Maine Policy Matters

S3E1 Offshore Wind Development - A Comparison of Rhode Island and Maine

On our first episode of season three, we cover an article by Mary Morrissey, who gives us an inside perspective on Maine’s offshore wind development and proposes short- and long-term actions to guide Maine’s development of the offshore wind industry in federal waters in her article “Maine and Offshore Wind Development: Using the Coastal Zone Management Act and Marine Spatial Planning to Influence Projects in Federal Waters.” This article was published in volume 31, number 1, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
You can find Mary Morrissey's article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol31/iss1/2/
Transcript
How can looking to Rhode Island as an example in offshore wind development benefit Maine?
Today, we will be looking at a comparison between Rhode Island and Maine’s offshore wind development projects made by Mary Morrissey, a law student and editor-in-chief of the Ocean and Coastal Law Journal at the University of Maine School of Law.
Welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.
On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. On our first episode of season three, we will be covering an article by Mary Morrissey, who gives us an inside perspective on Maine’s offshore wind development and proposes short- and long-term actions to guide Maine’s development of the offshore wind industry in federal waters in her article “Maine and Offshore Wind Development: Using the Coastal Zone Management Act and Marine Spatial Planning to Influence Projects in Federal Waters.” This article was published in volume 31, number 1, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Morrissey’s article in Maine Policy Review.
How can comparing Rhode Island’s coastal management plan help Maine’s current offshore wind efforts and potential for marine spatial planning? Morrissey provides somerecommendations based on the Governor’s Energy Office offshore wind roadmap process.
Morrissey outlines the actions that Maine can take to replicate Rhode Island’s model in a ‘responsible’ way – as concerns for sustainability of marine ecosystems and the coastal economy are quite high given the environmental challenges on the horizon. Back in 1972, Congress passed the Coastal Zone Management Act, or the CMZA, to, “preserve, protect, develop, and where possible, to restore or enhance the resources of the nation’s coastal zone.” This act encourages states to develop and implement their own management programs for land and water resources of their spatial zone. For example, both Rhode Island and Maine participate in the CMZA and have their own coastal management plans. Where Maine can learn from Rhode Island is from their site assessment management plan, referred to as an SAMP. Maine has yet to designate a SAMP.
Morrissey cites that, “Marine spatial planning is a public, sociopolitical process that aims to manage human activities to achieve predetermined outcomes.”  Marine spatial planning is important because it identifies areas of ecological concern, makes space for conservation efforts, and protects cultural heritage, among many other benefits. Even though there are many benefits to marine spatial planning Morrissey names five main challenges. The first is marine spatial planning cannot be effectively carried out without legislative and regulatory efforts. Second, the necessity of stakeholder engagement to produce an innovative, long-term plan. Third, the requirement for collaboration and coordination to allow for engagement with administrative entities and overlap with regional, local, or other strategic plans, policies, and laws. Fourth is managing errors in plan design and execution. And lastly, that marine spatial planning is a process that can slow offshore wind development.
As an example of a state that successfully faced these challenges, Morrissey discusses Rhode Island’s offshore wind planning and their Ocean SAMP. This regulatory document was a result of 2006 Governor Donald Carcieri’s goal of harnessing 15 percent of the state’s electricity from wind within a span of three years. As Morrissey explains:
The Ocean SAMP is a regulatory document made up of three integrated approaches: research, policy making, and public engagement. It maps a portion of Rhode Island’s state and surrounding federal waters to identify how to use this region and manage its resources to support the state’s environmental, social, and economic needs. It also specifically details potential effects on existing uses and resources in the Ocean SAMP area, including impacts on port development and job creation, electricity rates, coastal processes and physical oceanography, marine mammals, and commercial and recreational fishing…Ultimately, the Ocean SAMP was one of the first marine spatial plans in the nation and “laid the groundwork for the siting and permitting of the nation’s first offshore wind farm.”
It was not until 2010 that the Coastal Resources Management Council approved the Ocean SAMP, giving it the force of law. In 2011, NOAA approved the Ocean SAMP as part of Rhode Island’s coastal management plan, which meant that federal actions that have reasonably  foreseeable effects on Rhode Island’s coastal zone must undergo federal consistency review to ensure they do not conflict with the Ocean SAMP.   This created an issue because NOAA only ensured federal action that impacted the state waters were consistent with Rhode Island’s coastal management plan. This led Rhode Island to take a new approach to apply for a geographic location description.
This request was approved in late 2011, and Executive Director of the Coastal Resource Management Council Grover Fugate remarked that the geographic location was
“the first of its kind in the state and the nation, and allows the Coastal Resource Management Council to have a voice in what kind of offshore development takes place in the federal waters off Rhode Island’s coast….This tool will work as a major component of the Ocean SAMP, and both will help further Rhode Island’s role as a model for other states in marine spatial planning.”
Ocean SAMP has five other strengths and strategies that Maine could find useful: conceptual benefits, tangible goals and guiding principles, strong university engagement and research, extensive stakeholder and public engagement, and adequate funding.
In 2019, Governor Mills received a request from the Board of Ocean Energy Management to join a Gulf of Maine Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force. In response, Maine began focusing on its offshore wind through four efforts. The first is Aqua Ventis, an 11-megawatt floating offshore wind technology pilot. It will be located south of Monhegan Island, more than 12 miles off the coast of Maine. The University of Maine designed the VolturnUS floating concrete hull technology that will support the wind turbine and will lead design, engineering, research and development, and post-construction monitoring. UMaine and the US Department of Energy also funded many studies and surveys to help these efforts.
The second effort is what is being called a research array, the nation’s first floating offshore wind research site in federal waters, which is a response to  the federal government’s ambitious energy goals and to “ensure that Maine develops [the offshore wind] industry in a manner that capitalizes on [its] innovative technology and abundant resources, while protecting [its] interests, industries, environment and values.
The third is a roadmap, supported by a $2.166 million grant from the US Economic Development Administration, that will detail how to advance offshore wind in ways that support Maine’s people, economy, and heritage. The roadmap also looks to understand and plan for the state’s role in commercial offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine.
The fourth is a moratorium on offshore wind projects that was established by Governor Mills to restrict the state from licensing, permitting, approving, or authorizing leases, easements, or other real property interests for offshore wind projects in state waters for 10 years. The Mills administration also proposed the moratorium to appease fishing interests, especially lobstermen, who opposed the research array over concerns about what they saw as potentially disastrous impacts on the lobster industry.
Morrissey suggests that “if Maine can implement a marine spatial plan, there are
potential environmental, social, and economic benefits—not least of which would be more efficient coordination of offshore wind efforts with other marine industries, such as aquaculture and fisheries, while protecting areas of biological and ecological concern.”
However, she names a few challenges and possible solutions for implementing this planning. The first is the risk of interrupting progress from changes in administration as well as fitting Maine’s legislative and regulatory process. Planning for differences in administration stance toward marine spatial planning policy is not something that can necessarily be codified with ease, to say the least. However, regarding the issue of fitting a SAMP to Maine’s legislative and regulatory framework, Maine could follow Rhode Island’s plan of building a regulatory framework explaining the marine spatial plan’s goals, means of implementation, decision-making authority, general policies, and regulatory standards.
The second is Maine’s large gulf size. The Gulf of Maine spans 36,000 square miles of ocean and 7,500 miles of coastline, with Maine stretching along 3,478 miles of that coastline and the rest being split between Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. In comparison, Rhode Island only has 384 miles of coastline with the Ocean SAMP covering roughly 1,467 square miles of the ocean as well as no international border. Maine would need to expend more energy and resources to define the limits of a marine spatial plan and divide the area among different ocean uses.
The third is concerns for collaboration. Maine must obtain support from its fishing communities, particularly lobstermen with over 4,800 lobster licenses, to successfully create a marine spatial plan.
As a solution to these concerns, Morrisey closes her article with several actions that Maine can take to replicate Rhode Island’s model and responsibly develop offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine.
Regarding actions that could be taken immediately, Morrissey outlines the following, increasing opportunities for public engagement beyond a public comment period, including fishing community in research, facilitate collaboration and investigating research gaps using public tools – such as the Northeast Data Portal, develop educational materials to communicate the benefits of offshore wind development, and developing partnerships with other Northeastern coastal states to identify points of concern and how the Gulf of Maine will be affected.
Beyond the immediate actions, Morrissey outlines longer-term options including signing memorandums of understanding with neighboring coastal states to facilitate collaboration, a marine spatial plan like the Rhode Island SAMP discussed earlier, codifying the marine spatial plan, and then expanding it into federal waters.
As a final note on this issue, Morrissey concludes:
Rhode Island serves as a primary example of how to use federal consistency review and marine spatial planning effectively in the form of an Ocean SAMP…Maine can begin working on its own marine spatial plan by capitalizing on preexisting efforts…The offshore wind industry is moving quickly, and it is in Maine’s best interest to take proactive steps to extend its influence into federal waters. Maine’s marine economy, environment, and ecology depend on it.
What you just heard was Mary Morrissey’s perspective on offshore wind development and marine spatial planning in Maine based on her article in Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be hosting professionals in the lobster industry for an interview and a synopsis of James and Ann Acheson’s article titled “What Does the Future Hold for Maine’s Lobster Industry?”
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.

S2E8 Frank O’Hara’s Comparison of Covid-19 to the London Plague

Today, we will be covering an article by Frank O’Hara titled, “The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared.”  This article was published in volume 30, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Frank O’Hara’s article in Maine Policy Review.            
In the article, O’Hara uses historical accounts from a 5-year-old survivor of the London Plague: Daniel Defoe. Listeners might recognize Daniel Defoe as the author of the novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe also wrote a lesser known novel called A Journal of the Plague Year. This novel is based on Defoe’s childhood experience of the Plague, city records, and his uncle’s diary.
You can find O'Hara's article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol30/iss2/14/
Transcript
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Great London Plague of 1665. What, if anything, do we stand to gain by comparing these two crises?
Actually, quite a bit, according to long-time community and economic development planner, Frank O’Hara.  Today, we will be offering statistics and a survivor’s historical account of the Great London Plague of 1665 compared to the COVID-19 pandemic. While these two events may seem unrelated, the way survivors experienced them isn’t all that different.
Welcome to the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I’m Eric Miller, research associate at the Policy Center. For those of you who tuned in for this season of the show, we are deeply grateful for your attention and we are excited to bring the next season starting January 17th, 2023.
We’ll be bringing in the new year with discussions regarding the lobster industry, opioid crisis, forest resources, and. So we hope that you are as excited as we are for those essays and interviews. Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season and we will be back with you all next year. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine.
Today, we will be covering an article by Frank O’Hara titled, “The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared.”  This article was published in volume 30, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Frank O’Hara’s article in Maine Policy Review.
In the article, O’Hara uses historical accounts from a 5-year-old survivor of the London Plague: Daniel Defoe. Listeners might recognize Daniel Defoe as the author of the novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe also wrote a lesser known novel called A Journal of the Plague Year. This novel is based on Defoe’s childhood experience of the Plague, city records, and his uncle’s diary.
Frank O’Hara uses excerpts from that novel to argue that our current experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic are not that much different from those of people in 1665 London.
At first glance, it would seem that there is little in common between these two plague experiences. How can we compare the mass deaths in the first 18 months of the Great Plague in London, for example, to the 98 percent survival rate of people infected by the coronavirus?
Despite these drastic differences, Frank O’Hara argues that there are similarities in the “human element” that get at what he calls  “basic human reactions to crisis”   that can teach us some lessons for the current pandemic. The human element of both crises goes beyond the differences in medical understanding, research and distribution systems, and public health infrastructure.
O’Hara identifies ten main similarities between the Great Plague and COVID, which he calls: the Early Rumors, Fears and Complacency, Fleeing to the Country, Quackery, the Economic Collapse, Government Relief Strategies, Government Public Health Strategies, Masks and Cleanliness, Social Division, and Easing Up Too Soon.
Today we’ll be looking at three of these topics: Fleeing to the Country, the Economic Collapse, and Easing Up Too Soon. We’ll start by discussing what O’Hara calls “Fleeing to the Country,” which refers to people’s attempts to leave crowded cities as a way of staying safe.
Dafoe writes in A Journal of the Plague Year:
The richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry, thronged out of town with their families and servants in an unusual manner. Nothing was to be seen but wagons and carts, with goods, women, servants, children, and coaches filled with people of the better sort, and horsemen attending them all hurrying away. In all it was computed that 200,000 people were fled and gone.
This type of plague-fueled migration also happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York City, one of the most populated cities in the US, had a net outflow of 100 thousand households in 2020. This means that people were relocating to their summer houses or moving back in with their parents in smaller towns to try and get away from over-populated areas. Maine experienced a real estate boom in 2021 for this exact reason. Recent research from the Brookings Institute has found that “51 of the 88 U.S. cities with a quarter million people or more lost population between July 2020 and 2021.”
In both centuries, migration to the country highlights a class disparity. Wealthy people in both centuries were able to escape once things got bad, a move that not everyone could afford to make.
Relevant to wealth and class disparity is the next section of O’Hara’s article: the Economic Collapse.
O’Hara writes that “here in the United States, the country lost 20 million jobs in April 2020, the largest single-month decline on record. As we’ve covered in previous episodes, the hardest hit sectors were leisure and hospitality, retail, professional services, and manufacturing. This economic collapse is similar to what happened to the economy in London during the plague.
From Dafoe’s journal:
All master-workmen in manufactures stopped their work, dismissed their journeymen and workmen, and all their dependents. As merchandising was at a full stop, for very few ships ventured to come up the river, and none at all went out; the watermen, carmen, porters, and all the poor, whose labour depended upon the merchants, were at once dismissed, and put out of business. All the tradesmen usually employed in building or repairing of houses were at a full stop; so that this one article turned all of the ordinary workmen of that kind out of business, such as bricklayers, masons, carpenters, joiners, plasterers, painters, glaziers, smiths, plumbers and all the labourers depending on such. The seamen were all out of employment, and all the several tradesmen and workmen belonging to and depending upon the building and fitting out of ships, such as ship-carpenters, caulkers, ropemakers, dry coopers, sailmakers, anchor-smiths, and other smiths; blockmakers, carvers, gunsmiths, shipchandlers, ship-carvers, and the like; all or most part of the water-men, lightermen, boat-builders, and lighter-builders in like manner idle and laid by. All families retrenched their living as much as possible, so that innumerable multitude of footmen, serving-men, shop-keepers, journeymen, merchants’ bookkeepers, and such sort to people, and especially poor maid-servants, were turned out, and left friendless and helpless, without employment and without habitation.
Listeners might recognize some similarities from this account of the unemployment and supply chain disruptions that we are currently experiencing. Despite the similarities between the two crises, O’Hara points out that unlike 17th century London, the United States had unemployment insurance to cushion the economic impacts, something that did not exist in 17th century London.
The last section of O’Hara’s article that we will be covering today is Easing Up Too Soon. O’Hara states that, in the summer of 2021 in the United States, we opened up too soon, which allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to reignite through August and September via the new Delta variant. But even with rising numbers of cases and death, governments did not increase restrictions.
Something similar happened in London according to Dafoe:
Upon this notion spreading that the distemper was not so catching as formerly, and that if it was catched it was not so mortal, and seeing abundance of people who really fell sick recover again daily, they took to such a precipitant courage, and grew so entirely regardless of themselves, that they made no more the plague than of an ordinary fever, nor indeed so much…This imprudent, rash conduct cost a great many their lives who had with great care and caution shut themselves up and kept, retired, as it were, from all mankind. A great many that thus cast off their cautions suffered more deeply still, and though many escaped, yet many died. The people were so tired with being so long from London, and so eager to come back, that they flock to town without fear or forecast, and began to show themselves in the streets, as if all the danger was over. The consequences of this was, that the bills increased again 400 the very first week in November. 
O’Hara identifies other similarities such as the quackery of Londoners and Americans trying to make at home remedy treatments, the swift relief programs the magistrates of London and America’s federal government pieced together, the ways public health was handled by London officials and the US Centers for Disease Control, and Londoners’ and American’s desires for being done with the crises before they were actually over.
O’Hara concludes his article with a hopeful message and prediction:
There were similar behaviors in both centuries with regard to hating quarantines, falling for quack remedies, and easing restrictions before the pandemic was over. There were also differences. The American response to COVID-19 was much more casual than London’s response to the plague, our social divisions persisted during the pandemic, and oddly doctors in 17th century London appear to have been listened to with more respect than doctors today.
The year after the Great Plague ended, the Great Fire burned the City of London to the ground. Many records were lost, and the plague was forgotten in the rush to rebuild. Had that five-year-old boy not returned to tell the story 50 years later, we would know very little about the plague that wiped out a quarter of London’s population in 1665. Which raises the question—is there a five-year-old child in Maine today who will someday tell of our experiences in 2020 to future generations?
 
What you just heard was Frank O’Hara’s comparison of the Great London Plague of 1665 to the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience. Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E7 Sustainable Small Businesses and Employee Ownership

On this episode, we will be offering data and strategies from Rob Brown, the director of Business Ownership Solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Business Ownership Solutions works throughout the Northeast states with business owners to think through whether conversion to a cooperative could meet their needs. They also work with employees or community members to execute the co-op conversion. 
You can find Rob Brown's article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1905&context=mpr
Transcript
Today, we will be offering data and strategies from Rob Brown, the director of Business Ownership Solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Business Ownership Solutions works throughout the Northeast states with business owners to think through whether conversion to a cooperative could meet their needs. They also work with employees or community members to execute the co-op conversion.
This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.
On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today, we will be covering an article by Rob Brown, the director of Business Ownership Solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute. Brown gives us an inside perspective on how we can build back our economy in his article entitled  “How to Save Jobs and Build Back Better: Employee Ownership Transitions as a Key to an Equitable Economic Recovery.” This article was published in volume 30, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Rob Brown’s article in Maine Policy Review.
What are small business owners to do in the midst of a pandemic as they approach retirement age? How can small businesses and their employees successfully stay afloat once the owner decides to retire? Rob Brown has some answers.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Maine was already on the leading edge of what is called the “silver tsunami.” This term refers to the large oncoming wave of baby boomer business owners looking to exit and retire, many of whom do not have a plan and don't understand the process and options.
Nationally, the average age of business owners is over 50 years old. In rural Maine, almost half of business owners are over 60.
Maine has 12,790 small businesses where the owner wants to retire in the next several years. These retirements would affect 108,000 workers across the state.
And yet, less than one in five business owners have a documented exit plan for what will happen to their businesses–and their employees–once they retire.
What options do business owners facing retirement have?
Having their children take over the business is risky, as business transitions to second generations are only successful 19% of the time.
Well, what about retirement age owners selling their businesses?
This is also often not a good option either, as only 20% of commercial listings for businesses actually sell.
If retirement-age owners are closing their businesses, what happens to their employees? What are they to do when their jobs close down with the business?
Brown paints a picture of how such retirements impact employees and the community: “Too often, the default option ends up being liquidation and closure, and the smaller and more rural the business, the greater the likelihood of that outcome. As a result, business closure due to owner retirement is the largest single source of avoidable job loss over time.”
Workers affected by business closures had a harder time reentering the workforce.
In response, Brown argues that helping businesses transition to employee ownership can address some of these problems.
How can employee ownership save small businesses, and how has the “silver tsunami” been impacted by COVID-19?
Let’s take a look at a few small businesses in Maine that were saved by an employee ownership transition.
Rock City Cafe and Coffee Roasters is a great example. Maine’s first ever espresso bar and bookstore combo was opened in Rockland in 1992. After receiving community support, the business grew and added a coffee-roasting business. This allowed them to move to larger locations and become Rock City Cafe and Coffee Roasters. By 2010, Rockland had become a national model for downtown rejuvenation and Rock City Cafe and Coffee Roasters was an anchor business on Maine Street. At this point, the owner was considering retiring and it was time for her to consider her options. Because she was deeply committed to her 35 mostly young employees, she decided to transition her business to a worker-owned cooperative. This decision preserved her legacy, rewarded her employees who helped her build the business, and helped her secure a good retirement income for herself. But most importantly, this decision helped her business survive the COVID-19 pandemic better than other food and tourist-oriented businesses.
Three retail businesses on Deer Isle offer another example of a successful employee ownership transition. Burnt Cove Market, the Galley Markey, and V&S Variety employees heard that the owners of these businesses were thinking of selling the stores and retiring. So what did they do? They worked with a group of advisors to create the Island Employee Cooperative and bought the stores. Now the employee-owned Island Cooperative is one of Deer Isle's largest year-round employers, the largest worker cooperative in Maine, and second largest in all of New England.
As Brown argues, these examples suggest that employee ownership transitions are a good option for building back better, especially since the pandemic has impacted small businesses.
What are the benefits of employee ownership transitions?
First, these transitions are more profitable and productive. They create more jobs in the good times and lay off fewer workers in downturns, and invest more in workforce training. They also have lower rates of bankruptcy, closure, and loan default.
For workers, this means increased wages, benefits, and job stability and security. The benefits are even greater for low-income, non college-educated, minority, women, and young workers.
A big concern in Maine has been attracting and retaining young workers. One study that tracked 9,000 young workers from ages 18 to 35 highlights the benefits of working for an employee-owned company. These workers saw 33 percent higher wages, 92 percent higher household wealth, and 53 percent longer job tenure. These impacts held true regardless of race, gender, or geography.
Formerly incarcerated workers were also shown to have a lower rate of reoffending, had 25% higher annual income, and worked 9% more hours than formerly incarcerated workers in nonemployee owned companies.
Even though some businesses were able to survive through employee ownership transitions, others did not or were not able to make this change and as a result, were not so lucky.
Permanent business closures between March 2020 and February 2021 increased between one-third and one-half of what was expected before the pandemic.  Even though business closures were not as bad as the pre-pandemic predictions, Brown writes, “Saying ‘It could’ve been worse’ is cold comfort for business owners who lost their life’s work and the millions of workers who lost their jobs.”
Factors such as no exit plans and the type of business contributed to many business closures.  For example, businesses offering personal services and food service closed more frequently than businesses like construction and home improvement stores.
Even businesses that survived the pandemic are still struggling. In October 2021, Census data confirmed that nearly 60 percent of Maine’s businesses are still facing moderate to severe negative impacts from the pandemic. Many businesses are still behind on at least one bill, such as rent, loan, and supplier bills.
Because of this, Brown and others who work with businesses have seen an increase in retiring business owners looking to make an exit plan.
Here is Brown’s perspective, “In my work throughout the Northeast providing introductory exit planning education for business owners and consulting on transitions to employee ownership, I have seen a tripling of requests for assistance and attendance at workshops. Lawyers, accountants, and others who communicate directly with businesses, have told me that they are seeing the same thing—older business owners, already thinking about how to retire before the pandemic, want to develop a plan now.”
Rob Brown argues that, “If anything, the pandemic’s impact on job security and stability and its acceleration of income and wealth inequality has strengthened the argument for promoting and supporting employee ownership transitions. Helping business owners sell to employees could be a key to an equitable economic recovery.”
What could this transition look like for businesses on a national scale?
Brown offers a prediction: “An article in the Harvard Business Review calculated that if 30 percent business ownership were extended to all workers through employee-ownership models, household wealth would more than quadruple for the bottom 50 percent of workers, for all Black workers, and for all workers with only a high school degree.”
This kind of large-scale action cannot happen without the help of public policy. What have public policy officials been doing to help businesses shift to employee owned businesses?
Public policy like President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and the Mills administration’s 10-year economic development strategy could provide benefits for local business owners seeking retirement.
These benefits include things like exit planning outreach; education and technical assistance for business owners; expert financial advice for employee ownership transition; assistance in designing and executing a transition; and education and training for employee groups in business management, finances, and strategy so they can succeed.
Many states are also offering or considering tax and other incentives for selling a business to the employees. Around 18 states have employee ownership centers to provide education, training, and technical assistance for businesses considering employee ownership.
In the past, Maine offered a tax credit to encourage private citizens to contribute to Family Development Accounts programs, so matching funds are available to support low-income workers’ savings, but this incentive was eliminated by the previous administration. Restoring this funding could leverage substantial additional private funding. These funds would be helpful to employees saving to build equity for a worker cooperative transition.
These policy examples are a sampling of ideas and resources that could be part of a larger project that is effective in the short and long term. In the short term, these policies can help by preserving small businesses and jobs while building wealth for communities and individuals in the long term.
Rob Brown concludes with a hopeful message:
“From a public policy perspective, it is oftentimes much cheaper to save existing businesses and jobs than to replace them once they’re gone. Throughout Maine, there are grocery stores, cafés, coffee roasters, construction companies, energy companies, farm businesses, manufacturers, insurance agencies, and many other types of businesses that are owned by their workers. They are a model for how an economy, even in the face of unprecedented threats, can be made to work for working people and their communities”
What you just heard was Rob Brown’s perspective on how employee ownership transitions can be an answer to saving retirement age business owners from having to sell or close down theirr businesses. Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be covering Frank O’Hara’s piece entitled, “The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared.”
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E6 Maine Food System and the Pandemic: Interview with JG Malacarne and Jason Lilley

On this episode of Maine Policy Matters we are joined by scholars Jonathan Malacarne and Jason Lilley to discuss how the pandemic shocked the Maine Food System and how it recovered. 
You can find their article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol30/iss2/5/
Transcript
Eric Miller: The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic quite literally shocked the Maine food system economically affecting many individuals and sectors in different but interconnected ways. Many households, budgets were disrupted as people lost income, which led to acquiring food in two different ways, all while concerned over the availability of certain products.
Maine food producers faced multiple stressors as the demand for food at home rose, the restaurant market disappeared, and the availability of labor and the tourist market became uncertain. In response to these shocks, policymakers were forced to innovate and adapt in order to support farms, protect consumers, and ensure the food security of the people in Maine.
What can we learn from these shocks of those early days of the pandemic in order to help food consumers, producers, and policymakers deal with the next big shock? This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. I'm Eric Miller, Research associate at the center. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine.
Today we will be covering JG Malacarne, Jason Lilley, and Nancy McBrady's Maine Policy Review article entitled "The Response of the Maine Food System to the Onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic", which argues that reflecting on how the Maine food system weathered shocks early in the pandemic can help us prepare for future crises.
This article was published in Volume 30 number two of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the center. We will first briefly summarize that article and then speak directly with Dr. Malacarne, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maine, and Jason Lilley, Assistant professor of sustainable agriculture and maple industry educator at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension about where the food system is now, two years later, and what the future of food in Maine might look like. Malacarne, Lilley, and McBrady offer data on how the pandemic shocked consumers, food producers, and policymakers in different ways. For example, before the pandemic, Maine was already the most food-insecure state, and the pandemic made this issue worse.
Food insecurity in Maine rose to 14.6% in 2020, compared to 12.4% in 2019. This rise was not related to the unavailability of food, but rather the surge in unemployment and underemployment during the pandemic's early days. Food distribution outlets thus increased their efforts. Good. Shepherd Food Bank of Maine, for example, distributed 31.7 million meals during the first year of the pandemic as part of the USDA's Farmers to Families Food Box Program.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP waived their three month eligibility limit and made it easier for applicants to apply, update, and use their benefits with the pilot programs for online food purchasing. To help curb food insecurity, the USDA announced the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer Program, which allowed households with children facing school closures to access resources through the state's EBT card system.
During the early pandemic, there was also a rise in the demand for local products. Hannaford reported that purchases from Maine vendors went up by 33.5% in March 2020 compared to March 2019. Local vendors were partly able to meet this demand via direct to store deliveries and safe direct to consumer sales.
Maine farmers, however, also experienced challenges that complicated their ability to plan for this growing demand, such as, as Malacarne et al. wrote: "The disappearance of the restaurant market restrictions on face-to-face marketing and extreme uncertainty about labor availability and the tourist market. To help address this issue, a farmer led effort led to the creation of the main farm in seafood directory, which opened on March 19th, 2020."
By the end of March, 337 farms and seafood vendors listed their operations and available products on the directory. In under a month, the directory received 47,000 views by consumers who were interested in safe, local, and direct shopping. At the end of September of 2020, the Maine Farm and Seafood Directory had gathered 483 farmers, fishermen, and other producers, and received 91,910 views.
What did consumers and farmers alike learn from the pandemic in these shifts and how do we move? Malacarne et al. conclude their article with two points. The first is the vital need for investments in agricultural storage, processing, and packaging infrastructure in the state. The second is the need for packaging and processing infrastructure to be flexible enough to shift across the restaurant, institutional, and consumer-facing markets.
Having the ability to shift markets when needed will be more sustainable and effective. Malacarne et al. conclude: "Resilient systems include a measure of flexibility and redundancy. Maine can maintain, even enhance its integration into the broader food system while increasing the prominence of its own agricultural products by investing in local agricultural infrastructure, Maine can provide market opportunities to its producers, increase the reliability of the supply of important stable goods for its consumers, and provide sources of employment and income to its workforce. Now we will be talking with Malacarne and Lilley about what the future of the Maine food system might look like.
Thank you both so much for joining us today.
Jonathan Malacarne: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having us.
Jason Lilley: Thanks for having us.
Eric Miller: Before the pandemic, what aspects of the main food system are unique strengths and weaknesses relative to other states? Has the pandemic and other shocks changed these attributes at all? And if so, how?
Jason Lilley: So I'll jump in on that one. I would say that from the farmer perspective, the production side of things, Maine has really been ahead of the game and has had a leg up in relationship to the diversity of production types here in the state. So there's a lot of different types of agricultural production that happen.
And not all, but a lot of that agricultural production is marketed through local channels. So there's a lot of good relationship building that happens between the clients and, and or the consumers and the farmers as well as loyalty on the consumer's part to either specific farms or to just supporting the Maine food system as a, as a whole. And I've spoken with many folks from the Ag Service provider network, so people from Cooperative Extension and various organizations. And it, it really is a kind of out-of-state Maine is really known for the style of agriculture that we have.
Jonathan Malacarne: I think that's a great description of some of the strengths on the, on the challenges side and moving a little bit to kind of viewing it through the consumer's eyes. Maine's a very rural state. People are pretty spread out and in certain parts of Maine, one of the challenges is the distance to places to go and buy food. It's often hard to support traditional grocery stores in areas with low population density, and that means that you either have to travel farther to buy food or you have a more limited set of options from which you can buy food, and maybe you need a car to get there. and so as particularly for vulnerable populations, both of those can can make it hard to access food, even if food exists and is offered at an affordable price somewhere.
Eric Miller: Yeah, those excellent insights. It reminds me of a couple of facets of Maine in terms of social relationships in that it's like a big small town in that you can get to know everyone, but at the same time you can't get there from here. So it's going to be a struggle to maintain the supply chain connectivity. And both of those strengths and weaknesses are reflected there, and that's really, really interesting to me. You suggest in your article that there's a need for investment in agricultural storage processing, and packaging infrastructure in Maine. You also stress the need for packaging and processing infrastructure to be flexible enough to shift across restaurant institutional and consumer-facing markets.
Have you noticed any evidence of these shifts occurring in Maine over the past two years?
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, I'll start. So I think the first thing to note is that these are really long-term issues. And while it feels like a lot of time has passed in terms of infrastructure changes, we're still very much in the early stages of making use of what we learned during the pandemic.
At the same time, I think there has been some great movement In infrastructure investment both on kind of through private sources, farm businesses, realizing what they need and starting to make those changes as well as support from, from the state through access to grants. I think we're just finishing up the Department of Ag Conservation and Forestry administering about $19 million in grant funding specifically for increases in processing infrastructure on farm businesses.
I believe they made 64 grants totaling just under $19 million—that finalized maybe this past month. And so it's great to see that happening. And it's also important to acknowledge that that's really just the tip of the iceberg. In terms of needs for infrastructure investment, there were many, many more applicants proposing much-needed upgrades to the system and to their own operation that remain to be funded in the future. So definitely moving in the right direction, but it's a slow process.
Jason Lilley: Adding a little onto the Ag Infrastructure Investment program that Jonathan was mentioning, those 60 some awardees they were awarded the grant funds due to the strong agreement and plans to build out the infrastructure on their farm in a way that would help with distribution and processing, not only for their own farm, but for other farms that they're collaborating with. Or other farms in, in the network with, you know, similar types of production. So that was, yeah, really exciting to see.
That's gonna have some huge impacts. That's anywhere between 250 and $500,000 per awardee. And as Jonathan, I was also mentioning there were almost 800 applicants. So that really from my perspective shows the immense amount of need for additional funding into these types of improvements.
Eric Miller: Yeah. On one hand, it's very encouraging to get so much interest and the fact that this kind of programming and funding is, is, is rolling. But yeah, the, it definitely highlights the, the, the need which hopefully will be addressed as soon as, as feasibly possible, whether it's through the state, federal programming, what have you.
So can you talk a bit about the consumer demand for local food markets? Uh, is that demand still increasing? What progress and or setbacks has the local food market faced since you wrote this article?
Jason Lilley: So, in my role with Cooperative Extension, I spend a lot of time driving around visiting farms, primarily in the southern part of the state. And one of the, as mentioned in the article, one of the big benefits, I guess, of the pandemic was this big turn towards local food and a huge amount of interest. And um, that has really carried over for the majority of producers. So not only have they built relationships with local people in their communities.
Um, but now the restaurants have started open back up and are really trying to, to, to push hard to support local businesses and all that.
Jonathan Malacarne: Like Jason mentioned earlier, Maine has long had a strong consumer demand and strong consumer interest in local food. And I think that that has continued for lots of people and for, for lots of you know, businesses that make it their goal to provide food that matches well with what consumers want. But now, like always it's not everyone and it's not a continual upward path. Some shoppers have gone back to previous behaviors. Some businesses have gone back to business as usual.
Others, you know, found that they liked what they were doing. When it came to food procurement during, during the pandemic and consumers have, those consumers have continued to prioritize local purchases, and a lot of businesses as they reopened and recovered, have identified that being more integrated with local producers can be something that differentiates them in the eyes of consumers and have, have really doubled down on that.
Eric Miller: Yeah, it's really interesting to think about benefits coming out of Covid, but one thing that was really almost like special to see was how much more engagement people had, both what was on their plate and, and how it got there. And I find that to be something that I mean this goes into my, my personal biases, but I'm very happy to see how that transformation happened because prior to Covid, I, you see the grocery shelves and, and most of the calories people were getting were not necessarily from, they were from a longer supply chain. And so it's nice to see maybe some, some nudging toward engagement with local producers. and a more diverse set of types of food is nice to see.
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, I think it's a little, I know, we all, a lot of us who work in this space and who have these conversations we spend a lot of time you know, being, being happy about that. I think it's important to, to realize, and this is a point that we make in the article as well, that the goal, especially if we're talking about resilient food systems, isn't necessarily to, to make them hyper-local.
Eric Miller: Right.
Jonathan Malacarne: There are lots of things that we can't produce here, or lots of things that would take many more resources to produce here.
And so don't actually kind of have that desirable, say, environmental impact or that desirable impact on sustainability broadly that we might think because they're local. I think the goal is, as you mentioned, to diversify and to really take a little bit more holistic view of the food system and figure out what we can do well here and make sure that we're doing that. And at the same time recognize that there are many ways to ensure access to affordable, high-quality food for, for everyone. And that involves making use of our resources here, but then also integrating in a smart way to kind of the broader national and global food system.
Eric Miller: This is why I appreciate having folks like you studying this so carefully because it's so nuanced. There's no silver bullet solution. It's not too industrialized nor hyper-localized. So how would you describe the situation that the main food system is in now, two years in the pandemic and at a point where food costs have been rising for various other reasons?
Have any lessons from the early days of the pandemic helped the food system, whether these new shocks?
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, so there's, you know, one of the things that's more salient now is that We're always facing, there are always shocks to the food system, the, the pandemic, the early days of the pandemic, especially where a sudden, large, unexpected and kind of unprecedented shock.
What we're facing now with rising food costs happens repeatedly, right? Food costs go up, food costs go down. and I think that a few things make this different. and consumers have some, some experience now from the pandemic that can help them face rising food costs. And the first is we all have a little bit more practice being flexible.
And so whenever the cost of, I'm an economist, and so I imagine that whenever the cost of one thing goes up, consumers decide whether or not they wants to continue purchasing it or whether they want to switch to a similar, but maybe cheaper or good. and we have a lot of evidence that that's actually what consumers do.
So I work with a group at the University of Maine and at the University of Vermont that's part of the National Food Access and Covid research team. and we run some ongoing surveys and rising food prices is one of the questions that we asked about. and so in our most recent survey 62% of respondents reported that the rising food costs has made them alter their behavior.
But then at the same time, there's a lot of work that's done, and in particular I'm thinking of the Consumer Food Insights report that runs out of Purdue. That happens at a much, much higher frequency. and they see similar things that consumers are changing their food purchasing behavior in response to rising food price.
But what they find is that some of that is seeking out more sales and discounts, or some of that is swapping between name brands and generic brands. and so it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a one-for-one association between rising food prices and rising food expenditure in every household.
And that is not at all to say that rising food prices are not challenging, it's just that we have a little bit, everybody has a little bit more practice now responding to challenging situations when it comes to procuring food, and so I know that the system itself is dealing with that and is using that experience very wisely. And I'm confident that consumers are doing the same thing.
Jason Lilley: I would say that the farmers who again, have more of a direct to consumer outlet um, have, have been able to maintain those relationships and that. A lot of the early structures that they set up in order to, to market safely in the face of, of Covid.
So their online sales platforms, their increased, you know, newsletters, all of that have really carried over and not only allowed them to continue to market to these new customers, but have allowed, have allowed them to improve their businesses as a whole. So they've got better tracking of what they're producing and what they're selling and, and what market outlets their products are going through.
So there are a lot of benefits and kind of on-farm lessons learned that are definitely going to be carried over from the perspective of the farmers who sell wholesale and who have less control over their pricing, they're, this has been a very challenging season. farm inputs have gone up, you know, between 60 and 120%.
So while farmers' cost of production is going, is essentially doubled their, what they're getting has, has really not increased at all. I've spoken to several farmers who work with some grocery chains and, and they haven't seen any increase since 2019. So it's really tough for them to figure out, you know, how they're gonna continue to make the farm viable if what they're selling their product for doesn't match that cost of production.
So that's a serious hurdle that needs to be addressed.
Eric Miller: Yeah, it's, it's fascinating how this, this practice and flexibility has, has carried over. and it's also, it blows my mind how in the span of two and a half years we have experienced two historic global shocks, One being pandemic and the other, of course being the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So, to, I, I'm glad you are keeping tabs on how this, how input costs, is changing and negatively affecting folks and how that's going to shape policy coming up. And so to transition to little policy talk so there are policy initiatives that help support the food system at the onset of the pandemic.
Now that most of those have expired, have there been any new policy initiatives to aid with ongoing food and financial insecurities due the pandemic or even gas price increases? Uh, what kind of food policy do we need at the present moment?
Jason Lilley: Yeah, I think that you know, unfortunately I don't have any specific, you know, silver bullet policies that would really solve some of these crises.
But I think that, you know, going back to the previous question, my response in that farmers need to get paid more to match the cost of productions is kind of counter to Jonathan's response of the consumer's ability to pay for food and, and rising food costs. So I don't know if, if there is a solution of stipends for food or, you know, offsets for, for the cost of production. I don't know in what form that would come in, but that is something that does need to be addressed. So.
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, this is actually what Jason just highlighted is often at the top of my mind. I teach a class called the Main Farm and Food Economy and we really engage with this directly like this, this challenge of supporting farmers and wanting farmers to get paid for their effort and for the products they produce and the service that they provide. And at the same time, trying to manage the cost of food so that everyone has access to sufficient quantities and qualities of food to live a healthy lifestyle. and it really is, it's one of those challenging questions to answer and then put on top of that.
You know, having to, to realize and recognize that anything that we do that affects the price of, of fuel or affects the price of chemical inputs, you know, may also have undesirable impacts for, for emissions and for our kind of ongoing needs to address climate change. and all of these things are connected and, and that makes it really hard.
I think it is important to note that, you know, while some of the specific programs and policies that were designed to address needs at the beginning of the pandemic may have expired. There were lots of organizations and lots of uh, departments and divisions within organizations like the USDA that this is just what they do. And supporting, supporting both farmers and supporting consumers has been their mission since long before the pandemic and will continue to be their mission long after the pandemic, as they administer and run programs to support both farmers and food insecure households every day.
And here it's the same, the same is true here in Maine, right? There are organizations and there are many people who get up and go to work every day. And this is just, this is their job, and we are going through a moment where that's been a little bit more in the public eye. And I would love that to be true all the time so that we acknowledge their efforts and support funding for their program even when we're not dealing with a new acute crisis, right? Access to sufficient quantities and quality of food is an ongoing and always pressing need, and as Jason mentioned, supporting farmers is similarly and, and ongoing and always present pressing need and to, to deal with it. We need to pay attention, not just when something new and exciting and big happens, but every day.
Eric Miller: I really appreciate you both entertaining such an easy question to toward the end of the interview here, and I also appreciate how you're able to communicate these challenges of consumer prices as well as farmer income as that is very, very challenging problem to address. To finish things off, is there anything else you'd like to share about the Maine food system that we haven't covered already?
Jason Lilley: Yeah, I'll, I'll just jump in as kind of a cherry on top here and remind folks of, you know, the scenario we were in at the onset of the pandemic. Everyone was you know, fully stressed out, confused, didn't know what was going to happen.
And farmers took a moment, you know, pivoted, you know, almost immediately, and, and really worked on figuring out how to continue to support our community and our local economy and our local food systems. And I would argue that they did that in a way that was wildly successful. And, you know, not at I mean definitely at their own expense and risk to their own health.
And you know, it was financially burdensome, but they all stuck with it. And they were, they were here for the state. And now, you know, the tables have kind of turned, like things have kind of leveled off. We're seeing inflation kind of in our general economy. I've heard numbers of eight to 13% for the average American.
Um, and to pair that with farmers, increased cost, cost of productions being, you know, 60 to 120% in increases. So, I think it's now a moment to, for the, you know, general consumers of Maine to just really kind of step back and think, you know, if we have the means at all, it's really, it goes beyond just the food that we're putting on our table. Us taking that effort to support our local farmers has that ripple effect at supporting a whole economy, the ecosystem you know, and our communities. So that's what I would leave us with.
Jonathan Malacarne: I can't do better than that, so I'll give Jason the last word there.
Eric Miller: Yeah, that was very well put. Thank you, Jason, and thank you Jonathan as well for joining us today on Maine Policy Matters.
Jason Lilley: Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks.
Eric Miller: What you just heard was JG Malacarne's, Jason Lilley's, and Nancy McBrady's perspective from their article, "The Response of the Maine Food System to the Onset of the Covid- 19 Pandemic." Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Policy Center at the University of Maine. For citations for the data provided in this article, please refer to the original article in Maine Policy Review. The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the policy center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, script writers for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we'll be reading a summary of Rob Brown's article entitled "How to Save Jobs and Build Back Better: Employee Ownership Transitions As a Key to an Equitable Economic Recovery." We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine.
You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform and stay updated on new episode releases. I am Eric Miller. Thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E5 Interview with Liam Riordan - Democracy and the Humanities

Today, we have with us Liam Riordan, Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine and serves as Chair on the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission. Riordan was the past Director of the University of Maine McGillicudy Humanities Center, is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and has been a faculty member since 1997. In his current role, Riordan helps organize Maine National History day, a statewide history contest for middle and high school students. His recent work has included him traveling across Maine giving talks such as “What Did We Learn from the Maine State Bicentennial? Reflections on Historical Commemoration”. He also gave a talk titled “Picturing Maine’s Indigenous Context”.
Transcript
Eric Miller: Welcome to Maine Policy Matters, a podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the
center. Today we have with us Liam Riordan, Adelaide and Allenberg, professor of history at the University of Maine and serves as chair on the city of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission, Riordan was the past director of the University of Maine McGillicuddy Humanities Center, is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and has been a faculty member since 1997. In his current role, Riordan helps organize Maine National History Day, a statewide history contest for middle and high school students. His recent work has included him traveling across Maine, giving talks such as “What Did We Learn from The Maine State Bicentennial? Reflections on Historical Commemoration. He also gave a talk entitled “Picturing Maine’s Indigenous Context.”
Miller: Hi, Liam. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Riordan: Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m happy to be invited to Maine Policy Matters.
Miller: So what brought you into the field of humanities and what role does this subject play in discussing American history and modern policy issues?
Riordan: So I’m a history professor at the University of Maine, and I arrived here in 1997, and so my initial way of understanding my work as a historian was a somewhat traditional academic understanding that I’d be a scholar. I do original research about the American Revolutionary era, which is my period of specialization and that I would teach undergraduate courses of all sorts, big survey classes to 150 students, small upper-level classes, and one of the real privileges of being a member of the history department at the University of Maine is that we are the only PhD-granting department in the humanities in the entire state of Maine. And so I think that’s a really interesting responsibility, and it’s an aspect of the history department at the University of Maine that I’m really proud of.
Miller: Yeah, very nice. Thank you so much for entering that field and contributing in such a way and taking on a public service to this degree in being so involved and I know the university is paying some dividends from your, from your service. Could you tell us a bit by what you mean, chatting about the public humanities, and how this relates to policy specifically.
Riordan: So this is really a significant way in which my understanding of my role as a history professor changed over the course of my 20 plus years at the University of Maine I, I mentioned earlier when I began, I really thought of myself as a scholar and as a teacher both at the undergraduate and graduate level. But, I now realize that there is really an important role for university faculty to play in helping to lead the public humanities in Maine, and what I mean by that is that the humanities have a really vital role to play not just in the scholarly and university tradition, but the kind of impact that the history, particularly, but the humanities more broadly, should have on how we understand life in Maine in the 21st century. And so in this sense, it has a real significant application for public policy, and there are a variety of ways I sort of got involved in this commitment to the public humanities. First was I served two terms as a member of the Board of the Maine Humanities Council, which is the state affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and that really helped me understand the place of the University of Maine in the context of the state of Maine quite differently.  And then a few years after that, I became, helped to organize and became one of the early directors of what’s now called the McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine, and that has a number of goals, but one of them is to share the humanities research that students and faculty do more broadly with the public. And as the director of that Humanity center at UMaine, I guest edited an issue of Maine Policy Review in 2015 that looks specifically at the relationship between humanities and public policy. And then more recently still, because I’m a specialist in the American Revolutionary era, I got very involved with the commemoration of the Maine Bicentennial. So that 200-year celebration of Maine becoming a state that sort of connected the year 1820, Maine’s birthday as a state with 2020 lead to a lot of public speaking all around the state. It’s led to a volume that I’m co-editing with my colleague Richard Bud, and I also organized conference at the University of Maine in the summer of 2019, all of them really emphasizing the public humanities and the need for us to improve our quality of life in the present by having a deeper understanding of significant historical themes and events in the Maine past.
Miller: Yeah, that celebrating Maine’s Bicentennial is very exciting. What did you, and you played a very special part in that celebration, what did you enjoy most about touring the state, doing that, public speaking , and maybe what was one of your most memorable interactions during that experience?
Riordan: So it was a real privilege for me to do a lot of local public speaking about the Maine Bicentennial and one of the curious things, so I gave I’ve forgotten, you know, close to 100 public talks over the course of four or five years, and one of the sort of curious things about this is that I trained for my PhD in Philadelphia and part of my training was to try to argue that the position of New England in our understanding of early American history was overstayed. So then, of course, I got my job at the University of Maine and I had to sort of start changing my tune and learn more about New England generally and about Maine in particular. So my process of developing my understanding of that statehood era that culminates with statehood in 2020 really began as a listening experience in a lot of ways, and many of these early meetings were really just discussions to try to understand what did people see as pressing issues from the statehood era that had some relevance for them in the 21st century. So one of the memorable experiences I had was being hosted by a colleague in Madawaska and getting a very different understanding of what Maine statehood meant from the perspective of people living in the northern part of the state, where statehood, and especially the eventual clarification of where the northern boundary was with the state that didn’t occur until the early 1840s. This was a much more traumatic event in memory that is very much ongoing to the present, particularly for Francophone people in the Saint John River Valley. So that was one really memorable experience for me and I, I would say the second more broadly is just the way in which doing the Bicentennial commemorative work helped me to realize the incredible passion that is had for history at the local level. So local historical societies, county genealogical societies. Practically every Public Library in the state has a local history room and, and that’s really where a lot of the most intense commitment to understanding our past lies and a lot of that occurs at really a great distance from academic historians and professional scholars. So to kind of circle back to my interest in public history, a commemoration is a kind of special opportunity to try to connect that local passion at the grassroots level with what goes on in the university both in terms of my scholarship, but also in terms of my teaching.
Miller: Yeah, we are all very grateful for our librarians and volunteers and passionate stewards of preserving history, whether oral or written down, that is so valuable. And I also find so fascinating how seemingly nearby places can have such different perspectives on the history of a place. And so as you as you mentioned in 1820, Maine was gained its statehood suffering from Massachusetts as part of the Missouri Compromise, which for as I’m sure many know, but Missouri and Maine rendered as states at the same time Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a Free State and so as a historian what does this context of the birth of Maine mean to you as well as this milestone of reaching 200 years.
Riordan: So, Eric, thanks for that question. You know, the way in which Maine statehood was connected to Missouri is I think almost certainly the most famous aspect of The Maine statehood era. And it’s a complicated story of how that unfolded. And I have to confess, I never really understood it very well until I began to do my preparation for this Maine Bicentennial commemoration of statehood. And so one of the things that I now feel pretty strongly about is that we probably shouldn’t describe this event as the Missouri Compromise. And I say this because of a letter that four members of The Maine Congressional delegation published in a Maine newspaper in 1820 to explain why they voted against Maine becoming a state. In the US Congress in the spring of 1820. And what they said was that it was such an abomination for Maine to become a state and to accelerate the expansion of slavery West, that it would be better for Maine not to become a state. And they specifically say in their letter that they rejected the idea that this was a compromise, that this was something forced upon them and that they disagreed with and that they thought was a big error for the United States. And what’s really interesting about this very technical vote in the US Congress in the spring of 1820 is that in that meeting of the House of Representatives, the district of Maine, just a portion, still a part of Massachusetts, but the district of Maine before it became a state had 7 U.S. congressmen. Now, that’s pretty interesting to anyone with a sense of civics today, right? We only have two U.S. congressmen today, and we barely hold on to two. Knock on wood when the census comes in. So we had seven when we were a district as part of Massachusetts, and five of those seven voted against the critical bill where Maine and Missouri were linked, and slavery would be permitted to expand into the western part of what was then the Louisiana Territory. Now even just to keep going deeper on this little nugget, the vote in the US House of Representatives was so close on this issue that if those two in the minority in Maine had voted with the majority of the Maine delegation that would have blocked the expansion of slavery to Missouri. And so for me, this opens up a really fascinating counterfactual sort of speculation. That if those if the full seven members had voted against Maine statehood because they objected to slavery expanding to Missouri, I really wonder, might that have led to a very different outcome for slavery in the United States? That, of course, will come to an end, but only with three decades of continued expansion of slavery after, and with the horrific personal and financial cost of the civil war that if we had had bolder and more courageous political leadership earlier, and Maine was really at the center of this, perhaps we would have had a much different course for the expansion of slavery and the kind of, you know, no more pivotal event in American history than the civil war that would, of course, come three decades after the Maine/Missouri crisis that ends with the joint admission of those two states.
Miller: Wow, there are so many layers there that we could pick away at I something that just stands out to me immediately is the courage I would assume that would be bad politics to vote against more autonomy in for the, what was then then district of Maine becoming their own state having more control of their own territory, so, a little bit of a follow up. Was there much political cost to those five individuals?
Riordan: So that’s a great question and it’s a little tricky to figure out the answer to that. Some of them don’t stand for reelection, others because Maine becomes a state. It then gets 2US senators, so one of those congressmen gets named by the legislature to become a senator. So that’s really a good research question that maybe one of my graduate students should take up in the future. Broadly speaking, the small number of northern members of the House of Representatives who voted with the southern interests to expand slavery, the majority of them faced a very difficult time getting reelected to Congress. Now it is different in the Maine context, right? Because obviously they were voting in favor of becoming a state, but I like to think that there was enough anti-slavery popular interest in Maine that that would not have prohibited them from becoming being reelected or continuing their careers as politicians in the district of Maine, and I do not think it would have seriously changed Maine becoming a state. That the, you know, some people sometimes say that there was a timeline and it had to get done quickly, but I think that’s really not the case. It’s quite clear that political leaders in Massachusetts, as well as the majority of people in the district of Maine, agreed that having two New England states, Maine and Massachusetts, made sense by early 1820. So I think statehood would have happened anyway and I think we might have had a somewhat different future for slavery and antislavery if Maine representatives had acted differently in that critical vote in the Spring of 1820.
Miller: Yeah, wow, I love history for this reason is digging into things that occurred centuries ago and getting into the discussions around a particular issue, and that it wasn’t as straightforward as the outcome. There was discussion and disagreement all happening at the same time. I appreciate your clarification and maybe we will get an answer to that question someday. You may have just covered this in the past question, but is there a significant event or period in Maine history that you believe is underappreciated?
Riordan: Well, let me, I’ll just continue to talk a little bit about the statehood era. Cause this sort of represents my specialty in what I know best. And I do think that talking about the Maine/Missouri crisis is the most famous aspect of how Maine became a state. But it’s interestingly also to sort of start our discussion at the very end. And I think one of the things that’s really surprising to people in Maine today is that it took a very long time for popular opinion in Maine to decisively express itself that Maine did want to separate from Massachusetts. So I think this does kind of surprise people ’cause we are pretty familiar with this idea of being suspicious from people of from away and having, you know, cutting comments about flatlanders from Massachusetts. But this is a good example of how the distant past surprises us. It, it was not an easy decision for people to cut that long connection. And so when I talk about this statehood era, I’m really talking about a period from the 1780s to the final successful vote for Maine statehood in July of 1819. And in that final vote, there are overwhelming majorities for Maine to become an independent state. But previous to that final vote, there were five other statewide elections that were all bitterly contested and the movement changed a lot over time, and so something that we might think would be an automatic or easy decision from the perspective of 2022 was actually something extremely difficult and that really required a lot of work and a lot of changes in the independence movement over the course of several decades before we got to that explosive moment of the Maine/Missouri crisis in 1820.
Miller: Yeah. Thank you for expanding upon with that answer, talking and diving so deeply into the Maine/Missouri crises. And so, of course the Wabanaki Nations were present long before Maine statehood. So, would you like to discuss the context of relations with Wabanaki Nations at the point of statehood and how these relations have changed or developed over two centuries?
Riordan: So this is really a very important issue, both for thinking about the history of Maine, but also thinking about contemporary circumstances in Maine and one thing I think is important to stress is that when we’re talking about commemoration. That, I think, is a different act than just celebration. And so commemoration calls on us to reflect and engage and think about the circumstances of how Maine became a state in 1820. And that means more than simply being partisans and fans and saying that that was really a great thing. And so one of the important observations is that Maine statehood in 1820 accelerates the colonial process of dispossession of Wabanaki people from their homeland, and I would say that it even accelerates a experience of genocide for those Wabanaki people. And this was an absolutely crucial issue in 1820, as Massachusetts prepared to transition away from having a sort of sovereign government roll over the district of Maine. And part of the articles of separation that the Massachusetts legislature required Maine voters and the new Maine government to accept as part of the terms of separation was an explicit recognition that the new state of Maine would take on all the duties and responsibilities and obligations that the state of Massachusetts had entered into in its state-to-state treaty negotiations with tribal nations. And that is a very serious and you know textually specific aspect of the articles of separation that become part of The Maine Constitution. Now some of your listeners may know the Maine Legislature and Maine voters in 1875 voted to redact this passage from printed copies of The Maine Constitution. They said it would remain lawfully intact and enforced, but this specific language about Maine bearing responsibility for maintaining Massachusetts treaty agreements no longer would be printed in The Maine Constitution. This is kind of bizarre and hard to wrap our heads around. And as recently as four or five years ago, the legislature revisited this, but were not successful in getting this language restored to printed copies of The Maine State Constitution. You can actually find the language the, Secretary of State’s office, in a separate piece of legislation, has made it available to the public, but this, I think, really stands as a clear symbol of just how unequal that transition to Maine State sovereignty was for Wabanaki individuals, for Wabanaki communities, and for Wabanaki sovereignty as their own tribal governments. And Massachusetts even gave the new state of Maine a large sum of money to continue to honor their treaty obligations. So, we might think in the 21st century that Wabanaki issues are somewhat newly resurgent in public life in Maine, but this was also a searing issue in the statehood era and was a big part of the transition from Massachusetts to Maine sovereignty that I think, if we think about this logically, also had clear implications for Wabanaki sovereignty. The last thing I will say is that it’s striking that that 2020 bicentennial of Maine statehood is also the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Act that is the sort of crucial Federal legislation that remains a matter of really intense political debate in Maine about the balance of tribal state relations. And I do feel that that hasty language in the 1980 law that has been interpreted as excluding Wabanaki federally recognized tribes from the benefits of over 200 Federal laws pertaining to Indians since 1980 is really an extraordinary injustice and is something that should be addressed by the Maine state government, so that Wabanaki tribes don’t discover this, don’t continue to suffer this very unfair discrimination in how they’re treated as sovereign entities.
Miller: I really appreciate your differentiation between commemoration and celebration. There are things in history that we don’t have to celebrate at all, but recognition being a huge factor in just grappling with the past, and something that comes to mind as we’re just talking about the courage of those five legislators that voted against slavery or the Missouri Compromise, but then also at the same exact time, that language being striked from the distributed papers of the Maine Constitution, I find that quite interesting and taking a stance on one subjugated population and not necessarily carrying that over to a different, and within the bounds of the new created place, minority population. So as guest editor of the 2015 Maine Policy Reviewspecial issue on Humanities and Policy, you covered William Adams’s piece entitled “The Urgency of Democracy”. What would you like to share about the significance of that piece in the current state of American democracy?
Riordan: Great. Well, thanks for that question about the issue of the Maine Policy Review that I guest edited back in 2015, and I’ll remind your listeners that all issues of the Maine Policy Review are accessible on the Digital Commons of the University of Maine Library, pretty easy to Google and get there, and you can look up in the special issues column, you can click on the one related to the humanities and policy and see the wide spectrum of pieces that were in that particular issue. William Adams wrote one of the two Margaret Chase Smith essays that opened that 2015 issue. We had sort of two high profile national figures on the humanities landscape in the United States, write our Margaret Chase Smith essays, William ‘Bro’ Adams was then the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and he wrote a piece called the Urgency of Democracy. I think you’ve covered this on a recent podcast so listeners who are regular subscribers have probably heard him read that piece. And one of the things that really strikes me about it is that he, you know this was published in 2015. So this was before both of our most recent presidential elections that have been so controversial, and I think that he was really, had a sense of foresight about the coming crisis of American democracy and how this connects directly to our need for a more robust engagement with the humanities in order to preserve the quality of civic life in the United States. So, I’m going to just repeat what I think are the final lines of William Adams’s essay in that 2015 issue. He wrote that, “the humanities provide richness, beauty and wisdom in our lives, and they help our communities to flourish. But we need them, especially because the humanities provide the intellectual and emotional foundations for democratic life and citizenship. For Maine and the country as a whole, the urgency of the humanities is the urgency of democracy.” So for me, what I think he means by this is that a concept like citizenship, well, what does it mean to be a citizen or a concept like democracy? These are both fundamentally born out of the humanities, right. We don’t get a sense of citizenship from mathematics. We don’t get a sense of citizenship from a well-designed bridge or road. We don’t get a sense of democracy from a bottom-line analysis of how to have the most successful investment, right. And I think a lot of times scientific, technical, economic calculations are ones that get prioritized in how we think about what matters for public policy. And so, William Adams’s essay at the start of that 2015 issue of Maine Policy Review really was the opening note of, I think, some 30 essays in that issue that explored, you know, what do we mean by the humanities? What are the value of the humanity? And how could a more robust engagement with the humanities have a positive impact for our quality of life in Maine and for the types of public policy that we value and choose to pursue? So, you know, we’ve got in the time since that article was written, we’ve got a national presidential election that remains contested. We’ve had the US Capitol building stormed in a violent riot. And this is absolutely crucial that I think we really take up William Adams’s point that the urgency of democracy and the urgency of humanities are deeply related to one another. And this circles back to my opening comments of why I think the public humanities are so crucial for where Maine and the nation are in the 21st century. That the humanities prioritize the qualitative aspects of human experience. And in our daily life that means the basic skills that we have for insight, for reflection and for better understanding our place in an often confusing and complex world.
Miller: Thank you for all that additional context around William Adams’s piece. I second the recommendation to listeners if you haven’t listened to that episode or read the piece. I’m frankly when I read it, I was so taken aback by the fact that it was written in 2015. I would have assumed that it was sometime in 2021 if the date was removed. It’s amazing how some folks can articulate such an incredible point at a time, but that seemed a little bit, not quite, as of course was very relevant at the time, otherwise you wouldn’t have wrote it, but even more relevant today. So to finish things off, is there anything that you’d like to share that we haven’t covered already?
Riordan: Well, I guess I’ll close with another plug to your listeners. I’m really proud of that 2015 issue of Maine Policy Review that looks at the intersection of the humanities and policy. And of course we’ve got people like William Adams or the President of the American Association of Arts and Sciences who give our sort of opening Margaret Chase Smith essays, but the, the heart of that issue are about 30 other essays that really showcase the vitality of the humanities in Maine. And this is partly university faculty, but it’s also important organizations like the Maine Humanities Council, like your public library like, your local historical society, like museums, theaters, concert halls, and movie houses. So, I would encourage everyone to take a look at that issue online at Digital Commons, and I’d also say it’s time to reengage with the humanities. And that could be something different for every single listener. It could be pursuing other podcasts, it could be reading a book, it could be visiting your local historical society or library and participating in the way that the humanities can really enrich our individual lives, but more significantly, is how it can enrich our communal lives. And I, I do think we’re at a moment where we need a more robust sense of what are our civic responsibilities as citizens and how can we have a more civil life in the state of Maine? So that starts with our family and our households and our friends and our neighbors, but the humanities should have a robust part in that for everyone.
Miller: Thank you so much for your perspective and your service to humanities in the state of Maine. And thank you so much for joining us today, Liam.
Riordan: Thanks, Eric. It’s been a pleasure to be on the podcast.
Miller: What you just heard was Liam Riordan’s perspective on Maine’s history. Maine Policy Review is a peer reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant. In two weeks, Jonathan Malacarne and Jason Lilley, two of the authors of an article entitled “The Response of the Maine Food System to the Onset of COVID-19 Pandemic” will join us for an interview. We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.  I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E4 William D. Adam’s’ Reading of ”The Urgency of Democracy”

In preparation for election day on November 1st, today we are hosting William D. Adams—the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities—for a reading of his essay “The Urgency of Democracy.” 
Link to essay: https://mcspolicycenter.umaine.edu/mpr/2021/06/16/the-urgency-of-democracy/
William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.
Transcript
Eric Miller: In preparation for election day, today we are hosting William D. Adams—the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities—for a reading of his essay “The Urgency of Democracy.”
William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion-dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.
(Music)
This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. The article covered in this episode was published as the Margaret Chase Smith Essay in Maine Policy Review, Volume 24, Number 1.
Here is William D. Adams.
Williams D. Adams: Maine is well known for producing impressive political leaders and for producing impressive women political leaders in particular. Senator Margaret Chase Smith is rightly remembered as the first of these in the contemporary era, anticipating and no doubt inspiring the impressive careers of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Chellie Pingree, among others.
Senator Smith grew up in Skowhegan, where her father was the town barber. She attended Lincoln and Garfield elementary schools and Skowhegan High School. I don’t know what subjects Senator Smith learned at Lincoln and Garfield elementary schools or at Skowhegan High School, but considering her distinguished career it’s not too fanciful to imagine that they included healthy doses of civics, American political history, and the American constitutional tradition.
In Maine and across the country, these foundational concerns of primary and secondary education, along with many humanities subjects, are under increasing pressure. We are familiar with the reasons—fewer resources, the pressure of testing regimes and expectations, the introduction of new technologies, and misguided, if understandable, anxiety over career readiness, which continue to envelop many of our policy frameworks for assessing and reforming education.
The effects of this pressure are not surprising. According to statistics produced by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in both 1994 and 2010 “a substantial majority” of school-age children in the United States “failed to demonstrate ‘proficiency’ in U.S. history.”1 Worse still, nearly 60 percent of high school seniors graduating in those years failed to demonstrate even a basic knowledge of U.S. history. It’s some consolation, though not much, that the history proficiency of students in the fourth and eighth grades improved between 1994 and 2010, though the percentages of students with only a basic understanding remains depressingly low. Student achievement in civics shows a somewhat more encouraging trend. In this realm, fourth and eighth graders showed improvement between 1998 and 2010. Still, less than 20 percent of all students in these grades demonstrated civics achievement levels of proficient or advanced. As was true of the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments in other humanities subjects, strikingly lower levels were observed among older students, with only 64 percent of twelfth graders demonstrating a mid-level of basic achievement in 2010.
In what seems almost surely to be a related development, meaningful political participation in the United States continues to decline, and civic engagement of all kinds is increasingly fragile. For evidence, we need look no further than the most recent general election. As the Washington Post reported (November 10, 2014):
General election voter turnout for the 2014 midterms was the lowest it’s been in any election cycle since World War II, according to early projections by the United States Election Project. Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots as of last Tuesday, continuing a steady decline in midterm voter participation that has spanned several decades. The results are dismal, but not surprising— participation has been dropping since the 1964 election, when voter turnout was at nearly 49 percent.
It’s hard to imagine a robust democratic political culture without a citizenry that is at least proficient in U.S. history, the basic structure and workings of our political institutions, and in the founding principles and values of American democracy. And it’s hard to imagine proficiency in these areas without an abiding commitment to civic education in our schools, colleges, and universities.
But the democratic significance of the humanities goes well beyond the need to cultivate specifically civic and historical sensibilities. Democracy and democratic citizenship also require the ability to think critically and clearly about the central issues of shared concern, to imagine alternatives to standing arrangements, to entertain and advance the common good, and, perhaps most important of all, to feel empathy and respect for others. These capacities are in some important sense inherent to human nature, but they require the cultivation, reinforcement, and testing that lie at the heart of humanistic learning, exchange, and understanding.
Democracy flourishes alongside a robust sense of place. This may be especially true in Maine, where sense of place is such an important part of collective identity. With the help of the National Endowment for the Humanities, scholars from the University of Maine have recently given to the people of Maine a remarkable new asset related to place—the Historical Atlas of Maine. Now a beautiful printed book, the Atlas is entering a planning phase to become a national model as an interactive digital resource. It will then serve as a resource for schools and individuals across the state and beyond.
Maine also has another wonderful humanities resource in the Maine Humanities Council (MHC), one of the most energetic and admired of the national system of state and territorial humanities councils supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The MHC is doing exemplary work around the state, providing resources and leadership to the statewide humanities network.
Over the years, Maine has also served as a mecca for creative writers and artists and now boasts an international reputation for its literary and artistic production. Our lives are richer and fuller as a result of such creativity in our backyard. We’ve also experienced the power and impact of the cultural economy, which will be such an important part of Maine’s economic future.
The humanities matter in all of these ways. They provide richness, beauty, and wisdom in our lives, and they help our communities to flourish. But we need them especially because they provide the intellectual and emotional foundations for democratic life and citizenship. For Maine and the country as a whole, the urgency of the humanities is the urgency of democracy.
(Music)
What you just heard was William D. Adams’ reading of his essay entitled “The Urgency of Democracy.” Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to the original article in Maine Policy Review.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be hosting Liam Riordan—Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine and Chair on the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission—for an interview of his perspective on Maine’s history.
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.
(Music)
William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.

S2E3 Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day with Gail Dana-Sacco

In commemoration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on October 10th, we will be hosting Gail Dana-Sacco on today’s episode with her reading of her article entitled “Indigenous Voices Charting a Course Beyond the Bicentennial: Eba gwedji jik-sow-dul-din-e wedji gizi nan-ul-dool-tehigw (Let’s try to listen to each other so that we can get to know each other)”
Link to article: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1857&context=mpr
Credit for intro and outro music goes to Allen Sockabasin, who advocated for the restoration of the Passamaquoddy language throughout his lifetime through his music and his teaching.
Gail Dana-Sacco became the first known Passamaquoddy to earn a Ph.D. when she completed her doctorate in health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Today, her work centers on advancing wolibmowsawogon, a world in which Indigenous peoples, lands, and languages can thrive. This article is dedicated to all the Passamaquoddy who have come before us and who are with us today, and the ones who are still to come, whose love and support have made this journey possible and will guide us forward. Gazelmulpa.

S2E2 Interview with Maine State Economist Amanda Rector

In this second episode of Maine Policy Matters Season 2, Eric Miller interviews Amanda Rector, the Maine state economist since 2011. Rector describes what it was like to be the state economist during the pandemic, how things turned out compared to how she originally thought they would turn out, the effects from the federal response to the pandemic, changes in the workplace, and makes predictions for the future.
Maine State Economist Amanda Rector Transcript 
Miller: Welcome to your main Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, Research Associate at the Center. 
Today we have with us Amanda Rector, State economist since 2011. In her role as state economist, she analyzes Maine's economic and demographic conditions to help inform policy decisions. 
Rector is a member of the state of Maine Revenue Forecasting Committee and serves as the Governor's Liaison to the US Census Bureau. 
Amanda Rector has published an essay in the Maine Policy Review entitled, “(Un)precedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, which you can find of reading of right here on the Maine Policy Matters podcast. Her essay details her personal experience with the pandemic and her journey from unprecedented to precedented times. 
She explains how research has given us a historical reference point for the pandemic, saying we will be talking with Rector about her thoughts on what has changed since those first days of the pandemic. 
[Background music] 
Miller: Firstly, thanks so much for joining us today. 
 
Rector: It's my pleasure. 
 
Miller: To start with an easy one, can you describe for us a bit what it was like to be the state economist in those early days of the pandemic? 
 
Rector: Well, I suddenly became a lot more popular. It's funny how a pandemic and recession will make economists suddenly people that everybody wants to talk to. You know, I think that one of the things in the early days, everyone was scrambling to get a sense of what was happening and scrambling to get data. And so, in some senses, there was this sort of drinking from the firehose effect of just everybody trying to grab onto any piece of information they possibly could. 
So, I felt like I was spending hour upon hour just reading things that were in some cases completely foreign to me. I had not done a lot of reading about pandemics in the past - not in my usual wheelhouse. 
And then I started just - I think one of the advantages to Maine is that because it's that, it's that sort of big, small town feel. Everybody is willing to just pick up the phone and talk. And so I spent a lot of time just getting on the phone saying, “Hey, you know? What are you seeing? What's happening in your field? Are you seeing things going on in your businesses? What are you worried about? What are you concerned is going to happen that you're not going to be able to come back from or recover from?  
And you know, it was really challenging to try to wrap my arms around everything that was going on in a fashion that I could then condense that and share helpful information with the folks who are making policy decisions. 
 
Miller: Yeah, I can't even imagine. I can't say that I heard too much from a state economist prior to the pandemic myself and I have a masters in economics, so it really has been interesting to observe how the ground has shifted in so many ways over the past two years. 
What surprised you over the past two years now that we're in a different part of the pandemic, did any of what you predicted in your piece come true, or what did we get right? We need to work out. 
 
Rector: You know, I think we thought it was going to be a lot worse than it really was in economic terms, particularly at the very beginning. 
And if you look back at some of the predictions that were coming from very qualified forecasters, there was a lot of doom and gloom that was coming out. And I think that the thing that we didn't and what prevented those really dreadful outcomes was the federal response. 
We simply had no way of knowing that the federal response was going to be as rapid and as extensive as it was. And so that really provided enough cushion to prevent those outcomes that were being tossed around early on where you know revenues declining by just tremendous numbers and it didn't happen. 
And in fact, if you look at our revenue picture now, we have revenues that are well above and beyond even what you know, our most recent forecasts were we've seen just a lot of revenue growth. 
We certainly we don't have explanations for all of it. You know a lot of it is still unprecedented in a different way now, I guess, because it's, you know, looking at this and saying, gosh, we don't really know where all this is coming from. 
But I think some of it was a matter of the federal supports that came out. If you look at what happened for personal income, for example, personal current transfer receipts, which are the funds that come from a government entity, either to or on behalf of an individual and it includes things like Social 
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, other income maintenance benefits, veterans benefits, a whole slew of different things. 
Those become a really important component of personal income during a couple of quarters. 
In particular, the quarters where stimulus checks went out when the enhanced unemployment benefits were flowing, and then when the child tax credit payments were going out during the second half of 2021. 
And so that enabled people to continue to engage in the economy at a level that wasn't really anticipated. We haven't really seen that kind of a response before and so that was able to keep people paying their bills, going up shopping. 
Maybe in some cases ordering online because they couldn't actually go out. But able to engage with the economy in a way that If they hadn't had those supports, we wouldn't have seen those purchases continue and it would have been a very different situation for revenues in turn.  
 
Miller: When you mentioned the speed of the federal response, my mind immediately goes to the 2008 and the federal response was a little bit slower. They'll shift your targeted in a much different way than the CARES Act that came out at the beginning, which I'm interested in how the policymakers learn from that and realize the scope of the pandemic and what that means economically, as well as from a personal health context. 
 
Rector: Right. I think there were there were a lot of feelings that the response following the Great Recession wasn't enough and there were a lot of concern is that we, the federal government, needed to move more rapidly this time around. 
And of course, now we'll learn from this one and hopefully we won't face another global pandemic anytime soon, but certainly in terms of what the response might be next time. Learning what worked, what didn't work. Uhm, and where things need to be tweaked further? 
 
Miller: Right. Every experience is definitely a learning experience. Yeah, as a research Economic Research practitioner myself, I have a little bit of a technical question I'm interested in asking you if you indulge me. Now it's been a couple of years we have data from the more traditional economic giants that like the Census Bureau that release data. How does the unconventional and creative data sources that you piece together match up with what they've released now, like the Census Bureau, such as, you know, calling up businesses, et cetera. 
 
Rector: Yeah, you know, some of some of what we heard absolutely panned out. I mean, when I talked to folks who were in the leisure and hospitality industry, they said we can't do anything because it is literally our business model is face to face interactions and we cannot do face to face interactions. 
We knew that they were going to be hard hit and they absolutely were and that has been a piece of the economy that has been somewhat slower to come back although certainly as we're in the summer tourism season now, they're hopefully doing better than they had been. 
I think you know I think that some of the pieces that we looked at there were there were some data sources that I was looking at from Opportunity Insights. They had a website, tracktherecovery.org was their website and we relied on that because it was reasonably well vetted, but they put together a bunch of different sources on things like small business openings and consumer spending and employment. And they were much more timely than a lot of the official sources they had some on employment where they were looking at employment levels by income rank essentially so high wage, middle wage, low wage workers and what were the employment. One of the things that we were seeing there was this K shaped recovery where the higher wage jobs were coming back faster than the low wage jobs and that seemed to pan out in the official data as well. If you looked at the sectors that were lagging behind in the recovery, they tended to be lower wage sectors. So leisure and hospitality, which I mentioned, some parts of health care and social assistance including long term care and social assistance - child cares in particular - and state and local government particularly, sort of the public education piece of it. 
So that was one piece that we had an indication that that that was happening before we got the official data on that one. 
And another one that actually tracked really well was the time spent outside the home. 
 
Miller: Those walks those walks were big. 
 
Rector: One of the earliest data sources that was actual data that I got was vehicle miles traveled from the Department of Transportation, which you would not think of as a traditional economic indicator, but if you think about the nature of the recession, like, people physically couldn't go anywhere and so we saw vehicle miles traveled drop because of course people weren’t driving to work anymore and they weren't driving to restaurants or to go shopping and or to schools. 
And that matched up very well with some of the early declines in employment and then the declines in sort of time spent outside the home, which was one from the track, the recovery website that I mentioned that was I think they were using cell phone data to figure out where people were traveling to using, you know, pings off of cell phone towers and stuff, and that they broke that down by times set up outside the home for different purposes, like going to a workplace and the workplace numbers as everybody shifted to remote work, or a lot of people, shifted to remote work. 
We saw that remain subdued, even though things like time outside for recreation went up considerably higher than they had been. 
So, there were certainly there were some sources that gave us early indications of what the official data sources might be trending towards later on. 
 
Miller: It's so interesting and fun to reflect how parsing different levels and really digging into the nitty gritty can yield things like the differing recoveries or reactions in different blue collar, white collar, and what type of industry. 
It's really interesting and important for responding to and learning from the pandemic and any sort of economic disruption. 
 
Rector: Absolutely. 
 
Miller: So, we are recording this shortly after the June consumer price report came out and, speaking of government speed and degree of response, some would argue because of the 2008 was slower and obviously did not have the as much of a direct U.S. citizen level response in help. 
The recovery was quite slow and obviously the pandemic response was fast and quite a bit of money went to U.S. citizens. So, which is led to very different recoveries. 
So, there was a 1.3% increase for the month of June and a total of a 9.1% increase of the last 12 months. 
Can you reflect on the current economic picture or how much of this inflation is beyond our control in the state of Maine? And how much is from the stimulus packages and what role do supply chain issues play at this current moment? 
 
Rector: Inflation has been one of the hot topics of the past few months. I would say that here in the state of Maine, our control over the national inflation numbers is basically non-existent. 
I mean, we are a very, very small portion of the overall national economy. 
I think Maine makes up .3% of the US GDP, something like that. So, what we do here has pretty small impacts in terms of the national inflation there. There's been some research and some studies done trying to figure out sort of how much of an effect the national stimulus had on inflation. 
It, you know, it seems like it may have contributed, but the more important factor is going back to what we talked about at the beginning. If it hadn't happened, things would have been just so much worse from so many different levels, everything from, you know, supporting state revenues to people being able to continue to support businesses that they are patronizing or being able to pay their rent, being able to buy groceries, I mean, those federal programs had actual calculable results, reducing poverty levels, for example. So, there were a lot of impacts that came out of those beyond, you know, the potential negative consequence of having higher inflation. 
I think a lot of what happened with inflation and honestly, nobody really knows for sure. 
Inflation, if anything, I think economists have discovered that we have less of an idea of what causes inflation than we did previously. So, certainly there, the supply chain piece of it I think was a very big part, particularly early on essentially prices were going up because you couldn't get the stuff that you needed, got bogged down for a number of different reasons. Part of it was certainly related to COVID and closures due to COVID workforce shortages. 
Because of COVID there were some issues around, you know, we really learned just how globally integrated our economy is during the pandemic. Part of it is that the cost of shipping containers went up so much and if you have pain so much more to move stuff that price gets translated through the price of the actual thing that is being transported and that you're buying. 
So, there were factors related not just to the shortage of the stuff, but the movement of the stuff.  
There was a lot of demand that happened at the same time. 
And then there are things that are completely unrelated to all of that. More recently, energy prices have been playing a big role in the increases in inflation as food prices have as well as shelter. 
For a few different reasons. I mean, the Russian invasion of Ukraine played a big factor in those rising energy prices, although they've been rising even prior to that. 
But it has really added a whole extra level of volatility and increases and that's playing into the food price increases as well. And then shelter, you know, if you look at the housing market in Maine, we saw real estate become extremely desirable as a lot of people wanted to be here and we just haven't had a lot of supply. If you look at when do people decide to, you know, when do businesses decide to make the investment in building a bunch of new housing stock? 
Well, it's when you're expecting a lot of new household formations and either it's because you have a lot of young people who are moving out of their parents' homes and into their own homes or you have a lot of migration into an area and Maine hadn't had a lot of that before the pandemic. And so, we haven't had a lot of new homes being built for a long period of time. So limited housing stock and a lot of demand and prices went through the roof and that's been happening in a lot of the country. 
It's not just in Maine, but those are certainly if you look at the contributing factors to inflation, those are really essentials. 
Those aren't things that we have a lot of discretion over we all need to have shelter, we need to have food and we need to be able to have you know a mode of transportation and heating our homes and electricity and all of those things that go into energy prices. 
So, we're at the whims of inflation right now. Really, I think the, you know, the good news is that we did see energy prices come down a little bit in the past few weeks. 
Gas prices in particular have started to tick down a little bit. And the Federal Reserve is acting very aggressively to raise interest rates in the hopes of cooling inflation. And that, of course, plays into cooling demand, particularly for things like housing, doesn't do anything to alleviate the affordability issues.  
But it does perhaps put a little bit of a damper on how much that has been growing recently, but it also the psychology of it is almost equally as important because it gets into people's minds that this is a temporary situation, there is action being done to bring it under control and so people don't become locked into the mindset of we're going to have prices just higher and higher and higher. 
Which then in turn tends to make prices go higher and higher and higher. 
 
Miller: Right, yeah. Something that is encouraging about the lower energy prices and seeing at the pump myself a small but real decrease is that I guess it gets into that economic theory of increasing velocity of the dollar and that's the fears of hyperinflation, which is really, really catastrophic. And speaking of global integration, today, I think it came out that the euro and the dollar are of the same value, which hasn't happened in a long time. And so there are these macroeconomic trends manifesting all around the world, and so it's from an economic perspective, interesting to observe and curious how it will all play out. 
 
Rector: A fascinating time to be an economist. 
 
Miller: In your essay, you mentioned that the notes on your whiteboard were up for so long before you went back to your office that you could still see their traces. How has your workplace and the way you conduct research change since moving to remote work? Then back to in person working, has returning to normal been possible? 
 
Rector: You know, I'm still actually primarily working remotely, and I think that for the type of work that I do and long term, I'll be in more of a hybrid situation, which for the type of work that I do, makes a lot of sense. A lot of what I'm doing is sort of me and a computer and an Excel spreadsheet. 
And I do not need the distractions of being in the office when I am trying to do that. At the same time, there are certainly times when it's really helpful to be in person, in the office, meeting face to face with people and collaborate. 
And getting back to that is definitely nice. 
I think that it's been really interesting. I do a lot of presentations for different groups, and I have had a mix of in-person and remote presentations and I think there are a lot of advantages to having that flexibility now. 
It used to be that everything was in person and there are a lot of things that actually are better suited to an online format. Maybe you want to have a lot of breakout groups, and boy, it's a heck of a lot easier to do those when you can just click a button and send people into little groups instead of having to physically move people into small group discussions. And it means, you know, particularly for a shorter presentation, it means that instead of spending an hour driving there, parking, getting in, getting set up. 
And then we're reversing that whole process for a 20-minute presentation. 
It's just a matter of logging in, doing the 20 minutes and then moving on to the next thing. 
But there are also certainly some advantages to the in-person presentations. I like being able to sort of read the room as I'm giving a presentation. I get a much better sense if I'm actually there. 
Are people following? Did I lose everybody somewhere down the line and they're just staring blankly at me? Is it after lunch and they're all snoozing now? I can't tell that I'm doing a presentation online whether that's the case, but I like the fact that it seems going forward there's going to be more of this flexibility in how work gets done and how meetings take place and how presentations are done that sort of best suits the format to what the type of work or event or presentation is. 
And I think that one of the things that we did a lot more of during the peak pandemic period was the collaborations and just trying to figure out, ‘oh, hey, you know, I don't have any data on this. Can I talk to some people or gosh, you know? 
I'm working on this stuff and it's kind of related to that. Maybe we should talk about this together and see if we can figure out some way to work together on this.’ I think there's a lot more collaboration. 
I think people became more used to sort of all hands on deck during the pandemic, and having the ability to be comfortable with reaching out to other people and asking for help or asking for a chance to collaborate, I think is maybe one of the other silver linings to come out of this as we're realizing that you can get a lot of really interesting insights if you're working with people that you don't normally work with. 
 
Miller: Totally - it's really amazing that we had all this technology before and then we were all forced to figure it out. And really interesting things that have come out of it is obviously allowed us to do this, which we could have done before, but I mean it just seems like everyone realized, oh all right, we are going to adjust and we'll take what we like moving forward and then once, you know, the pandemic has changed and has become more severe, sometimes less severe other times, and in the lulls, you can kind of be creative in how in person you want to be, which has been really nice for those that are more vulnerable than that. 
So, to kind of cap things off, I won't hold you this, but we have to do predictions because you're an economist, even though you're trained to be how precarious the nature of that business is. Will we ever see $3 gasoline or $6 lobster again? 
 
Rector: Uh, gazing into the crystal ball. You know the thing you learn about being an economist is that your predictions are pretty much always going to be wrong. It's just a matter of minimizing how wrong they are. Uh, you know, I think in in terms of inflation, I do think that we're on a course for inflation. 
I don't know if it's peaked this month or if it's going to peak next month, but I think we're at the point now where we should start seeing inflation come down in the coming months and return to more normal levels. 
I think it's going to be high for a while still, but I don't think it's going to be as high as it is right now. I think the fact that the Fed is acting so aggressively is going to curb the inflationary pressures. 
You know, there's also the people are muttering about the next recession and are we in one or are we going to be in one. 
 
Miller: The perennial question. 
Rector: Uh, yeah, I know. If I'm not talking about a recession, it just doesn't feel like a normal year, you know. But I think that it's sort of an interesting shift. Normally we're thinking about the next recession and states generally don't have a lot of resources and we're thinking about, well, what is the Fed going to do? How can the federal government both, in terms of fiscal policy and monetary policy, help states whether whatever the recession might look like. 
States are actually in better shape than the feds right now, I think, because we still have money flowing out from the American Rescue Plan Act, and in Maine, it's going out through the Maine Jobs and Recovery Plan, and that's a not insubstantial chunk of change. 
You know, it was it was a billion dollars, all told so we still have, we have hundreds of millions of dollars, that is still flowing out wrote over a period of a year plus. Which is timed I think really well in terms of helping to support economic activity now at the point when we're sort of thinking, oh gosh, are things going to be slowing down and the federal government doesn't have a lot of resources right now to do things if there is another recession and the state Budget Stabilization Fund is in really good shape and I think that provides us with a lot of cushion if there is something that happens to be able to continue to provide programs and services without having to do the mad scramble to cut things right off the bat the way often happens in a recession. 
So, I think it feels very strange to be in this position, you know, at a state level facing down potentially the next downturn, whatever shape it might take, but having reasonably good resources as we're looking ahead to that. 
 
Miller: Very nice. 
 
Thank you so much for entertaining the prediction question. 
 
Is there any exciting research or anything we haven't particularly asked a question that you would like to toss out there as we close out? 
 
Rector: I think one thing that I would mention, you know, I talked a little bit about the real estate market and how interested people were in moving to Maine and I would just say, you know, we did see a really strong migration into Maine during the pandemic. 7th in the nation for our migration rate in 2021, and when we just recently got the final breakdown of 2021 population estimates, we got age and race and ethnicity. We actually saw our median age decline.  
 
Miller: Wow. 
 
Rector: And that's the first time in decades that that has happened, and we were the only state that saw that happen. So, we did in fact see migration of younger populations into the state, which is really important in terms of providing future workforce as more of the baby boomers head into their traditional retirement years we've been struggling, wondering where the workforce is going to come from in the future and this really provided some positive signs that we will in fact have some available workforce down the line. 
 
Miller: That's an excellent note to end on. 
 
Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it, Amanda. 
 
Rector: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. 
 
Miller: You just heard Maine State Economist Amanda Rector’s thoughts on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and what the future might hold.  
 
You can read her published work on this topic in Vol. 30, Issue Number 2 of the Maine Policy Review.  The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center at the University of Maine. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our Production Consultant.  
 
In two weeks, we will have a reading by Gail Dana-Sacco of her essay, “Indigenous Voices Charting a Course Beyond the Bicentennial” to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  
 
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.   
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.  

S2 E1 Amanda Rector’s ”(Un)precedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic”

Maine Policy Matters—Season 2, Episode 1
Link to Essay: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol30/iss2/1/ 
What’s a state economist to do in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic? When everyone is asking for answers, but they are hard to find?
In this episode of Maine Policy Matters, Amanda Rector, the Maine state economist since 2011, shares her thoughts on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic’s economic impact, and what the future might hold.
Transcript
What’s a state economist to do in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic? When everyone is asking for answers, but they are hard to find?
Amanda Rector, the Maine state economist since 2011, shares her thoughts on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic’s economic impact, and what the future might hold.
[Background music]
This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine.  I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.
On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today, we are going to hear an essay written by Amanda Rector–the Maine state economist–entitled  “Unprecedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
In her words (full text of original article):
I remember very clearly the last days I spent in my Augusta office before the COVID-19 pandemic had me working from home. The last in-person meeting I spoke at was awkward as we tried to figure out the social dynamics: do we shake hands? Elbow bump? Wave from a safe distance? I chatted with someone in the parking lot who was hauling a computer monitor and keyboard and box full of paperwork to her car. “Who knows when we’ll be back,” she joked. The white board in my office was covered with notes on the potential economic effects from the pandemic. They were up for so long before I came back that I can still see traces of it that I couldn’t fully erase—a memory of the last days before so many lives changed so much.
I spent the early days of the pandemic drinking from a firehose of information, trying to wrap my brain around the economic impacts of a global pandemic. As an economist, I found I was suddenly a very popular person, even though it felt like I was just repeating the phrase “I don’t know” in every conversation. The only upshot was that no one else knew either. I took advantage of the small-town nature of Maine to start calling folks up, asking how their businesses or sectors were doing, what they saw coming down the pike, and what might be helpful as they navigated this strange new world of PPE (personal protective equipment) and stay-at-home orders. While the plural of anecdote is not data, on-the-ground perspectives do count for something when data aren’t available.
Data are my bread and butter: I use numbers and trends to understand what is happening and then translate that data for people who are trying to make decisions, whether policy, business, or research related. The challenge was that the pandemic broke my data sources. Demographic and economic data are notoriously lagged and most traditional sources wouldn’t start reflecting effects from the pandemic for months. The first source of real data I could get my hands on was vehicle miles traveled from the Maine Department of Transportation. We could use this as a proxy for economic activity because of the nature of the economic disruption—economic activity had slowed because the physical movement of people had slowed.
Even as quickly as the pandemic was breaking traditional data sources, though, there were people and organizations scrambling to put together innovative new data sources. Many of these new sources used big data and all of the digital information we trail behind us as  we move through the world. Opportunity Insights, for example, gave us estimates of consumer spending, small business openings, employment, and time spent outside the home. Were the data perfect? No. But it was much better to have semireliable, timely data (with an understanding of the shortcomings) than to be flying blind. Even the US Census Bureau, the staid bureaucratic stalwart of thoroughly vetted and significantly lagged data, got into the act, producing Small Business and Household Pulse Survey data with astonishing speed.
Federal policy response happened rapidly as well. The Federal Reserve Bank made monetary policy shifts and Congress passed fiscal stimulus and economic supports that were signed by the president in short order. Recent analysis has shown just how important those measures were: the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account various assistance programs, actually fell in 2020 and would have risen if it weren’t for the federal stimulus packages. Federal supports staved off what could have been disastrous economic consequences.
It is important to remember, however, that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a highly individualized experience. Everything from race and ethnicity to gender to household status to income level to geographic location to industry and occupation to the presence of children in the home has affected any given person’s impact from the pandemic. It has been difficult, at times, to remember that not everyone is having the same experience and that what has been a mild inconvenience for some has been an earth-shattering disaster for others.
It appears that, for many people, the pandemic has triggered a period of soul-searching. No one has been completely untouched by the pandemic, and the rapidity with which change happened has thrown us all for a loop. For some workers, this has been a time to think about what they really want out of life and work. Maybe it’s higher wages or better benefits (or any benefits, in some cases). Maybe it’s a different field of work. Maybe it’s more time spent at home instead of on the road commuting to a job. Maybe it’s more autonomy or more respect or more consistent hours. Anthony Klotz, an organizational psychologist at Texas A&M University, coined the term “the Great Resignation” to describe recent rises in job quits tied to the desire for better work, however that might be defined. We seem to be engaged in a nationwide period of navel gazing, with the final conclusions yet to be determined.
Where is this period of reflection and re-evaluation taking us? In some cases, it is accelerating trends that already existed. Remote work was already increasing before the pandemic, but with so many people working for so long in some form of remote work, it is likely that a higher share of remote work is here to stay. Recent surveys have indicated that workers are looking for the ability to work either fully or partly from home or a remote location. The combination of health risks for older people and a strong stock market likely accelerated the retirements of many older workers. Challenges in hiring workers, particularly in fields such as retail or leisure and hospitality, will likely accelerate the automation trends that were already beginning to take over for some hard-to-fill vacancies.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a recession that lasted from February to April of 2020. A mere two months. The shortest recession on record. But it was also the deepest recession on record. It shows up in our economic data as a rift, or a spike, depending on the measure. Long-term analysis will have to treat the pandemic period as an outlier; I anticipate many future research papers with an asterisk next to 2020–2021. During the first months of the pandemic, the word I heard most often was “unprecedented.” It became so overused that it started to lose meaning. We used that word so much because there were so many things we had no benchmark for, no prior experience with, nothing to look back on. I have to imagine this is one of the words that will be synonymous with the COVID-19 pandemic. But now, what we have been through is precedented and the analysis that has resulted provides us with a historical reference point when looking back at the pandemic period and the resilience, ingenuity, and change it has sparked.
[Background music]
What you just heard was a reading of Maine state economist Amanda Rector’s essay entitled “Unprecedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” You can find this essay in Maine Policy Review’s special issue on Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Volume 30, No. 2. Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, edited by Linda Silka, Joyce Rumery, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In the next episode we will host Amanda Rector for a more in-depth interview about her thoughts on COVID’s economic impact.
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller—thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.
 

S01E02 - Maine Policy Matters: Universal Basic Income, Covid-19, & ME

In this episode of Maine Policy Matters, Daniel Soucier sits down with Dr. Michael Howard to discuss the confluence of Universal Basic Income and the novel coronavirus pandemic.
[00:00:00] Daniel Soucier: Hello and welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the official podcast of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where we discuss the policy matters that are most important to Maine's people and why Maine policy matters at the local, state, and national levels. My name is Daniel Soucier and I'll be your host. 
[00:00:26] On June 19th, 2019 governor Janet Mills signed. LD 1324 into law. The bill created a committee to study the benefits and feasibility for social safety net reform in Maine. That could include a basic income program for the state. On the national political stage, entrepreneur, Andrew Yang made the Freedom Dividend a $1,000 per month stipend for every American adult.
[00:00:52] The major pillar of his 2020 Democrat primary campaign recently due to the intense economic distress felt across the world due to the Coronavirus pandemic countries have embraced experimenting with basic income to address workers and families battered by the virus. In the CARES Act, Congress appropriated direct cash payments of $1,200 from most adults and $500 for each child. In Spain, the government is moving forward to create a permanent basic income program to address the long-term economic stress brought on by Covid-19. We sat down with Dr. Michael Howard, a philosopher at the University of Maine, who is the co-editor of the Journal Basic Income Studies, and is also the national coordinator for the United States Basic Income Guarantee Network to find out what basic income is, what type of pilot programs exist in the United States and across the globe, and the confluence of basic income policies with the Coronavirus pandemic.
[00:02:02] Michael, thank you so much for joining us today to discuss UBI as a policy matter at the local, state, and national level, and why UBI matters for the state of Maine. 
[00:02:13] Michael Howard: Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. 
[00:02:15] Daniel Soucier: Michael, I've noticed in just about every media outlet over the past year, there has been discussions of universal basic income, which some folks refer to as UBI or basic income, and we'll refer to it in all those ways throughout this podcast.
[00:02:30] A lot of times these media reports tend to be vague and oftentimes they mischaracterize universal basic income. So can you explain for us the major tenants of UBI and does it have supporters on both sides of the political aisle? 
[00:02:46] Michael Howard: Yeah. The universal basic income as scholars refer to it is one kind of minimum income guarantee.
[00:02:54] It's distinctive features are that it is individual. It goes to each person and not to households. It is universal. Everyone gets it regardless of age, wealth, or income. And it is not means tested. It is also unconditional. It is not conditional on any behavioral requirements such as willingness to work or look for work or having been laid off or pursuing some particular course of study or approved volunteer work.
[00:03:24] And it is in the form of cash rather than an in-kind benefits such as food stamps. There are variants of a minimum income guarantee. And when you mentioned the confusion sometimes people use basic income to refer to some other forms of minimum income guarantee, such as a negative income tax, which is like a basic universal basic income, but it is phased out as income from other sources rises.
[00:03:51] So it goes to the people who need it, but not to people who were above a certain threshold. And the earned income tax credit is similar to a negative income tax, but it is in addition to being phased out at higher incomes, is conditional on working for wages and it phases in as one earns more income and then phases out as one's income continues to rise.
[00:04:15] So the earned income tax credit, while it is responsible for lifting a lot of people out of poverty, it still leaves a lot of people in poverty who are not eligible. Now universal basic income has supporters across the political spectrum. On the political left, you have groups like Black Lives Matter that have endorsed basic income. You have on the right libertarians like Charles Murray, who's written a book supporting a basic income. So in a certain sense, there's a broad support for the general idea, but when you get into the policy details, you find considerable difference between the kind of basic income people want on different parts of the political spectrum.
[00:04:54] Daniel Soucier: Wow. Thank you so much for clearing that up for us. So UBI seems to be this unique and innovative policy solution that in recent times have been circling around both national and state level, even in the state of Maine. And so we recently saw entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who made UBI a major part of his platform as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and here in Maine, governor Janet Mills signed LB 1324 into law just this past June in this established committee to study the benefits and feasibility for starting a universal basic income for the state of Maine. So are there currently UBI programs in place right now in the United States or maybe even globally, and if so, are those programs able to achieve their desired policy effects?
[00:05:48] Michael Howard: Yeah, let me start with the the LD 1324 here in Maine. It's a matter of full disclosure. I'm on that committee. And we've only had one meeting and partly because of the pandemic and partly because of the business that the legislature's engaged in, we've only met once and things are on hold right now.
[00:06:07] But the bill isn't actually necessarily looking at universal basic income at the state level. It's a bill to explore ways to enhance basic income security and that sort of broad sense of ensuring that everybody has basic necessities covered. But it might be done through an expansion of the earned income tax credit, making it refundable.
[00:06:31] There are lots of different things that the committee's looking at. And I suspect we might look at ways to move in the direction of basic income like policies, but it's really too early to tell where we're going with that committee at this stage. The only long-term government, universal basic income policy, I think anywhere in the world is Alaska's permanent fund dividend.
[00:06:56] And I co-edited two books on the permanent fund dividend. It's not a full universal basic income in the sense of being adequate for basic needs. But since the 1980s it has given every Alaskan, including children between a thousand and $2,000 annually. Based on the performance of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was capitalized from Alaska's Oil Wealth. The policy contributes to Alaska being a state with relatively low poverty and relatively low inequality, and it's extremely popular.
[00:07:29] It's almost the third rail of Alaska politics. It was introduced by a Republican governor. With support from Democrats and the legislatures as well as Republicans. So that's a policy that's very interesting to look at. And currently there's a minimum income pilot project underway in Stockton, California, where a sample of residents in Stockton are receiving $500 a month for an extended period of time. And there are some initial results that show it's quite promising. What people find is that this money is not wasted. People at the ground level know what their needs are. And about 40% of them are using it for food. It's a way that it highlights the amount of food insecurity, even with existing welfare policies in place, that when given some extra cash, people spend it on food, they spend it on healthier food.
[00:08:21] So that's an experiment to watch. And there's planning for a project underway in Oakland, California that's privately financed. There's talk about a pilot project in Chicago. Our neighbors to the north in Ontario launched a very serious basic income pilot project, and unfortunately it was brought to a halt by the incoming Ford government.
[00:08:42] That's not really gonna go further, but there's enough initial evidence from that to, to be worth exploring. And although not a government program, the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina have given regular cash payments to all tribal members over a fairly long period of time. And those the results of that have been studied and people have found that it's not so much a handout as it is a hand up.
[00:09:09] Recipients experience better mental health results better results in finishing school, finding their way into meaningful employment. And so the cash payments are really more of an investment in human capital. And that's one ex another experiment that people point to. So it's been around for a while and there's a fair amount of evidence of what people would actually do if they received a universal basic income.
[00:09:34] Daniel Soucier: So that's fascinating. So there's some sort of precedent out there. There are some examples to point to. And with this increased media attention, this increased political attention for ubi as a policy option as a means to reform the social safety net. So does UBI draw a larger, a longer history? Has this, is this a fairly new idea? Did it, start percolating up with the Alaska permanent fund and discussions around that? Or is there a longer history here for universal basic income discussions?
[00:10:07] Michael Howard: It actually goes back quite a ways. The American Revolutionary, Thomas Payne is one of the earliest proponents of a universal cash payment in the form of a lump sum to be paid at the age of maturity and an old age pension. And this was gonna be based in his proposal on a tax, on the rent from land. Payne's idea was that once the land is bought up by a minority of the population other people are excluded from what ought to be thought of as what nature provides to all of us in common, the land.
[00:10:43] And those who have appropriated the land owe a compensation to the people who've been excluded. And so his idea was you give a lump sum and maturity and an old age pension so that nobody is thrust into poverty from lack of access to the commons. In the 20th century, a guaranteed minimum income, it was in the form of a negative income tax, was proposed on the political right by economists, Milton Friedman.
[00:11:09] And it was supported on the left by Martin Luther King Jr. and many other people. George McGovern in his presidential campaign favored what he called a demo grant, which was a kind of a minimum income guarantee to all citizens. And after that presidential election, Richard Nixon proposed a family assistance plan, which would guarantee a minimum income for all. Now, that included some work requirements and it failed to pass the Congress, but it came out of that milu of discussion about guaranteed minimum income. And then the idea was faded into the background for quite a while but more recently late 20th century in the last couple of decades.
[00:11:51] Partly in response to persistent poverty in all the countries with advanced welfare states, partly in response to fears of job loss due to artificial intelligence and automation. And partly to regardless of how the automation will unfold the growing precarity of employment, more people in part-time and temporary jobs without benefits.
[00:12:17] There's been interest in some kind of floor to be put under all earned income, and we could add to that concerns about the ecological limits to growth. The way that capitalist economies have dealt with poverty and low wages is to try to increase the pie. So capitalists still keep their profits and workers get a trickle down from the growing economy, but, if we face ecological limits to growth, then we have to find new solutions to a growing population, more people coming to the labor market, but perhaps fewer full-time well-paid jobs there for them.
[00:12:55] As evidence of the sort of growing interest, we see pilot projects popping up all over the world from India, which had a major pilot project. Namibia in Southern Africa, Finland, about a year ago, had a pilot project Ontario, I mentioned in Stockton, Oakland and California. Mississippi has a pilot project underway, and there's been considerable interest in UBI across European countries Germany, Italy, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland have had either discussion about pilot projects or referenda showing a widespread public interest. So it's really on the agenda. And of course, Andrew Yang's campaign in the United States has put it on the political agenda here in a way that it hasn't been for a very long time. 
[00:13:44] Daniel Soucier: As an American Revolution specialist, I find it absolutely fascinating that ideas circling around basic income can be traced back to the founding of the country. So it seems like there's this bipartisan support for UBI today and his historically over time as well. And there are some, pilot projects in place for UBI policies at local, state, and national levels throughout the United States and in the world.
[00:14:13] So what are the objections then, to look at the other side of the coin? What are the objections to universal basic income from either, political, economic, or maybe philosophical stem. 
[00:14:26] Michael Howard: Yeah. I think the two major objections one is economic and the other is moral. The economic objection you often hear is that it would cost too much.
[00:14:36] For example, if you take the US population of roughly 330 million and multiply that by say $12,000, which is a ballpark figure that some people would propose for a basic income. You got a figure of nearly 4 trillion dollars and that just people's throw up their hands and say, who could afford that?
[00:14:58] Now $12,000 is not enough for an individual to live on, but you can imagine a family of four with $48,000 they might be able to meet a lot of their basic needs with that. If children got only half of what adults receive, which is quite commonly the proposal, you get a amount for parents, maybe half that for children, the family of four would receive 36,000, but the gross cost would be quite a bit less than 4 trillion.
[00:15:28] Andrew Yang's proposal didn't have anything for children, so it would be significantly less, but you're still talking about a pretty large gross cost somewhere in the trillions. One response to this gross cost worry is to point out that in a well-designed basic income scheme, the money going to those above a certain threshold would be routinely clawed back in taxes.
[00:15:55] So the net cost to the taxpayers would be closer to maybe a sixth of the gross cost that would be from my, 4 trillion figure, it'd be a little over half a trillion. Now that's still a lot of money, but it's not the apparent budget, busting amount of the gross cost. And if people find the gross cost nevertheless to be an insurmountable problem, a negative income tax would achieve the minimum income guarantee for what amounts to the net cost of a universal basic income.
[00:16:27] And actually in practice even the net cost would be substantially less because some of the other cash transfers of the current welfare state would become redundant. It's not clear why you would need an earned income tax credit or a food stamp program if everybody had a universal basic income. I think the cost argument is really much overstated most of the time.
[00:16:51] But that is when you just look at the, it's you look at university tuition, at the prestigious private colleges and you say, oh my God, $60,000 a year. I can't afford that. You look at the fine print and there are always scholarships, there are loans, and it becomes manageable for quite a few people to still go to a one of those schools.
[00:17:12] Now, the moral objection actually may be the more difficult one to overcome, and this is the objection that people have to giving quote people something for nothing. Why should able-bodied people who are able to work be given cash that's not conditional on their doing any work. Now the main response to this point is to call attention to the rather narrow conception of work that we tend to take for granted. Many people make contributions to society all the time but they're not paid. The most important example of this is people staying at home and raising their children. Most often these are women and they are often economically dependent on their husbands if they have a husband.
[00:18:03] If they don't, they're often in extreme poverty. And moreover, those who are in families with husbands, they are often trapped in situations of domestic violence. So basic income would first of all recognize that they're doing important work and it would give them an option to leave if they're in a situation that is really not tolerable.
[00:18:26] So that's one kind of feminist argument for a basic income that there's work going on, it's not paid. It may in fact be exploited, and this is a way to address that exploitation. There are other kinds of work that people do that is unpaid and not recognized. That has to do with artistic creativity, volunteerism, and community.
[00:18:46] This would be a way to encourage, recognize that and enable people to do it who otherwise would not be able to do it. A further response is to argue that with support from some of the past pilot projects there will not be a catastrophic number of people dropping out of paid employment. On the contrary, a universal basic income can enable people to enter the labor market, facilitating transportation, tools, training, and flexibility in choosing between full and part-time work while attending to childcare and dealing with other necessities of why. 
[00:19:27] Daniel Soucier: So I find these pilot projects and how people are spending the money to be absolutely fascinating and shows the different ways that UBI could be implemented and have people utilize that income for a variety of reasons. Now with recent news, we would be remiss not to discuss the convergence of UBI policy with the novel Coronavirus Pandemic.
[00:19:49] Governors throughout the country, including Maine, have issued widespread stay-at-home orders due to Covid-19, and there's been vast economic disruptions in the United States and across the globe. So Congress has recently passed the CARES Act, which is a 2.2 trillion economic relief package that includes $1,200 payments for many Americans, as well as $500 for each child and prior to its passage, we saw proposals for unconditional cast payments to address the crisis, not only from more progressive liberals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but also from conservatives like Mitt Romney. Now as Congress is coming to consensus on a fourth phase of Covid- 19 economic relief that includes more direct payments, it makes me wonder what the role of UBI has what ability UBI has to play in times of national emergencies, such as the novel Coronavirus Pandemic to provide citizens with some sort of economic stability.
[00:20:52] Michael Howard: Yeah, I think it has an important role to play. Of course we don't understand enough about the virus to know when the stay-at-home orders can be safely lifted. It'll be interesting to see what happens in China as restrictions, which have been much tighter than in the United States, are slowly lifted.
[00:21:10] After having reached zero new cases, at least if you accept the government reports there, will the virus come roaring back requiring a retightening of restrictions? In the United States, we're nowhere near the peak of infections and even further from zero new cases. So I think this could go on for months.
[00:21:31] A one-time payment of $1,200 is clearly not gonna be enough to relieve the economic distress and unemployment compensation, which is another part of that package. Even if it's liberalized to include some self-employed people as the law included, it still leaves out many people who are not employed when the crisis began and they're now, they can't get jobs 'cause there are no jobs to be had.
[00:21:57] So not only will people be suffering with no income, the economy will be further weakened from lack of demand. The most straightforward method to restore confidence, stimulate demand, and reach all the people who are needing help, and to do this with a minimum of bureaucratic delay is to send checks to everyone on a regular basis until the lockdown can be safely lifted.
[00:22:26] The House Fi nancial Affairs committee proposed $2,000 to adults and a thousand dollars to children for the duration of the crisis. That's, I think, something in that ballpark is what we need. Now, of course rich people don't need it. People will say, why do you give it to everybody? But I think we can address that problem rather easily by just taxing that money back from those who are still earning substantial incomes by the end of the year.
[00:22:53] That seems to me to be the solution to the, giving it to people who don't need it, just as in, in a well designed basic income scheme, that scheme that's permanent. You build that into the integration of the tax code together with the income payments. 
[00:23:07] Daniel Soucier: Interesting. So as you noted before, one of the common objections to universal basic income is the claim that it would disincentivize working for wages and cause people to become comfortable staying at home.
[00:23:21] However, it seems like in the times of a pandemic that UBI could be a valuable tool in policymakers tool chest for combating the spread of disease. What role do you think UBI can play as a public health policy to help flatten the curve? 
[00:23:36] Michael Howard: Yeah, exactly. The usual objections to basic income simply aren't relevant in this situation.
[00:23:43] We want to incentivize people to stay home and not to seek employment, or to put it more accurately, most people don't need an incentive to stay home. The jobs have vanished as non-essential businesses have been closed. The problem is to enable people to survive during the lockdown without spreading the infection.
[00:24:04] I can add that the other objection, the cost objection is much less relevant in the current context. We've seen in space of a week, the Congress appropriated over $2 trillion without a thought as to where the money would come from. Apparently it's just gonna be deficit spending. Now, in normal times, the worry would be that such spending would be inflationary, but our situation now is the threat of deflation.
[00:24:32] Plunging ever deeper into a recession, we may very shortly be facing higher unemployment rates than during the Great Depression. So this is not a time to worry about inflation. It is a time to worry about keeping people economically secure in their homes and in their small businesses so that there is an economy left to rebuild when the virus has passed.
[00:25:01] Daniel Soucier: So you've discussed earlier that there are several programs at local, state, and national levels throughout the world for direct basic income payments. Now, at least on a temporary basis, right? The United States of America is experimenting with UBI as a public health and economic policy to combat novel Coronavirus and provide economic relief to millions of Americans once the pandemic subsides. What do you expect that America's gonna learn from this experiment with temporary UBI? 
[00:25:33] Michael Howard: Yeah. First, one big caveat. As with other, universal basic income experiments. We won't know whether the way people behave with a guaranteed income that is temporary is the way that they would behave if the income were permanent.
[00:25:50] And all the proposals for this are for a temporary emergency, basic income. So that's an unknown. That said the experiment would be unique in that it would include the entire country. All of these previous experiments have been either a sample population or maybe, rare cases, a whole town as in Dauphin, Manitoba.
[00:26:14] A limitation of these earlier minimum income experiments, in addition to there being temporary, was that they were limited to particular cities. So the systemic effects on the labor market of everyone receiving the guarantee are not observable. But if the entire country gets a universal basic income, then we'll have a chance to see for some period of time what some of those systemic effects might be.
[00:26:37] For example, we might find that employers will need to make some jobs more attractive in order to get people to take them on. Right now, people, if they have no choice but to take the job that's on offer or they have no income at all. That's a choice that significant numbers of people won't have if everybody's getting a basic income.
[00:27:00] And it gives a little more bargaining power to the worker in relationship to the employer for the conditions of work. And we might be able to see some more of that effect if a universal income is spread throughout the whole economy. 
[00:27:15] Daniel Soucier: That's quite thought provoking. Unknowing, the, we don't really know how this is gonna play out and but we will see what some of the systematic effects are as this unfolds.
[00:27:27] As many Americans have never really recovered from the economic stress brought on by the 2008 Great Recession have experienced a rather precarious work life over the past decade or more. So do you think that the millions of individuals that are now suddenly experiencing temporary job loss may increase their empathy with individuals who are struggling on a more regular basis with economic security? And could this perhaps lead into some policy changes at either the local, state, or national level? 
[00:27:59] Michael Howard: I would hope that would be the effect. The phrase I hear a lot during this pandemic is, we're all in this together. I think it's not quite true. Some people have no choice but to report for essential work.
[00:28:11] And some of them, like the frontline healthcare workers people in food production and transport they don't have any choice but to show up and they're doing so often that considerable risk to themselves and their families. On the other hand, you have some people who are privileged enough that they can retreat to their country homes and just ride it out.
[00:28:31] So the risk is very unequally distributed. Nevertheless, the threat of illness is real for all of us, and most of us are being affected in our family lives, our economic security, or our work. Many of us who are still working or working at home that could bring us together and break down some of the usual divisions that separate us between the employed and the unemployed.
[00:28:59] Or between those who work at home and those who work outside the home. And I'm thinking work here again, in a broader sense of just paid employment. People who do homework, who take care of their children. If everybody's at home, we're all doing a little more of that kind of work. And I think it may increase sympathy and understanding both within families and across some of the usual divisions in society. Also having to live for some period of time on a fraction of one's normal income, which many people will have to do, may educate many people about what it is like to survive on a low income. And this could lead to more generous and less restrictive policies down the road. But a lot of this depends on the politics, both during and after the pandemic.
[00:29:45] And I don't think it's clear what that response will be. In Hungary, Victor Orban has used the pandemic as an excuse to start ruling by decree. Basically, it's declared a dictatorship, so you have, on the one hand, the politics of fear and authoritarianism, but I would hope in this country that instead we would take the path of politics, of hope and solidarity instead.
[00:30:10] Daniel Soucier: So it seems like UBI might be able to be used by policy makers to help minimize some of the effects happening by novel coronavirus. However, I've noticed on the news that many policymakers are skeptical that these direct cash payments are a good idea during the Coronavirus pandemic because there, there's a fear that once these policies are in place, even if they're temporary, that they're gonna be hard to roll back.
[00:30:39] But as you've noted that, we're not sure how long the pandemic's going to last for. Some experts have suggested it could be as long as 12 to 18 months from now. And if that's the case, there certainly will be some intense economic distress for an unknown period of time. So even once the virus is battled back a bit, there's still gonna be some economic ripples to come out of this and this is most noted by the fact that in the first two weeks of these stay at home orders, there's been nearly 10 million new unemployment plans, which is a truly unprecedented figure. So what do you think the role of UBI could be in restarting the American economy after the pandemic subsides?
[00:31:21] Michael Howard: Yeah. I think it, it actually won't be hard to repeal 'cause you can simply stipulate in the law that the payments will end when the crisis is passed. But people may find that there is, and I think people may find there's much less labor market withdrawal and the critics fear. Doctors are reporting to work even when they're facing life-threatening conditions because they're committed to work, they have a dedication. And in normal times, most people want incomes above $12,000 per year. So they will seek employment above the basic income as soon as it's available. As the crisis ends, we may find that it would be desirable to continue the basic income, or we may find that we taper it down to a lower level so we still have an income floor, but not what we need when we have mass unemployment. Or we may decide to phase it out altogether, but as you suggest it, it may be necessary after the pandemic is over to maintain income support until businesses can get back into full operation and people can deal with accumulated debts.
[00:32:32] The future is so clouded that we really can't know exactly what we're dealing with. But one thing we can see right away is that to rely on the existing structures of the welfare state, in particular the unemployment compensation system it's not prepared to handle a crisis like this.
[00:32:51] The bureaucracy is too small to handle this deluge of applications. And more importantly, there are just lots of people who don't meet the bureaucratic requirements to receive unemployment payments. Many people are just gonna fall between the cracks. So we need something else that's more efficient, more tailored to the across the board needs that everybody's experiencing and I think we're likely to see something like a part, a temporary universal basic income, regular cash payments to everyone on the agenda for the fourth phase of the response to this crisis. 
[00:33:32] Daniel Soucier: That's very interesting. So before we, before our time together is over it's not every day that we get to sit down with a trained philosopher to discuss what might come out of the coronavirus pandemic if it does indeed extend longer than a month or two. Clearly there's gonna be some need for innovative policy responses that's gonna allow at least a portion of people to return return back to the typical traditional workplace from either working at home or being dislocated from work if the United States is gonna keep the economic engine from failing. But what do you see as the long term, maybe social, political, or lifestyle changes that might come out of the Covid-19 crisis? 
[00:34:18] Michael Howard: Yeah. As you say some essential work will need to be done throughout the shutdown. People need to eat and be housed. There are the other usual health emergencies that will continue to arise. Essential infrastructure will need to be repaired. That includes the communications infrastructure that we're increasingly relying on. And our economy is so integrated into the world market that there's not going to be any rapid decoupling of the United States from the world market, and they're going to need to be manufacturing and transport across national lines.
[00:34:55] It's really the whole world is in this thing together. But, in the context of the pandemic ,I think interestingly, the role of a basic income may be the opposite of what is usually thought of. Basic income advocates often argue that job losses due to artificial intelligence and automation combined with lower levels of consumption if we are not to overshoot the planet's ecological limits, that these two things point toward people working less, sharing the remaining work more, and spending less time, less spending, less money on consumer goods and enjoying more leisure and quality time in their communities. A basic income as normally conceived can facilitate all of these by partially decoupling income from paid employment.
[00:35:49] If part of your income is from a basic income, and part is from wages, then you can share a job more easily than if all of your income has to come from that job. However, during the pandemic, we don't want to maximize the participation of everyone in the paid labor market. That would only increase exposure to the virus. Rather, we want to maximize non-participation and keep the number employed doing the essential tasks to the minimum. Interestingly, an emergency universal basic income in combination with the right other policies can do that. But for those kept from employment, the basic income needs to be regular and it needs to be large enough to enable people to survive.
[00:36:36] That's why I think if this, if the lockdown continues for a more extended period of time, you really have to look at unconditional cash payments going out. Beyond just the onetime payment that people are supposed to be receiving. 
[00:36:51] Daniel Soucier: Michael, thank you so much for virtually sitting down with us today to discuss Maine policy matters and why UBI matters to the state of Maine.
[00:37:01] Michael Howard: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:37:06] Daniel Soucier: Thank you for joining us. We would like to thank our sponsor, Maine Policy Review for bringing Maine Policy Matters podcast to you. You can find this in all of our episodes where podcasts are hosted, including SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play. Remember to follow the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center on social media and drop us a direct message to express your support, provide feedback, or let us know what main policy matters to you.
[00:37:37] This is Daniel Soucier, and I'll see you next time on Maine Policy Matters. The information provided in this podcast by. The University of Maine System, acting through the University of Maine is for general educational and informational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and speakers, and do not represent the official policy or position of the university.