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.

S01E01 - Maine Policy Matters: The Impact of Maine Policy Review

The focus of Maine Policy Matters is the exploration of policy matters at the local, regional, and national levels as well as to highlight how policy decisions in Maine matter at the local, regional, and national levels. The double play on the title reinforces the mission, vision, and values of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center to inform public policy processes and promote civil discourse, integrity, and societal decision-making to solve the critical issues facing Maine and the nation. The podcast facilitates open and inclusive communication to advance relationships between policymakers, community leaders, students, faculty, and staff in the University of Maine System. In the first episode of the podcast, Dr. Linda Silka, the executive editor of Maine Policy Review and Senior Fellow at the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions discusses the emerging and innovative policy research featured in the journal. She emphasizes MPR’s essential role in policymaking and policy education in Maine and discusses the scope and impact of the publication which has been downloaded over 260,000 times in over 203 different countries. This highlights that Maine policy matters to individuals across the globe.
[00:00:00] Daniel Soucier: Hello and welcome 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, regional, and national levels. My name is Daniel Soucier, and I'll be your host.
[00:00:26] There are so many interesting and innovative things going on in Maine politics and Maine policy today that deciding on a topic for our initial podcast was no small feat. Instead of choosing one in our first episode, we sat down with Executive Editor of Maine Policy Review, Dr. Linda Silka, to discover the emerging policy issues that researchers, students, and policymakers are writing about in the Journal. Since its inception in 1991, Maine Policy Review has published nearly 800 articles and has well over two thousands subscribers. Since augmenting its print edition with a Digital Commons website, Maine Policy Review's articles have been downloaded over 260,000 times from over 9,100 institutions from over 203 different countries. This excellent resource highlights the variety of Maine policy matters being researched and debated in the state, but also shows that Maine policy matters to individuals across the globe.
Transcript
[00:01:35] Hi Linda, and thanks for joining us today. Thanks for asking me. Linda, can you tell us the topical focus of Maine Policy Review? What's contained in the journal the pages of the journal, and what's the overall mission for Maine Policy Review? 
[00:01:50] Linda Silka: One of the things that is just so interesting about Maine Policy Review is what the title says, what the name of we are really focused on Maine and we're really focused on policy, and we're very much focused on, not the most immediate thing, but very much on review, on really thinking about what's gone on in the past, what's going to go on in the future, what's going on now, and how we can think about all of these things.
[00:02:19] Daniel Soucier: So would you say, so it's sounds like Maine Policy Review is not your, say, your typical academic journal with these like theorists and specialists that are speaking to audiences of like their specialist peers. But Maine Policy Review is something that's a bit broader. So could you describe for us the writing style and maybe the accessibility of Maine Policy Review? Who's really writing these articles for publication and what do you think their intended takeaways or their intended audience is? 
[00:02:48] Linda Silka: Yeah. Really a good question. In a lot of states there's a big gap. There are great things being written by academics and there are great things being written by newspapers, but there isn't anything like a journal that, that takes a longer view that brings in different kinds of writers and really speaks to a kind of style of writing that doesn't assume that you have a whole bunch of academic knowledge. It doesn't dumb down anything. It just doesn't hide things behind the kind of academic knowledge we often use and our writers vary greatly. We have academics we have policy makers, we have business leaders, and we try very hard to help people write in a way that's going to help them reach a broad audience. That's really important. We want high school students to be pick able to pick up Maine Policy Review and say, oh, this relates to a class I'm in. We wanna have people living in senior facilities be able to do that.
[00:03:55] We want people in the Augusta State House. We want people that are working for councils of government. We want people to pick it up and say, I need to tell my other colleagues about this because it's really covering some important things. 
[00:04:09] Daniel Soucier: That's fascinating. So it sounds like it combines the best of both worlds as part, living in the realm of academia, but still it is accessible to a broad broad audience. So it sounds like Maine Policy Review is this really content rich journal and is able to speak to a variety of different individuals. Both that are, in the realm of policy making as well as individuals just interested in understanding policy. So have you found that there's any specific themes or topics that's gotten more coverage over time in Maine Policy Review? Does Maine itself have any recurring issues that keep popping up in the journal over time? 
[00:04:47] Linda Silka: One of the things that's a recurring issue and probably won't be a surprise to a lot of people, is. How do we keep our children in the state once they leave school, how do we make sure we have the jobs and the opportunities that people will stay?
[00:05:05] How do we make sure that people want to come to Maine who have the skills that we need? And that's a, that's an interesting struggle that if you look back we're in our bicentennial year. That's been a long-term struggle for Maine, is how to make sure that people can find what they need in the state.
[00:05:25] And there are a lot of policy issues there. They're about what kinds of jobs are available, how do we train people? They're about education. They're about the infrastructure that exists. We are. We are so far apart compared to other states in New England. Our distances are so great. We have opportunities to think about that in terms of the policy kinds of issues and having people come and have people stay, but they're recurring kinds of issues.
[00:05:53] And we are a state that is, on the one hand, we've long term been focused on things like marine issues and forestry and farming. Those are still very important, but how do we blend and think about those with other things that are going on in the times now. And so it, those are common kinds of issues that keep recurring and we really go at 'em, we really think about 'em.
[00:06:20] We don't say we haven't solved it, so we're never gonna be able to solve it. I, there's a real interesting can-do kind of approach. 
[00:06:27] Daniel Soucier: So these, so I guess I'll look at it from the other side of the coin for a second. So do you think the fact that these policy issues keep recurring, so things like articles about jobs, articles about training, about education, about, eliminating the drain of young people from the state or maybe even attracting others to the state.
[00:06:48] If you, so you see these as recurring issues over time in Maine Policy Review. Do you think the state is does it mean we're having trouble solving these problems as a state? Or what do you make of that?
[00:07:01] Linda Silka: Another interesting question. What I make of it is that they really are difficult problems and we need to step up and try things.
[00:07:10] Not assuming that they're necessarily gonna work, but they're are. What we do is, is really based on the best evidence in terms of what's gonna go on. But they're really difficult kinds of issues and we gotta keep trying. One of the, they're now books being written by policy makers and academics that are about wicked problems and that should really resonate with Maine.
[00:07:34] And they use that term for these problems that don't have a single solution. They might be things that combine what we need to do about education. So increasing the number of students that go to college, what we need to do about the decline in certain industries, what we need to do about the issues that are going on in terms of an aging population.
[00:07:57] And they're, when I tell students, I say, okay, we're gonna talk about wicked problems. And I hold up, some of the books that have been written about it, they laugh. They just say, oh yes. 'Cause it really resonates in terms of the use of Wicked in, in, in Maine. 
[00:08:14] Daniel Soucier: Absolutely. So you've, I guess you see Maine Policy Review looking at these wicked problems as a real asset that they keep recurring in the journal.
[00:08:24] Linda Silka: Yes. Yeah. 
[00:08:25] Daniel Soucier: Great. So in every issue of Maine Policy Review, I see that you write a column entitled Reflections. And one theme I've seen running through these columns in Maine Policy Review is how Maine is at the forefront regionally and nationally and policy related matters. Can you expand on this and maybe speculate a little bit on Maine Policy R eview's role in propelling Maine to its position as this policy innovator?
[00:08:52] Linda Silka: Yeah. Last week I was down in Maryland at a meeting that was bringing together people from a lot of different states who were thinking about policy kinds of issues. And I took some copies of Maine Policy Review and we talked about some things that were there and that. In two weeks, I'm going to Arizona to give talks about some of these kinds of things at University of Northern Arizona.
[00:09:15] And they're interested in part in trying to figure out why is it that there are these interesting things going on in Maine. And there are a couple things that are. To me or fascinating about Maine, that may be why some policy kinds of things get started here and get going here. One is that people know each other.
[00:09:37] The degrees of acquaintance are people are pretty linked. It's so information gets passed around fairly quickly. The second is, and I'm not gonna name any states, but states that I've lived in. There's a lot of status oriented things that are not a part of the Maine kind of way of doing things.
[00:09:58] And I saw that status oriented approach really getting in the way of coming up with solutions. It was more about the person and less about the problem solving. And I think a third interesting thing is we have a whole set of the issues come together. So we have a coastline, a lot of interesting opportunities and problems.
[00:10:26] We have forestry, we have just all these things that come together and so we have to keep thinking about policy across our different kind of positions and points. 
[00:10:37] Daniel Soucier: That's very interesting. So it's in some ways Maine Policy Review then is really reflective of Maine culture and of Maine society.
[00:10:46] Now one of my favorite parts of the journal, Linda, are these thought-provoking covers that are designed by Maine artist, Robert Shetterly. Now, we know that there's been a bit of controversy at times regarding the cover art for Maine Policy Review. Can you tell us a little bit about that controversy and what are the assets and liabilities for Maine Policy Review that come along with having such evocative cover based on original artwork? 
[00:11:12] Linda Silka: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes people are concerned when they see the artwork. They've, they draw conclusions about the artwork that are different than the artists expected. And I think it's the Maine way that they let us know.
[00:11:28] They don't just go and talk to their neighbors and say, but they let us know and then we actually try to be responsive, have a little piece, in the so the next issue about it. But one of the things that's interesting about the covers is I was over at one of the offices the, in the university, one of the big offices and we were talking a little bit about Maine Policy Review and they said, we are so jealous, we just love those covers. And when I go to visit different legislators, the first thing you'll see oftentimes on their table that in their waiting room is the Maine Policy Review. And when I was down in Washington for a meeting with our congressional representatives going to their offices, They had them on their tables, the Maine Policy Review, that was very exciting.
[00:12:18] Daniel Soucier: Interesting. So the having the same artist over time definitely gives Maine Policy Review a distinct look to it and it's brands it in a way. Now my favorite personal cover is, the sheep that's sitting in front of the recliner watching television and smoking a cigarette. This looking at a quintessential what's wrong with American lifestyle, piece of artwork.
[00:12:42] Which MPR cover is your favorite and why? 
[00:12:46] Linda Silka: I have two favorites. One is the one for the library issue and where it shows a drawing of a cell phone, capturing that now we listen as opposed to ne necessarily reading. But it also shows the steps going up to it that look just like a library.
[00:13:07] So it captures that whole issue was about do we do we still need libraries? And the head of the UMaine Library and I wrote a piece for it that was called something like our library's necessary or are libraries obsolete. And it has been downloaded more than anything else I've ever written and I hear from people, and you look at the map that comes up on our website about what's being downloaded and where, all over the world people are thinking about that issue apparently. 
[00:13:42] Daniel Soucier: That makes me really think about the scope and impact of Maine Policy Review and sort of the shift that covers really exemplary of the shift of Maine Policy Review in some ways from just being a print medium to having some sort of digital space.
[00:13:58] Now, the content of the journal from the articles and columns like yours that you write, To the cover art really make the journal a compelling read and a really recognizable feature, like you said, in legislative offices, in businesses, places like this. And so Maine Policy Review in its history is published nearly 800 articles over three decades, and there are over 2000 subscriptions to the print copy of the journal.
[00:14:27] So who are the individuals or institutions on MPR's mailing list that's that's receiving the journal. 
[00:14:33] Linda Silka: Yeah. Every library in the state gets it, and you'll often see it displayed all the legislators get it. And then there also are a lot of individuals and organizations that, that get it.
[00:14:48] My hope is that high school students. Will you sit in their classroom? Since they can download articles and they can see things that we find more and more ways to really reach people across the age range because policy issues affect us all and the writing is really intended to be accessible to everybody.
[00:15:09] And we do have I mean there was a wonderful article in the Citizen Science issue that was a teacher who interviewed one of his students who was doing really interesting citizen science. I'd love to have every student in the state know about that, download it and read that article.
[00:15:30] Daniel Soucier: That's fascinating. Now I do know that the journal does have some relationship with high schools through the Margaret Chase Smith Library's essay contest, and that you do publish yes. At times articles from high school students. Could you talk a little bit about that? 
[00:15:45] Linda Silka: Yeah. It's just, it's such an important kind of initiative to have, to assist students in seeing that they have something to offer, that they have something to say and to learn how to frame what it is they have to say and that it isn't just something that they shared with their family or shared with their teachers, but that it gets a broad audience by being in each year in one of our issues.
[00:16:10] And it's just really interesting to read those and. See what the students have to say and to get a sense of kind of, of what's going on. And another one of my dreams would be to have everyone who comes to Maine to teach in colleges in their orientations, that they would read those essays written by high school students in Maine to give a sense, get a sense of the culture and the talent that's there. 
[00:16:37] Daniel Soucier: That's very interesting. A lot of people say that youth, is the call provides the call to action for policymakers. So it's great that you fold high school students into the journal.
[00:16:47] Now, what's really impressive to me regarding the readership of Maine Policy Review is it's not only, its vast impact throughout the state of Maine, right? You said it's in every library and in all these institutions, but it also has this worldwide readership. So I was thinking about this just this morning. And I looked online at the readership of the journal through University of Maine's Digital Commons website, and there was over 260,000 downloads of Maine Policy Review articles from almost 9,100 institutions in over an astounding 203 countries. So who's the typical audience accessing the journal online? In what ways do you think they're using Maine Policy Reviews content? 
[00:17:32] Linda Silka: It's when you have time in the morning and your bored go on the website and just, you can just sit there and watch the downloads and it tells you which article. Who's downloading it, and there's a wonderful map. So you can see that people in India are downloading, or the it's just really interesting to see. And you can see that there's every kind of institution, represented. There are governments in different countries. There are schools, there are colleges, there are businesses. It's just very interesting. And I, to go back to the example earlier of the library issue, it's, and how often it gets downloaded.
[00:18:21] It's getting downloaded in all these different countries. You see it all, all over in Africa, in Eastern Europe. It, and so trying to think about what does that mean and how do we pay attention to that is just, it's just very interesting 'cause on the one hand, our primary audience is having this work for Maine, but knowing that it's really getting downloaded at a lot of, in a lot of other locations is very exciting. 
[00:18:51] Daniel Soucier: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And it shows to how things have changed over time for Maine Policy Review. That, it's gone from this The sort of in-print only journal to having this broad worldwide appeal through the University of Maine's Digital Commons website.
[00:19:06] So clearly having some sort of online presence really is a benefit to the journal. So you're utilizing UMaine's Digital Commons website to increase the readership. In whay other ways is Maine Policy Review moving itself into the digital age where, print media seems to always need some sort of supplementation online, right? Because we have this 24 hour news cycle now, and individuals have this insatiable need that once they start learning about or researching various topics, it's just this need for instant gratification to learn everything you can about that topic. So in what ways is Maine Policy Review interacting with that?
[00:19:45] Linda Silka: What I think is really interesting is we're saying we're not going to simplify things in the sense that we're not gonna keep this kind of deep knowledge going on, but what we're gonna do is bring eyes to it and we're gonna use whether it is things like Twitter or other kinds of really skills that, different strategies that we're learning about and we have a lot to learn.
[00:20:06] But bringing the eyes to the issues, to the questions, to the opportunities, and using all of those different opportunities to increase people's thinking about policy in Maine, because what's true of a democracy, it's that we, ideally, we make decisions based on what everyone, thinks. Maine is leading in some of the ranked choice kinds of things that we're really thinking about those things.
[00:20:39] So how do we make sure that we're using new technologies to bring people to the complicated issues. 
[00:20:46] Daniel Soucier: Yeah. So I did notice that you are you, like you said, you're on Twitter. There's this increased presence on social media, a Instagram account, a Facebook account, and it's very true that a lot of the content in Maine Policy Review can't be simplified down, can't be boiled down to the 144 characters or whatever. So it's interesting that you're using a platform like Twitter to steer people in the right direction by looking what people are talking about online and then saying, Hey, if you're interested in tourism, check out these articles.
[00:21:18] Linda Silka: Yeah. Yeah. 
[00:21:20] Daniel Soucier: Fantastic.
[00:21:21] Linda Silka: Yeah. And it is just amazing on, really on all my travels. One of the first things I ask people when I'm giving talks different places, I say, have you been to Maine? And I get one of two different responses. One is, oh yes, and then long stories about being there. And the second is no, but I want to go to Maine. 
[00:21:45] Now, growing up in Iowa, we didn't hear people saying things like that. And so how do we, people are very interested. They are interested in how we're solving problems. They're interested in coming and spending time here. How do we make sure that they know about the interesting kinds of ways we're thinking about how to solve problems.
[00:22:07] Daniel Soucier: So it sounds like you've been traveling a lot for work and you tell people about About Maine Policy review. People will have this interest in Maine. Maine has this very strong sense of place with visitors, with local people. Now, when you travel, do you take Maine policy with you? 
[00:22:23] Linda Silka: Yes.
[00:22:23] Daniel Soucier: And what do people when you're traveling for conferences, to give talks, to have meetings? What are people's reactions? Those people from away when you introduce them to Maine Policy Review? 
[00:22:33] Linda Silka: Two or three things people say. One is, We don't have anything like this. How did this get started? How do you do all of this? That's one thing people say. The second is are pieces downloadable. And the third thing that people often say is, I'm interested in _ policy issue. Have you had anything on that? And then I say yeah, and if we happen to be near a computer, I show 'em how you can go online and check those things out.
[00:23:04] Or if we're not, I show them. A copy or two that I'm carrying and I say let's see what's in this issue and things. So those are the kinds of questions that I get. But the first thing that, or the comments, but the first thing is usually, oh, we don't have anything like this. 
[00:23:19] Daniel Soucier: That's interesting. So in some ways, Maine Policy Review is at the forefront of this exchange between academia, policy makers and having this real mix, this real asset of being able to talk amongst audiences, talk across different education levels like you said, getting high schoolers, college students involved all the way up through academics, policy makers, business leaders that's fantastic.
[00:23:44] And maybe
[00:23:45] Maybe if you look at that map of downloads as you're traveling around the country, maybe the downloads spike in areas where where you have been.
[00:23:52] Linda Silka: That would be fun. 
[00:23:54] Daniel Soucier: So that's interesting because in some ways, it seems throughout our conversation here you're talking about how Maine Policy review exemplifies the uniqueness of Maine society and the uniqueness of culture in the state of Maine. Do you have any further thoughts on that or/
[00:24:09] Linda Silka: Here's an example of how I think that it does illustrate that, and that is one of the, we always have a Margaret Chase Smith essay written by somebody who's noted, about issues that are going on. One of them in the last few years was by Ted Ames. A fisherman. But he's also somebody who won the MacArthur Genius Award, and he's really thinking about how do we maintain our fisheries in a warming ocean? And having him be the person who wrote that, I think really illustrates something about Maine. Here's somebody who is deeply committed to fishing, but also deeply committed to policy and is internationally recognized for his innovative work in that area.
[00:24:57] Daniel Soucier: That's interesting. So Maine Policy Review in some ways is made by local people for local policy concerns, obviously with these broader ramifications, but it also creates some sort of local buy-in to these policy policy issues as well. That's, that's all incredibly fascinating. So I guess before we're out of time together, it'd be great for you to share with us like what's on the horizon for Maine Policy Review. Give listeners an idea of what where Maine Policy review is going in the future. Now I know Maine Policy Review has had a variety of special issues in the past, right? So topics like leadership, food, aging, climate change, and of course my favorite as a historian, the intersections between humanities and policy.
[00:25:43] So does Maine Policy Review have anything planned to commemorate Maine's bicentennial? 
[00:25:48] Linda Silka: Yes. We're so excited about, we're doing an issue that's focused on the bicentennial and it really, the bicentennial in so many ways illustrates the kind of thing that we're trying to do with Maine Policy Review.
[00:26:02] Looking into the past, looking at the present, thinking about the future. And there's just so much that's terrific that is going on right now. Little snippets and papers. Just all kinds of wonderful things. Colin Woodard who's on our, our Maine Policy Review board has been doing amazing lead articles in the Portland paper about the bicentennial and the kind of history.
[00:26:28] So we're, we have great people who have come forward to write articles. We're really trying to capture all kinds of different perspectives, the past, the future, where we're going as a state and very excited about it as this issue will represent, I think what we do which is not focusing just on the present.
[00:26:52] But looking at the past, looking at the present and looking at the future. 
[00:26:55] Daniel Soucier: That's interesting because it circles back to what we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, which is the assets of Maine Policy Review, having these issues occur over and over again in the in the journals.
[00:27:08] So it sounds like the bicentennial issue in some ways brings all of that together and combines the when... 
[00:27:14] Linda Silka: Great point. 
[00:27:14] Daniel Soucier: ...the past, the present and future together, and a very concrete way for readers. Now moving into the digital world and administering a journal, editing a journal must have some unique challenges.
[00:27:28] So what are some of those unique challenges for Maine Policy Review as you move forward? 
[00:27:33] Linda Silka: Really thinking about again, this, how to keep the depth of analysis that's included, but how to do it in a way that works when we have podcasts or when we have Twitters or when we have things on Facebook and how to really think about continuing to keep the complexity of the analysis so we end up with policies that have a long life, that work across different issues. And so many people haven't solved this yet. We probably, it'll take us a while to figure out how to bring together the digital age things, but we're working on it and we have. Telling people like you that are helping.
[00:28:14] Daniel Soucier: Thanks, I appreciate that. Now I know, yeah, I have seen that do, there's some facts and figures that get posted to Instagram and Facebook that shows like a chart of for example the age range of suicides in Maine. 
[00:28:28] Linda Silka: Yes. 
[00:28:28] Daniel Soucier: And then that steers readers to that article on that subject, or it talks about tourism in Northern Maine- there's charts about that, and then that steers readers to those broader articles. So in some way, it sounds like you're harnessing social media to say, here's an interesting clip that fits into those that one image or those 144 characters, and then saying, and here's the broader thing that, here's the broader topic you can get at.
[00:28:56] Linda Silka: Yeah. That's not the whole story. Go read the whole story. 
[00:28:59] Daniel Soucier: Fantastic. That's great that you're doing that in this age of clickbait where people get headlines and then all they do is share the headlines and they never dig into the story. So it sounds like Maine Policy Review's really committed to this.
[00:29:13] Moving people towards the broader, the more complex story instead of just delivering those small snippets. And that is it. 
[00:29:21] Linda Silka: And wouldn't it be fun if we had in neighborhoods across the state, like we had a Maine Policy Review day where neighbors just come together and everybody talks about the same article, but that's really relevant to something, that's going on in the state right now.
[00:29:37] I'm leading a number of book groups and where I'm really seeing just how much people like having something that can focus their discussions and boy, it would just be so interesting if we could move in that direction or thinking about the different faith communities where people regularly get together and could we have May is the month where you read a Maine Policy Review issue and talk about it. And we all, or people who are listening to this we decide, to do that in some way or going to a lot of the retirement communities, that are there, or that we come up with a package of materials for newcomers that come into our communities and one piece of that is a one pager about the Maine Policy Review and how they can, get it and learn from it. 
[00:30:23] Daniel Soucier: Very interesting. So if you are if an individual who's listening is interested in setting up a book group or bringing MPR into their faith communities I've provided your contact information as the summary.
[00:30:35] Is it would it be good for them to contact you? 
[00:30:37] Linda Silka: I'd love that.
[00:30:38] Daniel Soucier: You can steer them in directions. 
[00:30:39] Linda Silka: Yes. I'd love that. Yeah. 
[00:30:41] Daniel Soucier: So let's say to close let's pretend for a minute I'm a policy maker or I'm a business leader, or I'm an educator who's really discovering Maine Policy Review for the first time through this podcast, right? Listener out there. So can you tell me quickly why I should hop online and access my free copies of the journal? And in what ways is Maine Policy Review an asset to these individuals? 
[00:31:06] Linda Silka: Yeah. What I would say to myself is, what's a problem that I'm worrying about or thinking about? And I don't know as much as I would like about it.
[00:31:17] Could be about roads, could be about children, could be about the environment. And if you go to the website, you'll see you can put in a word and a topic and pull it up. And so I would say you're gonna find think about what you're worried about. Think about things you want more information at.
[00:31:37] Think about things you really care about for Maine. Take a look at the website. Put in some words, see what you find, and then think about who are two or three other people that you know that you'd like to share those ideas with. 
[00:31:54] Daniel Soucier: Fantastic. So Linda, I would like to thank you so much for sitting down with us today to talk about maine policy matters and why Maine Policy Review matters to the state of Maine.
[00:32:05] Linda Silka: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
[00:32:13] Daniel Soucier: Thanks for joining us on Main Policy Matters. 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 as this show develops to express your support, provide us some feedback, or let us know what Maine policy matters to you. The information provided in this podcast by the University of Maine System acting through the University of Maine is for general education 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.
[00:33:00] This is Daniel Soucier and I'll see you next time on Maine Policy Matters.