 In this video, we're going to be going over concepts from chapter five, constructing solutions in the book thinking about social problems. These, this is meant to be reviewing some of the things that will be on the exam from this chapter. So we mentioned before in chapter three, we talked about different kinds of framing. We talked about diagnostic frames, and we also talked about motivational frames. And I said then that we would come back to prognostic frames. So that's where we're going to start in chapter five. Prognostic frames answer audiences questions about what should be done and what can be done. So prognosis is looking towards the future. Diagnosis is looking towards the past. And so, you know, the name of this chapter is constructing solutions. When you are using a prognostic frame, you are going to be proposing a solution to the problem that you're making a claim about. And prognostic frames are going to come up against influences and competition. And Loski goes over some of these competing claims and things that run against making your prognostic frame. For one thing, diagnostic frames often limit what you can say about the future. So if you diagnose a problem as being located, for instance, in people, as in, and we talked about this in an earlier section of this course, this idea of person blame. If your diagnostic frame starts with, you know, people do bad things, therefore crime is up, right? You have now diagnosed the problem as being located in individuals who commit crimes. That is going to limit the solutions you propose. You are not going to propose solutions that emphasize, for instance, structural problems of poverty and lack of education. And you're going to look at prognostic frames that involve incarceration and demotivating people who would commit crimes. Another problem is that you come up against is cultural themes. We've talked about cultural themes before. These are things that most people understand. And so if you are, for instance, proposing a solution, she talks about in this chapter, women's shelters. So if you're framing the solution to be women should be able to go to places that are secure and get restraining orders. You are coming from the point of view of the kind of humanitarian frame in which you're saying this is a way to protect women and their children from abuse of men. But you run up against cultural themes about family. Very often the competing claim or the person who is trying to say we don't need to build more shelters will construct this as a person, a woman breaking up her family. So, you know, what you can, you know, there are more cultural themes about keeping the family together than there are about protecting women. This is not as true as it used to be. I think that the idea that women should be able to leave abusive relationships is an idea that has far more acceptance than it once did. But nonetheless, these cultural themes have to be overcome sometimes in order to propose solutions that sound like they're going against particular cultural themes. Also, a lot of times there are unintended consequences for solutions and this is this can create problems when you're trying to affect a solution. Of course, the biggest example of an effort to solve a problem that ended up creating a lot more problems than it solved is prohibition. So, you know, the progresses were very powerful in the early part of the 20th century. And they wanted, there was a lot of alcohol abuse during this time. A lot of people felt like this was a big social issue problem because men who abused alcohol were not taking care of their families. Often abuse came along, physical abuse of family members came along with alcoholism, unemployment came along with alcoholism and so forth. So, you know, very well-intended people said, okay, let's stop selling alcohol. Let's make it illegal to obtain alcohol. And they succeeded in getting an actual amendment to the U.S. Constitution that outlawed alcohol throughout the entire country. And the next thing that happened is not people stop drinking, but rather a huge network of underground black market alcohol happened. They had this huge expenditure and trying to keep people from getting alcohol. And you have, you know, the 1920s being called the roaring 20s because anybody could find any amount of alcohol they wanted to find. And, you know, police did raids, but then it led to police corruption where, you know, organized crime began to pay off police. And it just, you know, by the end of the decade, it was very obvious that this was no solution at all, that it wasn't going to stop people from drinking. And then in fact, it was going to encourage a whole lot of other bad behavior. So, one of the problems in creating a prognosis, creating a solution is that you may have consequences of that solution that actually lead to more problems rather than less. And of course, you're always when you are constructing a social problems claim, trying to get people to invest their time, their energy, their money. And there are lots of things in a capitalist society that are trying to take people's time, people's energy, people's money. So, you are in fact, in proposing your solution, fighting against and competing from, you know, everything from watching movies on Netflix to buying big cars to figuring out what the Kardashians are doing to solving all of the other problems that are facing us. So, always when you are proposing a solution, you have to consider, well, why would people spend their time, their energy and the money on this when their time, money and energy could go to something else. So, formula stories that include proposing solutions that are framed with a prognostic framing have some things that we need to talk about. As you recall, formula stories always center on harm and horribleness. They're always going to create a, or construct an understanding of victims and an understanding of villains and figuring out who's wrong and who's right, how to reduce that harm, how to right that wrong. So, formula stories, of course, are highly motivational if they are told correctly, because they are simple, because they help people see things in a very concise and clear way. And because if they're done right and you have a very blameless victim and you have a very evil villain, people connect to that and they, you know, feel the need to do something about it. The problem is, especially when you're looking at implementing those solutions, formula stories reduce things down to their simplest form. And that means that when you actually start solving a problem, start proposing solutions to a problem, if you forget the stuff that you didn't talk about and proposing that this is a problem. If you forget the stuff that you left out of the formula story, then implementing might, it might come back to bite you, right? Because, for instance, let's say that you want to look at the question of how poverty increases crime rates in a particular area. So, you make the case that if we did some things to reduce poverty in a particular location, that we should see crime being reduced. And if you come in and implementing that solution and say, okay, it's very simple. What we need to do is employ people because employment is a way out of poverty, or at least it used to be. And so you create more jobs. So that's the solution that you're creating, right? You've said, okay, poverty is the reason that people steal, reason that they sell drugs, the reason that they do these bad criminal behaviors. So if we find work for them, make sure that they have a chance to have food on the table, to take care of their families, they will not go out and do this. Simple, right? Simple formula story. However, there are a lot of things that might complicate that story. For one thing, jobs can be lost. And so you need to have a solution that includes job security and not just creating more jobs, right? Another thing is jobs sometimes require an educational level. And so you need to include finding ways to create training and to lift up the education of people so that they'll be able to take advantage of these jobs that you're creating. Another thing is that there are some bad actors that may come along that may take government money to create jobs or may take government money to create training programs and then they don't actually deliver or they aren't really doing exactly what they said that they were going to do. You know, it may be that in their proposal where they get the government money in order to do this, you know, the business says we're going to employ 200 people. But it turns out that only 80 of those people are going to have a permanent job and the other 120 people will have seasonal work and will not make a living to bring them out of poverty. So, you know, if you just think the solution is create more jobs and you don't think about all of these other factors as to how jobs actually help to lift people out of poverty, then you may not succeed at what you're doing. So, if you forget the middle part as it is, if you tell the formula story, and you forget that there are all these other factors that are involved when you start implementing a solution, you may miss a really important element that will doom your solution to be unsuccessful. So, when you're talking about solutions, most frequently, not always, but most frequently, what you were talking about are changes and policies. Now, what are policies? Well, policies come from our part of what we call the public arena. And the public arena includes two main actors, organizational actors, government agencies, and we're talking about everything from your school board all the way up to Congress, right, and the federal government. So, government agencies are very important in understanding solutions because almost always somebody is going to have to change a policy or change a law in order to affect these changes. But private organizations also because private organizations have policies within their organization that affects the everyday life of people. So, you may work to change private organizations by lobbying them, educating them, talking to them about things that they could do to change their policy. So, we're going to concentrate mostly on government agencies and the kinds of factors that go in and creating a solution, you know, constructing a solution within a government setting. So, I kind of took what Lowsky talked about in paragraphs and put it in this little chart to kind of help you understand how the realities of government affect how solutions are constructed and which solutions are easier to push through than others. So, she talks about what she calls good and bad people. And she also talks about, or I think the word that she used was positive and negative construction, right, positive and negative construction, and who has political power and who doesn't. And these combinations create policies that are different. Okay, so high political power means that the victims who are being constructed in your formula story have influence over the political system. These are victims that are paid attention to either because there are a lot of them, or they're well organized, or they have cultural capital that can be used to make or break a politician's career is essentially what we're saying. So, high political power, if victims have high political power, they're going to get benefits offered to them more quickly. And these benefits are going to be stronger benefits. This is, you know, the good people are the victims and high political power are people who have, who wield some political capital in these government domains. Bad people are usually the villains, right? And if they hold a lot of political power, then, you know, the policies are probably going to be more symbolic than they're going to be substantive. And then, of course, the opposite is true too. If your victims have low political power, then, you know, but they are sympathetic victims, then there may be some policy changes, but they'll be more symbolic than they will be substantial. And if your villain has low political power, then, you know, you can get the political capital to create policies to punish them quickly. So let's give some examples here to kind of help understand this. So, a group that has high political power that is considered a sympathetic victim are older adults, right? Seniors. And traditionally, seniors have wielded a lot of power. They've organized the AARP, the Gray Panthers are two examples of this. And because they hold this political power, most politicians know that these are the people who will go out and vote, right? They are people that have to be considered when you're running for elections. So, there have been some very substantial programs that have benefited older folks, Social Security, Medicare, these are very almost sacred public policies now. Why they were able to get these benefits and keep these benefits and most politicians who try to take away these benefits end up, you know, not doing as well politically as they could, is because of that high political power and that sympathetic victim. An example of a group that is a sympathetic victim that has low political power are children. So we've talked about how children are a good victim to construct because children are often considered blameless, often considered not responsible for their lives that if they are in harm's way, it is not their fault that they were in harm's way. But children don't vote. And that is why even though lots and lots of politicians will give lots and lots of lip service to, quote, doing it for the children, most of the time the policies and laws that are set forth centered around issues that benefit children are mostly symbolic. A good example of this is daycare, right? So there is not a lot of support for daycare. There is, you know, the federal government has passed a tax credit for daycare. But you know, it's helpful. I mean, I'm sure that if you are a parent and you qualify for this tax credit, you want to take it and it will help you a little bit in providing daycare. But the truth is, it's more symbolic than substantive. Like, I think the most that you can get is $2,500 and nowadays that barely pays for a month of daycare if you need to put your kid in daycare on a daily basis. So, yeah, they've done something about it. They've patted themselves on the back. But the truth is, it's a more symbolic benefit than it is a substantive benefit. Examples of villains with high political power. Well, all you have to do is just take a look at what happened in 2008 and 2009 to understand this. Here are bad people who have crashed the economy to bad behavior. They took way too many risks with regular people's money and set up, you know, predatory lending and set up selling mortgages on Wall Street. That they were not able to support or ensure and so forth and everybody agreed. This was bad behavior on this part and something has to change and it has to get better. And there was a lot of discussion and a lot of people arguing for a lot of different policy changes. And there were some policy changes that were made. But they were very weak. Why were they very weak? Because banks wield a lot of political power. Most everybody who is sitting in Washington has had a bank or a bunch of banks give them money for reelection. So there were no big arrests made. There was no breaking up of banks. In fact, we went from about 16 major banks in the country to only seven or eight major banks in the company in the two or three years after. So these things that were quote unquote too big to fail actually became bigger, like you would think that if they were too big to fail, then one of the things you would do to ensure that this didn't happen again would be to make them smaller. But they managed to get bigger and more consolidated than they were before the collapse of the market in 2008. So this is because they had high political power and the government has a hard time making policies that punish people with high political power. And then the last category, low political power and villains. A good example of this is the war on drugs. So the war on drugs, a lot of people understood that addicts are victims and drug dealers and people who sell drugs and people who import drugs are the villains. But drug addicts have low political power. And so most of the policies that were passed were policies that offered punishment to drug addicts and drug dealers. And in fact, most of the people who got punished most of the people who are in jail on drug charges are the people with the least amount of political power and hasn't really changed drug trafficking that much. So this basically created a lot of people in prison and not really done much to solve the problem of drug addiction has not really done much to solve the problem of selling drugs on the street and so forth. So it was very quick to punish, but it was not a punishment for the powerful people who are at the top end of this it was a punishment of the people who had the least amount of political power. And as you can see, if you are constructing a social problems claim, and part of your prognosis framing is to seek out changes and government policy, you have to take into account this reality of how government works. You have to construct a solution that has a chance to be able to be implemented successfully and create a successful solution by the government. So what are some of these strategies that address this kind of complications of this high low good bad high high power low power good person bad person. Well, one of the things that usually is successful is picking the right time. So, you know, there are a lot of people who complain that every time a school shooting happens, people come out of the woodwork to talk about gun control. Is this the right time? Or is it not the right time? Well, if you talk about gun control and nothing has occurred lately, though, of course, we were getting to the point where it was occurring what it felt like all the time. But you want to pick the time when it's in the minds of people, especially in the minds of government people. So, most of people who work at doing social problems claims, consider big news incidences as the right time to push their issue. The George Floyd protests over the summer. Another example of this. The easier and more inexpensive a solution can be, the better you have, the better chance you have of getting somebody in government to pay attention to it. Expensive solutions, solutions that are going to take years to implement are not going to be met with as much positive reception. Of course, again, you go back to the powerful political person, you know, with high political power is pushing it. You've got a better chance for it to go through even a minute cost money. And, you know, the easier, I mean, if you're not somebody of high power, then easy and inexpensive helps your cause. Person blame solutions are often much easier than system blame solutions when it comes to the government. Why is that? Because when you talk about system changes, you implement, you implicate a lot more people in the problem. If this is a problem of them and their behavior, as opposed to us and our behavior, it's a much more comfortable thing for a politician to do. So a politician can much more easily get people to pay for with tax dollars things that are blaming individuals than things that are blaming, you know, the collective at large. Of course, emergencies, this kind of goes back to pick the right time that when things are happening and they are very, very urgent, governments supposedly are willing to do more, spend more money, consider more solutions. We had a little bit of a breakdown about in the last year with the pandemic, but even the pandemic at first anyway, brought some money. I mean, there were people who are actually talking about universal basic income at one point last spring. And that's something that hasn't been talked about in any kind of general sense for forever as far as I can tell. So the emergency idea together to actually get people to consider at least thinking about that particular solution to economic problems. Everybody in America especially loves to declare war on things. This is a cultural theme. It goes back to the idea of the way that the country came together during World War Two. There is at this point a lot of romance in that history. If you look at the real history of World War Two, people were not quite that united. There were quite a few people who went on strike during that time because a lot of businesses that have war contracts wanted to make profits and they didn't pass along the extra money that they were making to their workers. But there has been ever since World War Two, this rhetoric of, you know, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on obesity, the war on this, the war on that. So one of the strategies that a lot of claims makers use is to put it in this kind of militaristic war on terms. Science and law often times can get governments motivated in a way that is different from the general public. So if you have experts who come and testify about the solutions that you're talking about, you very often can appeal to ideas and data a lot more than you can if you're trying to motivate the general public or motivate particular individuals within the general public. Well, why is this? Well, in part because government officials like to know that they like to show that they know what they're doing, in part because most government policies are going to be measured in some way in order to determine whether they're being successful or not. So if you can present a solution in a scientific way, you can quantify it and make it easier for government bureaucrats to follow it and figure out whether or not it is a successful or an unsuccessful program. Also, if you put things in the language of law, you very often can put policy makers in a particular position where they sound like they're not following their own rules. I probably ought to bring up mothers against drunk driving at this point. When they went to the government officials, which were the police officers and the judges, they did come emotionally because they were victims. Most of the people who were talking to these people had lost somebody either to injury or to death because of a drunk driver, but they also came with a lot of information about the laws that were on the books. And part of their appeal was you need to enforce the laws that already exist. So because governments are about making laws and implementing laws and enforcing laws using the language of law can very often convince them to do what you want to do in your solution. Also, you know, there are very real things that are seen by government policy makers as things government ought to be concerned about. And so if you appeal to their understanding of what they should be doing, you can very often get them to look at your solution in a way that you might not if this is like a new area that government would be concerned with. Organizational sponsors, you're not very powerful, but you find a powerful organization that does affect the way that they think about political power. You have a chance to getting your ideas heard, your case heard. This can be big charities, this can be big companies that want to support a particular idea to give you an example of this. Oftentimes environmentalists connect themselves to solar companies. So you have a company that wants to make money off of selling products that create solar energy. They have a lot more money to hire lobbyists to get across the idea. So this little political bedfellows gives it a chance to be heard in a way that a small nonprofit environmental group might not be able to be heard. You try to figure out what are the most politically acceptable solutions. And that means that you probably when you're trying to figure out what solution you want to propose are going to shape it into that thing that is politically acceptable. And of course, what's politically acceptable with one group may not be or one in a particular year with a particular political makeup might not be acceptable in a different period of time with a different Congress or a different state legislature and so forth. So oftentimes the timing of solutions are very dependent upon who is in control or who is in power at the time that you're making the proposal. So, you know, in the last four years, if you wanted to fight the good fight for the environment, you probably didn't go to Congress to do this, because especially between 2016 and 2018 when it was a Republican controlled presidency House and Senate that were not interested in environmental things. People weren't going there and proposing environmental solutions at that level. So, what we're talking about here is that government is the audience. And this creates some specific claims makers. It also creates some specific audiences because you want, you may not go directly to or have the chance to go directly to the policy makers themselves, or the law makers themselves, but you can put pressure on those lawmakers by going to other groups, convincing them to help you put the pressure on. So, public opinion, as I've said a few times before, an audience that is the general public is a difficult audience to deal with, because they are so distracted. And you have a lot more competition for your claims than you might not. But on the other hand, if you succeed in getting public opinion to follow what you're talking about, like mothers against drug driving again, a very successful case in which they changed public opinion. And in doing so, it was very easy for them to then change laws and to push for more enforcement of the laws that exist. So, public opinion generally is a way to, you know, if you get enough people petitioning, you get enough people calling, emailing and so forth, then you get the ultimate audience, the government to pay attention to your solution. Media, of course, is another way if media is willing to cover your stories and talk about your issues. But, you know, if you can get a reporter to really invest some time and do, you know, investigative reporting, you have a chance to put more pressure on to government. And of course, there are people who march, who, you know, have a cause that they think is really important, and they dedicate their time and their money and their effort to that cause. In such, they often create a large enough group of people, either by marching or by organizing in some way to write letters to send emails to make phone calls and so forth to get government's attention. So if government is your ultimate audience, if lawmakers, the policymakers are your ultimate audience, you very often have kind of a first level audience ahead of that that you get their attention, and then may in turn get the attention of government. The last thing that Lowsky talks about in this chapter is what she calls cultural changes and how social movements happen. She talked a lot about social movements in this class, which might be a little bit unusual for a social problems course because a lot of people who teach social problems really emphasize social movements as a way to create social change. But Lowsky ends the chapter by talking about some specific things that make hoping for a social movement to create change makes it a little bit difficult. So social movements are very often centered around what she calls collective identities or types of people. This is in part because very often it is specific groups of people who are being harmed. And then, you know, you want to create a movement whereby these people feel empowered, and they want things to change. Of course, the most obvious of this is the civil rights movement, right? So the civil rights movement centered mostly around African Americans. It was a movement that created a kind of collective identity of being African American in the United States, especially under slavery, especially under Jim Crow laws and so forth. And of course nowadays that collective identity is centered around police brutality, housing discrimination, income inequality and so forth. These collective identities are strong in helping create a social movement, but it also has a tendency to limit who can get involved, who can change. And if you are representing or have an identity that has low political power, it may not have as much an effect or may only create symbolic change rather than real change. Most of the time social movements are about a change of values. So it is either creating something and making it more valuable or it is devaluing existing values. So you are either working towards a change that says black lives matter or this matters or that matters. That's a value change. It's saying that the way people are being treated suggests that their lives do not matter and we are creating this movement to show you why they do matter. So it's devaluing existing values and pushing for new values. The Black Lives Matters, Black Lives Matters, for example, is devaluing white supremacy. It's devaluing institutional racism. Now are these values that people articulate? No, but they still are obviously valued within the political spectrum. And as such, this movement is saying, wait a minute, this is, you know, they're tapping into cultural themes by saying this is not equality. This is not patriotism. This is not freedom, all terms that everybody is supposed to agree on. And so it is supporting a set of values, a set of cultural themes, but it also is trying to create a new value in the idea of what matters, what is important, what should be getting our attention.