AC - util climate change education NC - john locke hospitals violence cap bad 1AR - util climate change everything else was on case
Isidore Newman
4
Opponent: Mercer Island KS | Judge: StPeter, Joshua
AC - case NC - structural vio teachers and hospitals everything else was on case
Isidore Newman
Doubles
Opponent: Harrison JC | Judge: Panel
AC - same case as rd6 NC - union infrastructure econ living wage cp everything else was on case
Scarsdale
1
Opponent: SouCar SD | Judge: Chin, Andrew
AC - Util climate Econ NCNR - police hospitals 1AR - case 2NR - case (collapsed) 2AR - case
Scarsdale
6
Opponent: Lexton MS | Judge: StPeter, Joshua
AC - AC NC - ev ethics queerpes k 1AR - on case 2NR - ev ethics 2AR - on case
Scarsdale
3
Opponent: NewSci LF | Judge: Vega, Miana
AC - util Econ indopak NC - justice structural vio Pic 1AR - case 2NR - case 2AR - case
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Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Contact
Tournament: any | Round: 1 | Opponent: any | Judge: any Hi! My name is Ilias, if you want me to disclose my case you can contact me with the information below:
Contact:
hangouts/email: papageorgioui@bxscience.edu
pronouns: he/him
9/17/21
0 - PLEASE NOTE
Tournament: any | Round: 2 | Opponent: any | Judge: any If a round doesn't have a cite it's because cites were down and I never got a chance to submit it or it's the same case that already has a cite
SepOct: I lost my computer w all my documents so I never had the chance to disclose my sepoct cases but I do have the general file I used so that checks back against evidence ethics or whatever disclosure theory you wanna run
12/11/21
NOVDEC - Education Adv
Tournament: Isidore Newman | Round: 2 | Opponent: Oak Grove FK | Judge: Brown, Daniel Education Adv Education is on the decline, the aff is key to solve Pantuso 20 Phillip Pantuso, 1-8-2020, "Why Is American Education Declining?," River, https://therivernewsroom.com/why-is-american-education-declining/ Lex AM But a decade later, in an era of divided politics, one of the rare things the right and left have agreed on is the failure of Common Core. In December 2019, the latest results came out from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which compares the United States’ ranking to other countries every three years. It showed that despite billions of dollars being spent, academic performance by American 15-year-olds was stagnant overall: slightly above students from peer nations in reading, but below the middle of the pack in math, according to The New York Times, with a widening achievement gap between high and low performers. About 20 percent of American 15-year-olds could not read at the level expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the PISA test. That was on the heels of the latest results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a US test that showed that two-thirds of children are not proficient readers. Compared to the last time the test was given, in 2017, the average eighth-grade reading score declined in more than half of all 50 states, and the average score in fourth-grade reading declined in 17 states. Math scores remained relatively flat overall. Strikes lead to teaching reform but legal restrictions hinder success, Bradford 21 Derrell Bradford, February 11, 2021, "A Rolling National Teacher Strike Is Why Schools Are Closed," Education Next, https://www.educationnext.org/rolling-national-teacher-strike-is-why-schools-are-closed/ Lex AM To better understand what is happening today, it is worth examining the activism of teachers unions in recent years as they confronted state and local governments. In 2018, we saw a series of teacher strikes and job actions that captured the nation’s attention. What we now know as Red for Ed—marked both by the red t-shirts that became the uniform of teachers-union activism and, perhaps also, the Republican political leanings of states in which the strikes happened (Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia)—were teacher protests at a scale perhaps not seen since those in Wisconsin opposing then-Governor Scott Walker’s Act 10 reforms, which, among others things, made it more difficult for unions to maintain their representation of public-school teachers. The protests in 2018 provide compelling context for escalating teachers-union activism in the years that follow. But first, they highlighted the issues that ostensibly matter to teachers unions and, perhaps by proxy, teachers themselves. At the root of the Kentucky protests were public-employee pensions, an unpopular incumbent trying to change them, and, to a lesser extent, tax-credit scholarship legislation that would have helped private schools. Kentucky’s state-employee pension plan is one of the nation’s worst funded, with approximately 16 percent of the assets it needed to meet expected liabilities. The state’s Republican governor at the time, Matt Bevin, along with the legislature, passed pension-reform legislation that the Kentucky Education Association and other public-employee unions opposed through a series of sickouts and days of action at the Capitol that essentially shut down many of the state’s school districts. With Kentucky teachers engaged, Governor Bevin was summarily defeated by the state’s attorney general, Andy Beshear, a Democrat who opposed the pension plan and who benefitted from substantial teacher and teachers-union activism. As Vox reported at the time, Kentucky Education Association president Eddie Campbell asserted that he’d never seen teachers so engaged in the political process. He also stated that “the case they made to their communities changed the course of this election and the course of public education in this state.” In Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona, the issue was more straightforward: teacher pay. And the teacher strikes, sickouts, rallies, and activism overall were effective in achieving the goal of increasing teacher pay. Oklahoma legislators increased teacher pay by on average $6,000 (approximately 16 percent). West Virginia’s teachers won a 5-percent increase, while Arizona’s protests saw Governor Doug Ducey increase teacher pay by 20 percent preemptively. While the fight over public-employee pensions is incredibly complicated, there were winning arguments to be made for increasing teacher compensation in these states. Ultimately, those arguments carried the day. But the pay increases were not the most important achievements of these efforts. Instead, as a series of advocacy actions, teachers unions were able to test a range of important theories about what was possible and, more importantly, what was tolerable to the citizens in their respective states. When teachers strike, local economies are affected. Working parents may need to stay home and watch their children, and the education of children is disrupted in proportion to the length of the strike. If there was any lesson to be learned from these early efforts, it was that teachers unions, now emboldened, could cause massive disruption to daily life and emerge better off for it economically. But the strategy had only been tested in red states. To understand whether it could work across the country, it would need to be successful in one of the nation’s large urban districts, as well. In 2019, strikes in Los Angeles and Chicago provided just this opportunity. Hooray for Hollywood United Teachers of Los Angeles’s weeklong strike in January of 2019 disrupted the city, its politics, and relationships between teachers, families, and over 630,000 students and their schools. It was a tension-rich affair exhaustively covered by the national media. And it featured a cast of characters right out of a Hollywood film. Alex Caputo-Pearl, the leader of United Teachers of Los Angeles, appeared in the role of champion of the common man, economic justice, and worker rights. Austin Beutner, the district superintendent and Caputo-Pearl’s ostensible foil, had been a highly successful businessman. And the city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, rounded out the production as the charismatic dealmaker with higher political aspirations. The tilt was watched in living rooms across America. Democratic presidential candidates chimed in in support of the striking teachers. In contrast to the Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona cases, in Los Angles, the union failed to achieve a clear financial win. Beutner, who had taken to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to explain the district’s dire fiscal straits, exacerbated by pension commitments many described as unsustainable, had put a deal on the table before the strike. That was the deal that was largely accepted after the strike. The mayor committed to putting a tax increase on the ballot for schools. The initiative wound up getting rejected by voters. But United Teachers of Los Angeles claimed victory anyway. They’d stopped the city for the better part of the week. Soon after, raising teacher pay became a key element of the platforms of several of the Democratic presidential candidates, including California’s own Senator Kamala Harris. The union had also opposed charter schools in the city and recommended a moratorium as a policy plank in its list of demands. The school board voted 5-1 in support of a resolution doing just that. If the Los Angeles strike was about how to get to yes, the Chicago strike was about one word: “no.” Newly elected mayor Lori Lightfoot, a progressive’s progressive in a state where unions are an essential fixture of daily political life, offered the Chicago Teachers Union a 14-percent raise over five years at the start of their negotiations. The union refused. On October 17, 2019, the CTU began a 15-day strike that disrupted the lives and learning of 300,000 students. The mayor and the CTU eventually reached an agreement. Los Angeles and Chicago answered the question the initial Red for Ed efforts posed: could broadscale teacher activism in the form of job actions and outright strikes result in financial or policy wins for those same unions? The answer was clearly yes. These large-scale disruptions could extract policy victories from elected officials on both sides of the political aisle. Covid-19 and the Rolling National Teacher Strike While the efficacy of strikes and job actions in the era of labor solidarity seems to have been more than proven, it is still difficult, both logistically and legally, for teachers unions to strike in many parts of the country. In New York, for instance, the state’s Taylor Law prohibits public employees from striking. Disregarding this law can have serious consequences (as the Transport Workers Union once discovered) such as fines and the suspension of automatic dues collection. As labor watchdog Mike Antonucci has noted, a national teacher strike would rapidly deplete the strike funds of both national teachers unions. In normal times, such a sweeping action would be unworkable.
Higher wages increases student performance, Evans 19 David Evans, 5-3-2019, "Does Raising Teacher Salaries Improve Performance?," Pacific Standard, https://psmag.com/education/what-do-teacher-salaries-do-to-teacher-performance Lex AM RAISING SALARIES ATTRACTS AND KEEPS GOOD TEACHERS In Texas, increasing teacher pay reduced turnover, which in turn increased student performance. Likewise, national studies from the United States and the United Kingdom also find that students do better when teachers have relatively better wages. Studies from Latin America have looked specifically at the pull factor of higher wages for civil servants—of which teachers are a subset. In Brazil, higher wages for civil servants drew more educated candidates into the service. In Mexico, higher salaries for civil servants attracted more candidates who were more conscientious and who had higher IQs. But higher salaries also attract less qualified candidates. In education, one challenge is selecting those candidates who will go on to be great teachers, which brings us to the topic of higher standards for teachers. REFORMS BEYOND JUST SALARY INCREASES ARE NEEDED What countries that have made large gains in learning have shown is that combining salary increases with other critical reforms is the way to success. Setting higher standards to enter the teaching profession is a way to both pay teachers what they're worth while making sure the very best candidates are teaching. Finland and Singapore, two countries known for high performance on international tests, have highly competitive entry into the teaching profession. In both countries, a small fraction of applicants to teacher training schools are accepted, allowing teacher training schools to only accept those applicants with excellent academic credentials. By contrast, a recent study of teacher preparation graduate programs in the U.S. found that fewer than half required a 3.0 grade point average. Ecuador provides a clear example of how increasing teacher selectivity can lead to gains. Ecuador doubled teachers' starting salaries in 2009. At around the same time, it introduced a national hiring exam and teacher evaluation systems, and it made getting into teacher training colleges and subsequently getting a job as a teacher more selective. The country also instituted incentives for high performing teachers. Ecuador went on to register the highest student literacy gains of any country in Latin America on regional tests conducted between 2006 and 2013. In other countries, the key reforms may be different. Brazil registered large learning gains in the first decade of this century after a series of reforms in the 1990s. These reforms increased teacher salaries while also increasing the educational requirements to become a teacher, expanding in-service support for teachers, ensuring more financing for rural schools, and, later, introducing better measurement and publicity around student learning results. Kenya recently saw student learning rise with a nationwide program that included detailed teachers' guides, professional development, and coaching for teachers. THE OPTIMAL EDUCATION SYSTEM In a recent study, the World Bank highlighted how many education systems seem to be stuck in a low-learning trap, where teachers and schools lack both the support and the motivation to give students what they need. Low teacher salaries, together with inadequate support for teachers and little selectivity in teacher preparation, can keep U.S. schools far below their potential. But increased pay is not enough. As experiences from around the world show, higher pay must be accompanied by an array of other reforms–ranging from increased selectivity into the field to more mentoring and coaching to help teachers already in the field give their best to our students. Educational innovation solves extinction. Peter Serdyukov 17. National University, La Jolla, California. 03/27/2017. “Innovation in Education: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What to Do about It?” Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching and Learning, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 4–33. Lex AM Introduction Education, being a social institution serving the needs of society, is indispensable for society to survive and thrive. It should be not only comprehensive, sustainable, and superb, but must continuously evolve to meet the challenges of the fast-changing and unpredictable globalized world. This evolution must be systemic, consistent, and scalable; therefore, school teachers, college professors, administrators, researchers, and policy makers are expected to innovate the theory and practice of teaching and learning, as well as all other aspects of this complex organization to ensure quality preparation of all students to life and work. Here we present a systemic discussion of educational innovations, identify the barriers to innovation, and outline potential directions for effective innovations. We discuss the current status of innovations in US education, what educational innovation is, how innovations are being integrated in schools and colleges, why innovations do not always produce the desired effect, and what should be done to increase the scale and rate of innovation-based transformations in our education system. We then offer recommendations for the growth of educational innovations. As examples of innovations in education, we will highlight online learning and time efficiency of learning using accelerated and intensive approaches. Innovations in US education For an individual, a nation, and humankind to survive and progress, innovation and evolution are essential. Innovations in education are of particular importance because education plays a crucial role in creating a sustainable future. “Innovation resembles mutation, the biological process that keeps species evolving so they can better compete for survival” (Hoffman and Holzhuter, 2012, p. 3). Innovation, therefore, is to be regarded as an instrument of necessary and positive change. Any human activity (e.g. industrial, business, or educational) needs constant innovation to remain sustainable. The need for educational innovations has become acute. “It is widely believed that countries’ social and economic well-being will depend to an ever greater extent on the quality of their citizens’ education: the emergence of the so-called ‘knowledge society’, the transformation of information and the media, and increasing specialization on the part of organizations all call for high skill profiles and levels of knowledge. Today’s education systems are required to be both effective and efficient, or in other words, to reach the goals set for them while making the best use of available resources” (Cornali, 2012, p. 255). According to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report, “the pressure to increase equity and improve educational outcomes for students is growing around the world” (Vieluf et al., 2012, p. 3). In the USA, underlying pressure to innovate comes from political, economic, demographic, and technological forces from both inside and outside the nation. Many in the USA seem to recognize that education at all levels critically needs renewal: “Higher education has to change. It needs more innovation” (Wildavsky et al., 2012, p. 1). This message, however, is not new – in the foreword to the 1964 book entitled Innovation in Education, Arthur Foshay, Executive Officer of The Horace Mann-Lincoln Institute of School Experimentation, wrote, “It has become platitudinous to speak of the winds of change in education, to remind those interested in the educational enterprise that a revolution is in progress. Trite or not, however, it is true to say that changes appear wherever one turns in education” (Matthew, 1964, p. v).
12/11/21
NOVDEC - Lay AC
Tournament: Scarsdale | Round: 1 | Opponent: SouCar SD | Judge: Chin, Andrew Util Pleasure is an intrinsic good. Moen ’16 – (Ole Martin, PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy @ University of Oslo, "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267). Modified for glang Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative. 2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good. 3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask what heris end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Although pleasure and pain thus seem to be good candidates for intrinsic value and disvalue, several objections have been raised against this suggestion: (1) that pleasure and pain have instrumental but not intrinsic value/disvalue; (2) that pleasure and pain gain their value/disvalue derivatively, in virtue of satisfying/frustrating our desires; (3) that there is a subset of pleasures that are not intrinsically valuable (so-called “evil pleasures”) and a subset of pains that are not intrinsically disvaluable (so-called “noble pains”), and (4) that pain asymbolia, masochism, and practices such as wiggling a loose tooth render it implausible that pain is intrinsically disvaluable. I shall argue that these objections fail. Thus, the standard is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Calc indicts don’t link—my framework is a general principle to be applied intuitively, not a rigid calculator. Prefer— 1 – Death first – death is the best quantifiable way to measure pleasure and pain because comparing sufferings is immoral 2 – A just government refers to one that acts utilitarian meaning that a utilitarian framework is key to understand the perspective of the actor in the topic MVO 18’ What does a just government mean? https://www.mvorganizing.org/what-does-a-just-government-mean/ A just government is fair to ALL people that it governs. This includes not only the governed, but also the governors. Subjecting the governors to the same laws as the governed will help to ensure that no one group’s interests are served at the expense of others.
Plan text: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.
Contention 1 is Climate Change Climate strike participants get arrested now. Scanlan 19 Quinn. Quinn Scanlan. Voting, campaigns and elections for @ABC. “Jane Fonda arrested in climate change strike outside Capitol”. 10-11-2019. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jane-fonda-arrested-climate-change-strike-capitol/story?id=66209415. Academy Award winning actress Jane Fonda, 81, was arrested by police with a group of about a dozen protesters Friday after being warned repeatedly to leave the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Inspired by youth climate activists like Sweden's Greta Thunberg, 16, who herself recently came to Washington to testify in front of Congress, Fonda, who, throughout her long career, has engaged in activism, dating as far back as the Vietnam War, recently told ABC News that while she's in the nation's capital, every Friday, she'll attend "Fire Drill Friday," a weekly event featuring scientists, celebrities and activists addressing the various facets and impacts of climate change. The event title is a play on Thunberg saying during a speech at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January, "I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is." "11 o'clock every Friday morning come get arrested with me or choose not to it doesn't matter," told ABC News in an earlier interview about her planned effort. Fonda said she decided to leave her home, and comfort zone, through the holidays, and move to Washington for four months, because she wanted to "make a commitment to" the issue of climate change. In an interview with ABC News Deputy Political director MaryAlice Parks for an episode of of ABC News Live's "The Briefing Room," Fonda said that while they bear no blame for causing it, the kids are leading the charge on fighting climate change. "They're saying, 'Come on, you know, you're taking our future away from us. We need -- we need you to support us.' And so grandmas unite," she said. "I want to stand with them and raise up... their message. This is -- this is serious... This is a crisis unlike anything that has ever faced humankind." Stressing she was not being hyperbolic, Fonda said this is the "one issue" that matters because it "will determine the survival of our species," and said that's why she'll be attending Fire Drill Fridays weekly. David Swanson/AP, FILE Actress and activist Jane Fonda talks to a crowd of protestors during a global climate rall...Read More "I think every single human being has to say, 'What can I do to put this at the forefront?'" she said. "(With) everything that's going on in the news, well, we have to fight our way through that and find ways to get climate change in people's minds." The esteemed actress pushed back against criticism that Hollywood's presence could make climate change a more polarizing issue. "What we're facing is so important and so urgent, it doesn't matter. Those -- those things don't even matter," she told Parks. "This is the future. This is whether we're going to survive." Fonda also said that the United States needs "to lead the way" on this issue, so that other countries who contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions, like China and India, "follow suit." While she's been passionate about this issue for "decades," she credits her current endeavors on Thunberg's recurring protest outside Swedish parliament, and other student climate strikers around the world for taking on this issue so passionately. Strikes incentivize companies to take climate action seriously. Ivanova 19 Irin. Work, tech, climate and data for @CBSNews. Priors: @HuffPost, @CrainsNewYork, @newmarkjschool. “These businesses are closing for Friday's climate strike”. 9-20-2019. No Publication. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/global-climate-strike-businesses-close-their-doors-in-time-for-climate-strike-2019/. Thousands of people are planning to walk out of work or school on Friday to press global leaders for solutions to rapidly escalating climate change. And while it was students who started the movement, more and more workers—and even companies—are joining them in support. Some businesses are letting workers take the day off to protest, while others plan to close their doors outright. They tend to be small or mid-sized businesses — most of the country's largest corporations have yet to weigh in on the strike, although plenty of people who work at them might yet participate when walkouts are set to start Friday afternoon. Here are the ways workers and companies are supporting the strike. Walkouts Amazon is expected to see more than 1,500 employees walk out, with the largest contingent exiting its Seattle headquarters, as they push the company to cut ties with fossil-fuel companies and stop funding groups that deny climate science. The company on Thursday announced it would make its operations carbon-neutral by 2040 and run entirely on renewable energy within a decade. More than 900 Google workers and unknown numbers of workers from Facebook, Atlassian, Cobot, Ecosia, Microsoft and Twitter are vowing walkouts. The strikers have details at Tech Workers Coalition. Some smaller companies are giving workers paid time off to participate in the walkouts. These include Atlassian, Sustain Natural, Grove Collaborative and others. Closures Ben and Jerry's corporate offices in South Burlington, Vermont, will be closed during the strike on Friday, while shops worldwide will either be closed or open later than usual. The company is also stopping production at its manufacturing plants in Vermont and the Netherlands, according to Adweek. "We recognize that climate change is an existential threat to our planet and all its inhabitants, and therefore we are proud standing with the youth-led movement demanding bold action in response to the climate emergency," a spokesperson said. Patagonia is closing its retail stores for 24 hours on Friday. "For decades, many corporations have single-mindedly pursued profits at the expense of everything else — employees, communities and the air, land and water we all share," CEO Rose Marcario wrote on LinkedIn. "Capitalism needs to evolve if humanity is going to survive." Lush Cosmetics will close its manufacturing facilities and retail outlets on September 20 in the U.S. and on September 27 in Canada. It's also halting online sales on Friday. Badger Balm is closing for the day and giving workers paid time off to demonstrate or volunteer. The company is also donating 5 of online sales from September 16 to 27 to AmazonWatch.org to aid in preserving the shrinking Amazon's ecological systems, it said. Burton, the outdoor retailer, is closing its offices and owned retail stores on September 20th or 27th (depending on their country of location). It also won't make any online sales for 24 hours on Friday. SodaStream, the seltzer maker owned by PepsiCo, is shuttering its headquarters and closing e-commerce on Friday. Digital doings and more The heart of the strike will be in the streets, but that doesn't mean the action stops there. More than 7,000 companies have pledged to draw attention to the protest by either donating ad space or putting banners on their sites. Participants include Tumblr, WordPress, Imgur, Kickstarter, BitTorrent, Tor, BoingBoing, Greenpeace, Change.org, among many others. Companies’ influence is the key internal link to passing important Climate Policy while also boosting the economy WRL 19’ WRI develops practical solutions that improve people’s lives and protect nature. Our more than 1,200 staff have deep expertise in policy, research, data analysis, economics, political dynamics and more. We work with partners in more than 50 countries and currently have offices in 12 countries: Brazil, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. https://www.wri.org/insights/3-ways-business-must-use-political-influence-champion-climate-ambition Reducing your "carbon footprint" may have qualified your company as a leader on climate change 10 years ago. But today you must do more than that. The definition of leadership has changed—and it increasingly includes responsible, proactive lobbying for climate action that reduces emissions. More than 500 companies have committed to emissions reductions targets based in science, and more than 150 have committed to powering their operations entirely with renewable energy by 2030. Businesses are disclosing their emissions and evaluating their supply chains for climate risks. But checking even these boxes won't be enough to be considered a corporate leader on climate in 2019, and it certainly won't be enough to stop a changing climate's worst impacts. A new report from EDF highlights how most corporate climate leadership rankings overlook policy advocacy, and argues that this is a huge "blind spot" for any true measure of a company's contribution to climate change solutions. They are correct. Companies can and must reduce emissions, but only public policy can elevate these efforts to the scale and pace of emissions reductions needed to mitigate climate change. The political influence of climate-forward businesses with long histories of successful lobbying on other industry-specific issues can lend climate policies the credibility they need to achieve lasting impact. For aspiring firms looking to start real impact at the state and national level, here are 3 important starting points for responsible climate policy advocacy. This is your 2019 corporate climate lobbying checklist: 1. Share Your "Climate Story" Companies have an authentic and credible perspective to share on the long-term threat from climate change to their operations. This perspective is your climate story; crafting an honest, persuasive one is the first step in engaging elected officials. Corporate government affairs teams need to know and show how climate connects to the company's interest areas. Climate change poses real business risks that affect the economy, jobs and the private sector's ability to provide goods and services. The person who knows the company's climate story best and the person who relays it to policymakers may not be the same. Do those who interface with policymakers in your company know what your firm is doing on climate? When sustainability and policy don't interact internally, the result is that most businesses are not getting the credit they deserve for their science-based targets and emissions reduction measures within the halls of government or having influence. When companies can share their "climate story" using data points and anecdotes, it gives policymakers the credibility and confidence to then go and advocate for ambitious policy. When elected officials can be informed by business, it gives them the confidence to speak to climate issues with authority. 2. Meet Policymakers "Where They Are" Most of us want a safe, stable climate, but engaging policymakers while lobbying isn't a conversation that starts with "I want." Government Affairs staff know this, but sustainability practitioners helping to draft talking points for interaction with policymakers may not. Recognizing that elected officials represent constituents with certain needs is an important baseline for drawing a Venn diagram between what responsible business wants and what policymakers want. Understand the local context in order to make compelling cases about whatever your issue is, whether that's procuring renewable energy or buying fleets of electric vehicles. Tailor your advocacy to issues at the core of a district or state's interests, and you are more likely to generate buy-in from elected officials. 3. Push Government to Be Bolder When businesses advocate for climate ambition and send governments clear signals of commitment, this enables governments to be bolder in their own commitments. Likewise, when government sends the private sector clear, long-term signals about climate policy, business can act with the confidence it needs to make low-carbon investments. The Ambition Loop, a paper produced by WRI with We Mean Business and the UN Global Compact, highlights instances where business and government have sent one another these clear signals, which created the enabling conditions for more confident climate action. A few market leaders have begun to harness their influence and engage in thoughtful climate advocacy. Danone North America, Nestle USA, Unilever United States and Mars, Incorporated formed the Sustainable Food Policy Alliance to advocate for public policy in the United States in five key areas, one of which is the environment and climate change. The group focuses on communicating to policymakers their support of policies such as putting a price on carbon, and recently released a set of principles advocating for ambitious action on climate. Time to Lobby Firms on the leading edge must harness their political influence and recognize that climate policy is urgently needed to protect their customers, employees, suppliers and their own business interests. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate found that bold climate action could deliver at least $26 trillion in economic benefits and generate over 65 million new low-carbon jobs in 2030. One of the most compelling narratives a business can tell comes from the private sector harnessing the potential trillions in economic growth to be had when they do well by doing good. The pressure is on companies to put their lobbying where their climate leadership is, with investors, NGOs, and US consumers increasingly expecting companies to act. Policymakers will need to listen, but companies first must step up with authentic, credible narratives and demonstrate that they are willing to spend their political capital to further climate objectives. Marginalized Groups are Disproportionately Affected by Climate Change Yip 7/21 Why Marginalized Groups are Disproportionately Affected by Climate Change https://earth.org/marginalised-groups-are-disproportionately-affected-by-climate-change/
Environmental racism refers to the injustices suffered by marginalized communities in terms of unequal distribution of environmental resources and hazards, and discrimination in environmental support and policy-making. In essence, the burdens of pollution, natural disasters, and poisoned resources are distributed unequally in society, with marginalised communities being hit disproportionately harder. When it comes to severing climate change, this means that racial minorities will be bearing the brunt of the environmental impacts. One such case of environmental racism can be observed in the United States, where people of color suffer from a multitude of environmental injustices. In the US, air pollution is distributed unevenly among the different racial groups, with people of color being hit the hardest. An important ratio to consider when assessing the distribution of adverse impacts of pollution is the ratio of how much pollution one is responsible for relative to how much pollution one is exposed to. Scientists have found that Hispanics and African-Americans breathe in 63 and 56 more pollution than they make respectively. On the other hand, Caucasians are exposed to 17 less air pollution than they make. This means that relative to their contribution to pollution, people of color in the US are disproportionately exposed to pollutants. Across the country, people of colour on average are also exposed to far higher levels of air pollutants (PM2.5), regardless of region or household income. In short, people of colour in the United States are disproportionately impacted by an increasingly polluted climate, both in relative and absolute terms. Inequality also exists on the global scale, where there exist large disparities in emissions and climate impacts from country to country. There is a large asymmetry when it comes to the proportion of CO2 emissions from region to region. For example, North America is home to only 5 of the world’s population, but it emits 18 of the world’s total CO2. Conversely, Africa is home to 16 of the world’s population, but emits only 4 of total CO2. In other words, different continents hold different amounts of responsibility when it comes to climate change, and some regions should bear more of the blame. Moreover, in terms of aggregate income, 86 of global CO2 emissions are emitted by the richest half of countries in the world, whilst the bottom half only emits 14. This inequality in global emissions renders the issue of international climate change responsibility very delicate and contentious. In light of this, the countries hit hardest by climate change are coincidentally the countries with less relative responsibility for climate change. For example, the Philippines consists of 1.41 of the total world population, but it only produces 0.35 of total world’s emissions of CO2. Yet, it has been hit disproportionately hard from climate change; every year it suffers numerous casualties and damage from typhoons, floods, and landslides of increasing frequency and intensity. Climate Change leads to extinction Spratt and Dunlop, 19 David Spratt is a Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne, and co-author of Climate Code Red: The case for emergency action. Ian T. Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome. Formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chairman of the Australian Coal Association, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and chair of the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading 1998-2000. “Existential climate-related security risk: A Scenario Approach” Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration May 2019 https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_b2c0c79dc4344b279bcf2365336ff23b.pdf An existential risk to civilisation is one posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity which may never be undone, either annihilating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential. With the commitments by nations to the 2015 Paris Agreement, the current path of warming is 3°C or more by 2100. But this figure does not include “long-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks, which are materially relevant now and in the near future due to the unprecedented rate at which human activity is perturbing the climate system. Taking these into account, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming by 2100. 7 Scientists warn that warming of 4°C is incompatible with an organised global community, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable. The World Bank says it may be “beyond adaptation”. But an existential threat may 8 also exist for many peoples and regions at a significantly lower level of warming. In 2017, 3°C of warming was categorised as “catastrophic” with a warning that, on a path of unchecked emissions, low-probability, high-impact warming could be catastrophic by 2050. 9 The Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warns that “climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.” He says 10 that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.” 11
Contention 2 is the Economy The Global Economy is stabilizing and set for increases in 2021 but is still falling behind World Bank 6-8 6-8-2021 "The Global Economy: on Track for Strong but Uneven Growth as COVID-19 Still Weighs" https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/06/08/the-global-economy-on-track-for-strong-but-uneven-growth-as-covid-19-still-weighs A year and a half since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global economy is poised to stage its most robust post-recession recovery in 80 years in 2021. But the rebound is expected to be uneven across countries, as major economies look set to register strong growth even as many developing economies lag. Global growth is expected to accelerate to 5.6 this year, largely on the strength in major economies such as the United States and China. And while growth for almost every region of the world has been revised upward for 2021, many continue to grapple with COVID-19 and what is likely to be its long shadow. Despite this year’s pickup, the level of global GDP in 2021 is expected to be 3.2 below pre-pandemic projections, and per capita GDP among many emerging market and developing economies is anticipated to remain below pre-COVID-19 peaks for an extended period. As the pandemic continues to flare, it will shape the path of global economic activity. Strikes spill-over to broader support of the labor movement and unions – every strike encourages more strikes Hertel-Fernandez et al. 20 Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, associate professor of public affairs at Columbia University, where he studies American political economy, with a focus on the politics of business, labor, wealthy donors, and policy, Suresh Naidu, professor of economics and public affairs at Columbia University, where he researches economic effects of political transitions, the economic history of slavery and labor institutions, international migration, and economic applications of naturallanguage processing, and Adam Reich, associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he studies economic and cultural sociology, especially how people make sense of their economic activities and economic positions within organizations, 2020, “Schooled by Strikes? The Effects of Large-Scale Labor Unrest on Mass Attitudes toward the Labor Movement,” American Political Science Association, https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720001279/Kankee Strikes and Labor Power in an Era of Union Decline We examined the political consequences of large-scale teacher strikes, studying how firsthand exposure changed mass attitudes and public preferences. Across a range of specifications and approaches, we find that increased exposure to the strikes led to greater support for the walkouts, more support for legal rights for teachers and unions, and, especially, greater personal interest in labor action at people’s own jobs, though not necessarily through traditional unions. Returning to the theoretical expectations we outlined earlier, the teacher strikes appear to have changed the ways that parents think about the labor movement, generating greater public support. The results regarding workers’ interest in undertaking labor action in their own jobs also suggests evidence in favor of the public inspiration and imitation hypothesis, underscoring the role that social movements and mobilizations can play in teaching noninvolved members about the movement and tactics. Still, an important caveat to these findings is that strike-exposed parents were not more likely to say that they would vote for a traditional union at their jobs, possibly reflecting the fact that the strikes emphasized individual teachers and not necessarily teacher unions as organizations either in schools or in parents’ own workplaces. Further research might explore this difference, together with the fact that we find somewhat stronger evidence in favor of the imitation hypothesis (i.e., support for labor action at one’s own work) than for the public support hypothesis (i.e., support for the striking teachers). Before we discuss the broader implications of our findings for the understanding of the labor movement, we briefly review and address several caveats to the interpretation of our results. One concern is whether the results we identify from a single survey can speak to enduring changes in public opinion about the strikes and unions. Given the timing of the teacher strikes in the first half of 2018, our respondents were reflecting on events that happened 7–12 months in the past. We therefore think that our results represent more durable changes in opinion as a result of the strikes, in line with other studies of historical mobilizations and long-term changes in attitudes (Mazumder 2018). The AFL-CIO time-series polling data, moreover, further suggest that there were increases in aggregate public support for unions in the strike states after the strikes occurred. Nevertheless, follow-up studies should examine how opinion toward, and interest in, unions evolve in the mass teacher strike states, and it would be especially interesting to understand whether unions have begun capitalizing on the interest in the labor movement that the strikes generated. We also note that, despite the large sample size of our original survey, we still lack sufficient statistical power to fully explore the effects of the strikes on all of our survey outcomes. Future studies ought to consider alternative designs with the power to probe the individual outcomes that were not considered in this study. Another question is how to generalize from our results to other strikes and labor actions. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to develop and test a more general theory of strike action, there are factors that suggest that the teacher strikes we study here represent a hard test for building public support. The affected states had relatively weak public sector labor movements, meaning that few individuals had personal connections to unions; most were also generally conservative and Republican leaning, further potentially reducing the receptivity of the public to the teachers’ demands. And lastly, the type of work we study —teaching—involves close interaction with a very sympathetic constituency: children and their parents. This should make strike disruptions more controversial and increase the likelihood of political backlash (and indeed, we do find that the strikes were less persuasive for parents who may have lacked access to childcare). Nevertheless, additional factors may have strengthened the effects of the strikes; namely, that education spending in the strike and walkout states had dropped so precipitously since the Great Recession, giving teachers the opportunity to connect their demands to broader public goods. Considering these factors together, we feel comfortable arguing that strikes are likely to be successfully in other contexts where involved employees can successfully leverage close connections to the clients and customers they serve and connect their grievances to the interests of the broader community. This is likely to be especially true in cases where individuals feel they are not receiving the level of quality service they deserve from businesses or governments. The flip side of our argument is that strikes are less likely to be successful—and may produce backlash—when the mass public views striking workers’ demands as illegitimate or opposed to their own interests or when individuals are especially inconvenienced by labor action and do not have readily available alternatives (such as lacking childcare during school strikes). This suggests that teachers’ unions’ provision of meals and childcare to parents (as happened in a number of the recent strikes) is a particularly important tactic to avoid public backlash. In addition, our results suggest that future strikes on their own are unlikely to change public opinion if all they do is to provide information about workers’ grievances or disrupt work routines. Our exploratory analysis of the mechanisms driving our results suggests that it was not necessarily information about poor school quality or the strikes themselves that changed parents’ minds, but perhaps the fact that the teachers were discussing the public goods they were seeking for the broader community. We anticipate that strikes or walkouts that adopt a similar strategy—similar to the notion of “bargaining for the common good”—would be most likely to register effects like ours in the future (McCartin 2016). Notably, that is exactly the strategy deployed by teachers in Los Angeles, who spent several years building ties to community members and explaining the broader benefits that a stronger union could offer to their community in the run-up to a strike in early 2019 (Caputo-Pearl and McAlevey 2019). In all, our results complement a long line of work arguing for the primacy of the strike as a tactic for labor influence (e.g. Burns 2011; Rosenfeld 2006; Rubin 1986). Although this literature generally has focused on the economic consequences of strikes, we have shown that strikes can also have significant effects on public opinion. Even though private sector strikes have long sought to amass public support, public-facing strikes are even more important for public sector labor unions, given their structure of production and the fact that their“managers”are ultimately elected officials. But how should we view strikes relative to the other strategies that public sector unions might deploy in politics, such as campaign contributions, inside lobbying, or mobilization of their members (cf. DiSalvo 2015; Moe 2011)? Given the large cost of mass strikes in terms of time and grassroots organizing, we expect that public sector unions will be most likely to turn to public-facing strikes (like the 2018 teacher walkouts) when these other lower-cost inside strategies are unsuccessful and when their demands are popular in the mass public. Under these circumstances, government unions have every reason to broaden the scope of conflict to include the mass public (cf. Schattschneider 1960). But when unions can deploy less costly activities (like simply having a lobbyist meet with lawmakers) or when they are pursuing demands that are more controversial with the public, we suspect that unions will opt for less public-facing strategies (on the logic of inside versus outside lobbying more generally, see, for example, Kollman 1998). Indeed, our results complement work by Terry Moe and Sarah Anzia describing how teacher unions work through low-salience and low-visibility strategies, such as capturing school boards, pension boards, or education bureaucracies, when they are pushing policies that tend not to be supported by the public (Anzia 2013; Anzia and Moe 2015; Moe 2011). Our results yield a final implication for thinking about the historical development of the labor smovement: they suggest that the decline of strikes we tracked in Figure 1 may form a vicious cycle for the long-term political power of labor. As we have documented, strikes seem to be an important way that people form opinions about unions and develop interest in labor action. As both strikes and union membership have declined precipitously over the past decades, few members of the public have had opportunities to gain firsthand knowledge and interest in unions. Moreover, strikes appear to foster greater interest in further strikes, feeding on one another. If unions are to regain any economic or political clout in the coming years, our study suggests that the strike must be a central strategy of the labor movement. Reviving unions revives the economy Hindrey 20 Leo Hindrey Jr., columnist for Fortune, 10-19-2020, "Commentary: Why stronger labor unions would speed up America's post-COVID recovery," https://fortune.com/2020/10/19/labor-unions-covid-19-economic-recovery//Kankee Recessions always inflict the most pain on Americans in the middle and lower end of the income distribution range, destroying jobs, eroding wages and wiping out savings for those working in industries such as construction, manufacturing, hospitality and retail. But the crushing economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have reached levels unseen in the last four decades, and the long-term scarring will be severe without intervention from Congress – not just in the form of emergency relief, but also with targeted policy solutions. One solution lawmakers should prioritize is a historic workers’ rights proposal, given that defanged labor protections are a large part of the reason the downturn has been so devastating to those who can least afford it. We need to bring back fairness to an economy that is increasingly plagued by a fundamental imbalance of power between workers and employers. And at a time when our nation is engaged in a vital conversation about economic justice, we need to make union membership a civil right. When the pandemic struck, only about one in ten workers were unionized, a steep decline from the nearly one-third of workers who were members of a union in 1964, myself among them. As a result, millions of Americans—many of them essential workers—were left without a voice at the table when employers were deciding their fate. They had no ability to minimize layoffs or to define what paid sick leave would look like during the pandemic. The consequences of this are hard to overstate. At the peak of the pandemic, jobs in low-wage occupations—many of which have chronically low rates of union membership, such as food services—disappeared at roughly eight times the rate at which high-wage jobs did. This inequity has especially ravaged communities of color. It’s long past time to reverse the trend in declining union membership. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which passed the House in February just weeks before the coronavirus began to spread in the US, would authorize financial penalties for employers that violate workers’ rights, strengthen the ability of workers to join together in boycotts and strikes, and facilitate collective bargaining agreements, along with a number of other sweeping reforms. In so doing, the PRO Act would modernize federal labor laws. Republicans in the Senate said in February that they would not take up the legislation, and some in the business community have claimed that it is “completely stacked against employers.” But after eight months of economic devastation to workers, Senate leadership owes it to the American people to give the bill a fair hearing. When enabled, unions have proven remarkably effective in helping workers during the pandemic. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, for example, reached an agreement with UPS guaranteeing paid leave for any worker who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or who is required to be quarantined due to their illness or that of a family member. Stronger union membership must be a pillar of our nation’s recovery plan. When unions are strong, America is strong: Unions boost wages of both union and non-union workers, they create a more balanced economy, and they improve the health and safety of the workplace. By contrast, when unions are weak, inequality skyrockets. In order to protect America’s most vulnerable workers, it’s time for lawmakers to update our nation’s outdated labor laws. And we especially need to make union membership a civil right which is just as codified and protected as all other civil rights. Unions are also critical to RandD and innovation. Shin et al ’19 Ilhang Shin, College of Business and Economics, Gachon University; Sorah Park, Ewha School of Business, Ewha Womans University; Seong Pyo Cho, School of Business, Kyungpook National University; Seungho Choi, Ewha School of Business, Ewha Womans University; “The effect of labor unions on innovation and market valuation in business group affiliations: new evidence from South Korea”; 10/26/19; Asian Bus Manage 19, 239–270 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41291-019-00089-9; Accessed 7/7/20 NT *Edited for readability In contrast, unions can facilitate innovation by reducing grievances and staff turnover or by improving employees’ moral and training (Freeman and Medof 1984). Ulph and Ulph (1989) argued that an increase in union power can actually increase RandD as the union bargains over employment and wages. Furthermore, unions may allow firms to increase the speed of diffusion and implementation of technology and, hence, increase the firm’s incentive to invest (Menezes-Filho et al. 1998a, b). For instance, in the European studies, there was no compelling evidence that unions have a detrimental effect on RandD (e.g., Menezes-Filho et al. 1998a, b; Schnabel and Wagner 1992). Menezes-Filho et al. (1998a) showed that a negative relationship between unions and RandD investment disappears when unions could control the availability of innovative technology in the industry in the UK. Furthermore, Menezes-Filho et al. (1998b) showed that unions in the UK improve a firm’s relative RandD performance. In addition, Schnabel and Wagner (1992) showed that unions do not impede innovation in Germany, because of the more cooperative nature of industrial relations. Strong labor unions may act as a corporate governance mechanism that monitors the agency problems, thereby mitigating managerial myopia. This may eventually encourage risk taking and innovative behaviors. According to Chen et al. (2011), labor unions can effectively monitor managerial actions because they can acquire their firms’ information more easily than can outside stakeholders can. Also, unions exert their power on management by using their bargaining power to increase the corporate transparency. For instance, affiliated labor unions in Korea have asked management to share information and to allow their participation in decision making in order to monitor whether managers harm the transparency and betray the trust of stakeholders.2
Graphs omitted One of the important dynamics why recessions end is that because inflation decelerates more than wage growth. Thus, for the 90 or so of people who still have jobs, there are some compelling bargains, enough to jumpstart more spending. That all gets short-circuited if wages actually decline. Then, the fact that debt payments, unlike prices, do not decline, overwhelms the possibility of spending.
Recessions cause immense amount of death, pain and suffering Doerr 20’ https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull35.pdf The recession-mortality nexus and Covid-19 Sebastian Doerr and Boris Hofmann Key takeaways. Countries with a stronger predicted GDP decline in 2020 have also seen a larger number of deaths in excess of official Covid-19 fatalities. Historical data show that recessions are systematically associated with higher mortality, especially in developing economies. Following a recession, death rates remain elevated for several years. The eventual death toll of Covid-19 may be understated if the impact of the pandemic-induced recession is neglected. Limiting the economic fallout of the pandemic could also reduce excess mortality.
11/13/21
NOVDEC - Workforce Retention Adv
Tournament: Isidore Newman | Round: 4 | Opponent: Mercer Island KS | Judge: StPeter, Joshua Workforce Retention The Great Resignation is here: the world is entering an era of unprecedented labor shortage with no end in sight. Tharoor 10/18 Ishaan Tharoor, a columnist on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York. He also teaches an undergraduate seminar at Georgetown University on digital affairs and the global age, 10-18-2021, "The Great Resignation Goes Global," Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/18/labor-great-resignation-global/, 10-23-2021Aanya In the United States, the phenomenon dubbed as the “Great Resignation” seems to be picking up speed. A record 4.3 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in August, according to new data from the Labor Department — a figure that expands to 20 million if measured back to April. Many of these resignations took place in the retail and hospitality sectors, with employees opting out of difficult, low-wage jobs. But the quitting spans a broad spectrum of the American workforce, as the toll of the pandemic — and the tortuous path to recovery — keeps fueling what Atlantic writer Derek Thompson has described as “a centrifugal moment in American economic history.” Wages are up and businesses face staffing shortages, while the experience of a sustained public health emergency has prompted myriad Americans to reevaluate their work options. “This pandemic has been going on for so long, it’s affecting people mentally, physically,” Danny Nelms, president of the Work Institute, a consulting firm, told the Wall Street Journal. “All those things are continuing to make people be reflective of their life and career and their jobs. Add to that over 10 million openings, and if I want to go do something different, it’s not terribly hard to do.” The “Great Resignation” in the United States was preceded by a far greater — decades-long, arguably — stagnation in worker wages and benefits. In lower-end jobs, earnings have not matched the pace of inflation, while work grew more informal and precarious. Workers’ rights activists now see a vital moment for a course correction. October has been a banner month for American organized labor, with major strikes across various industries sweeping the country. “Workers are harder to replace and many companies are scrambling to manage hobbled supply chains and meet pandemic-fueled demand for their products. That has given unions new leverage, and made striking less risky,” my colleagues reported. For the average worker in a developed Western economy, there are reasons for encouragement. “The truth is people in the 1960s and ’70s quit their jobs more often than they have in the past 20 years, and the economy was better off for it,” wrote Thompson in the Atlantic. “Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out. And they’re being rewarded for their lack of patience: Wages for low-income workers are rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession.” In social democratic Western Europe, a stronger safety net has led to somewhat less disruption in the workforce. But similar trends are at play: “Data collated by the OECD, which groups most of the advanced industrial democracies, shows that in its 38 member countries, about 20 million fewer people are in work than before the coronavirus struck,” noted Politico Europe. “Of these, 14 million have exited the labor market and are classified as ‘not working’ and ‘not looking for work.’ Compared to 2019, 3 million more young people are not in employment, education or training.” A survey published in August found that a third of all Germany companies were reporting a dearth in skilled workers. That month, Detlef Scheele, head of the German Federal Employment Agency, told Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that the country would need to import 400,000 skilled workers a year to make up for shortfalls in a host of industries, from nursing care to green tech companies. Pandemic-era border closures and rising wages in Central and Eastern European countries have led to shortages of meatpackers and hospitality workers in countries like Germany and Denmark. “Frankly, this is a pay issue,” said Andrew Watt, head of the European economics unit at the Macroeconomic Policy Institute at the German trade unions’ Hans Böckler Foundation, to Politico. “Wages will have to increase in these sectors to get people back into tough, low-paid jobs. That’s no bad thing.” But the story gets a bit more uneven, and certainly more grim, in the developing world. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 26 million people lost their jobs last year amid pandemic-era shutdowns, according to the U.N.'s International Labour Organization. The vast majority of jobs that have returned are in the informal sector, an outcome that often means even lower pay and greater precarity in a region already defined by profound economic inequality. “These are jobs that are generally unstable, with low wages, without social protection or rights,” said Vinícius Pinheiro, regional director for the ILO, at a briefing last month. He also noted the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the region’s youth. According to one study earlier this year, 1 in 6 people aged between 18 and 29 in Latin America and the Caribbean had left work since the pandemic began. In Asia’s diverse economies, other pains are being felt. China is seeing its own version of the “Great Resignation,” with a younger generation of workers more disenchanted by their prospects and turned off by the relatively low wages in the manufacturing centers that powered China’s economic rise. Authorities in Beijing warn of a growing shortage of skilled workers in its crucial tech industry, a challenge for China’s leadership as it tries to steer the national economy toward more skilled sectors. And as global demand picks up after the fallow months of the pandemic, China’s factories are feeling the pinch of labor shortages Another labor-related pandemic phenomenon is crystallizing in neighboring Vietnam: Many migrant workers who left for their rural homes when jobs in big cities dried up amid lockdowns are not coming back. “It’s clear that there was extreme hardship faced by both businesses and workers during the prolonged lockdown,” said Mary Tarnowka, executive director of AmCham Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, to the Financial Times. “And there was particular pain and hardship for people at lower income levels who didn’t have money for rent or food.” In their villages, many of Asia’s working poor can at least count on roofs over their head and food to eat. It’s another form of resignation. Those who clung to what jobs they could keep were often coping with more dire conditions. When the pandemic snarled fast-fashion supply chains, millions of garment workers in South Asia, as a recent study by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance documented, had to swallow wage losses and endure work arrangements marked by widespread human rights abuses.In a survey interviewing 1,140 garment workers in Myanmar, Honduras, Ethiopia and India, researchers from Britain’s University of Sheffield and the U.S.-based Worker Rights Consortium found that a majority had been forced to borrow money and many incurred greater debt over the course of the pandemic. About a third of workers who changed jobs reported worse working conditions, including lower pay and more risk. “Workers were already not being paid fair wages and had little savings at the beginning of the pandemic,” said Zameer Awan, field worker with the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, to Reuters. “Now most are deep in debt and those who have found jobs again find themselves in more abusive conditions but without a voice anymore.”
12/11/21
SEPTOCT - Stock AC
Tournament: SEPOCT | Round: 1 | Opponent: any | Judge: any Stock AC
Framework
Pleasure is an intrinsic good. Moen ’16 – (Ole Martin, PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy @ University of Oslo, "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267). Modified for glang Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative. 2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good. 3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask what heris end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Although pleasure and pain thus seem to be good candidates for intrinsic value and disvalue, several objections have been raised against this suggestion: (1) that pleasure and pain have instrumental but not intrinsic value/disvalue; (2) that pleasure and pain gain their value/disvalue derivatively, in virtue of satisfying/frustrating our desires; (3) that there is a subset of pleasures that are not intrinsically valuable (so-called “evil pleasures”) and a subset of pains that are not intrinsically disvaluable (so-called “noble pains”), and (4) that pain asymbolia, masochism, and practices such as wiggling a loose tooth render it implausible that pain is intrinsically disvaluable. I shall argue that these objections fail. 1 – Death first – the best quantifiable way to measure pain because it is immoral to compare suffering.
The World Trade Organization — the WTO — is the international organization whose primary purpose is to open trade for the benefit of ALL .
C1: Accessibility
Current IPP systems are damaging to developing countries – 3 links OXFAM 21’ Oxfam is a global organization working to end the injustice of poverty. Oxfam provides grants and technical support to local organizations around the world. Together with these partners, they support long-term solutions that help poor communities grow nutritious food, access land and clean water, and obtain decent work and fair wages.
Loopholes allow IPs to break out of conventional rules – uniquely bad in developing countries and hinders innovation
(A)Patent linkage prohibits a country’s drug regulatory authority from approving a medicine if there is any patent—even a frivolous one—in effect. It requires regulatory officials to police patents in addition to their core work of evaluating the safety and efficacy of medicines. (B)Patent extension provisions allow companies to seek extensions of the 20-year patent term to compensate for administrative delays by patent offices and drug regulatory authorities. (Such delays are inevitable in developing countries, where these offices are chronically underfunded and are facing increasing numbers of patent applications.) (C)Data exclusivity creates a monopoly that is separate from patents by prohibiting a country’s drug regulatory authority from approving a generic medicine based on the clinical trial data provided by the originator company.
2. Generic Competition is better – IPPs interfere.
Extensive patent protection for new medicines delays the onset of generic competition. And because generic competition is the only proven method of reducing medicine prices in a sustainable way, such high levels of IPP are extremely damaging to public health. Thanks to the cost savings from use of generics, PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) has successfully initiated treatment for more than three million people worldwide, and saved $380 million in 2010 alone.
3. See Peru: IPP makes medicine inaccessible, current system makes it worse Peru is a low- to middle-income country with high levels of poverty and inequality and with a high burden of chronic and noncommunicable diseases that require medicines over the long term. Prices for patented medicines to treat cancer, for example, are unaffordable for households and have exhausted most of the government’s resources available to pay for treatments under the public health system. A 2010 study by a Peruvian government entity (the Director General of Medicines, Supply and Drugs, or DIGEMID) revealed this stark reality: the monthly cost of one key patented medicine needed to treat head and neck cancer is equivalent to 880 times the daily minimum wage in Peru, an amount that would take a worker more than two years to earn, without a single day off.
Studies prove – IP is damaging to accessibility Since the introduction of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995, there has been considerable concern that poor access to essential medicines in developing countries would be exacerbated because strengthening intellectual property rights (IPR) leads to monopoly of pharmaceutical markets and delayed entry of lower-cost generic drugs. However, despite extensive research and disputes regarding this issue, there are few empirical studies on the topic. In this study, we investigated the effect of IPR on access to medicines and catastrophic expenditure for medicines, using data from World Health Surveys 2002-2003. The index of patent rights developed by Ginarte and Park (1997) was used to measure the IPR protection level of each country. Estimates were adjusted for individual and country characteristics. In the results of multilevel logistic regression analyses, higher level of IPR significantly increased the likelihood of nonaccess to prescribed medicines even after controlling for individual socioeconomic status and national characteristics associated with access to medicines. This study's finding on the negative impact of IPR on access to medicines calls for the implementation of more active policy at the supra-national level to improve access in low- and middle-income countries. Impact: Lack of medicine due to IPPs has devastating consequences – Effects Millions WHO 17’
Nearly 2 billion people have no access to basic medicines, causing a cascade of preventable misery and suffering. Since the landmark agreement on the Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, WHO and its partners have launched a number of initiatives that are making market forces serve the poor. The WHO prequalification programme is now firmly established as a mechanism for improving access to safe, effective and quality-assured products. WHO has struggled to improve access to medicines throughout its nearly 70-year history, and rightly so. Good health is impossible without access to pharmaceutical products. Universal health coverage depends on the availability of quality-assured affordable health technologies in sufficient quantities. Lack of access to medicines causes a cascade of misery and suffering, from no relief for the excruciating pain of a child’s earache, to women who bleed to death during childbirth, to deaths from diseases that are easily and inexpensively prevented or cured. Lack of access to medicines is one inequality that can be measured by a starkly visible yardstick: numbers of preventable deaths. Efforts to improve access to medicines are driven by a compelling ethical imperative. People should not be denied access to life-saving or health-promoting interventions for unfair reasons, including those with economic or social causes. Millions of yearly childhood deaths from diseases that could have been prevented or cured by existing medical products would be unthinkable in a fair and just world.
Pandemics can cause significant, widespread increases in morbidity and mortality and have disproportionately higher mortality impacts on LMICs. Pandemics can cause economic damage through multiple channels, including short-term fiscal shocks and longer-term negative shocks to economic growth. Individual behavioral changes, such as fear-induced aversion to workplaces and other public gathering places, are a primary cause of negative shocks to economic growth during pandemics. Some pandemic mitigation measures can cause significant social and economic disruption. In countries with weak institutions and legacies of political instability, pandemics can increase in political stresses and tensions. In these contexts, outbreak response measures such as quarantines have sparked violence and tension between states and citizens.
When it comes to vaccines, developing countries are left out which hurts everyone – See Covid Harman 21’ https://theconversation.com/profiles/sophie-harman-137760 Sophie Harman is Professor of International Politics and a BAFTA-nominated film producer. Sophie’s teaching and research draws on her extensive fieldwork experience in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and the global health and international political economy hubs of Geneva, Washington DC and New York.
We will never end the death and destruction of COVID-19 until we get real about vaccine equity. In a month of high-level meetings from the G7 to the World Health Assembly, we have seen a lot of rhetoric from the global north, and a lot of frustration and urgency from the global south, but still no substantial changes on how to get the world vaccinated. Vaccines offer an incredible opportunity for science to outpace the virus, but now we are seeing the virus outpace our outdated politics. Around 0.8 of all COVID vaccines distributed in the world have gone to poor countries. Most of the 1.65 billion doses of vaccines administered have been in rich countries. We know that this is a problem. Global coverage of the vaccine is imperative to prevent death and disease from COVID-19 and to help stop new variants. Unless we sort out this imbalance the threat of COVID-19 will never go away. As we argue in BMJ Global Health, we can address this imbalance through a call for vaccine justice. We need to move past outdated charitable models of poor countries depending on rich countries for their leftovers. Instead, we need to develop manufacturing and distribution capacity throughout the world to get vaccines to where they are needed and fast. We believe in experts. We believe knowledge must inform decisions. To start, the international community needs to stop pushing charitable models of sharing leftover vaccines and Covax. Sharing leftovers is unsustainable and dependent on the whim of individual countries, often coming too little, too late. Pledges at the G7 are all very well, but these are already too late and mask the substantial problem of vaccine nationalism and hoarding. Covax, the initiative set up to avoid vaccine nationalism and hoarding, was doomed to failure from the outset. It was created to ensure every country in the world has access to doses for 20 of its population in 2021, regardless of ability to pay. Covax has been lauded as an effective model that delivers. However, it is already running into three major problems. The first is perhaps the most obvious: doses for 20 of a population this year will never be enough to build up immunity to COVID-19 quickly enough. The second is supply. India is the main supplier of vaccines to Covax. India’s introduction of vaccine export restrictions to help deal with its devastating outbreak is limiting supply to Covax. The third is perhaps more predictable – a significant funding shortfall.Charitable models like Covax are always under-funded. If they are under-funded in the short term, there is little hope for their medium and long-term funding. We have seen this time and again with financing initiatives from Make Poverty History to the health-related Millennium Development Goals. Institutions will always be going cap in hand to states who will never fully pay up. A lot of rhetoric from the global north. Hollie Adams/EPA. Covax has become a political dead cat in global health. For every accusation on vaccine hoarding or lack of support for sharing intellectual property, states use Covax as evidence that they are committed to vaccinating the world. Covax is used as an example of good intentions, while simultaneously as an excuse for blocking the transfer of technology and passing of intellectual property waivers in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Low and middle-income countries are on to this. This is why they are pushing for the waiver and suspicious of efforts towards a new international pandemic preparedness treaty. Such states accept the charity from Covax as the only offer on the table but know the way out of their situation would be to make vaccines themselves. It doesn’t have to be this way. States must be empowered to produce their own vaccines and draw from previous knowledge of effective community vaccination campaigns and mobilisation to stimulate uptake. The role of the international community must be to facilitate technology transfer, vaccine production capacity in-country, and the development of in-country immunisation campaigns. Anything else is just a distraction. Defenders of intellectual property suggest low and middle-income countries lack the capacity to develop vaccines. This smacks of discrimination as to what is seen to be possible in poor countries. If such defenders truly believe this to be the case: put your money where your mouth is and help build capacity. Low and middle-income countries can produce vaccines through technology transfer and investment from high-income countries, and through working with vaccine supply experts, such as Covax, to negotiate complex supply chains. Complex, yes. Impossible, no. Pharmaceutical companies can be compensated by additional public funds. Their investment does not have to be out of pocket. Given that state funding was fundamental in stimulating research and development of COVID-19 vaccines, state funding can likewise be used to incentivise technology transfer. As the head of IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, said: “Vaccine policy is economic policy,” and thus investment in vaccines are good investments for states given the threat of COVID-19 to the global economy. A year ago, no one thought it would be possible to have safe and delivered vaccines for COVID-19. Public finance, private innovation, and scientific endeavour combined to show what could be possible. Let’s stop talking charity and start getting real about what will end this pandemic.
New Pandemics are deadlier and faster are coming – IPPs leave developing countries vulnerable Antonelli 20 Ashley Fuoco Antonelli 5-15-2020 https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/05/15/weekly-line "Weekly line: Why deadly disease outbreaks could become more common—even after Covid-19" (Associate Editor — American Health Line) While the new coronavirus pandemic suddenly took the world by storm, the truth is public health experts for years have warned that a virus similar to the new coronavirus would cause the next pandemic—and they say deadly infectious disease outbreaks could become more common. Infectious disease experts are always on the lookout for the next pandemic, and in a report published two years ago, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health predicted that the pathogen most likely to cause the next pandemic would be a virus similar to the common cold. Specifically, the researchers predicted that the pathogen at fault for the next pandemic would be: A microbe for which people have not yet developed immunities, meaning that a large portion of the human population would be susceptible to infection; Contagious during the so-called "incubation period"—the time when people are infected with a pathogen but are not yet showing symptoms of the infection or are showing only mild symptoms; and Resistant to any known prevention or treatment methods. The researchers also concluded that such a pathogen would have a "low but significant" fatality rate, meaning the pathogen wouldn't kill human hosts fast enough to inhibit its spread. As Amesh Adalja—a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who led the report—told Live Science's Rachael Rettner at the time, "It just has to make a lot of people sick" to disrupt society. The researchers said RNA viruses—which include the common cold, influenza, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (or SARS, which is caused by a type of coronavirus)—fit that bill. And even though we had a good bit of experience dealing with common RNA viruses like the flu, Adalja at the time told Rettner that there were "a whole host of viral families that get very little attention when it comes to pandemic preparedness." Not even two years later, the new coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, emerged and quickly spread throughout the world, reaching pandemic status in just a few months. To date, officials have reported more than 4.4 million cases of Covid-19 and 302,160 deaths tied to the new coronavirus globally. In the United States, the number of reported Covid-19 cases has reached more than 1.4 million and the number of reported deaths tied to the new coronavirus has risen to nearly 86,000 in just over three months. Although public health experts had warned about the likelihood of a respiratory-borne RNA virus causing the next global pandemic, many say the world was largely unprepared to handle this type of infectious disease outbreak. And as concerning as that revelation may be on its own, perhaps even more worrisome is that public health experts predict life-threatening infectious disease outbreaks are likely to become more common—meaning we could be susceptible to another pandemic in the future. Why experts think deadly infectious disease outbreaks could become more common As the Los Angeles Times's Joshua Emerson Smith notes, infectious disease experts for more than ten years now have noted that "outbreaks of dangerous new diseases with the potential to become pandemics have been on the rise—from HIV to swine flu to SARS to Ebola." For instance, a report published in Nature in 2008 found that the number of emerging infectious disease events that occurred in the 1990s was more than three times higher than it was in the 1940s. Many experts believe the recent increase in infectious disease outbreaks is tied to human behaviors that disrupt the environment, "such as deforestation and poaching," which have led "to increased contact between highly mobile, urbanized human populations and wild animals," Emerson Smith writes. In the 2008 report, for example, researchers noted that about 60 of 355 emerging infectious disease events that occurred over a 50-year period could be largely linked to wild animals, livestock, and, to a lesser extent, pets. Now, researchers believe the new coronavirus first jumped to humans from animals at a wildlife market in Wuhan, China. Along those same lines, some experts have argued that global climate change has driven an increase in infectious diseases—and could continue to do so. A federally mandated report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 2018 warned that warmer temperatures could expand the geographic range covered by disease-carrying insects and pests, which could result in more Americans being exposed to ticks carrying Lyme disease and mosquitos carrying the dengue, West Nile, and Zika viruses. And experts now say continued warming in global temperatures, deforestation, and other environmentally disruptive behaviors have broadened that risk by bringing more people into contact with disease-carrying animals. Further, experts note that infectious diseases today are able to spread much faster and farther than they could decades ago because of increasing globalization and travel. While some have suggested the Covid-19 pandemic could stifle that trend, others argue globalization is likely to continue—meaning so could infectious diseases' far spread.
C3: Innovation
Strong Patents Threaten Innovation Due to Cost Wiens 21, (Jason Wiens is policy director in Entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where he leads the Foundation’s strategy to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship by improving public policy. He oversees a national grant portfolio of advocacy projects that educate policymakers about how government can support entrepreneurship and directs the Kauffman-led Start Us Up coalition. His views on entrepreneurship policy have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Roll Call, The Hill, Washington Monthly, and VentureBeat, 8-25-2021, "How Intellectual Property Can Help or Hinder Innovation," https://www.kauffman.org/resources/entrepreneurship-policy-digest/how-intellectual-property-can-help-or-hinder-innovation/, accessed 9-1-2021) The Dangers of Too-Strong Patents Expansive patent rights make successive innovationve activity more costly. Having to seek permission from all related patent holders bids up the cost of innovation. Overly strong patent rights disproportionately benefit large firms. Larger firms they are more likely to use patents to entrench their position in the market, as opposed to small- and medium-sized firms that are more likely to use patents to accumulate revenue and enhance their reputation. When patent rights are stronger, firms with intellectual assets are emboldened to threaten other inventors with litigation. For example, NPEs often discourage innovation by more productive innovators. Seeking a Goldilocks Approach When intellectual property rights are too strong or too weak, they reduce the incentives for innovation.
IPP Doesn’t achieve its goal of increasing innovation, but rather reduces it Reichman 09 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3060777/ If it remains true that a country cannot play in the knowledge economy without suitable intellectual property rights (IPRs),22 experience in many OECD countries is demonstrating that badly configured, unbalanced, over-protectionist IP regimes gradually stifle innovation by making inputs to future innovation too costly and too cumbersome to sustain over time.23 Such regimes also enable large corporations that are sometimes slothful innovators to accumulate pools of cross-licensed patents that create barriers to entry for the truly innovativesmall- and medium-sized firms.24 Properly designed IPRs do, however, protect innovative small- and medium-sized firms from the predatory practices of their larger competitors.
Impact: The lack of innovations hinders the progress of society and destroys the possibility of a better future. Lee 2018 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2444569X16300154 Innovation has been the main task of humans throughout history (Lee, 2015). To survive and improve the quality of life, continuous innovation efforts have been imperative. All major revolutionary waves of human history – agricultural, industrial, information, and now convergence – are all about innovation for creating new and better value (Lee, Olson, and Trimi, 2012). Political leaders exhort the importance of innovation for social justice and a better quality living environment for the citizens. Global executives stress the importance of continuous innovation for new products/services and ventures for customers, yet 94 percent expressed dissatisfaction with their innovation performance (Christiansen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan, 2016). Managers of non-profit organizations pursue innovation to challenge the social ills of the economic divide, digital divide, and goal divide (Lee, 2015). The purpose of innovation is much more profound than just creating greater customer value, better competitive advantage of firms, and an environment for better quality of life. The ultimate goal of innovation should be the creation of a better future. The “small i” for innovation is for an individual, organization, society, or country. However, the “Large I” should be innovation for creating a smart future. The benefits of innovation may accrue to individuals, groups of people, communities, industries, societies, nations, regions, and the world. What is common to all these entities is that they all pursue innovation for better preparation of the future (Canton, 2015, Drucker, 1985). However, innovation should not be for passively being future smart by preparing to meet the uncertain future by being predictive, adaptive, and agile. Instead, innovation should be for more aggressively active in creating a smart future that provides more opportunities for a better quality of life. The term “smart” has been used widely nowadays, for example, smartphones, smart cars, smart homes, smart infrastructure, smart cities, smart countries, and the like. The term “smart” represents the concept of hope and aspiration that depends on a person's perspective. The smart state depends on the given condition, environment, culture, and the person's value system. Nevertheless, the general concept of a smart future should mean a living environment which is much better than the current state of affairs. The smart future should be where innovation would help develop intelligent solutions to complex problems to secure a humane environment (Streitz, 2015). In such a smart future, people can more freely pursue opportunities to learn and grow, be engaged in good relationships, be happy with the community and work place, and also have a comfortable and healthy life style with adequate financial resources (Gallup-Healthways, 2015). Creating such a smart future requires much more than just smart gadgets, advanced technologies, convergence strategies, and government support. It requires a fabric of soft innovations that can nurture an aspirational future such as social justice, rule of law, transparency, accountability, cohesive collective wisdom of people, and shared visions and goals (Kramer and Pfitzer, 2016, Porter and Kramer, 2011).
Method
The role of the ballot is to evaluate the consequences of the affirmative’s policy proposal.
Scenario analysis builds portable skills of critical thinking, creativity, and planning. Barma et al. ’16 Barma, Naazneen (Naazneen H. Barma is Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School), Durbin, Brent (Brent Durbin is Associate Professor of Government at Smith College), Lorber, Eric (Eric Lorber is an adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security), and Whitlark, Rachel (Rachel Whitlark is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology). “’Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science.” International Studies Perspectives, Volume 17, Number 2, pgs. 1-19, https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/48304/Barma_using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Policy debates empower students to activism. Apolitical narratives become coopted by institutions. Coverstone ’05 Coverstone, Alan (Alan Coverstone is a debate coach at Wake Forest University). “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact.” Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact, 17 November 2005. An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables prevents action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention