Senator Ron Johnson Lets Numbers Illustrate His Views in “On the Issues” Visit

US Senator Ron Johnson let the numbers tell a lot of the story Tuesday during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Marquette University Law School.

Numbers showing how the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) that comes from federal spending, which has risen a lot with projections that it will keep rising. Numbers showing how the gap between projected federal revenue and spending has grown and is forecast to become much bigger. Numbers showing how, in the history of Social Security, the amount collected exceeded the amount spent every year until 2010 but now we’re at the start of a projected long run in which payments are greater than revenue. Numbers showing how steps such as increasing taxes on rich people would do very little to close the gaps in upcoming federal budgets if we stay on the course we’re on. He showed these and other matters as graphs on two large screens in Eckstein Hall’s Appellate Courtroom.

But Johnson also included numbers on some non-economic issues. A chart on the dramatic long-term climb of “births out of wedlock” appeared to spark the most reaction in the audience of about 200. The single-mother birth rate was 6.9% in 1964 and 41% in recent years, Johnson’s chart showed. He called the rise “a very graphic, very harmful unintended consequence of all of our good intentions” in the national War on Poverty, started in the 1960s. Among the factors Johnson said were behind the increase: Public benefits policies that provided unintended incentives for mothers not to get married. As “a compassionate society,” he said, government wanted to help those in need.

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Confirmation Bias

Teaching dispute resolution typically includes making students aware of the many different biases that influence our views of conflicts and our decision making. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about confirmation bias during this election. According to the Oxford Dictionary, confirmation bias is “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.” A prime example of this bias in operation during the election cycle is the decision about who won the second Presidential Debate. Republicans tended to state that Romney won, while Democrats typically called the debate in Obama’s favor.

There’s an interesting blog post about this phenomenon and satire on Social Psychology Eye, an associated site for Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on Social and Personality Psychology. Even though the post is from April 2011, it has some good points to keep in mind in the next few weeks while we’re barraged by negative ads, phone calls, internet ads, etc. One great piece of advice is at the end of the post:

“Here is one tip for overcoming confirmation bias within yourself: When most people do ‘reality testing’ they seek information that confirms their existing views are correct. Instead, try to do the opposite. Try to find evidence that argues against your existing views. It may be uncomfortable, but it can be more likely to lead to information that is accurate rather than just comforting.”

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The Boden Lecture: The Reconstruction Era Birth of Our Concept of Citizenship

The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 – as great as the first two were, it was the third that put in place the concepts of American citizenship and the civil rights of all Americans that are part of the bedrock of American life, prominent historian Eric Foner said in a lecture at Eckstein Hall.

Delivering Marquette Law School’s 2012 Robert F. Boden Lecture last week, Foner focused on the origins in American law of birthright citizenship, the principle that (with immaterial exceptions) anyone born in the United States is a citizen and has basic rights that go with citizenship.

Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, said many people assume that the principle of “equality under the law” dates back to the origins of the United States – or, as he put it humorously, that the nation was born perfect and has gotten better ever since.

In reality, he said, the nation was definitely not premised on equality under the law in its early stages. For one thing, the Constitution itself did not give citizenship to even free black people, much less to slaves. And, Foner said, citizenship issues were controlled by individual states, rather than the federal government. Every state in the nation had laws that treated black people worse than white people, he noted.

The great changes that declared all men (women’s issues came later) born in America to have basic rights, such as the right to own property and take disputes to court, came with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, put into law by Congress over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, and the subsequent adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The rights extended by those federal enactments and others in the Reconstruction Era were violated with impunity for many decades. But the rights they embraced eventually took hold and came alive in the Civil Rights Era of the mid-twentieth century, Foner said.

Foner said the history of America is a tale of ups and downs, of rights granted and lost. The right to citizenship extended to anyone born in the United States has become controversial in recent years as immigration issues have heated up, he observed. It is a right that arose from the “titanic struggle” of the era of the Civil War and its aftermath, and it was one of the nation’s ways of addressing the legacy of slavery and the pervasive denial of rights to black people. Given how birthright citizenship has served the country, Foner said, “we should think long and hard before changing it.”

A version of Foner’s Boden Lecture will appear in 2013, in the next Marquette Lawyer.

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