And Gen Z are proudly and loudly identifying with both gender and sexual fluidity. How do we square these two realities? In this episode, Talk Policy to Me reporter Amy Benziger dives into how the rise in representation of people from across the gender and sexual spectrum in media, business, and government has caused a policy backlash by the old guard to solidify their conservative base. Our guests include Fran Dunway, Founder of TomboyX; Corey Rose, a student at UC Berkeley Journalism School and former reporter for South Florida Gay News; and Pau Crego, Executive Director of the SF Office of Transgender Initiatives.
Show Notes In 2016, California voters legalized recreational cannabis through Prop 64. Now, five years after legalization, city’s are grappling with the difficulty of prioritizing social equity in the cannabis licensing process for Black, brown, and formerly incarcerated small business owners who were negatively impacted by the war on drugs. In this episode, Talk Policy to Me Reporter Noah Cole talks with Amber Senter, a cannabis advocate and Executive Director of Supernova Women and Chaney Turner, Chair of the Oakland Cannabis Regulatory Commission.
This episode was supported by research from Nabil Aziz and Victor Vasquez of the Cal in Sac Diversity and Entrepreneurship Summer 2021 fellowship program.
References https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/business/cannabis-dispensaries-oakland.html?smid=url-share
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-27/california-pot-industry-social-equity-broken-promises
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/01/in-billion-dollar-cannabis-market-racial-inequity-persists-despite-legalization.html
https://escholarship.org/content/qt7pb360bg/qt7pb360bg.pdf
https://escholarship.org/content/qt1wx6w6w2/qt1wx6w6w2.pdf?t=qzvyay
https://amberesenter.com/
https://www.beyondequity.online/
The Republican Party and the Democratic Party take different approaches to talking about race and racism. While politicians in the Republican Party have used coded language or “dog whistles” to stoke racial division, politicians in the Democratic Party either avoid talking about race in favor of talking about class issues or talk about race as a matter of white over nonwhite conflict. Each of these approaches have had difficulty resonating with a broad multiracial coalition of voters needed for electoral success. Berkeley Law Professor Ian Haney López has an alternative approach to messaging around race that could resonate with most Americans: Race-class fusion politics. In this episode, Talk Policy to Me Reporter Noah Cole speaks with Ian Haney López (Author of 2019’s “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America”) about the race-class fusion approach to building a multiracial coalition for elections. Noah and Professor Lopez discuss the historical precedent for the approach, the focus groups that demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, and criticisms of the approach. References
Can Democracy (and the Democratic Party) Survive Racism as a Strategy?- - Ian Haney Lopez Medium Article
Merge Left- Ian Haney López
Dog Whistle Politics - Ian Haney López
https://projectjuntos.us/ - Fusion politics messaging focus group findings
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/ - Poor people's campaign
https://peoplesaction.org/ People’s action
https://race-class-academy.com/ Race-Class Academy resources for learning about race-class fusion politics
Audio credits AOC Demolishes Lauren Boebert's Welfare Hypocrisy- The Young Turks (Youtube)
Ron DeSantis slams critical race theory as 'poison'- Fox News (YouTube)
The First Presidential Debate: Hillary Clinton And Donald Trump (Full Debate) | NBC News NBC News (Youtube)
Poor People's Campaign asks America to face the injustices keeping millions in poverty PBS Newshour (Youtube)
George Goehl: If Dems Don't Embrace Populism They Will Be Destroyed People’s Action (Youtube)
This is the second episode in a two-part series about changing how we vote in the United States. In today’s episode, Talk Policy To Me reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks with voting systems researchers Sara Wolk and Clay Shentrup about what they think the order of operations should be to get to a place where everyone can vote their conscience and votes accurately translate into who ends up in power. GSPP researcher and policy analyst Charlotte Hill will be back with her thoughts too.
To learn more about STAR voting, which Sara discusses in the episode, go to starvoting.us.
For more information on ranked-choice voting, go to fairvote.org/prcv.
And check out a brand-new initiative to bring proportional representation to the House of Representatives at fixourhouse.org.
In recent months and years, legislation meant to make it more difficult to vote, especially for Black and brown people, has proliferated in some state legislatures. But problems with the way we vote in the United States go deeper than these laws. In Part 1 of this two-part episode, Talk Policy To Me reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks to GSPP researcher Charlotte Hill about what it would look like to fundamentally change how we vote in this country.
Look out for Part 2 next week.
To learn more about proportional representation and what it could look like in the U.S., go to fixourhouse.org.
As of 2021, there were 30 million online dating users in the US and 321 million users worldwide. Despite this massive number of users, there's very little policy that regulates how users behave on these platforms. Studies show that a majority of women have experienced sexual harassment online and that rarely is any action taken by law enforcement in situations where technology is being used to commit acts of gender-based violence.
Talk Policy to Me host Amy Benziger joins Ziyang Fan, the head of digital trade at the World Economic Forum, to interview Nima Elmi, head of public policy at Bumble. Most people know Bumble as the dating app that challenges outdated gender norms by only giving women the ability to send the first message when they connect with a match on the app. What you might not know is that Bumble has a female-led policy team doing amazing work to keep women safe, both online and offline. We'll explore how their team is challenging legislators in both the U.S. and the U.K. to protect women and how she views the future of dating in today's current digital landscape, the metaverse, and beyond.
In February 2020, the Oakland City Council passed Oakland's Fair Chance Housing ordinance. The legislation was the first in California — joining cities nationwide like Seattle and Portland — to ensure that people returning home from the criminal justice system can legally live with family members and access, on their own, nearly all other forms of previously off-limits rental housing.
In this episode, Talk Policy to Me host Amy Benziger talks to housing activists Margaretta Lin and Lee “Taqwaa” Bonner about the fight to bring this legislation nationwide.
To support fair chance housing, visit fairchance4all.org.
With 59% of the US population fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the increased availability of booster shots, and the rise of a new variant, having a highly vaccinated public is incredibly important to the fight against COVID in the months ahead.
In this episode, Talk Policy to Me reporter Noah Cole talks to psychologist and behavioral scientist Philipp Schmid and public health expert and data scientist Crystal Son about the do's and don'ts of effective vaccine communication.
Referenced in the Podcast The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook- A practical guide for improving vaccine communication and fighting misinformation
World Health Organization Best Practices- How to Respond to Vocal Vaccine Deniers in Public
The remaining mile: How do you persuade uncertain Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19? (Civis Analytics Report)
The A’s proposal for a new waterfront baseball stadium at Oakland’s Howard Terminal is a multi-use development site that would include shops, parks, and housing. As the City of Oakland and Alameda County negotiate with the A’s over how these benefits are paid for, much has been made about the impact that sports stadiums have on communities.
In this episode, reporter Noah Cole speaks with Dr. Richard Noll of the Stanford Economics Department and Veronica Cummings of the Oakland’s City Administrator’s Office about the economic impact of sports stadiums on cities and the equity-focused community benefits process for engaging the community in the proposal.
Additional Reading Oakland City Council approved a Howard Terminal ballpark roadmap, but not on the terms the A’s want- https://oaklandside.org/2021/07/21/oakland-city-council-vote-athletics-howard-terminal-ballpark-term-sheet/
Sports stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, Stanford expert says-https://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/30/stadium-economics-noll-073015/
Oakland Waterfront Ballpark District at Howard Terminal Community Benefits- https://www.oaklandca.gov/topics/community-benefits-agreement-cba-for-the-oakland-as-waterfront-ballpark-district-at-howard-terminal
Community Benefits Agreements - https://www.forworkingfamilies.org/cblc/cba
Alameda County votes Yes to help fund Oakland A’s Howard terminal ballpark project- https://www.athleticsnation.com/2021/10/27/22748993/oakland-as-howard-terminal-ballpark-alameda-county-vote-tax
As Congress struggles to pass a spending bill that includes some of the biggest climate legislation the U.S. has seen, there’s another big hurdle the country needs to clear to make big moves on climate change —the electric grid.
In this episode, reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks to energy policy expert Steve Weissman, environmental scientist Grace Wu, and energy equity researcher Daniel Raimi, to better understand how the grid needs to change to better adapt to the effects of climate change and mitigate future effects.
Transcript Noah Cole: [00:00:01] Hey, Amy. [00:00:01][0.2]
Amy Benziger: [00:00:01] Hey, Noah. [00:00:02][0.1]
Noah Cole: [00:00:02] Today we're talking about climate change. [00:00:04][1.4]
Amy Benziger: [00:00:05] We have the most progressive president on the environment in decades, but we still can't seem to get anything done on the local or federal level. [00:00:11][6.1]
Noah Cole: [00:00:12] It's easy to blame the lack of progress on right wing holdouts in Congress, and that is a big part of the equation. But it's not the focus of today's episode. After listening to the experts on today's podcast, one thing should be clear. There are a range of tradeoffs at every step of the way that well-intentioned actors are considering. [00:00:28][16.6]
Amy Benziger: [00:00:30] So today, our reporter Elena Neale-Sacks is breaking those tradeoffs down for us. You'll hear from a UC Berkeley professor who's going to lay out the fundamentals of the electric grid. [00:00:37][7.6]
Noah Cole: [00:00:38] An environmental scientist whose work analyzes the effects of energy infrastructure on land use and wildlife. [00:00:43][4.4]
Amy Benziger: [00:00:43] And a researcher focused on the legacy of environmental racism. [00:00:46][2.4]
Noah Cole: [00:00:47] Let's kick it over to Elena, and we'll be back at the end of the pod with some thoughts. I'm Noah Cole. [00:00:50][2.8]
Amy Benziger: [00:00:51] I'm Amy Benziger, and this is Talk Policy To Me. Today, we're talking trade offs and the electric grid. [00:00:56][4.4]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:01:06] We're starting off the episode talking to Steve Weissman, a lecturer at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, who worked at the California Public Utilities Commission for 30 years. I wanted to talk to Steve to better understand the grid's history, how it works, and how climate change has shifted the way we think about energy. [00:01:25][19.4]
Steve Weissman: [00:01:27] It's really been over the last 140 years or so that we've evolved to the grid that we have now. Initially, when there was electricity needed for some type of of commercial process, then the company itself would would get a generator and create the power that they needed. When it became commercial, you still had had power being provided on pretty much of a neighborhood basis. There'd be one small generator and some poles and wires delivering the power to people within that neighborhood. Over the course of time, as you had more and more of these small generating companies doing business, they started to combine into one larger company. And as the technology improved, we learned how to have much larger power plants, which nobody would really want to have close to where they live or work. And so they they were put in a distant location. We determined that you could have high voltage lines that can carry the power in to where people live and work. [00:02:25][57.6]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:02:26] OK, I'm going to pause here for a minute because these high voltage lines, or transmission lines, are a super important part of the conversation when it comes to adapting the grid to better withstand the effects of climate change, as well as making it more reliant on renewable energy and less reliant on fossil fuels. [00:02:44][17.4]
Steve Weissman: [00:02:45] Not all parts of the country are equally blessed in terms of strong wind or a lot of solar energy available. And so there's a desire to be able to move this power longer distances to serve people in other locations. Solar and wind are intermittent. The wind blows when it's going to blow and the sun shines during the daytime. And yet people need power at many other times when those resources aren't available. The more you can spread out the resources across a broad region, the greater reliability you can have because the clouds will roll by or or you may be in a different time zone so people's needs for power at a particular hour may be different. And so this has made the notion of building out the transmission grid to move power long distances a lot more appealing. [00:03:33][48.5]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:03:35] And this is where tradeoffs come into play. In one camp, people argue it would be way more cost effective to build more transmission lines to get electricity from point A to point B, to take advantage of the natural cycles of solar and wind power, especially because we still haven't found a great way to store energy and save it for later. But there's another camp that wants to bring the focus back to localized power sources. [00:03:59][24.3]
Steve Weissman: [00:04:01] One vision is to make buildings energy neutral. You build a new building, make it very energy efficient, maybe put solar on the roof and maybe have some some battery storage. And hopefully the building basically takes care of itself. What normally happens is every time you create a new building, it creates a new burden for the greater grid. So the extent to which we can have new construction incorporating these, these opportunities for self generation and greater efficiency, and the more we can retrofit existing buildings to be able to do the same thing, the less we're going to have to rely on these long distance lines. But it also provides the opportunity that if there's a blackout in the broader grid, that that particular location can be isolated or islanded from the major main grid and continue to provide service to people. [00:04:55][54.5]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:04:57] I wanted to know, what's a situation where the grid would experience this kind of shutdown. [00:05:01][4.1]
Steve Weissman: [00:05:02] In a place like California, where you have the potential for these dramatic wildfires. We've all experienced these public safety power shutoffs or times when involuntarily the grid goes down as a result of of severe conditions. If people could have their own system to use, then they have their own form of reliability. We talk about combining the ability of various people in a particular area to to have rooftop solar, to be able to share storage, et cetera. [00:05:35][32.6]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:05:36] All right, so that example has to do with adapting the grid to better deal with the effects of climate change we're already seeing. [00:05:43][6.8]
Steve Weissman: [00:05:44] Adapting the grid to a changing climate requires a recognition that hotter temperatures and lower supplies of water in some areas, and flooding in other areas, all three of those things can have a dramatic impact on the ability of particular generating resources to function. In the West, we rely significantly on hydroelectric power. But this year, for instance, the Oroville Dam, one of the major dams, is at about 25 percent of average and average isn't even full capacity. So it's really reached a point where it may not be able to generate electricity at all and where it can produce electricity, there's going to be less there to provide to the grid than there would have been otherwise. [00:06:29][45.1]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:06:30] There's another piece of the puzzle too: changing the grid to prevent the worst case climate scenarios. Also known as mitigation. [00:06:36][6.0]
Steve Weissman: [00:06:38] Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is another critical component, of course, and there are tremendous opportunities related to the electric grid that come in two flavors. One is it's possible to take a lot of things that generally rely on fossil fuels, like transportation, and electrify them so that they won't be directly burning fossil fuels anymore. But then the other important flavor is you can take that grid and decarbonize it. Try to do everything you can to eliminate the use of fossil fuels for generating electricity. And so then what you've done is you've created a much greater reliance on the electric grid, but it's going to be a cleaner grid providing a product that's going to be more favorable for the environment. [00:07:18][39.6]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:07:19] So, with a baseline understanding of the technology of the grid, I wanted to understand the decision-making behind where that technology goes and what happens when it's installed. So I called up Grace Wu, an assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. Grace's work has focused on the impacts of clean energy infrastructure on land use and conservation efforts. And she co-founded this tool called the Map R-E Initiative. [00:07:44][25.4]
Grace Wu: [00:07:45] The Map R-E initiative is essentially a way to help policymakers, decision makers plan where to put these types of wind and solar and transmission lines, and these criteria really need to be based off of who lives there. So, you know, is it a community member? Is it industry like, you know, a coal mining plant that needs this electricity? We need to bring all these different voices to the table and consider all of their needs when siting huge landscapes of infrastructure. [00:08:24][38.3]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:08:25] Just a quick note. Grace used this word "siting" a lot when we talked. It just refers to the placement, or site, of some type of energy infrastructure, like a transmission line, wind farm, that sort of thing. If you already knew that, cool. Now back to Grace. [00:08:39][13.7]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:08:40] Could you kind of tell me just a bit more about your research on the impact of clean energy infrastructure kind of in general? [00:08:47][6.8]
Grace Wu: [00:08:48] So the enormity, the scale and the pace of this transition and the transmission, the power plant infrastructure that's required to achieve this is entirely unprecedented and will have significant impacts on our land resources because all of this infrastructure needs to be sited somewhere and where that somewhere really dictates the ecosystem impacts, the community and social impacts, job implications. So the geographic and spatial component of this transition is extremely important and has, you know, social, environmental, economic ramifications. [00:09:31][43.4]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:09:33] This research is clearly very interdisciplinary. So what are kind of all the different fields of study that come into play? [00:09:40][7.3]
Grace Wu: [00:09:43] Academically, we work with models, but from a practical perspective, trying to use the results of the, of the research, we work really closely with energy planners. So the Public Utilities Commission, for example, at the state of California and the California Energy Commission, they they work together, these energy principles within the state, to implement these short term energy plans that ideally eventually achieve these mid-century ambitious targets. And so our, my goal in my work is to improve upon their planning process in a way that helps us integrate a lot of important spatial information, and namely, from my perspective, this ecosystem impacts into that process so that we can plan with those considerations. [00:10:35][52.5]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:10:37] So you mentioned that part of what you do is collaborating on finding kind of what are some of the best and worst places to build infrastructure? So what are some of the best and worst places? [00:10:48][10.6]
Grace Wu: [00:10:49] We really are trying to target what we call low impact areas. These are brownfield locations, ideally, or areas that have been previously degraded by prior land use like agriculture. [00:11:06][16.4]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:11:07] Another quick, explanatory comment here. A brownfield location is an urban planning term for any previously developed land that is not currently in use, and Grace said there are two primary criteria for identifying a brownfield location. The first is some kind of land degradation, so think abandoned farmland that was flooded. The second is somewhere that's close to a power plant that already has transmission lines to make sure there's as little destruction to the land as possible. [00:11:34][26.7]
Grace Wu: [00:11:35] Bad places, worst places are what we would call greenfield development sites. So these are areas that have had very little human impact, and we want to maintain the quote unquote intactness of these landscapes because it has ecological value. There's very little intact landscape actually left. And so any incremental damage that we do to those landscapes is a fairly large impact on the whole, ecologically speaking. So it's not in terms of the absolute, you know, acres damaged, but it's really we've kind of already brought it to the brink and now we're pushing it even more in terms of of available habitat. [00:12:23][47.5]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:12:29] Yeah, I'm curious, is there a lot of differing ideas about how to go about this or is there a good amount of consensus in terms of like, "all right, this is what we need to do. This is where we need to do it. Let's go."? [00:12:42][13.7]
Grace Wu: [00:12:43] Yeah. The conflict that you're mentioning, it's got multiple names now. So there's a green versus green, that's been coined and then the Green Civil War, because this is really kind of infighting between people who really want renewable energy development from a climate perspective, and environmentalists who are really thinking about land use change like I am who are more traditionally from a conservation background. But nonetheless, we're all in this green camp together. [00:13:15][31.9]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:13:16] Can you kind of talk a bit about comparing the impact of the current grid versus some kind of predicted or possible impact of a cleaner grid? [00:13:28][11.5]
Grace Wu: [00:13:29] Yeah. So it would be helpful to bring in some numbers to give you a sense of the scale of this impact. So what we're seeing in the Western states, some preliminary analysis has shown that we need to increase the transmission infrastructure by between 50 to maybe 80 percent. I should also add that the location of the power plant matters for the transmission impacts. As I said earlier, it's not just the distance, but if you cite a power plant in a very pristine or intact landscape, you're you're going to have to put up a new transmission line, presumably much longer, because that area is relatively underdeveloped. [00:14:11][41.7]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:14:13] OK, OK. We know we need to increase the size of the electric grid. So I asked Grace, how does that happen? [00:14:19][6.3]
Grace Wu: [00:14:21] Oftentimes, people refer to this problem as a chicken and egg issue because we don't know what should come first. Should we put the power plant there and then plan the transmission? But then transmission takes so long, like five to 10 years. We really need to put the transmission there before putting the power plant. But then who do you, what do you incentivize first? Because project developers are independent power producers, right? We can't dictate where they should really go. But then transmission planning, especially the interstate, is a multi jurisdiction, this very difficult, convoluted process of of multiple dozens upon dozens of landowners involved. So it's challenging just to get one line, you know, sited. And even though I said, you know, 50 to 80 percent, that's dozens upon dozens of large lines that will need to be sited by mid-century to achieve these goals. So yes, there's a lot of transmission. We still need a lot more, but we built all that transmission in the last, you know, 60, 70 years. We're going to have to do that in a much shorter amount, half that amount of time. [00:15:26][65.8]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:15:31] So along with Grace and Steve, I talked to one more person for this episode. And if you're thinking, OK, Elena, you must be about to explain how all these puzzle pieces fit together, not quite. There are still more tradeoffs, and a big one is that both the tech and environmental footprints of the grid are going to have a human impact too, especially when it comes to equity. [00:15:52][21.0]
Daniel Raimi: [00:15:54] My name is Daniel Raimi, I am a fellow at Resources for the Future. I also direct our Equity in the Energy Transition Initiative. [00:16:02][7.8]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:16:03] Daniel's work focuses on making sure that in this race to net zero, we don't leave people and places behind. [00:16:09][5.8]
Daniel Raimi: [00:16:10] So we all know that we need to reduce emissions quickly and deeply, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other air pollutants, to avert the worst impacts of climate change and to reduce the burdens on public health from energy use across the economy. We also know that it's not easy to do that and that doing so has the potential to create new challenges. For example, transitioning quickly to clean energy has the potential to raise energy costs for consumers. And so it's important that as we reduce emissions, we don't at the same time increase the energy burden for low income households and others that might struggle to pay their energy bills. In addition, there are many communities around the United States where fossil fuels provide an economic backbone in terms of jobs, in terms of tax revenues for schools and roads and bridges. And as we transition away from those fuels, it's important that those communities are able to succeed in the future and that communities that currently rely on, let's say, coal mining or coal fired power plants or oil production or oil refining or even natural gas production, looking forward can have more diversified economies and more diversified sources of public revenue so that they can develop new economic drivers as fossil fuels recede into the background. [00:17:42][91.4]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:17:43] Something else Daniel brought up while we were talking is that each local context is different when it comes to the clean energy transition. [00:17:49][6.3]
Daniel Raimi: [00:17:51] The issues that are experienced in, let's say, Appalachian coal communities are really different from those that you would see in the Permian Basin in West Texas or the Four Corners region in New Mexico, or, you know, the coal fields in Wyoming or Kern County in California, which is the leading oil producer in California. And so every local context is different, which means it's really hard to find a one size fits all solution. What the federal government has started to do in the Department of Energy and what our research has found is that the most successful approaches are likely going to rely on bottom up approaches, that is local experts, local economic development professionals, local businesses identifying what is going to succeed for their communities and then the federal government can help empower and enable those local solutions to grow. I think it's pretty clear that a one size fits all top down approach from Washington, D.C. First of all, it's not going to work. And second of all, it's not going to be welcomed in many of these communities where there's already a healthy skepticism of the federal government. In the past, we have not done a good job of siting infrastructure in a way that is equitable. The legacy of environmental injustice and environmental racism is all around us, particularly in cities. And so we need to make sure that the siting of this new infrastructure does not overly burden certain communities. The last thing I would say is that we can't forget about tribes. There are a substantial number of sovereign tribes in the United States where fossil fuels play a major role in the local economy. This is true, particularly in the Southwest, but it's also true in parts of Wyoming, North Dakota, other parts of the United States. And so tribes are also going to need to identify their own strategies for economic diversification. And those are probably going to look a little bit different from what you would see at the county or state level as well. And then again, the federal government, I think, can be supportive of tribes in those efforts. [00:19:54][123.0]
Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:19:57] What are some of the specific primary concerns you have about the kind of current trajectory of the energy transition? [00:20:06][8.8]
Daniel Raimi: [00:20:08] Oh, we have a lot of challenges right now. One big challenge is just the political environment is very difficult to to achieve the emissions reductions that we need, particularly in the United States. And another thing that worries me is that often when we do energy policy in the United States, our main form of energy policy is done through the tax code and it's done through subsidies. We subsidize every major energy source that there is in the United States. We subsidize oil, we subsidize gas, we subsidize coal, we subsidize wind, we subsidize solar. We subsidize electric vehicles. We subsidize carbon capture and sequestration. And you know, a more rational energy policy would not just subsidize everything, but it would also tax things that we don't like. Carbon, in particular, a carbon tax or a cap and trade system is the solution that, you know, most folks would say is ideal. Is it politically feasible? Not right now. Might it be politically feasible in the future? I think we can hope so, and we can try to push towards that. The end result of subsidizing everything is you get more of everything. And so when you look around the world at our global energy system, we have been adding to the energy system over time. We essentially use, you know, as much coal as we ever have in the world today. We use more oil than we ever have. We use more natural gas than we ever have, we use more wind, we use more solar, we use more nuclear. And so looking forward, we need to do more than just add to the energy system. We also need to start taking stuff out of the energy system, and our policies today are not really enough to get us there. [00:21:53][105.1]
Noah Cole: [00:22:12] Those of you that made it to the end, thanks for staying with us. [00:22:14][2.3]
Amy Benziger: [00:22:15] This is complicated. [00:22:16][0.8]
Noah Cole: [00:22:17] Right, and complicated in so many ways, just as we suggested in the intro. Technologically, politically, environmentally, the list goes on, and the major looming question is how this is going to get solved on the U.S. national stage and even local stage. So Amy, time for a prediction. A year from now, what's going to happen? [00:22:34][17.4]
Amy Benziger: [00:22:35] Well, this is less of a prediction and more of a dream. But man, do I hope Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema leave the Democratic Party. We've got a president who's making climate change a priority for the first time, so something's got to give in that a handful of folks have the power to stop that progress in its tracks. [00:22:49][13.9]
Noah Cole: [00:22:50] This is a tough issue. So let's stay in that dreaming mindset. What I hope is that we're talking about this as more of a local issue next year. Steve spoke about the value of a locally controlled grid, while Daniel spoke about environmental racism on the local level. There's a long history of Black and brown movement leaders doing environmental justice work in their own communities. So I hope that a year from now, their voices are more uplifted in the conversations around climate and energy. [00:23:14][23.6]
Amy Benziger: [00:23:29] Talk Policy To Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. [00:23:34][4.7]
Noah Cole: [00:23:35] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. [00:23:39][3.3]
Amy Benziger: [00:23:40] Elena Neale-Sacks produced and edited this episode. [00:23:41][1.5]
Noah Cole: [00:23:42] The music you heard today is Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Messiti Miller. [00:23:45][3.1]
Amy Benziger: [00:23:46] I'm Amy Benziger. [00:23:47][0.4]
Noah Cole: [00:23:47] And I'm Noah Cole. [00:23:48][0.5]
Amy Benziger: [00:23:48] Catch ya next time. [00:23:48][0.0]
Today's episode explores the new wave of "rights suppressing laws" with New York Times Op-Ed writers and legal scholars Jon Michaels and David Noll.
Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/opinion/texas-abortion-law.html
Transcript Noah Cole [00:00:02] I'm Noah Cole.
Amy Benziger [00:00:03] And I'm Amy Benziger
Noah Cole [00:00:05] This is talk policy to me.
[00:00:12] So these mining communities are being bullied. Just like we are. Bullied by the police. Bullied by the tabloids. Bullied by the government, and we now need to know what they need is touch and.
[00:00:25] Gays and minors not exactly the first thing most people associate with Senate Bill eight, which effectively bans most abortions in Texas. As of this recording, SB eight has been passed, paused and reinstated to huge controversy. As I was reading about SB eight, I thought about a film I saw recently called Pride. Pride is the true story of lesbian and gay activists in the early 80s. They were unlikely allies and some of the largest fundraisers for the families affected by the British miners strike. These activists saw miners beaten on TV and essentially starved out by the government. They saw a common enemy. The miners ended the strike after three hundred and sixty two days. But this incredible bond was formed.
Noah Cole [00:01:02] Miners marched in gay pride parades, which, as you can guess, was unheard of at the time. They fought against Section 28, a law introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality. The law even banned teaching material that implied being gay was acceptable.
Amy Benziger [00:01:18] So we thought about this when I read an op ed for The New York Times written by our guest today, John Michaels and David Knoll. It's called We are becoming a Nation of Vigilantes. The piece is incredible. It helped me look at SB eight, otherwise known as the Texas Heartbeat Bill, as part of a series of laws affecting vulnerable communities across the US, including marginalized voters, transgender folks and the teachers of critical race theory
Noah Cole [00:01:39] in the case of SB8. Anyone can bring a lawsuit against someone who assists in an abortion before six weeks. This means doctors who perform the abortions, but it also means front desk workers at clinics and even family members that drive a sister or a daughter to get an abortion. SB8 incentivizes those lawsuits with a minimum payout of $10000. We start to see this in other areas as well. Teachers can be sued for incorporating race into their study of history. Coaches can be sued for letting transgender girls play soccer. The common thread among these laws is that they're being enforced by private lawsuits among citizens rather than through government action.
Amy Benziger [00:02:16] So John and David are pushing for people to view this not only as a pro-life or pro-choice issue, but an issue of pro or anti-democracy.
Noah Cole [00:02:24] It sounds like you've covered a lot of ground, Amy. The Texas abortion bill, vigilante justice and building a multiracial democracy.
Amy Benziger [00:02:32] Yeah, I thought I'd pick a light topic to kick off the new season.
Noah Cole [00:02:35] Let's get to it then.
Amy Benziger [00:02:37] Today, we're talking your neighbor, the bounty hunter.
John Michaels [00:02:48] Hi, my name is John Michaels. I teach public law classes at UCLA School of Law.
David Noll [00:02:53] Hi, I'm David. No. I'm a professor of law at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey.
Amy Benziger [00:02:58] Thank you both so much for being here. In your piece, you use the term right suppressing laws. You talk to these new wave of laws as no longer looking at protecting personal rights and more as protecting our right to be offended. You call them part of a campaign to make us forget what rights really are. Can you talk to how, from a legal standpoint, this can be happening?
David Noll [00:03:16] The precedent that the law's defenders point to most commonly is federal environmental legislation. If you look at the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act, those laws are passed in the 1970s. The claim is that first I will be injured by the construction of a factory or the pollution of a river. But notice also that the suits are serving as a check on governmental enforcement. And so folks who have put together the rights suppressing laws point to those as a precedent. So using those as a model, they say, Aha, right? I don't like abortion. I don't like critical race theory. I don't like a trans kids using a bathroom that matches their gender identity. I can copy the technology from these older laws where injured parties actually are the ones bringing suit to enforce their rights. As if anybody performs an abortion in Texas, any person may bring suit against that person. But notice you've completely disconnected the connection between suffering an actual violation of your rights and your ability to go into court and bring suit. And it's for that reason that we and others have described this as bounty hunter regimes as vigilante regimes in a very literal way. They are encouraging a posse to make use of the civil justice system and come into court and enforce these laws.
Amy Benziger [00:04:41] Exactly. And it is anonymous is the idea of an enforcer, so everyone is scared to put their neck out there to protect each other because you never know who's going to be offended or look at it as an opportunity to make money. When I first read about the lives, scary to think that my mind immediately went back to the Fugitive Slave Act, which is one of the most shameful laws in America's history
David Noll [00:04:59] for folks who aren't familiar with it, the Fugitive Slave Act is enacted as part of the compromise of 1850. So the way that the law worked is it created special judges who are known as commissioners. The commissioners got dollars. If they found an alleged fugitive and ordered the fugitives return, they got five dollars if they found that the proof was insufficient. There was a thousand dollar fine for people who aided and abetted in section five of the statute, it says. All good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law whenever their services may be required. Just a completely striking parallel with the language of SB eight that says any person may drag an abortion provider or anybody who aids in assists or attends to aid and assist an abortion provider to court.
Amy Benziger [00:06:07] And that number a thousand dollars was essentially what enforce the law, because for so many of those folks who wanted to help escape slaves, that type of money at that time was so financially catastrophic that it would be impossible to act for almost anyone. And that makes me think you just can't stifle people's beliefs in a supposedly democratic system for very long before it erupts.
David Noll [00:06:32] The Fugitive Slave Act did not resolve the question of slavery. It was an incredibly contentious piece of our politics in the 1850s. It's part of the sequence of legal enactments that lead up to the Civil War. We don't want to overstate what these laws are doing, but at the same time, we want to be very clear that there is a historical analog for these laws and it doesn't lead to pleasant places. And so you should absolutely reject the idea that these are simply a conservative version of the Clean Air Act, or they're completely different and they threaten civil society in a way that established private enforcement statutes don't do at all.
Amy Benziger [00:07:17] I think there's been a universal humbling among many Americans and the understanding that history does repeat itself. Many of us have had the luxury of thinking this was impossible. But after January six, I think our belief in the stability of a never ending democracy in America started to feel really shaky. What do you point to is the roots of this instability in our lifetime?
John Michaels [00:07:38] There is a universe of vigilantism that, as we've seen, it has been on the rise for some period of time. We market roughly from the early part of this new century, where it became most apparent in the private policing of the southern border under the belief that the federal government is not doing enough to protect the homeland as it were. And we've seen over those periods of time armed patrols and. And the second area is the mobilization of every American to fight the war on terror at home. And so there's been this rise of policing, one of the neighbors policing those who seem like they don't perfectly quote unquote fit into our community. And this isn't the same story. This teacher is not doing what we expect the teacher to do, or these kids should use the bathrooms in which their gender birth directed them to do so. It's all about kind of enforcing conformity, but not even having the state do it. But to have individuals do it creates a situation where it's not big government doing it. It's almost like a grassroots movement, and this makes it look like these are just legal issues. And should this be in state court or should it be in federal court? And David, in our lifetimes, like, whoa, slow down. Let's not lose sight of the fact we're mobilizing some group of individuals against another group of individuals.
Amy Benziger [00:09:11] For many, the last five years have felt like a breaking open of an ideological divide in the United States over the basic human right to freedom, to live the way you want to have the same opportunities as your fellow citizens and to have control over your own body. What is set the stage for these rights pressing laws to take hold is a federal judiciary fundamentally reshaped by Donald Trump. In many ways, Trump convinced a lot of single issue voters who may not have liked him for many reasons to vote for him for a single one. The U.S. Supreme Court, the three Supreme Court justices he appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all under the age of 55, with the lifetime appointments and the power to control the court for decades. Throughout his term, he also appointed over 200 judges, fundamentally shifting the courts across the United States to the right. Let's talk about the role of the courts in 2021. It felt like when the Supreme Court declined to rule on SB eight, there was massive outrage, but it was also such a blatant Partizan play. It felt like we all sort of gave up on the court.
John Michaels [00:10:12] Just to be clear, Congress could pass a federal law that protects the right to abortion, and it's not that hard in the same way that Congress could do something to further protect voting rights. I mean, it might be hard to enforce, but it's not that hard to legislate if they if they are of the mind to do so. So I do think keeping attention, not assuming as I think progressives or liberals of earlier generations assume that the courts would bail us out. And I think people recognize that that's not true anymore. And so it puts more pressure on the political branches to do what's right. Quite frankly, it's a real it's a gut check moment for the Democratic Party.
David Noll [00:10:50] I would push back on the framing of your question because giving up on the Supreme Court suggests the image of a heroic Supreme Court that is willing to go to bat for the little guy and correct defects in the political process. Time and again, the court has acted in ways that privilege the rich and that undermine equality and that undermine the functioning of a fair democratic process. I would say certainly don't look to the Supreme Court to save us here, but also revel in that because as scary as things are. It is a moment to participate in democratic politics. And, you know, in this deeply ironic way, the best response to anti-democratic politics is more democratic. Politics is democratic engagement.
Amy Benziger [00:11:42] What about individuals? Where do we go from here?
John Michaels [00:11:45] Maybe this idea that individuals are policing one another could be a new political front to essentially take stock of who we are and who we want to be. That may be too optimistic, but this seems like a rallying cry.
David Noll [00:12:01] Historically, there's been sort of a tendency to splinter into interest groups, right? So that you have the environmental movement and you have anti-discrimination movement and different interest groups within democratic politics. And what we're seeing is that all of that stuff is connected, and the demands of these different interest groups are not attainable without good democracy, without fair electoral rules, without fair elections. It's extremely hard to predict how it's all going to unfold, but we do think that in a more democratic society, you would have less space because there's just not broad, popular support for turning neighbors on neighbors and undermining the principles that are that are recognized in ROE.
Amy Benziger [00:12:44] So we're trying something new at the end of every show. We're asking all of our guests for a prediction one year from now, what's changed with this issue?
John Michaels [00:12:51] I would say one year from now, we will see more copycat state legislation on a broader range of issues. It'll be increasingly dividing the world between blue and red.
David Noll [00:13:02] A year from now, the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit that has a high likelihood of resulting in SB eight, not the entire category of laws, but but SB8 being struck down. Congress, for all its flaws, is working on historic legislation, part of which is voting rights legislation. A year from now, we will be in in the midterm campaign if the stakes weren't clear. Surrounding reproductive justice prior to the enactment of SB eight, the fact that Texas has effectively shuttered every abortion provider in the state with threats of massive civil liability directed against abortion providers and people who aid and assist them, makes clear the stakes just in a tangible way that no law professor could ever do because this is affecting people on the ground and it is having direct impacts on how they live their lives.
Amy Benziger [00:14:03] Few movements for equality have happened without the solidarity of multiracial multi issue and multiparty groups across society. John and David made that clear. Noah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Amy Benziger [00:14:14] So what stood out to me, Amy, is that we started off with an interest in the Texas abortion law, right? But eventually we ended up with our need to improve democratic systems in the U.S. overall. Initially, I thought that fighting against abortion laws would involve striking the laws down through Congress or the Supreme Court. But according to John and David, we should focus on being proactive about passing pro-democracy reforms alongside striking down the laws. That way, these bills could never be passed in the first place.
Amy Benziger [00:14:44] So a year from now, what's your prediction, Noah?
Amy Benziger [00:14:47] I'm going to go ahead and cosign John's prediction. I think we'll see more copycat laws passed around the country a year from now. Since we're heading to the midterms, I think red state politicians will be looking to rally up their base with divisive social issues like these. What about you, Amy? Where are we at a year from now?
Amy Benziger [00:15:03] I think a year from now we see record breaking participation in women running, canvasing and voting for pro-choice candidates. You know, the day after Trump was inaugurated, I marched on Washington with hundreds of thousands of women, and what we later found out was the largest single protest in U.S. history. Right now, we have a heartbeat bill moving through the Florida Legislature that's going to be signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. If that happens, that's 50 million people in America across these two states alone without access to abortion services. You know, I think one state is scary. Two states are trend and people are going to rise up.
Miners Clip [00:15:36] Congratulations on two years. You are the founding members of lesbians and gays. Support the miners. Terrific. That's great. Oh, government by.
Amy Benziger [00:15:59] Talk policy to me is a co-production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.
Amy Benziger [00:16:07] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck
Amy Benziger [00:16:11] Editing for this episode by Amy Benzinger, and Elena Neale-Sack.
Amy Benziger [00:16:15] The music you heard today is Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Kenny Miller.
Noah Cole [00:16:19] I'm Noah Cole.
Amy Benziger [00:16:20] I'm Amy Bezinger.
Amy Benziger [00:16:22] Catch you next time.
Season 5 of Talk Policy To Me is dropping soon, with new hosts Noah Cole and Amy Benziger. Listen and subscribe!
During the holiday season, food is often central to the celebration. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are experiencing hunger for the first time, and food insecurity has become a daily reality for many. Today, we’re talking about what some say is a practical solution to rising hunger—urban agriculture and the policies that shape and support it.
If you live in the Bay Area and are experiencing hunger this holiday season, check out these resources that may be able to offer help:
- (San Jose) West Valley Community Services (https://www.wvcommunityservices.org/)
- (Berkeley) Berkeley Food Pantry (https://www.berkeleyfoodpantry.org/)
- (Peninsula) San Francisco-Marin Food Bank (https://www.sfmfoodbank.org/)
- (Oakland/Alameda) Alameda County Food Bank (https://www.accfb.org/)
- (Richmond) Richmond Emergency Food Pantry (http://www.refp.org/)
If you live outside the Bay, you can visit https://www.feedingamerica.org to find your nearest food bank.
In this final episode of TPTM Season 4, we say goodbye to hosts Reem and Colleen and hello to the incoming Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy, Dr. David C. Wilson.
Cash transfers discourage work, price ceilings and floors (like the minimum wage) are economically inefficient, and trade makes everyone better off.
If you’ve ever taken a basic economics course in high school or even in college, these were probably the major takeaways. But these are myths --dire oversimplifications at best, and outright inaccuracies at worst --that often represent the most basic building blocks of conservative arguments against critical safety net policies. In this episode of Talk Policy To Me, GSPP economist Hilary Hoynes and TPTM reporter Reem Rayef unpacked the most nefarious myths to surface the truth about the impacts of economic policies, and imagine a better way to teach and learn economics.
*CONTENT WARNING: This episode involves mention of police violence against people of color.*
Since the 1970s, Black police officers have formed informal unions in response to racism within their departments and in the greater community. In this episode, reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks to an economist, a law professor, and a former president of a Black police union to better understand the purpose these organizations serve, their limits, and the ways in which they differ from police unions with bargaining power, like the Police Benevolent Association and Fraternal Order of Police.
As vaccine rates rise and health experts give more public activities the stamp of approval, people have begun shifting from private spaces to public ones. Today, we’re talking about what public spaces are and the policies that govern them. We’ll also talk about the unhoused folks for whom the distinction between public and private space is less clear.
Archival audio from YouTube user Saul Rouda.
On this episode of TPTM, we’re talking philanthropy yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Since the Gilded Age, philanthropists have positioned themselves as gracious, charitable forces in society who are experts in identifying and solving our social ails. But the institution of philanthropy has had its critics from day one. What are the origins of modern philanthropy in the US, and how did they lead us to where we are today? What role (if any) does philanthropy have in a democratic society? And if there are real problems with philanthropy, how should we address them? Should we focus our efforts on implementing regulations and reforms of modern philanthropic institutions? Is our goal to tear down the institution of philanthropy writ large, and put in place a (potentially erosive) wealth tax? Or should we rely on rich people to voluntarily spend down their wealth? Colleen and Reem will dig in to explore the past, present, and possible futures of modern philanthropy in the US.
Want to learn more? Check out these follow-up resources:
- Resource Generation’s Class Privilege Quiz, Giving Pledge, and Class Definitions and Income Brackets
- Resource Generation’s National Partners, Movement for Black Lives and Center for Popular Democracy
- The Revolution Will Not Be Funded by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
- Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva
- Read Laila’s op-ed on the Goldman website
- Find Sophie Dover on Twitter
Philanthropy and Social Movements podcast series by Harvard Kennedy School students
With over 100 million users and counting in the US, TikTok is beginning to play a major role in the political education and mobilization of its young user base.
In this episode, which was written and recorded in the aftermath of the November 2020 election, Talk Policy to Me reporter Noah Cole spoke with Aidan Kohn-Murphy and Toni Akande, two of the teens who run the “Gen Z for Change” TikTok page. Aidan and Toni touched on how they used traditional organizing practices to get out the vote through TikTok in the last election cycle, the tradeoffs between producing popular and substantive political content, and where they think the future of online political mobilization is headed. Noah also heard from four additional political TikTok creators during a speed round of questions on politics, policy, and online civic engagement.
More info on:
- Gen Z for Change https://genzforchange.us/ https://www.tiktok.com/@genzforchange
- Quentin Jiles https://linktr.ee/Qrjiles https://www.tiktok.com/@quentinjiles
- Elise Joshi https://www.tiktok.com/@elisejoshi
- Matthew Rein “The Dem Hype House” https://www.tiktok.com/@thedemhypehouse
- Colton Hess “Tok the Vote” https://www.tokthevote.com/ https://www.tiktok.com/@tok.the.vote
Last summer, as a part of the public reckoning with racialized police violence, chants and mantras like “Whose Streets? Our Streets” and “We Keep Us Safe” and “We Are The Change We’ve Been Waiting For” resounded in the streets and all over social media.
What would it mean to take these slogans seriously? To actually imbue people and communities -- rather than political representatives and corporations -- with the power to create and change the world around them?
Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef delved into the practice and philosophy of anarchism, in search of an answer. In this episode, Reem speaks with Bryce Liedtke (friend, anarchist, GSPP alum, and Policy Director of the Scout Institute) about how he reconciles the principles of anarchism with his work in the policy space. Then, we hear from Dana Ward (anarchist, professor emeritus at Pitzer College) about the historical and philosophical origins and transformations of anarchism, in the United States and around the world.
Additional Reading
- The basics of anarchism as defined by Kim Kelly in Teen Vogue
- Dana Ward’s Anarchy Archives
- Are You An Anarchist? by David Graeber
Black History Month 2021 has been an eventful occasion at the Goldman School of Public Policy. One student organization, Black Students in Public Policy (BiPP) has been responsible for putting together a weekly speaker series on health and wellness, economic policy, politics, and social impact in the Black community. In this episode of *Talk Policy To Me*, we hear from 7 students in BiPP who share their path to public policy and the ways that they are celebrating Black History Month.
For more information on the Black History Month Speaker Series, visit goldman.school/blackhistorymonth
The highly contentious Georgia Senate elections are right around the corner. The results will determine which party holds a Senate majority for the next two years. In this episode, we take a step back and examine the Senate as an institution in the current political context of hyperpolarization. Is it still functional as a mechanism of effective government? Maybe. Or, maybe not.
To help make sense of it all, we spoke with UC Santa Cruz politics professor and co-author of The Invention of the United States Senate, Dan Wirls, and senior contributor at The Appeal, Jay Willis, who has written extensively on the Senate filibuster. Both Dan and Jay discuss the most worrisome aspects of the Senate—equal representation of states and the filibuster as a mechanism for gridlock—as well as potential paths forward.
When shelter-in-place orders were mandated in cities across the US, city employees sprang into action to facilitate the transition. Day-to-day government happenings were instantly and radically transformed, but one thing that cities still needed to do? Community engagement. In the face of orders for folks to stay home and social distance, cities faced a reality where they needed to quickly and efficiently transition to new or unfamiliar modes of digital engagement. So… how’d they do it?
In this episode, we hear from Meghann Lucy, a sociology PhD student who studied the transition to digital engagement in Boston this past summer, and Heather Imboden, an engagement practitioner and the founding principal of Communities in Collaboration in Oakland. Both Meghann and Heather discuss what cities are learning about how to meaningfully engage residents virtually, and how this moment is shaping the future of city-led engagement processes more broadly.
Nothing in the US Constitution mandates or guarantees a two-party political system. Yet Americans are accustomed to understanding the political landscape as a binary of Democrats and Republicans; third parties are rarely taken seriously, particularly on the national scale.
Members and candidates of political third parties, like the Green Party, argue that this is bad for democracy. With an increasing share of the electorate -- particularly young people -- growing disenchanted with the existing parties, third parties represent an opportunity to re-engage independent voters in civic life by better representing their worldviews and preferences. That’s why the typical Green Party platform reads like that of a very progressive Democrat, calling for deep investment in transformative climate policy, an end to all wars, and major social safety net expansion, plus electrical reforms that make third party candidates more visible and viable choices in the voting booth.
In this episode, which was written and recorded before the November 3 election, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef spoke with Jake Tonkel, a biomedical engineer who ran for San Jose City Council as a member of the Green Party. Jake shared his perspective on the positionality of local and national Green Party candidates in the political sphere, the damaging narrative around spoiler candidates, and the Green Party’s theory of change. Jake also charted a course for elevating the profile of the Green Party, and other non-major parties, through targeted electoral and ballot access reforms.
Related Resources
- Video from Vox on the benefits of multi-party systems
- Article by Briahna Joy Gray on “Vote Blue No Matter Who” politics, and their costs to democracy
- Document from the National Association of Secretaries of State detailing ballot access rules for every state
- CSPAN interview with Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins
- Jake Tonkel’s campaign site
On November 3rd, California voters will decide on Proposition 22. The Proposition aims to allow app-based drivers to maintain their status as Independent Contractors by carving out a special exception to Assembly Bill 5. We talk to Goldman Alumna Rebecca Stack-Martinez and the Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center Ken Jacobs about the implications of Prop 22 on labor and the influence of money on the most expensive ballot initiative in California’s History.
- Gig Workers Rising
- Report- “The Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiative Guarantees only $5.64 an Hour,” Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, UC Berkeley Labor Center
Talking: Election coverage—where’s the policy?
Hourly breaking news. An endless stream of push notifications. A backlog of political podcasts (but not this one, right?).
Today we’re talking about how the news media covers elections, and how voters can find real information within the sea of coverage in the final weeks before the election.
Welcome to Season 4 of Talk Policy to Me!
It’s been a whirlwind of policy news and happenings since you last heard from us (to say the least) and there’s a lot to catch up on. While we work hard on new episodes, we thought we’d pop into your feeds for a brief moment to introduce a few new members of the TPTM team and take a moment to ask one another: What media resources are you looking toward for grounding and clarity in the lead up to the November election?
Feel free to share with us what you’re reading or listening to @goldmanschool and @BIFYA_Berkeley on Twitter and @GoldmanSchool on Instagram and stay tuned for forthcoming Season 4 episodes!
The brutal murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis Police Department officers, and the failure of the justice system to quickly prosecute the police officers involved, has triggered an explosion of activism across the country, and the world, in loud protest of police brutality against Black people. These actions vary dramatically along spectrums of intended impact and severity. And the response from media, police, and the public have exhibited the same variation.
Overwhelmingly, we’ve seen peaceful demonstrations and efforts to funnel money to bail funds, Black-led organizations, and Black-owned businesses -- both powered strongly by the social media organizing of young people. We’ve also seen the amplification of looting and wealth redistribution actions, used as justification for violent police and military response which have been stoked and authorized by the president. Finally, we’ve seen the chaos and anguish of the moment used to leverage the importance of voting in the coming Presidential election and unseating Donald Trump.
These renewed calls to vote coincide with two clear barriers to democratic in-person elections: shelter-in-place orders in response to the ongoing spread of Coronavirus, and local curfew orders beginning as early as 1PM in some cities, aimed at reducing protest activity.
In mid-April, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef spoke with Dr. Sunshine Hillygus, Professor of Political Science at Duke University and co-author of the newly published Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes Into Civic Action, about the behavior of young people when it comes to voting and elections. At the time of the conversation, the Democratic primary had swung definitively in favor of Joe Biden, California had been under stay-at-home orders for over a month, and George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade were still alive.
Dr. Hillygus and her co-author Dr. John Holbein examine the personal and systematic barriers that stand between young people and the voting booth -- and the consequences of the vast disparities in voting rates between generations. In this episode, which is the last in Talk Policy To Me’s series on democracy, Reem and Dr. Hillygus discuss the damaging misconceptions about young people’s civic attitudes, and how these misconceptions are weaponized by conservatives in the service of voter suppression. Why is it so hard to get young people out to the voting booth? Who benefits when young people stay in on election day, and who pays the price? What is the role of the public school system in preparing young people to be engaged citizens? And how can state electoral policies support civic attitudes?
Dr. Hillygus asserts the importance of voting, particularly for those who want to see radical change in entrenched systems which seem broken beyond repair -- most notably, the healthcare and police systems. In the current moment, voting can seem like too small and too remote an action in response to the atrocities that have come to the fore in recent months, but which have been plaguing the Black community for much, much longer. And on its own, voting in November is too small an action.
The urgent challenges faced by the United States require direct action and local community, in addition to the long-term changes that could become reality if young people were proportionally represented in the voting booth.
Writing referenced in this episode is linked here:
- Stop Blaming Young People For Not Turning Out for Sanders by Ibram X Kendi
- An Excitingly Simple Solution to Youth Turnout For the Primaries and Beyond by Charlotte Hill and Jacob Grumbach
For more on the importance of voting for systemic change, check out the rest of Talk Policy To Me’s series on democracy:
- Talking Democracy in the Era of COVID-19
- Talking 16 Year Olds and Voting
- Talking Voting and Elections
For ways to support Black communities and frontline protestors in the Bay Area, please consider supporting the following organizations with your voice and/or money:
- The East Oakland Collective
- Anti Police-Terror Project
- People’s Breakfast Oakland
- National Lawyers Guild - SF Bay Area Chapter
The 2020 Census launched April 1st, 2020. With it comes yet another time where individuals have to distill their identities into check boxes with limited options. In this episode, we’re exploring how the race/ethnicity category options were created and how those available choices impact policy. Host Sarah Edwards talks with Cristina Mora, Associate Director of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Cristina wrote the book “Making Hispanics”, which explores the creation of the Hispanic ethnicity census category. Cristina shares the challenges in race/ethnicity category creation, policy and personal implications, and why the census is so important.
To fill out the 2020 Census for your household, visit 2020census.gov.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought America to a screeching standstill, with most non-essential businesses shutting down, events being cancelled and postponed, school systems going virtual, and skyrocketing unemployment. And on top of it all, we’re technically in the midst of an election season, which has also been severely disrupted by the shelter-in-place measures implemented across the country.
In this Q&A-style episode of Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef interviews former Labor Secretary and economic inequality scholar Robert B Reich on the subject of democracy in the era of COVID-19.
In other episodes for this series on democracy, we discuss barriers to the voting booth and distortions in our electoral system that suppress the will of the people -- particularly black and brown people, and young people. In this episode, we dive deep into what happens when a pandemic is layered over these persistent issues. What happens when candidates can’t campaign? When polling places are shut down due to a lack of volunteers willing to risk their health on election day? When governors cancel primaries in the interest of discouraging big gatherings? When the sitting president demonstrates flagrant disregard for public health, and a single-minded goal of securing a second term? What happens if a candidate dies of COVID-19?
Can we even call what remains a democratic election?
This episode was made possible by the curiosity and generosity of members of the GSPP community, who contributed their questions and/or voices to this project. A heartfelt thanks to you all! Voices heard on this episode are: Larry Rosenthal, Molly McGregor, Lily Nienstedt, Mai Sistla, Justin Lam, and Maiya Zwerling.
For more on inequality, democracy, and Twitter beef with Elon Musk, tune into Professor Reich’s Youtube series, The Common Good.
Continuing with our effort to cover the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy issues, Sarah Edwards (MPP ’20) speaks with Ellora Derenoncourt, who will join the Goldman Faculty in the fall. Tune in to the conversation unpacking the issues of racial inequality in health and economics and learn from Ellora’s historic economics perspective.
For more on Ellora’s work, visit her website.
Check out the “Campus Conversations” that was mentioned in the episode
For more in this series, check out Sarah’s conversation with Rashawn Ray.
In discussions around expanding voter turnout, many different policy interventions come up—same day voter registration, automatic voter registration, making Election day a holiday. But what if the best way to change the likelihood of people voting actually came in changing their first voting experience?
There’s a body of evidence that shows that voting for the first time at 16, rather than 18, increases the chances of people becoming life-long voters. In this second episode in our series on strengthening our democracy, we look at how this change can play a role to improve outcomes for all.
In this episode, host Sarah Edwards (MPP ’20) explores efforts to expand the right to vote to 16 and 17 year olds. She speaks with Brandon Klugman, Campaign Manger of Vote16 USA and Arianna Nassiri, a high school student in San Francisco leading the push to lower the voting age for SF local and school board elections.
Curious to learn more? We suggest the following:
- Read this article on the outcomes related to lowering the voting age
- Explore Ayanna Pressley’s efforts for federal legislation
- Stay up-to-date on San Francisco’s upcoming campaign
As the numbers are coming in, statistics show that communities of color, particularly Latinx and Black communities are both contracting COVID at higher rates and dying from it at higher rates. What is causing this inequity? What solutions can we enact, both now and in the future, to change this? Sarah Edwards (MPP ’20) spoke with Rashawn Ray, David M. Rubenstein fellow at the Brookings Institution and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.
To learn more about this issue, we recommend reading these two articles Rashawn wrote for Brookings:
- “Why are Blacks dying at higher rates from COVID-19?”
- “How to reduce the racial gap in COVID-19 deaths”
Welcome to the first episode in TPTM’s brand new series on Democracy!
Do you ever wonder why our voting and election systems work the way they do? Has anyone ever preached to you the virtues (or evils) of rank choice voting, blockchain, or eliminating the electoral college? Then tune in to the lastest TPTM episode where Colleen (MPP ‘21) sits down with elections-policy experts and fellow Goldman students Rachel Wallace (MPP’20) and Ben Raderstorf (MPP ‘20) to break down the “hows” and “whys” of our voting systems. Listen in as they chat about the values we embrace when designing our elections, break down a bunch of elections-policy proposals, and argue why we should care about any of this in the first place. Be sure to keep your eye out for upcoming episodes in our Democracy series. We’ll be talking about the upcoming election in the era of COVID-19 and trying to answer the pressing questions that arise given this unprecedented context.
We are nearly one month into California’s shelter-in-place order in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it looks like, in the Bay Area at least, we’re seeing some payoff from our early efforts to socially distance; hospitals have not seen the number of patients initially expected, and public health experts are tentatively declaring our success in flattening the proverbial curve.
In spite of these successes, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown America’s inequalities into even sharper relief. Those who are most exposed to risk are the poorest among us, the undocumented, the unhoused, the under-or un-insured, and those whose incomes have suddenly disappeared as non-essential businesses have closed down.
Talk Policy To Me hosts Colleen Pulawski (MPP ‘21), Sarah Edwards (MPP ‘20), Reem Rayef (MPP ‘21) and Khalid Kaldi (MPP ‘21) assembled on a video call for the podcast’s first ever virtual roundtable, to share learnings about the ways in which the crisis has both exposed and exacerbated gaping inequality in the US—and what policymakers, organizers, and communities are doing to protect the vulnerable among us.
In this episode we discuss all things COVID-19. How does the federal government’s stimulus bill risk cementing economic inequality? What does shelter-in-place mean if you don’t have a home? How should governors and mayors talk about the pandemic, when the president doesn’t appear to take it seriously? And what are the dangers and benefits of talking about silver linings?
To wrap-up our series on Demography Shifts, Colleen (MPP ‘21) sat down with Goldman School Visiting Assistant Professor Mia Bird, who started as an MPP student at GSPP before pursuing an MA in economic demography (and then returning again to GSPP as a PhD!).
Professor Bird discusses the different approaches that demographers and policymakers might take toward demographic shifts, shares her perspective on how demography can help destabilize stuck-in-the-past policy models, and offers thoughts on how demography and policy might work together in the future.
Colleen and Sarah (MPP ‘20) tease out some of the lessons they’ve learned about demography throughout this series and consider their responsibility to fold the demographic perspective into their work as future policy leaders.
More than half of the student population in U.S. public schools identify as students of color; yet less than one in five—18 percent— of the teacher workforce identify as teachers of color. Does diversity and inclusion in the teaching profession even matter? And, if so, how can public policy play a constructive role?
To find answers to these questions, Khalid Kaldi (MPP ’21) sat down with two former teachers of color. MPP student, Whitney Parra, explains the importance of cultural understanding in the classroom and provides a window into the personal experiences of a teacher of color. Then, UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Education, Travis Bristol, shares some of his policy recommendations on how to strengthen the ways we recruit and retain teachers of color.
For more on demographic shifts, check out our episodes on aging and transportation, direct care workers and fertility.
We know from research—and from personal experience with our own elders—that mobility and independence are key components of mental and emotional wellness for the over 65, or senior, population. However, once they’re no longer able to drive their cars due to health and safety concerns, that mobility—or ease of getting from point A to point B—plummets. A senior who no longer drives may be supported by their family for essential trips to health care services and the grocery story, but even in this best-case scenario, their physical world shrinks substantially.
The challenge is that when the elderly stop driving, they are largely left without good alternatives for transportation. For the vast majority of seniors who live in suburban and rural areas, there is no public transit to speak of, and a car-oriented streetscape means that walking isn’t a viable option either. And for the tiny percentage living in dense cities, public transit can be challenging to navigate for seniors who spent most of their lives driving their own cars –and it may not even serve the destinations they’re hoping to reach.
The elderly community is a treasured and crucial part of our social fabric; seniors work, provide childcare to working families, volunteer, create art, and more. Improving transit and transportation systems to serve their needs is imperative, particularly as the share of the US population over the age of 65 grows.
In the latest episode in our series on demographic shifts, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef (MPP/MA-ERG ‘21) speaks with Clarrissa Cabansagan of TransForm and Dr. Sandi Rosenbloom of UT Austin to uncover how transportation systems must respond to the existing (and growing) issue of elderly mobility –and how doing so could help get us all out of our cars and onto public transit.
Clarrissa Cabansaganis the New Mobility Policy Director at TransForm and a UC Berkeley alum. Her work at TransForm centers on transportation equity and justice, and what that looks like in the era of scooters and Uber. She is a lifetime Bay Area resident.
Dr. Sandi Rosenbloomis a Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Director of the UT Lab for Safe & Healthy Aging. Read her report for the Urban Institute on elderly access to paratransit services here.
For more on demographic shifts, check out our episodes on direct care workers and fertility.
As our population ages, we are faced with a number of policy challenges. One, in particular, stands out: how will we provide care for those who need help?
Our next episode in the series around Demographic Shifts explores the policy implications of the aging population and the people who will help care for them.
California expects to see its population of seniors rise from 15 to 25% in the next 40 years. While the challenge of caring for an aging population will expand as the population grows, there are real policy issues today. The Direct Care industry, which includes home care workers and care facility workers, faces many challenges. In this episode, Reem Rayef (MPP/ERG ’21) and Sarah Edwards (MPP ’20) speak with experts to unpack the challenges of today and tomorrow. Robert Espinoza from PHI National, a research and advocacy organization, shared the national perspective. Tanya Bustamante and Cuidonce Corona from Berkeley Aging Services Division ground the challenges in what is happening in Berkeley.
Interested in learning more? Check out Berkeley’s Age-Friendly Plan.
Read PHI’s most recent report.
Stay tuned for another episode exploring Demographic Shifts and the role of policy!
When news articles talk about the county’s declining fertility, there tends to be a tone of panic and often of judgment. But what is the truth of fertility rate declines? What role does policy play in impacting these rates? And how does the nature of fertility rates influence policy?
In this episode, Sarah Edwards (MPP 20) turns to a local expert, demography PhD Leslie Root. Leslie helps us unpack this specific intersection between demography and policy, and what it means for our future.
Curious for more information on changing fertility rates and policy implications? Check out the following:
- Leslie’s Washington Post Op-Ed: "Don’t Panic Over Declining Fertility Rates—And Don’t Let Anyone Guilt You”
- The Shift Project, which Leslie mentioned in the podcast. This research effort by Berkeley and UCSF researchers has advanced our understanding of the nature of shift work and the implications these policies have.
- Paid Leave US, an advocacy organization working to expand paid leave policies in California and the nation.
It’s 2020 and Talk Policy to Me is back with a brand new series on Demographic Shifts.
Over the next few episodes, we’ll dive into some of the most pressing demographic shifts taking place here in California, and discuss what their implications are for policymaking both here in California and across the country. In this short kickoff episode, hosts Colleen (MPP ‘21) and Sarah (MPP ‘20) ground us in a shared definition of demography, share a preview of some of the shifts we’ll be diving into later in the series, and pose some big-picture questions that these changes raise from the policy perspective.
Grab a warm drink and cozy up under your favorite blanket, listeners! In Talk Policy To Me’s final episode of 2019, we got all five hosts in one room to talk about... talking policy during the holidays. Join our hosts Reem, Khalid, Colleen, Spencer, and Sarah as they explore how policy gets personal during the holidays when we gather with family and friends, reckon with hometown and childhood memories, and look toward the future as a new year approaches.
How does public policy get all wrapped up in your holiday festivities? Looking for better ways to talk policy all season long?
- TPTM Challenge! Talk about policies, not personalities: ask everyone at your holiday dinner table to share one public policy they are grateful for.
- Perfect your productive, political persuasion with NYT’s Angry Uncle Bot for when talk of impeachment (inevitably) comes up.
- Need a moment to step away from all the political chatter? Check out Harvard Med’s strategies for self-care this holiday season.
Happy Holidays from all of us here at Talk Policy to Me. Catch you in 2020!
We’re not used to thinking about transportation as a raced policy area. But, like all other policy areas, transportation policy has the potential to improve racial equity or widen racial disparities. But writer and historian Dr. Ibram X. Kendi asserts that all ideas, actions, and policies are either racist or anti-racist, removing the gray area of so-called ‘race neutrality’ in his recently published book, How To Be An Anti-Racist. This means that transportation policy – like all other policy areas – has the potential to improve racial equity, or widen racial disparities.
For the final episode of our policy design series, Talk Policy To Me host Reem Rayef interviews two transportation experts about how planners and policymakers can build transportation systems that serve all communities, and improve accessibility for those who need it most. Dan Chatman, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of City & Regional Planning, discusses how public transit infrastructures can facilitate increased racial segregation, and describes the inequitable distribution of transit’s costs and benefits between white and non-white communities. Lateefah Simon, District 7 Representative on the BART Board of Directors and President of the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, makes the concept of anti-racist transportation policy concrete through discussion of current policy debates happening at the BART Board of Directors. Dan and Lateefah are passionate about centering racial equity in designing both transportation infrastructures, and the policies that we lay over those infrastructures. If you listen closely, you can hear them banging their fists on the studio table, as they drive home their points on transit justice.
The inequities of transit and transportation systems are clearly visible in the Bay Area, where BART lines and highways bisect historically Black neighborhoods, transit fares are regressive, and transit-oriented development is code for Black displacement. But the system isn’t broken beyond repair. Listen to this episode of Talk Policy To Me to learn how policymakers are integrating radical ideas of anti-racism into bureaucratic and regulatory processes to bring about justice in transportation systems, and beyond.
For more information about anti-racism, check out Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How To Be An Antiracist. It’s an impactful and important read.
For reading about equitable and just transportation policy in California, visit TransForm at www.transformca.org.
The study referenced in the interview with Dan Chatman, titled “Race, Space, and Struggles for Mobility: Transportation Impacts on African Americans in Oakland and the Bay Area” can be found here.
Thanks to the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute for the use of footage from the September 2019 talk by Ibram X. Kendi which was excerpted in this episode. The speech and panel conversation can be found in their entirety here.
Who benefits most from the tax system? What did the Trump tax cuts achieve? How do taxes affect inequality? What’s the relationship between taxes and democracy?
Tax policy seems like it was designed by, of, and for the rich. But, as our guest today Gabriel Zucman points out, the U.S. tax code was once a vastly different beast.
Zucman is an associate professor of economics at UC Berkeley, director of the Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and economic advisor for two 2020 presidential campaigns. His latest book The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make them Pay, co-written with UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, documents the dramatic transformation of the U.S. tax code. In less than a lifetime, Americans exchanged the most progressive tax system in the world—a tax system with marginal income tax rates as high as 94 percent for the highest earners—for one where the 400 wealthiest members of society pay a lower tax rate than any other income group.
Zucman’s work is clear. "Tax dodging” and the current iteration of the tax system—from income and payroll taxes to sales and property taxes—are not inevitable outcomes, but deliberate choices made by policymakers to privilege the interests of wealthy Americans and multinational corporations. If you believe this theory, it follows that we can and should make better choices in the future. For a preview of what these choices might look like and an outline of how we can design a progressive tax system for the twenty-first century, tune in to this conversation between Khalid Kaldi (MPP ’21) and Gabriel Zucman.
If tax policy brings you joy, check out:
- Tax Policy Simulator
- 60 Profitable Fortune 500 Companies Avoided All Federal Income Taxes in 2018, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Report)
- Combating Inequality Conference (Video)
What options do we have in our toolkit as policymakers when it comes to policy design? Are the tools government typically chooses to wield the most effective ones? If not, how can we get government to invest in a new approach to policy design?
In episode three of our series on policy design and implementation, Colleen Pulawski (MPP ’21) speaks with Brandon Greene of the Oakland Civic Design Lab and Michael Ford in the Oakland Department of Transportation about using human-centered design to restructure government policies and services. Spencer Bowen (MPP ‘20) joins in the conversation to help unpack what we, as policy students, should take away from this application of human-centered design.
Talking School Integration
Was school integration a “failed experiment”? Is the impact of policy limited when it comes to education?
In this episode, Goldman Professor Rucker Johnson debunks the myths around school integration and shares the insights from his new book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. In this second episode of our series on Policy Design and Implementation, Sarah Edwards (MPP ’20) speaks with Professor Johnson about the way well-designed policy can lead to significant outcomes for all children. The conversation covers the impacts of historic desegregation, the dangers of current resegreation, and the best combination of policies to achieve diversity and educational excellence.
As with many of the issues that Talk Policy to Me covers, there is more to the story of integration and race in schools than we could cover in this short episode. Here are a few resources we suggest if you are interested in diving deeper:
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Check out Children of the Dream, available at your local bookstore
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Read “It was never about Busing” by Nikole Hannah-Jones
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Explore the Washington Posts’ map on school district diversity
What do Healthcare.gov, police officer recruitment, and 911 call centers have in common? All can be improved through smart policy design tweaks!
In this episode, Goldman Professor Elizabeth Linos and TPTM host Spencer Bowen (MPP '20) discuss how small changes in policy design can result in big differences in impact. The first in our ongoing series on Policy Design and Implementation, this episode helps break down the different mechanisms that can be used to influence the direction of policy results. In addition, Professor Linos shares her most recent research, about small changes to improve the day-to-day lives (and then the retention!) of 911 call center staff.
The Talk Policy to Me team is back for Season 3! This season, our three hosts from last year(Spencer, Reem, and Sarah) are joined by two new hosts, Colleen and Khalid. Host Spencer Bowen (MPP 2020) leads a conversation with the team about how policies we take for granted were once policy choices. Hear from all five hosts as to what “status quo” policies they can’t let go of.
It’s often assumed that a college student living on ramen or going to events for free pizza is just part of the experience of being a “starving student.” But the data show a much grimmer reality: 56% of college students nationally have experienced housing insecurity and 40% of students at UC Berkeley are food insecure. How can this issue be tackled when the narrative downplays the depth of the problem?
In this episode, Sarah Edwards (MPP 2020) speaks with national and local experts on their efforts to change that narrative and provide real support to students. Sarah turns to Marissa Meyers from the Hope Center at Temple University for the national perspectives and to Ruben Canedo and Maria Balcazar from the Berkeley Basic Needs Center for what’s happening on the UC Berkeley campus. Tune in to learn more about the challenges that many students face and the progress toward solutions.
What more can you do? Our team suggests you start here:
- Check out the most recent report from the Hope Center with results from their “Real College” Survey
- Follow the conversations around concerns with the cost of college and around funding basic needs on college campuses—we suggest this brief, this article, and this report as a place to start.
- Help change the narrative downplaying the challenges many students face. Talk to the people in your life about this issue, share your story through the #realcollege campaign, or volunteer with the Berkeley Basic Needs Center.
Parks. Freeways. Street lamps. You might not group those together, but they’re all public goods – the goods and services that prop up a functioning society. They’re also things that our market-based economy doesn’t supply in the right places and right amounts without some thoughtful public policy.
Spencer Bowen (MPP ’20) sat down with his fellow MPP candidate Eric Harris Bernstein to talk about public goods – and specifically public restrooms.
In this episode, you’ll hear a broad overview of public goods, takes on ongoing bathroom-centered equity battles, scholarly perspectives on restrooms’ place in our culture, and much more. You’ll also hear a story about bathrooms that Eric produced in the fall for North Gate Radio’s “The Fix,” a radio show about public policy solutions.
Jaunary 2019 marked the one-year anniversary of the legalization of recreational cannabis use in California, and the launch of the Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley. Sarah Edwards (MPP ‘20) sat down with Michael Polson, researcher and anthropologist, to discuss the impact of legalization on the growers and on the rural communities whose economies often center on cannabis cultivation. Tune in to unpack the equity concerns of the new process, the role of stigma in media narratives, and the personal implications of these changes.
In Part 2 of our 2-episode carbon footprint series, TPTM hosts Reem, Spencer, and Sarah reflect on the results of their two-week-long challenge to drastically reduce their personal carbon emissions through changes to their diets, commutes, consumption habits, and electricity use. But do individual emissions reductions matter when corporations and industries continue to pollute with impunity? We can’t achieve ambitious climate goals – like California’s pledge to reduce emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 – through individual actions. So what else will it take?
Reem turns to Bob Epstein of Environmental Entrepreneurs, and then Professor Dan Kammen of the Goldman School, to learn about the transformations in technology, policy, and the environmental movement as a whole, that will facilitate success in climate mitigation. In this episode, we discuss the technological potential of carbon sequestration, China’s political advantages in climate progress, the benefits and pitfalls of market-based climate regulations, the future of the environmentalist movement, and what Bob eats for breakfast.
For this special edition episode, hosts Reem, Spencer, and Sarah talk about what it means to "talk policy."
How do they explain policy and policy school? Why do they think that it is important to talk about policy?
Our three hosts are first-year students at the Goldman School of Public Policy’s Master in Public Policy Program. They each bring different perspectives and background to the master’s program and to the podcast. Tune in to hear what brings them to the table (and to the recording studio) and what drives all of us at Talk Policy to Me.
1.5 degrees Celsius. According to a special 2018 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that’s the maximum global temperature increase allowable before we see catastrophic impacts on food security, ecosystems, water access, frequency and extremity of weather events, and more. The report warns global leaders and policymakers that failing to limit the Earth’s temperature increase will result in a world that is unrecognizable – and extremely difficult to live in.
Given the urgency and magnitude of climate change, what are individuals’ role in helping to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius? How do our lives and habits need to change? How does our responsibility, as residents of the wealthiest country in the world, compare to those living in poverty? And how does individual responsibility for carbon reduction interact with corporate and industrial responsibility? Does it matter that we recycle and buy local produce and use public transit when the US continues to buy oil from Saudi Arabia and 85% of Americans drive to work?
To get to these questions Talk Policy to Me reporter and Goldman MPP student Reem Rayef spoke with Chris Jones, one of the makers of the CoolClimate Calculator. The calculator is an online interactive tool that calculates users’ carbon footprints (the amount of CO2 they emit per year) using information about their homes, consumption habits, and lifestyles. The calculator then provides custom recommendations to users on how they might “green” their lifestyles – from buying an electric vehicle to eating a vegetarian diet.
How can we fix the stigma around welfare?
Welfare is deeply politicized and often stigmatized. Social support programs are strongly centered around beneficiaries working. Has it always been this way? Are we destined to be stuck with these political perspectives?
In today’s episode, UC Berkeley MPP student Sarah Edwards wraps up the three-part series around Universal Basic Income and the Social Safety Net. She examines a crossroads moment in our nation’s history when the Social Safety Net conversation began to talk about the “deserving” vs “undeserving” poor.
She then speaks with the California Budget and Policy Center’s Sara Kimberlin to explore California’s new policies driving the future of our safety net—and how we might not be as far from a UBI as it seems.
Special thanks to James Hawkins (MPP '18) for research support on this episode.
NIMBYism, geographical limitation, and weaponized policies have led the state to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem?
California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get here? Why has the development of solutions shifted from a city level to a state level?
UC Berkeley MPP student Spencer Bowen speaks with Ophelia Basgal and Elizabeth Kneebone from the Terner Center and California Assemblyperson David Chiu about five intersecting causes of California’s housing crisis.
UC Berkeley will spend $30 million on building new softball and beach volleyball teams. While Title IX is widely understood to be a sports equity law, its historical advancement of feminist interests and its application at Cal today reveal a more ambitious and inclusive agenda. Not merely a mechanism for intercollegiate sports, Title IX advocates for building holistic inclusive collegiate experiences and making that ethos integral to the operations and strategy of the university.
Goldman MPP ‘20 Spencer Bowen talks with Meagan Owusu, Head Beach Volleyball Coach at Cal and campus directors Denise Oldham and Jenny Simon O'Neal of Cal Athletics and Title IX programs to discover why Title IX is a flash point that opens opportunities, but also underscores the societal role of universities to foster the personal and professional growth in its students.
In our last episode on universal basic income, or UBI, a conversation between UC Berkeley MPP ‘20 student Sarah Edwards and Economics and Public Policy Professor Hilary Hoynes revealed that the landscape for UBI proposals and experiments is ripe.
In this episode, Goldman School student Sarah Edwards interviews Lori Ospina, about Stockton’s guaranteed income program, Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (or SEED for short). With a $1 million grant, SEED will distribute cash to 100 residents falling below the area’s $64,000 area median income. Although modest in scale, SEED’s potential to ignite other policy conversations on UBI on the local and state level is much greater in magnitude.
With growing acknowledgment of a wealth gap in the U.S., Stockton’s program could be dually meaningful—for the residents of this Central Valley city and for future conversations on social safety nets.
Professor of Economics Hilary Hoynes and UC Berkeley MPP Student ‘20 Sarah Edwards probe whether work is a solid foundation on which to build the welfare of American society. Can and should income from working really provide a stable base for all Americans? And can more universal coverage social safety nets for non-working adults alleviate the stigma of government support?
While welfare reform of the 1990s resulted in spotty coverage from the coupling of assistance and working, the universality of UBI could be an attractive counterproposal to extend coverage to those without it and reduce the stigma of government support. But untargeted programs risk becoming prohibitively expensive or overstretched.
In this episode of Talk Policy to Me, find out why loosening the bind between working and government support opens a new space where new possibilities for policy solutions can come forward.
Tune in to next week’s episode on the specifics of one experiment in Stockton, California.
Streets littered with bicycles and scooters represent the latest skirmish between Bay Area city administrators and the technology sector. In a region ready to confront carbon emissions and ready to embrace pedestrian-friendly streets, scooters have become the next item in an evergreen local debate on what mode of transport should dominant city streets, who should decide, and how to keep city residents safe.
San Francisco’s proximity to the hub of the technology sector makes it a “petri dish” for experimentation, says Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, transportation reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in conversation with UC Berkeley public policy student Reem Rayef about the issues that surround scooters. But -- while Bay Area tech companies seek to be a major player in urban transportation with its disruptive technologies, municipalities often have other goals in mind.
Tune into this lively conversation on how cities are responding to scooters, how companies are trying to get around city regulation, when local residents revolt against new technologies -- and whether scooters really are a better way to get around.
As rents continue to skyrocket in the Bay Area, housing displacement is disproportionately affecting people of color. A “geography of racialized inequality” has long been set in the region -- but today’s segregation is taking a new configuration as new housing market preferences take root. 80 percent of neighborhoods in the East Bay experiencing gentrification were previously redlined, according to a finding from UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project (link: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/) is providing research and data tools to characterize the nature of this displacement in the Bay Area. In this episode, UC Berkeley public policy student Spencer Bowen and urban planning alumnus Philip Verma discuss some of the data analysis and what it reveals about the the Bay Area’s housing market today. Tune in here.
Are you interested in getting engaged with housing issues in the Bay Area? Here are three suggestions from Philip Verma:
- Read Evicted by Matthew Desmond
- Every neighborhood has slightly different challenges. Find out what challenges your neighbors are facing by talking to your local council member.
- Learn more about Urban Displacement Project’s data tool here.
Young voter turnout is lower than overall voter turnout. But, as we approach the 2018 midterm elections, UC Berkeley public policy student Sarah Edwards speaks with Buffy Wicks, Sarah Anzia, and others to find that there are reasons to be optimistic about young voter engagement:
- Millennials are opinion leaders -- and have helped transform the social, cultural and political landscape in the last decade
- Young people are a tech-savvy cohort who can and are deploying technology to get out the vote
- While hot-button issues for young voters have been notably muted or absent, increasing concern around college loan debt and social safety nets are poised to drive interest and engagement higher
Wondering how to get more involved and have better conversations about voter engagement? Here’s a few ideas from our team:
- Vote!
- Attend community meetings in your local community
- Join our mailing list at Berkeley Institute for Young Americans
Food surrounds us -- and yet we can become careless about how food is transformed from the farm to something palatable on our plate. UC Berkeley public policy student, Reem Rayef, interviews Nina Ichikawa at the Berkeley Food Institute about what consumers should be thinking about in their individual consumption choices, but also what the impact the aggregation of those choices means for food overall.
Considering the role of multiple actors in U.S. food policy, they also discuss how coalitions of like-minded groups can mobilize greater and more equitable access to healthy foods. Get some food for thought with this episode all about food.
Wondering how to get more involved and have better conversations about food policy? Here are a few ideas from our team:
- Form a more mindful cohort of food consumers with a book club, reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Six seasons.
- Cook a local meal. Try shopping at the farmer’s market and learning about the sources of your food and the farmers who grew them.
Tara Regan Anderson (MPP '10) is the Director of Policy for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. She spoke with Jonathan Stein (MPP/JD '13) about the impact incarceration can have on children and families and why criminal justice reform is not just for advocates.
In the aftermath of the shooting death of Botham Shem Jean by an off-duty Dallas police officer, we're posting a conversation Jasmine Jones (MPA '18) had last spring with Professor Jack Glaser, an expert in stereotyping and implicit bias, especially in policing.
Goldman School student Jessie Harney speaks with host Jonathan Stein (MPP/JD '13) about mental health support for people suffering from PTSD, especially victims of sexual assault.
Host Jonathan Stein (MPP/JD '11) speaks with Dr. Lonnie Snowden of UC Berkeley about the stigma around mental health, disparities in access to mental health services, the Affordable Care Act's impact impact on mental health services, and more.
Goldman School student and DACA recipient Vlad Stoicescu Ghica discusses what brought him to the US from Romania, student activism as an undergrad at UCLA, and what it was like engaging then-newly-installed UC President Janet Napolitano on the subject of DACA and immigration.
Jesús Guzmán, immigration activist and Goldman student, shares his personal story, what the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program might be, and why he resists the narrative of a "good" versus "bad" kind of immigrant.
Host Jasmine Jones speaks with Professor Steven Raphael of the Goldman School of Public Policy about the impact immigration has on local economies, immigration policy in the last 50 years, and why he still believes we may be a more compassionate society than current rhetoric may lead us to believe.
Podcast introduction: Talk Policy To Me brings you personal stories and creative solutions from the next generation of public policy leaders.
Brought to you by UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans