Us and Them
This is my latest sermon, to be given today at the Community Unitarian Universalists in Brighton. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: Group identity is the source of many of the best and the worst things that people do. In the form of patriotism, school spirit, esprit de corps, or brotherhood or sisterhood, it can encourage crucial sacrifices and help provide meaning to people’s lives. But the dark side of group identity is the felt division of the world into “us” and “them”–with “them” viewed as not fully human. A key challenge for liberal religion is to help create a strong group identity that can embrace all of humanity.
I have been a strong supporter of more open immigration. So I have been concerned by the strength of anti-immigration sentiment revealed by Donald Trump’s success as a political candidate on an anti-immigration platform, and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, also driven in important measure by anti-immigration sentiment.
Economists argue over whether immigration is good for the people in the receiving country or not, for the most part coming down on the side of immigration raising the wages of the large majority of people in the receiving country, with the important exceptions of slightly earlier immigrants and those without a high school diploma. (Immigrants also are likely to raise rents and property values, which is good for those who own property and not so good for those who don’t.) But the most important benefit of immigration often goes unmentioned–the benefit to the immigrants themselves–many of whom come from nations that–relative to the United States–are in bad shape either economically or politically. To me, it is a breach of economic ethics to do a cost-benefit analysis that puts a zero weight on any category of human beings affected by a policy as anything more than a mathematical exercise; and to discuss immigration without mentioning the benefit of immigration to the immigrants themselves is to make the same error in a less formal way.
Although I am skeptical of it, an argument can be made that for some policy-making purposes, it would be appropriate to give a higher weight to the effects of a policy to current citizens than to the effects of that policy on an equal number of potential future citizens, but as can be seen in an exercise I have had my students do, when coming from a desperately poor nation, the benefits of immigration to an immigrant are so much greater than the costs to those in the receiving country that even if the well-being of immigrants is counted as worth only one-hundredth as much as the well-being of citizens, immigration often looks like a good deal.
So the key issue in immigration policy is whose well-being counts: who is in the charmed circle of people whose lives we are concerned about and who is not. On this question of whose well-being counts, Aristotle encouraged Alexander the Great to view all Greeks as friends and all non-Greeks with only as much concern as if they were beasts (1,2). In the same vein, I don’t think it is just an anthropologists’ legend that the word many hunter-gatherers have for their own tribe can be reasonably translated as “the People,” with the implication of a less-than-fully-human status for those in other tribes.
In many ways, we demonstrate that we do care about people in other nations. We provide both private and public foreign aid, with a fair bit of it altruistically designated for the world’s poorest of the poor. I think concern for the world’s poorest of the poor would be even greater than it is if there were a program for schoolchildren in the United States and other rich nations to chat over Skype–perhaps in broken English–with sister classrooms of schoolchildren in very poor areas of the world. I would be willing to bet a great deal that such a program would not go on for very long before someone got the bright idea that one of the best ways to help their friends abroad would be to help them immigrate to the the United States or other rich nation. And of course, if doable, that idea would be a sound one. The poorest of the poor, if brought to our shores, would soon be at a much higher standard of living than in the land they came from. The basic reason is simple. Leaving aside ruling cliques able to take over natural resource wealth, countries and regions become rich by being relatively well run. The same human being, in a relatively well-run country, does much better than in a poorly-run country.
According to the Gospels, Jesus had an answer for whose well-being counts both in the way he recognized women, lepers, children, Samaritans and tax-collectors day after day as full human beings, but also in his great charge:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, (Matthew 28:19)
In my blog post “‘Keep the Riffraff Out!’” which tries to ferret out that sentiment in many nooks and crannies of our public policy, I pursued an analogy between nations and religions, writing this:
Mormonism is a proselyting religion. Close to 35 years ago, I was one of many Mormon missionaries trying to persuade people in Tokyo to become Mormons. And most of you will one time or another see Mormon missionaries at your door, wherever you are in the world.
One of the positive features of a proselyting religion that is not always fully appreciated is that newcomers are fully welcome, as long as they make even a minimal attempt to fit in. And if they so choose, it is not hard for them to become full members of the community.
Sometimes, members of the Mormon Church question the virtue of bringing someone into the community who has enough needs that they are likely to require more help from the community than the amount they are able to help others. But the young women and men serving for a year and a half or two as full-time missionaries and higher Mormon Church authorities quickly overrule such sentiments.
I don’t believe in the supernatural anymore, so I don’t believe in Mormonism. But I do believe in America.
I wish America were a proselyting nation, eager to bring newcomers into the fold. I believe it would be a better world if more of the world’s 7 billion people were Americans. There are many people who would be willing converts to being Americans, but we keep them out.
Today I want to pursue the analogy between nations and religions in a little more detail. I think there are three basic models, that I will call the Unitarian-Universalist model, the Mormon model and the Zoroastrian/Orthodox Jewish model.
When my wife Gail and I, as well as some of our friends, fled from Mormonism sixteen years ago, we were not only welcomed by what is now the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor with open arms, but welcomed just as we were. I am sure former Mormons must have seemed weird to some of the members of the congregation, but they took all of that in stride, partly because they were conscious of their own idiosyncrasies.
When converts join the Mormon Church, they are expected to follow a substantial set of rules of conduct and behavior. Right away, they are expected to contribute not only financially but in assigned roles in the congregation. And even patterns of insider jargon and oddities such as a positive attitude towards Jell-O are soon inculcated. So it isn’t long before newcomers have patterns of action and speech that feel comfortable to the long-timers in a congregation.
Zoroastrianism has relatively few converts, and Orthodox Judaism makes it hard for people to convert if they weren’t Jewish at some level to begin with. One reason they are not proselyting religions is that historically, they were minority religions in lands where trying to convert others would have been seen as an affront to the dominant religion. But even now–though attitudes toward converts may be shifting–there are many Zoroastrian priests and Orthodox Rabbis who are very reluctant to accept someone as a convert who shows up on their doorstep wanting to convert.
The analogy is to three types of immigration policies:
- Welcoming people as they are, with all of the multicultural complexity that entails,
- Welcoming people on the condition that they quickly take on the patterns of the dominant culture,
- Discouraging people from coming in.
There are sincere believers in each type of policy. Personally, I find it hard to decide between the Unitarian-Universalist model of accepting people as they are and the Mormon model of trying to change people to better fit the cultural norms of the nation they are joining–if only to help guarantee people’s willingness to accept newcomers, and to help generate extra esprit de corps that may help people be more altruistic toward one another.
So far I have been talking about citizens and foreigners or members and non-members of a religion. But these are both special cases of a powerful psychological lens: “us” versus “them.” For many of the few people who would ever pay any attention to anything I said, the main us-them distinction is between those who are relatively well-educated–say those who have at least some college education or maybe a bachelor’s degree (or who act as if they do) and those who don’t have so much education (or act as if they don’t). Or for others, the main us-them distinction may be quite directly between the “us” of those who accept foreigners and other marginalized groups and the “them” who don’t.
It is hard not to want to exclude those who want to exclude and hard not to be intolerant of those who are intolerant, but Edwin Markham’s poem “Outwitted” shows the way to be intolerant of intolerance and to exclude exclusion without being intolerant of people who are intolerant or trying to exclude people who are exclusionist. Edwin wrote:
“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!
For those of us who can empathize with foreigners who want to join us in our fair land, one of the great tasks of empathy that we face is to understand the feelings of those who want to “keep the riffraff out” without thinking of them as riffraff. Full human beings–who should be treated as full human beings–can and do often want to treat other human beings as less than full human beings. This is not a rare quirk of human nature, but a common one. So we had better learn to deal with it.
My point of entry into attempted empathy with anti-immigrant sentiment is to think of the difference between a big city and a small town. Big cities are complex and attract people who like complexity. Adding, say, 5% to the population of that big city by the entry of additional immigrants adds a bit to the complexity, but doesn’t change the fundamental character of the big city. By contrast, in a small town of, say, 1000 people, where everyone knows almost everyone else, adding three families of immigrants could seem as if it totally changed the character of the town. Things just aren’t the way they used to be once those immigrants arrive, and there was a certain comfortable charm to the way things used to be. So the effect of immigrants on their surroundings isn’t just a matter of population percentages, but also a matter of how demographically complex the community was to begin with. Of course, in addition to the first few immigrants seeming like a big deal, the point at which “outsiders” become numerous enough to gain serious political influence–when it didn’t seem as if they had it before–is also a potential moment for distress.
In a Twitter debate I had about immigration policy after the Brexit vote, Morgan Warstler and Nick Rowe both argue that some of the opposition to immigration comes from people’s desire to, in effect, belong to a club that they like. A hint of evidence for this view can be found in the claim I have seen that those who are “socially-connected” by attending church or belonging to a literal club have been less likely to vote for Donald Trump. One theory for this would be that if one’s main social group is something smaller than the entire geographical community one lives in, immigrants moving into one’s geographical community are less disruptive of one’s social relationships than if one’s main social group is one’s entire geographical community. If this is true, a church one actually attends, by providing a social group somewhat buffered from demographic shocks, may tend to make make one more accepting of immigrants coming into one’s geographic community. By contrast, a church one doesn’t attend may act as a quasi-ethnic identity that makes one less tolerant of outsiders.
As I read the current news, it is painful for me to see refugees from war-torn lands shunned as if they were nuclear waste that can’t find a home even in Yucca mountain. And I hate to see people so eager to exclude immigrants that they will accept other serious costs to do so. To me, one of the most important principles is that human beings are human beings, and that everyone’s well-being counts.
I would love to find the secret to instilling in people a kind of patriotism not only for their own nation, but also for humanity. It may be only my parochial pride talking, but I think we are a remarkable and wonderful species. Without treating other animals or plants or sophonts badly, we should feel good about belonging to the ranks of homo sapiens.
On the other hand, when we see people behaving badly, it is worth remembering that they, like us, are still apes–so, perfect behavior is not to be expected. Let us give each other a break and forgive often, even as we strive to encourage the best in ourselves and others, while standing firmly against the worst impulses of human nature in others and ourselves.
Selfishness and the Fall of Rome
Link to Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell: The Death of a Superpower
pp. 418, 419:
It is only human nature to lose sight of the wider issues and focus on immediate concerns and personal aims. In the Late Roman Empire this was so often all about personal survival and advancement–the latter bringing wealth and influence, which helped to increase security in some ways, but also rendered the individual more prominent and thus a greater target to others. Some officials enjoyed highly successful careers through engineering the destruction of colleagues. Performing a job well was only ever a secondary concern. Even emperors were more likely to reward loyalty over talent. Officials and commanders needed only to avoid making a spectacular mess of their job–and even then enough influence could conceal the facts or pass the blame onto someone else. None of this was entirely new, but it became endemic. When ‘everyone’ acted in the same way there was no real encouragement to honesty or even competence. The game was about personal success and this often had little connection to the wider needs of the empire.
It was not a phenomenon unique to the Late Roman Empire, nor are its implications only of significance to the United States or indeed any other country. All human institutions, from countries to businesses, risk creating a similarly short-sighted and selfish culture. It is easier to avoid in the early stages of expansion and growth. Then the sense of purpose is likely to be clearer, and the difficulties or competition involved have a more direct and obvious impact. Success produces growth and, in time, creates institutions so large that they are cushioned from mistakes and inefficiency. The united Roman Empire never faced a competitor capable of destroying it. These days, countries and government departments do not easily collapse–and Western states do not face enemies likely to overthrow them by military force. In the business world the very largest corporations almost never face competitors that are truly their equal. Competition within the commercial market at any level is obviously rarely carried out on entirely equal terms.
In most cases it takes a long time for serious problems or errors to be exposed. It is usually even harder to judge accurately the real competence of individuals and, in particular, their contribution to the overall purpose. Those in charge of overseeing a country’s economy generally reap the praise or criticism for decisions made by their predecessors in office.
Henry George: Protective Tariffs are as Much Applications of Force as are Blockading Squadrons
“Trade does not require force. Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same–to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”
Video: Watch as the World's Cities Appear over 6,000 Years →
via Susan Dynarski
In Praise of the 9th Amendment
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Link to the Wikipedia article on the 9th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
It is not now, but the 9th Amendment to the Constitution should be one of the greatest defenses of liberty that we have. Here is a very brief description of an interpretation that I find attractive:
A libertarian originalist, Randy Barnett has argued that the Ninth Amendment requires what he calls a presumption of liberty. Barnett also argues that the Ninth Amendment prevents the government from invalidating a ruling by either a jury or lower court through strict interpretation of the Bill of Rights. According to Barnett, “The purpose of the Ninth Amendment was to ensure that all individual natural rights had the same stature and force after some of them were enumerated as they had before.”[13]
Randy Barnett’s key argument is that the many voters in the thirteen states who ratified the US Constitution would have understood the 9th amendment to mean that there was a personal sphere of liberty that encompassed a great deal. For example, based on the original public meaning of the 9th amendment, it wouldn’t take “penumbras” and “emanations” to see a guarantee of privacy rights in the US Constitution.
Randy Barnett also argues that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment– “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States”–which the Supreme Court gutted in the Slaughterhouse Cases, was meant among other things to extend this presumption of liberty to actions of the states. The Supreme Court has partially restored the meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause by its interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th amendment, but without as broad a scope of liberty. In particular, many aspects of economic liberty are no longer recognized as protected by the US Constitution.
Tyler Cowen: The Culture of Guns, the Culture of Alcohol →
Tyler has praise for Mormons here. Personally, even though I have left Mormonism, I continue the Mormon pattern of being a teetotaler, not drinking alcohol.
Keith Urban on Being Unstoppable
“Talent and gift is very much like running water–and when it hits something, it just goes around it and keeps on flowing.”
John Cochrane: Equity-Financed Banking →
This is an important blog post from John Cochrane.
John Koskinen: It Takes Patience and Persistence to Change Government Policy
“Academics frequently say the culture is hard to change because the bureaucrat is opposed to major change: I think that’s exactly wrong. You can’t make changes in a large bureaucracy by simply shouting and exhorting. It takes time. Talk to someone in the private sector about marketing and they’ll talk to you about the number of impressions it takes before somebody hears their message. Government is the same way.”
John Stuart Mill’s Roadmap for Freedom
The entire argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is summarized in the 12th paragraph of the “Introductory” chapter:
But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.
The first key concept here is of a personal sphere that an individual cares about more than other people do–or where other people care mainly if they have freely chosen to interact with that individual. In the middle of the description of that concept is an important phrase: “free, voluntary and undeceived consent.” It is not enough to establish valid consent that it be free and voluntary. It must also be undeceived.
The delineation of this personal sphere is the hard part. John Stuart Mill identifies what goes on inside one’s own brain as the most obviously personal sphere. It then requires a deep set of arguments to argue that freedom of thought requires freedom of speech–that we can’t really be who we freely, voluntarily and undeceivedly choose to be even in our own minds unless there is freedom of speech. For one thing, it is easier to think something if one dares to express it to others. For another without other people having freedom of speech, one will have relatively few choices of things to think.
Moving beyond speech to action, the delineation of a personal sphere ultimately requires reference to the physicality of human beings and ownership of objects. There are various ways to delineate this personal sphere. But as long as the principles are followed of giving each person a roughly equal personal sphere, without too much overlap, it will probably be all right. There may even be some ownable things that are “frills” and therefore can be distributed unequally as incentives without compromising people’s lives.
Finally, the idea that people can choose to pool their personal spheres for certain purposes to get together as a group and do their thing is very important. This is one of the most contested areas of the concept of liberty. For example, in current US law, getting together as a group for consensual sexual activity is a liberty that is now quite well protected, but getting together as a group for consensual economic activity is much less well protected–in part because many consensual economic activities that provide surplus to both parts still have a strong adversarial dimension because of disagreements over the relevant wage or price that divides the surplus. Debates about the scope of group liberty rage, with some arguing that sexual freedom should be curtailed, and others arguing that economic freedom should be expanded, while others argue for the status quo of freedom for consensual sexual activities and restraints for consensual economic activities.
Here, it is worth noticing that every argument for how two parties conducting consensual economic activity might affect others has a counterpart argument for how two parties conducting consensual sexual activity might affect others and vice versa.
The moral is that liberty is wonderful, but not simple. It takes deep thought to understand liberty.
The Extensive Margin: How to Simultaneously Raise Quality and Lower Tuition at Elite Public Universities
Link to the article on the Michigan Daily website
Every year, tuition increases are in the news. What people don’t realize is that for elite public universities like the University of Michigan, there is an easy way to raise quality while lowering tuition. And it is a strategy that can make a particular university more elite while striking a blow against elitism. The strategy is to increase the size of the student body, with a careful plan that scales up everything from dorms to professors to academic advisors to socializing venues necessary to take care of the extra students.
Increasing Quality: In talking of increasing quality, I mean in the first instance increasing the quality of the faculty, which over time has a big effect on the reputation of a university generally. A larger student body means more total tuition revenue that can pay for more professors. Even if the average quality of the professors in a department stayed the same, a larger department is likely to be perceived as stronger. (Whatever bit of research one thinks is important, it is more likely to have been done by someone in Department X if there are more total professors in Department X.) And it isn’t long before having a larger department makes it easier to recruit more impressive professors because there will be plenty of colleagues in a given field to work with in that department.
Reducing Tuition Rates: Increasing the number of students by 50% should be accompanied by increasing the number of professors by 50% in departments that have strong enrollments, the number of professors doesn’t need to be increased that much in departments that have many low-enrollment classes to begin with. And having more students should make it possible to offer a wider range of summer classes which can have extra-low tuition because underused classrooms in the summer come at very low cost to the university. In addition, if the number of slots for out-of-state students is increased by a somewhat bigger percentage than the number of slots for in-state students, the same tuition rate for both in-state and out-of-state students will raise more money per student because of the higher fraction of out-of-state students. Note that this shift policy makes it easier, not harder, for in-state students to get admitted, because there are more slots for in-state students.
Striking a Blow Against Elitism: The beauty of this policy is that while it makes the university more impressive academically, it strikes a blow against elitism since more total people can receive an excellent education. The imprimatur of that prestigious university is given to more total students.
The biggest problem with the strategy is the mechanical aspect of rankings that gives credit to universities simply for turning away a lot of applicants. So an important aspect of this strategy is introducing measures of how much students know by the end of their college education. But that is something a university that cares about student learning should be doing anyway.
To press the point, this strategy involves a genuine belief that the university actually teaches students a lot so that someone can arrive at the university not knowing much and leave it knowing a great deal as a result of what the university has done. If actually adding value is a central goal of a university rather than just choosing students who were already smart, then it needs to be measuring how much students have learned and especially how much knowledge and wisdom students have embodied in long-term memory.
Measuring how much students have learned requires something like adding to the usual practice of student surveys at the end of a class some kind of test that students take two years or so after they have taken core classes to see if they still remember what they learned. To make it a good measure of long-term memory, students should be discouraged from cramming for that test two years later. An easy way to help avoid a temptation for the students to cram is to make their individual grades on that test two years later confidential. Of course, it is important that students try hard on that test. Some very low minimum score needed for passing should ensure that most students try reasonably hard.
Note that the student satisfaction surveys at the end of each class about their experience in the class should also be continued. Student learning may be the most important objective of university classes, but it is not the only one: it also matters how pleasant it was for students to be in the class and learn the amount that they learned. The point is to augment that measure of satisfaction with a measure of learning retained two years later. Having a measure of the success of a class based, say, 2/3 on the amount students learned and 1/3 on how much they enjoyed the experience would have a dramatic effect on how well that objective was achieved.
Lydia Murray Interviews Me: Understanding where I am coming from, you might be interested in what Lydia Murray wrote based on her interviews with me and others in the article “Increasing tuition: a look at why costs continue to rise” for the University of Michigan’s student newspaper the Michigan Daily:
The University of California system saw a 15 percent cut in state funding between 2006 and 2013 and experienced a 52.8 percent increase in tuition revenue during that time frame. The UC system also maintained a three-year freeze in tuition between 2011 and 2014, when its Board of Regents voted for a five percent tuition increase per year for the next five years.
While it is clear that the University has increased its general fund at a much faster rate than other comparable institutions, according Miles Kimball — a University economics professor — increasing the budget is essential to maintaining a high quality of education. Kimball cited the increasing wage premium for highly skilled labor as a source for the expanding budget, as higher salaries are becoming necessary to maintain a high-quality faculty.
Kimball said the UC system is now facing fiscal challenges because it has not adjusted its budget to rising costs.
“You can always ruin your University, and basically the UC system has been going in that direction,” Kimball said. “It is actually very troubled by the kind of budget straightjacket that it has been put into.”
Courant echoed these sentiments, citing the so-called “cost disease phenomenon” in which the cost of highly skilled labor has increased rapidly while the productivity of this group has not changed. According to Courant, the University needs to pay higher salaries to faculty members to retain them and the quality of education they provide for students.
“The relative price of University activity, of University faculty in particular, as well as other skilled labor at the University, tends to rise relative to the economy as a whole,” he said.
Alternatives to Raising Tuition
According to Kimball, the University does not need to raise tuition to increase its revenue and budget size. Instead, Kimball said the University could systematically increase enrollment so that there is a both a larger student population and a higher proportion of out-of-state students. The larger student body and the increase in the number of out-of-state students could then circumvent any need for tuition increases.
“There’s a missed opportunity where we could easily keep the tuition from going up simply by increasing the number of students,” he said. “I think that is a big missed opportunity, and, to the extent that, you miss that opportunity, you’re not doing an appropriate thing, because the appropriate thing would be to seize that opportunity.” …
“You’re going to have to increase the budget,” Kimball said. “But increasing the budget doesn’t mean that you have to increase tuition.”
One thing that didn’t make it into the article was my speculation that the University of California schools will show the damage from overly severe budget pressure more slowly than the University of Michigan would because they have better weather. I am very interested to know just how big a problem the budget pressure in the University of California system is and what strains that has caused. Perhaps it isn’t as bad as the picture I painted in my interview. If so, I hope you will correct me.
Dominic Chu Interviews Miles Kimball for CNBC about the Need for the Fed to Reverse Course More Often
Link to CNBC segment “Economist: Fed needs to be more flexible”
I was very pleased at how this interview turned out. Take a look. Both links above have the video. Only 6 minutes and 26 seconds!
Alex Rosenberg made this happen, and does an excellent summary in the accompanying article, which also discusses Narayana Kocherlakota’s column “The Fed Needs More Than One Direction.”
I learned an interesting fact along the way. I did this interview for free, but CNBC paid the University of Michigan $700 for the use of the video facilities and personnel and satellite link at the University of Michigan to do the videotaping.
Alex Rosenberg interviewed me on the phone the day before the videotaping. Don’t miss his other interviews of me, in these posts: