Kruse Kronicle

Religion As An Activity Engaged In By Consenting Adults In Private

American Interest: Religion As An Activity Engaged In By Consenting Adults In Private

Sociologist Peter Berger concludes this article with this observation:

... But I do want to make a general observation: In all these cases the authorities accused of violating the plaintiffs’ rights operate with a definition of religion as a private matter to be kept out of public space. There is here a general issue of government overreach, as clearly illustrated by the (still unresolved) attempt by the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to provide contraception coverage in their employees’ health plans. Beyond that, though, there is a very ideological view of the place of religion in society. In other words, religion is to be an activity engaged in by consenting adults in private. The attorney for the Judeo-Christian side in the aforementioned American case had it quite right when he compared the treatment of his client’s religion with measures of disease control. This is not an attitude one would expect to find in a Western democracy. It is curiously reminiscent of policies toward religion in Communist countries and toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule.

An aggressive secularism seems to be on the march in all these cases. It seems more at home in Europe, which is far more secularized than America. Even in the United Kingdom, it seems, the drums of the French Revolution still reverberate. But how is one to explain this sort of secularism in the United States? The “nones”—that is, those who say “none” when asked for their religious affiliation by pollsters—are a very mixed lot. One theme that comes through is disappointment with organized religion. There is an anti-Christian edge to this, since Christian churches continue to be the major religious institutions in this country. Disappointment then, or disillusion—but why the aggressive hostility? There is yet another theme that comes through in the survey data: An identification of churches (and that means mainly Christian ones) with intolerance and repression. I think that this is significant.

Let me venture a sociological hypothesis here: The new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution. Since the 1960s there has indeed been a sexual revolution in America. It has been very successful in changing the mores and the law. It should not be surprising that many people, especially younger ones, enjoy the new libidinous benefits of this revolution. Whether one approves or deplores the new sexual culture, it seems unlikely to be reversed. Yet Christian churches (notably the Catholic and Evangelical ones) are in the forefront of those who do want to reverse the libertine victory. Its beneficiaries are haunted by the nightmare of being forced into chastity belts by an all too holy alliance of clerics and conservative politicians. No wonder they are hostile!

I suspect he is right.

The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor

New York Times: The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor - Thomas Edsall

A concept promulgated by the right — the notion of the hidden prosperity of the poor — underpins the conservative take on the ongoing debate over rising inequality.

The political right uses this concept to undermine the argument made by liberals that the increasingly unequal distribution of income poses a danger to the social fabric as well as to the American economy.

President Obama forcefully articulated the case from the left in an address on Dec. 6, 2011 at Osawatomie High School in Kansas:

This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people — we tell our kids — that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

The conservative counterargument – that life for the poor and the middle class is better than it seems – goes like this: Even with stagnant or modestly growing incomes, the poor and middle class benefit from the fact that a stable or declining share of income is now required for basic necessities, leaving more money for discretionary spending. According to this theory, consumption inequality – the disparity between the amount of money spent on goods and services by the rich, the middle class and the poor — remains relatively unchanged, even while income inequality worsens. ...

I like this article in that I think he does a fairly good job of laying out the conservative argument and then presents his counterargument in measured tones. There is a lot to process here, and there counterarguements to Edsall's arguements, but I appreciate articles that constructively frame issues.

Gallup chief sees signs of religious revival

Christian Century: Gallup chief sees signs of religious revival

Despite a deep drop in the number of Americans who identify with a particular faith, the country could be on the cusp of a religious renaissance, says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.

Grounded in more than a million Gallup interviews, Newport’s new book, God Is Alive and Well, argues that the aging of the baby boomers, the influx of Hispanic immigrants and the links between religion and health could portend a bright future for faith in America. [The following interview was edited for length and clarity.]

Why did you write this book?

I think religion is extremely important in America today. All of our research shows that, and I wanted to get empirical data about religion out there, rather than just speculation.

We here at Gallup have had a tracking project since 2008. We do 350,000 interviews a year, which is a huge and unique dataset that nobody else has. And personally, I grew up in a religious background and always found it interesting. ...

Of course, this caught my eye ...

You write that mainline Protestants are pretty much doing everything wrong in terms of growing their churches. Why is that?

For any group to grow, whether it’s a country or a church, you have to have more people coming in than going out. For example, the Catholic Church holds its own in terms of percentage of the American population because of the in-migration of Hispanics. But there is no massive in-migration of Protestants.

Second, there’s been no evidence that they’ve been able to evangelize effectively. And third, one way you grow is to have high fertility rates. Mormons are doing that well because their theology encourages big families. But Presbyterians, for example, have fewer children on average [than other Americans]. So, if you look at all the ways churches could grow, the mainline Protestants haven’t been able to hit the nail on the head with any of them.  —RNS

Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

Scientific American: Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

... Some scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel, are so unimpressed with science that they are challenging its fundamental assumptions. In his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel contends that current scientific theories and methods can’t account for the emergence of life in general and one bipedal, big-brained species in particular. To solve these problems, Nagel asserts, science needs “a major conceptual revolution,” as radical as those precipitated by heliocentrism, evolution and relativity.

Many pundits calling for such a revolution are peddling some sort of religious agenda, whether Christian or New Age. Nagel is an atheist, who cannot accept God as a final answer, and yet he echoes some theological critiques of science. “Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of consciousness, reason and morality. ...

... These qualms asides, I recommend Nagel’s book, which serves as a much-needed counterweight to the smug, know-it-all stance of many modern scientists. Hawking and Krauss both claim that science has rendered philosophy obsolete. Actually, now more than ever we need philosophers, especially skeptics like Socrates, Descartes, Thomas Kuhn and Nagel, who seek to prevent us from becoming trapped in the cave of our beliefs.

More Proof That Money Can't Buy Happiness

Business Insider: More Proof That Money Can't Buy Happiness

"... University of Missouri Marketing Professor Marsha Richins looks at this phenomenon in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, "When Wanting Is Better Than Having," where she compares high- and low-materialist shoppers. "High-materialist" consumers have much higher expectations of what a product will do for their overall happiness, which is why positive emotions peak and then fall again after a purchase.

According to research, materialists are "more likely to believe that acquisition will change the kind of person they are, improve their relationships with others, enable them to have more pleasure in their lives, and enhance the effectiveness with which they carry out daily tasks." They also experience "more negative emotions, such as anxiety, fear, and envy." ...

Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to ‘Long Data’

Wired: Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to ‘Long Data’

Our species can’t seem to escape big data. We have more data inputs, storage, and computing resources than ever, so Homo sapiens naturally does what it has always done when given new tools: It goes even bigger, higher, and bolder.

We did it in buildings and now we’re doing it in data. Sure, big data is a powerful lens — some would even argue a liberating one — for looking at our world. Despite its limitations and requirements, crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves.

But no matter how big that data is or what insights we glean from it, it is still just a snapshot: a moment in time. That’s why I think we need to stop getting stuck only on big data and start thinking about long data.

By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep — taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.

Because as beautiful as a snapshot is, how much richer is a moving picture, one that allows us to see how processes and interactions unfold over time? ...

... Why does the time dimension matter if we’re only interested in current or future phenomena? Because many of the things that affect us today and will affect us tomorrow have changed slowly over time: sometimes over the course of a single lifetime, and sometimes over generations or even eons.

Datasets of long timescales not only help us understand how the world is changing, but how we, as humans, are changing it — without this awareness, we fall victim to shifting baseline syndrome. This is the tendency to shift our “baseline,” or what is considered “normal” — blinding us to shifts that occur across generations (since the generation we are born into is taken to be the norm). ...

I strongly resonate with this article. Trends and trajectories over extended periods of time are often far more useful than details of the latest twist or turn in societal development. It is so easy to get lost in the challenges of the moment. When you stand back and look at our moment in time from the standpoint of centuries and millennia, we are living in the most astounding age of human flourishing in the history of the planet. We are never without challenges but there is good reason to expect that flourishing will improve in coming generations.

The two groups I find the most insufferable are youth who believe their latest insights are the magic solution that brings utopia and grumpy old curmudgeons who mope about, complaining the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Neither has a sense of the longue durée. We need to spend less time with journalists and more time with historians.

Dan and Me: My Coming Out as a Friend of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A

Huffington Post: Dan and Me: My Coming Out as a Friend of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A - Shane Windmeyer.

I spent New Year's Eve at the red-blooded, all-American epicenter of college football: at the Chick-fil-A Bowl, next to Dan Cathy, as his personal guest. It was among the most unexpected moments of my life.

Yes, after months of personal phone calls, text messages and in-person meetings, I am coming out in a new way, as a friend of Chick-fil-A's president and COO, Dan Cathy, and I am nervous about it. I have come to know him and Chick-fil-A in ways that I would not have thought possible when I first started hearing from LGBT students about their concerns over the chicken chain's giving practices.

For many this news of friendship might be shocking. After all, I am an out, 40-year-old gay man and a lifelong activist for equality. I am also the founder and executive director of Campus Pride, the leading national organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and ally college students. Just seven months ago our organization advanced a national campaign against Chick-fil-A for the millions of dollars it donated to anti-LGBT organizations and divisive political groups that work each day to harm hardworking LGBT young people, adults and our families. I have spent quite some time being angry at and deeply distrustful of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A. If he had his way, my husband of 18 years and I would never be legally married.

Why was I now standing next to him at one of the most popular football showdowns? How could I dare think to have a relationship with a man and a company that have advocated against who I am; who would take apart my family in the name of "traditional marriage"; whose voice and views represented exactly the opposite of those of the students for whom I advocate every day? Dan is the problem, and Chick-fil-A is the enemy, right? ...

I rarely post on anything dealing with same-sex issues at the Kruse Kronicle because my experience is that people simply cannot carry on a respectful cyber-conversation about the issue. I make an exception here because this story illustrates so well what needs to be happening more and more in our culture, especially in the church! Kudos to Windmeyer and Cathy for showing the way.

(Note: If you can't be respectful (from whatever postion you hold), don't comment!. I will delete the first disrespectful comment (name calling, characterizing people as evil or idiots, etc.). I will close comments with the second. I don't have time in my life to play referee to childish behavior.)

(HT: John Armstrong)

In The Future, We Will Eat 60-Day-Old Bread

Business Insider: In The Future, We Will Eat 60-Day-Old Bread

This post is part of the Roadmap To The Future Series. Roadmap To The Future explores innovative industry trends and breakthroughs in science, entertainment, and technology. This series is sponsored by Verizon.

Mold is the bane of any bread-lover's existence. 

The fear of green fuzzy splotches making baked goods unfit to eat within days of purchase may soon be relieved. 

MicroZap, a company based in Texas, has developed a method to keep bread mold-free for 60 days. That's about six times longer than the shelf-life of regular packaged bread.

"We probably could have gone farther, we just didn't try it," CEO Don Stull told Business Insider.  

Either way, a longer lifespan helps cut down on food waste, while encouraging manufacturers to get rid of preservatives. ...

It will be interesting to see if this takes hold. Years ago they developed irradiated meat which, as long as it was kept sealed, you store in your cupboard without refrigeration. The concept is so counterintuitive that to this day it hasn't been commercialized (that I know of.)

Saturday Links

1. Lots of news outlets picking up on this story  about technology displacing humans. In The Future, Machines May Have All The Jobs. We all know where this leads.

Seriously, technological innovation always creates dislocations. Fear of machines replacing humans goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The economy has always adapted and expect it will again.

2. Has the ideas machine broken down?

"The idea that innovation and new technology have stopped driving growth is getting increasing attention. But it is not well founded."

3. Business Insider reports that The Worldwide Demographic Cliff Is Going To Be Brutal

Alas, that won't help, as this graph compiled by statistician Simon Hedlin shows. The total dependency ratio (children and retirees, compared with those of working age) fell in all G20/OECD nations bar Germany and Sweden between 1960 and 2010. In the next fifty years, it will rise in all those nations, bar India and South Africa. In most nations, the ratio will rise by 40% or more; there are huge increases in dependency in parts of Asia (China and South Korea) and in eastern Europe. Britain and America are towards the bottom of the table, but their problems are big enough.

There are many implications. With more dependents to care for, it is very hard to imagine how we will pay down our debts. And it is also very hard to imagine how one can possibly expect government spending to shrink significantly.

4. San Antonio plans one of the nation's first bookless libraries

"... BiblioTech, a $1.5 million Bexar County paperless library will have scores of computer terminals, laptops, tablets, and e-readers – but not a dog-eared classic or dusty reference book in sight. 

“Think of an Apple store,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who led his county’s bookless library project, told NPR when describing the planned library.

The 4,989-squre-foot, digital-only library, one of the first of its kind, will feature 100 e-readers available for circulation, 50 e-readers for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets for on-site use. Patrons can check out e-readers for two weeks or load books onto their own devices.

“A technological evolution is taking place,” Wolff says. “And I think we’re stepping in at the right time.” ..."

5. Some good thoughts on The 10 Things Entrepreneurs Waste The Most Time On

6. College freshman survey: finance worries up, liberalism down

"UCLA's survey of incoming college freshmen shows fewer identify as liberals and an increasing number saying the economy significantly affected their college choice."

7.Walter Russell Mead on The End of the Religious Right?

"In some ways, this shift isn’t as dramatic as it might first appear. Even though younger evangelicals are increasingly walking away from the religious right, they are still self-identifying as Republicans (54 percent) more than Democrats (26 percent). Younger Christians still agree with the religious right on the issues but reject the movement’s tactics, tone, and narrow focus on social issues."

8. Scientific American: The Liberals' War on Science. How politics distorts science on both ends of the spectrum.

"Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science roughly equally (varying across domains), which is why scientists like E. O. Wilson and organizations like the National Center for Science Education are reaching out to moderates in both parties to rein in the extremists on evolution and climate change. Pace Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of liberty may not be a vice, but it is in defense of science, where facts matter more than faith—whether it comes in a religious or secular form—and where moderation in the pursuit of truth is a virtue."

9. How did Fido become domesticated by humans? Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

10. Any volunteers? Harvard Professor Seeks Woman Willing To Have A Neanderthal Baby

11. A fascinating history of high heels. Why did men stop wearing high heels?

That's all for this week. Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

Wall Street Journal: Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

Fear-mongering exaggeration about effects of global warming distracts us from finding affordable and effective energy alternatives.

In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn't help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.

For starters, let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.

Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%. Estimates published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that even with global warming proceeding uninterrupted, the level of wildfires will continue to decline until around midcentury and won't resume on the level of 1950—the worst for fire—before the end of the century.

Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that "there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years." The U.N. Climate Panel in 2012 concluded: "Some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia."

As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are getting worse. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was Wilma, more than seven years ago. ...

... In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no good will be achieved—at very high cost.

Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production support of existing, inefficient green energy, President Obama should focus on dramatically ramping up investments into the research and development of green energy. Put another way, it is the difference between supporting an inexpensive researcher who will discover more efficient, future solar panels—and supporting a Solyndra at great expense to produce lots of inefficient, present-technology solar panels.

When innovation eventually makes green energy cheaper, everyone will implement it, including the Chinese. Such a policy would likely do 500 times more good per dollar invested than current subsidy schemes. But first let's drop the fear-mongering exaggeration—and then focus on innovation.

Amen!

Does Income Bring Happiness?

Conversable Economist: Does Income Bring Happiness?

Back in 1974, Richard Easterlin published a paper called "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence" (available here and here, for example). Easterlin raised the possibility that what really matters to most people is not their absolute level of income, but their income level relative to others in society. If relative income is what matters, then an overall rise in incomes doesn't make me any better off relative to others, and so my happiness does not increase. Income becomes a sort of arms race: even as we all race to get more, it doesn't actually make us any happier. ...

He concludes with:

... For my own part, I confess that I find happiness surveys both intriguing and dubious. It seems to me that higher levels of income are typically correlated with more health, education, travel, consumption, and a higher quality of recreation, so it's not a surprise to me it seems to me that happiness rises iwth income. On the other side, it does seem to me that survey questions about life satisfaction are answered in the context of a particular place and time. If a person says that their life satisfaction was a 7 in 1960 on a scale of 0-10, and another person says that their life satisfaction is a 7 in 2013, are those two people really equally satisfied? To put it another way, if the person from 2013 was transported by a time machine back to live in 1960, with all their memories and knowledge of the technologies, medicines, foods, education, and travel available in 2013, would that time traveller really be equally happy in either time period? I suspect that when most people are asked to rank happiness on a scale of 0-10, they don't say to themselves: "Well, people living 100 years from now might have extraordinarily high levels of income and technology, so compared with them, I'm really no more than a 2." At best, survey questions on a scale of 0-10 seem like an extremely rough-and-ready way of measuring life satisfaction across very different countries or across substantial periods of time.

Tea Party Libertarians and Small Organic Farmers Make Strange Political Bedfellows

U.S. News:  Tea Party Libertarians and Small Organic Farmers Make Strange Political Bedfellows

The unlikely coalition between Tea Party libertarians and small organic farmers.

Laura Bledsoe didn't set out to join a political movement, she merely wanted to serve what she considered a sustainable meal. ...

... But it soon became apparent that her nervousness wasn't unfounded.

The health inspector arrived simultaneously with several of the event's guests. The Bledsoes led her to where the food was being prepared while the guests were guided on a chaperoned tour of the farm by interns.

"She literally came in and started looking for things she could find fault with," Laura recalls. "That just became apparent in her attitude and demeanor with how she handled things."

The health inspector raised several concerns, but chief among them was the meat the Bledsoes were preparing to serve. Because the event was advertised as a "zero mile footprint," the meat hadn't been sent through a USDA processing plant, as is required for any meat purchased at a grocery store or restaurant, so the inspector deemed it illegal to serve.

"She immediately demanded that we send our guests home and cease the event, and if we didn't she would call the police and have them personally escorted off the property."

Increasingly panicked, flustered, and "having a nervous breakdown," Laura attempted to reason with the inspector without success. In addition to being ordered to send their guests home, the farmers were also told they needed to pour bleach over all the meat to ensure it would never be served.

"It's one thing when you throw out a piece of food that you have no relationship to," Laura says. "But we raised these animals. When you raise animals and slaughter them and then prepare them, it's with great reverence that you eat this food. The total disregard for any of that was just appalling to me."

In the middle of this disruption, the Bledsoes recalled they had a number for the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization that protects the legal rights of family farms and artisan food producers. Though it was a Friday evening, the organization's lead counsel Gary Cox called them back within 15 minutes. He instructed them to ask if the inspector if she had a search warrant, if she didn't, Cox told them to tell her to leave the property.

The tactic worked. Though the health inspector threatened to come back with the police, she left, leaving the Bledsoes to explain what had happened to their guests. They had already poured bleach on the meat, but they were still able to serve their vegetable dishes without further disturbance, and of the 100 who signed up for the event, only a handful left because of time constraints, Laura says.

While the Bledsoes didn't immediately hear back from the health department, they decided to send out an E-mail recounting the experience to shareholders of their local food delivery service, known as a CSA. Soon, the story went viral, traveling the globe and leading to hundreds of E-mails from farmers and activists. Eventually, Laura was contacted by Nevada lawmakers, many of whom were sympathetic to her cause and wanted to reform state laws so that such a fiasco wouldn't happen again.

Without even meaning to, the Bledsoes found themselves swept up in a political movement that has only accrued momentum in recent years, one in which owners of small local farms and gardens are pitted against government agencies, both local and federal, over the rights of property owners and private citizens in terms of how and where they can prepare their food.

But what is perhaps even more peculiar about this movement is its bipartisan interest. Among its most vocal proponents you'll find an amalgamation of ardent Tea Party libertarians—concerned over property rights and the over-extended reach of government—and liberal environmentalists who believe the local, organic farm is the ecologically-friendly solution to the nation's health woes. ...

This is a wonderful case study of markets, public policy, and the challenge of crafting appropriate regulation. In many industries, regulation is as much about creating barriers against new competitors entering the industry as it is about safety or protecting consumers. It is a false perception that large corporations do not like regulation. In fact, enlisting government help in erecting barriers to new competitors is an intentional competitive strategy. I don't know if that is necessarily the case here but we can certainly see how adversely impacts small farmers, whether by design or not.

Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

Associated Press: Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

... To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through last June.

Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.

"Everything that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look like science fiction." ...

... So machines are getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession, have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five years, yet continue to operate just as well.

How is that happening?

-Reduced aid from Indiana's state government and other budget problems forced the Gary, Ind., public school system last year to cut its annual transportation budget in half, to $5 million. The school district responded by using sophisticated software to draw up new, more efficient bus routes. And it cut 80 of 160 drivers. ...

... -In South Korea, Standard Chartered is expanding "smart banking" branches that employ a staff of three, compared with an average of about eight in traditional branches. ...

... -The British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced plans last year to invest $518 million in the world's first long-haul, heavy-duty driverless train system at its Pilbara iron ore mines in Western Australia. The automated trains are expected to start running next year. The trains are part of what Rio Tinto calls its "Mine of the Future" program, which includes 150 driverless trucks and automated drills.

Like many technologically savvy startups, Dirk Vander Kooij's furniture-making company in the Netherlands needs only a skeleton crew - four people ...

... -Google's driverless car and the Pentagon's drone aircraft are raising the specter of highways and skies filled with cars and planes that can get around by themselves. ...

... "Trying to keep it from happening would have been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the combustion engine," Lavin says. "You can't stand in the way of technology."

The upside of emerging technology is that most will make goods and services less expensive. That improves our living standard. The downside is that much of the work we used to do in order to earn the wages to buy goods and services is rapidly changing. As the last sentence of the article notes, this is not the first time we have been in these circumstances. Years ago I read that in 1885, approximately 80% of everything we consumed in the U.S. was produced at home. By 1915, 80% was produced outside the home. It created massive economic dislocations. Each time these disruptions occur it has been hard for the people living at that time to foresee what the new economic order would look like.

It is critical that Christian thinkers wrestle with the challenges of technological innovation. Creative destruction (the market dynamic where jobs and industries are destroyed in the wake of creating new ones) has always been a difficult one for ethics. It is painful but the social cost of other alternatives is also quite high. Anti-technological calls to abandon consumerism or, conversely, just saying that “the market will sort it all out,” are not legitimate responses. I think topics like this should be at the center of our theological reflection about human labor and the economy.

Union membership falls to lowest percentage in 76 years

Reuters: Union membership falls to lowest percentage in 76 years

(Reuters) - The percentage of workers belonging to unions tumbled to 11.3 percent in 2012, the lowest percentage in 76 years, led by dramatic declines in states where lawmakers have put organized labor in the political crosshairs, government figures showed on Wednesday.

The total number of union members fell by nearly 400,000, from 11.8 percent of the workforce in 2011, the Labor Department report on union membership said. The rate of 11.3 percent of the workforce was the lowest since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was president. ...

...  Some analysts blame unions for the drop. Membership has been falling since 2008, when it was 16.1 million, or 12.4 percent of the workforce, federal data shows. It peaked in 1954, when 28.3 percent of workers were represented by organized labor.

"They must now admit that they are not investing enough staff and funds in organizing and not embarking on an imaginative journey to rediscover the relevancy of unions," said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. "Essentially, workers are feeling tremendous job insecurity ... Yet as today's figures suggest, workers are not turning to unions to act as their voice." ...

The Collective Turn - David Brooks

New York Times: The Collective Turn - David Brooks

David Brooks captures the essence of my perspective once again.

"... I am not a liberal like Obama, so I was struck by what he left out in his tour through American history. I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, but I’d also mention Wall Street, State Street, Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. I’d emphasize that America has prospered because we have a decentralizing genius.

When Europeans nationalized their religions, we decentralized and produced a great flowering of entrepreneurial denominations. When Europe organized state universities, our diverse communities organized private universities. When Europeans invested in national welfare states, American localities invested in human capital.

America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen by those at the national headquarters. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders who could never have attracted the attention of a president or some public-private investment commission.

I would have been more respectful of this decentralizing genius than Obama was, more nervous about dismissing it for the sake of collective action, more concerned that centralization will lead to stultification, as it has in every other historic instance.

I also think Obama misunderstands this moment. The Progressive Era, New Deal and Great Society laws were enacted when America was still a young and growing nation. They were enacted in a nation that was vibrant, raw, underinstitutionalized and needed taming.

We are no longer that nation. We are now a mature nation with an aging population. Far from being underinstitutionalized, we are bogged down with a bloated political system, a tangled tax code, a byzantine legal code and a crushing debt.

The task of reinvigorating a mature nation is fundamentally different than the task of civilizing a young and boisterous one. It does require some collective action: investing in human capital. But, in other areas, it also involves stripping away — streamlining the special interest sinecures that have built up over the years and liberating private daring. ..."

The last sentence of this paragraph is the key.

"... Obama made his case beautifully. He came across as a prudent, nonpopulist progressive. But I’m not sure he rescrambled the debate. We still have one party that talks the language of government and one that talks the language of the market. We have no party that is comfortable with civil society, no party that understands the ways government and the market can both crush and nurture community, no party with new ideas about how these things might blend together.

But at least the debate is started. Maybe that new wind will come."

Very well said.!

17 Equations That Changed The Course Of Humanity

Business Insider: The 17 Equations That Changed The Course Of Humanity

Mathematician Ian Stewart's recent book "In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World" takes a close look at some of the most important equations of all time.

A great example of the human impact of math is the financial crisis. Black Scholes, number 17 on this list, is a derivative pricing equation that played a role.

"It’s actually a fairly simple equation, mathematically speaking," Professor Stewart told Business Insider. "What caused trouble was the complexity of the system the mathematics was intended to model."

Numbers have power. In this case, people depended on a theoretical equation too seriously and overreached its assumptions.

Without the equations on this list, we wouldn't have GPS, computers, passenger jets, or countless inventions in between.

You can find the book here.

The Pythagorean Theorem

What does it mean: You can multiply numbers by adding related numbers. 

History: Attributed to Pythagoras, it isn't certain that he first proved it. The first clear proof came from Euclid, and it is possible the concept was known 1000 years before Pythoragas by the Babylonians.

Importance: The equation is at the core of geometry, links it with algebra, and is the foundation of trigonometry. Without it, accurate surveying, mapmaking, and navigation would be impossible.

Modern use: Triangulation is used to this day to pinpoint relative location for GPS navigation.

Source: In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

The logarithm and its identities ...

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices

Atlantic: The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices

A new paper reviews how psychology, biology, and neurology are ganging up on economics to prove that, when it comes to making decisions, people are anything but rational.

Daniel McFadden is an economist. But his new paper, "The New Science of Pleasure," shows the many ways economics fails to explain how we make decisions -- and what it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology.

The old economic theory of consumers says that "people should relish choice." And we do. Shopping can be fun, democracy is better than its alternatives, and a diverse and fully stocked grocery store ice cream freezer is quite nearly the closest thing to heaven on earth. But other fields of science tell a more complicated story. First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb. (That's one reason why stores place candy near the check-out aisle: They suspect your brain is too zonked to resist.) Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.

If you've read the work of Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman, you know exactly how far from perfectly rational we are when faced with a decision. Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences. So when we make a choice about how to spend a certain amount of time -- say, by going to Six Flags -- we forget that most of the time at an amusement park is spent waiting around doing nothing. Instead, we remember the thrill of the roller coaster. (This has been previously used to explain why people sometimes go back to disappointing old romantic partners, but that might be for another article.)

The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us. In a fascinating example, McFadden presents a study that shows Korean peasant women within the same village tend to use the same contraception -- even though there is "substantial, persistent diversity across villages." This pattern could not be explained by income, education, or price. Word-of-mouth explained practically all the difference.

In another corner of the ivory tower (or, more likely, across campus in a glassy lab), neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.

A final example to show how other fields of science are ganging up on classical economics: The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.

And there's much more. To explain it, here's Daniel McFadden himself. The following transcript of our email conversation has been very lightly edited for clarity. ...

Interesting stuff!

Martin Luther King Jr. Day: How well do you know MLK? Take the quiz!

Christian Science Monitor: Martin Luther King Jr. Day: How well do you know MLK? Take the quiz!

Martin Luther King Day honors the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. In the 50s and 60s King, a black Southern reverend who advocated nonviolent, peaceful resistance, became the voice of the civil rights movement. King was assassinated in 1968, though his legacy ensured his place in history as an American hero.

In August 2011, the Martin Luther King Memorial opened in Washington D.C. Along with the passage the the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the memorial serves as a permanent reminder of King's work. Test your knowledge of one of America's greatest men in this quiz.

- Laura Edwins, Contributor, Aaron Couch, Contributor

This is a great quiz. I think I got 18 out of 20. See how you do.

Saturday Links

1. I don't know much about Common Good RVA but I like their vision. Christianity Today published a piece featuring them, Why the Rest of Your Week Matters to God

"In general, the church has done a fine job equipping Christians for the "private" areas of their lives: prayer, morality, family life, and so on. However, in general, the church has done a poor job equipping people for the "public" parts of their lives: namely, their work, their vocation. The reality is, most people spend the majority of their time in this latter, "public" area."

And I like this video clip:

CommonGood RVA from This Is Our City on Vimeo.

2. Can we Survive Technology? Written 57 years ago, Fortune resurrected this article by John von Neumann. The editor's note begins:

Editor's note:   Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. This week, to mark our Future Issue, we turn to a feature from June 1955 by John von Neumann tackling the profound questions wrought by radical technical advancement—in von Neumann's day the atomic bomb and climate change. von Neumann was one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential geniuses. The polymath and patron saint of Game Theory was instrumental in developing America's nuclear superiority toward the end of World War II as well as in framing the decades-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. In his time, von Neumann was said to possess "the world's greatest mind." Here is his characteristically pessimistic look on what the future holds.

It is amazing how much of what he wrote remains true today!

3. Human beings are notoriously bad at evaluating probability and risk I hope to do some blogging on this in the not too distant future. For now, Business Insider has 'The Birthday Problem' Shows How Terrible We Are At Estimating Probability.

4. The Atlantic reports on a study concluding Wanting Things Makes Us Happier Than Having Them

"CONCLUSION: Although "materialists' perceptions that acquisition brings them happiness appear to have some basis in reality," that happiness is short-lived, Richins concluded. As such, "The state of anticipating and desiring a product may be inherently more pleasurable than product ownership itself.""

5. One of the most difficult topics to understand in economics is comparative advantage, especially why outsourcing jobs to other countries often is advantageous for both countries. Forbes has a creative piece this week, Is Outsourcing American Jobs Wrong?. However, as the BBC reports American manufacturers come back home, a trend that has been true for a few years now.

6. Whole Foods Founder Says Too Many Companies Get Capitalism Wrong

"In order to fight that perception and reclaim capitalism and business as positive words, businesses have to find a purpose beyond just making money. Profit is necessary for business, Mackey said, but it's necessary in the same way that his body has to produce red blood cells. It's needed, but it's not the sole purpose."

7. Fortune has a great piece on Why innovation is so hard.

"Most business leaders don't understand what makes innovation so different from everything else they do at work -- and they haven't adjusted their behavior to accommodate these differences."

8. We've all been watching Lance Armstrong this week. Beware! Study Finds That Having Power Can Make You Stupid

9. More on the continuing evolution of the print industry in The Growing Adoption of Creative Commons Textbooks and Nation's First Bookless Public Library Could Be in Texas.

10. Paper-Thin Computer Debuts at CES

11. Scientist reveal that Star Wars And Star Trek Got Warp Speed Totally Wrong.

"The science fiction vision of stars flashing by as streaks when spaceships travel faster than light isn't what the scene would actually look like, a team of physics students says.

Instead, the view out the windows of a vehicle traveling through hyperspace would be more like a centralized bright glow, calculations show. ..."

That's all for this week. Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.

Wal-Mart Thinks It Can Fix India's Insanely Bureaucratic Food Supply System

Business Insider: Wal-Mart Thinks It Can Fix India's Insanely Bureaucratic Food Supply System

Last week I linked an article reporting that rich countries are trashing up to half of all food. Our distribution channels are good but we tend to waste a lot of food through our consumption habits. Emerging nations are wasting food too, but for different reasons. Distribution channels are so bad that great quantities of food are wasted in transit. Furthermore, because the distribution channels are so bad, and food must pass through so many middle-men, it is often more expensive than it would otherwise need to be.

Business Insider now reports:

Last fall, following a relaxation in India’s foreign-investment rules, [Wal-Mart] said it was planning to open its first stores in the country in the next two years, tapping into a prized $490 billion retail sector. But to cash in, Wal-Mart and other foreign retailers will have to solve a fundamental problem: how to move goods into stores efficiently in a country that offers big retailers little in the way of modern logistics and is plagued by dilapidated infrastructure.

The hurdles are particularly daunting in the food sector, which makes up more than half of the revenues at the Bentonville, Ark.- based company.

Watch this video by the Wall Street Journal as the document the route of food from field to table. Here the age old cry of the various agents in present decrepit system opposing streamlined distribution for fear of losing their positions. The reality is that if distribution improves, then food will become cheaper, people will have more disposable income, people will eat better, people will become more productive, and all this will in turn lead to the formation of new businesses and jobs. I'm not saying the change will be painless and that some will not suffer in the process but I suspect the trade-off for the masses in terms of improved quality of life is huge.

Indian Road Trip: Produce's Long Haul to Market by WSJ_Live

How Social Entrepreneurs Use Rice Husks to Power India

PBS: How Social Entrepreneurs Use Rice Husks to Power India

Some excerpts:

… FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Despite billions of dollars in new infrastructure, power interruptions are chronic in India. Consumers large and small rely on backup systems, at huge cost to both the environment and economy, says energy expert Kirit Parikh. He traces the problem to policies that never really took into account the cost of power and gave it away to some consumers.

KIRIT PARIKH, energy expert: We started out with saying that farmers should get cheap and free electricity. This was 30 years ago, when we wanted farmers to really adopt more modern technologies. It was considered a good way to promote green revolution.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Power was distributed cheaply or free to farmers and other groups whose votes politicians courted. Little effort was made to meter it. That prompted many people to hook themselves up illegally. Parikh says a third of all power is stolen off the grid. …

… FRED DE SAM LAZARO: … But to anywhere from a third to a half of them, it really didn't matter, because they have never been hooked up to the electric grid.

Vast swathes of rural India remain off the grid or get minimal, unpredictable service from it. …

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Ratnesh Yadav has tried to tackle at least this part of the problem. He and a partner founded a company called Husk Power. Their idea? Village-based micro-grids.

At this one in the village of Patelli (ph) in the northeastern Bihar state, tractors arrive with rice husks, the byproduct of milling this region's staple crop. It is poured into a hopper, about 100 pounds per hour, and gassified to run a simple turbine. Each evening, 700 customers have access to power for five hours. …

… MAN (through translator): We used to work with a gas light. This is much cheaper. We used to stay open until 9:00 in the evening. Now we stay open until 10:00 or 10:30, so it's a benefit. …

… FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In five years, Husk Power has installed 75 of these simple plants. Their networks cover an area no bigger than a couple of square miles, with wires strung on poles made from bamboo, a renewable resource like the rice husk fuel.

RATNESH YADAV: The good thing about this rice husk is, it has no alternate uses. It doesn't burn easily, so you can't use it for cooking. You cannot feed it to cattle because it has high silica in it. So it is a waste. It has no value for anybody else. And that is why -- and it is in plenty. …

… ERIC BERKOWITZ, investor: As people increase income, which hopefully they will, that will create new livelihood opportunities, they will have opportunities to incrementally increase electricity that they will take from these kind of solutions, and maybe add maybe two lights, three lights, a radio, a TV, a refrigerator.

It's not the only solution. There's other solutions that involve solar technologies. And Husk Power is actually looking at those kind of solutions as well.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Renewable fuel plants also qualify for subsidies from India's government and possibly credits in a global carbon trade. Power expert Parikh appreciates what micro-plants can provide, but he doesn't see them as a long-term solution. …

Why Large Corporations?

askblog: Why Large Corporations? - Arnold Kling

Kling writes:

... Some possibilities:

1. Governments want them. Surely, from a “seeing like a state” perspective it is better to have large corporations that are dependent on favors than small firms that are not.

2. There are genuine economies of scale and scope, including network effects.

3. Workers believe that they are more secure working for large corporations, and they are willing to take less compensation as a result. Note that this sort of belief could be self-fulfilling. Note also that it is not terribly consistent with the data: compensation appears to be higher at large firms, although that comparison assumes that the investigator’s idea of objective value of workers is more meaningful than their actual choices.

Think about Google. It needs to retrieve, store, and process huge amounts of data. There are scale economies. Once you have that data, you can benefit from other data, so you want to expand into email, location services, social networking, phones, and anything else that generates data. So there are economies of scope as well.

Maybe that is an exceptional case.

My tendency is to think that economies of scale are fairly common, but economies of scope are relatively rare. I understand big companies that specialize in a relatively narrow capability–something like Fedex, for example. I am less convinced about organizations that branch into many functions, like universities or large financial firms....

I think his last paragraph is an important distinction. The size of the firms in an industry is directly related to the nature of the goods and services offered in that industry. The economies of scale and the technological wherewithal needed to execute the manufacture of a jet versus providing a haircut means a handful of big firms will exist in the former industry and no large firms will exist in the latter.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about having large corporations. They are indispensable in achieving certain ends. That doesn't mean they don't present challenges.

Your Personality Has Everything To Do With How Well You Invest

Business Insider: Your Personality Has Everything To Do With How Well You Invest

As a financial planner, Ray Linder sometimes found that he would give what seemed like solid, reasonable advice to a client that would be met with a surprising level of resistance–one that had more to do with emotions than anything else.

A little digging told him that people handle money differently, according to their personality type, and these differences were often in line with the Myers-Briggs test.

You’ve probably heard of it: The Myers-Briggs test is a psychological profiling exam that was created during WWII. It divides people into extroverts and introverts, and then segments them even more into types that sense vs. intuit, think vs. feel and judge vs. perceive.

It’s kind of complicated, which is why categorizing people into the 16 personality types outlined by the Myers-Briggs test – which you can officially take for a fee – is big business. (The results are often used by recruiters, human resources professionals, salespeople, matchmakers and lawyers in various professional capacities.)

Linder was so interested in the parallels between the Myers-Briggs test and his clients’ approach to finances that he literally wrote the book on it: “What Will I Do With My Money?“

He also consolidated the 16 types into four broader categories: Protectors, Planners, Pleasers and Players.

But he’s careful to point out that there’s no right or wrong place to be within the 16-category universe. Rather, the purpose of figuring all this out is to capitalize on your type’s natural assets – as opposed to shame yourself or beat yourself up.

We tracked down Linder to hear more about the four Ps – Protectors, Planners, Pleasers and Players. ...

I'm a planner. The description describes my investment challenges well.

Happiness, Meaning, and a Theology of Work

The Atlantic: There's More to Life Than Being Happy  This is a fascianting piece on happiness written by Emily Esfahani Smith as she reflects on the difference in between happiness and a meaningful life. I've got some thoughts below but here is one powerful excerpt:

... This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy....

And this is where the church does a great disservice. We form people into clients who look to the church as a route to personal happiness rather than as people who can discern meaning. And this is especially true for a theology of work and daily life. I perceive that the vast majority of Americans either see no meaning in their work as it relates to God's mission in the world or they find great meaning it their work precisely because it is such an important component to achieving the happiness that comes from getting what we want.

For the most part, the church confirms that there is no meaning to daily work. Meaningful work, as it relates to God, is the stuff that happens within the four walls of the church or as an extension of some ecclesiastical initiative. Christian service is framed as an alternative to work-a-day life, an escape from meaningless work into meaningful work. Church leaders correctly perceive that many people see no meaning to their daily existence but the ecclesiastical impulse is to answer the question of meaning over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

I see one of two strategies typically at work. One is to simply avoid saying too much about daily work while offering therapeutic spirituality and opportunities for service that (for some) supplement a daily meaningless existence or (for others) enhances the meaning we find apart from God and God’s mission in the world (essentially supporting idolatry.) The other is to offer prophetic pronouncements against greed and selfishness … correctly challenging idolatries that give false meaning to life … while steering people to participate in just causes like eco-justice, gun-control, or poverty advocacy. False ideologies may be challenged but, once again, the answer is to pursue the meaning question over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

Until the church is willing to honestly wrestle with the meaning of work and daily life, the church will never have be an effective expression of the Kingdom of God.

World GDP Trend

Economist

The world’s middle class will number 5 billion by 2030

Quartz: The world’s middle class will number 5 billion by 2030

Millions of newly affluent people in emerging economies are reshaping and resizing the global middle class. The world’s middle class will swell from 2 billion to almost 5 billion by 2030, with most of that growth coming from developing countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The world population in 2030 is expected to be about 8 billion.

The OECD defines “middle class” as making $10 to $100 a day, adjusted for the purchasing power of each currency. Today, people in developing countries make up almost 30% of the world’s consumer spending, up from 18% a decade ago as they become middle class. This change, what the US National Intelligence Council called a ”tectonic shift,” is one the most important trends for the next several decades. ...

Climate change doesn’t have to be all bad - Zachary Krabell

Reuters: Climate change doesn’t have to be all bad - Zachary Krabell

... But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it? ...

... It does not, however, follow that the future arc of these changes is disastrous. Unwanted, unwelcome and uneasy? For sure. Potentially lethal? Yes. But so much of the debate over the past 30 years has been over what is causing climate change, and how to prevent more change from happening, that comparatively less energy has been spent on adapting to it. In part, those most focused on these issues, from Green parties in Europe to environmentalists in the United States, have often believed that any discussion of mitigating the effects of climate change is tantamount to giving up on preventing it. That has led to a jeremiad mentality, epitomized by Al Gore and the scathing warnings of what lies ahead in his hugely influential 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.

The advantage of that approach was that it alerted many to the dangers of climate change; the disadvantage was that it scared people into passivity and closed fruitful avenues to policies focused on mitigating the effects rather than halting the trend. And while halting the trend might have been feasible (just) 20 years ago, the most we can achieve now is to reduce the rate and intensity of climate change until the world’s population levels off sometime in the middle of the 21^st century. Activists can and should still focus on reducing global emissions, but not at the expense of answering how we will live with the change.

Perhaps in recognition of the need of a new paradigm, “resilience” has quietly become a buzzword. The ever provocative Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his recent book Antifragile argues that only organizations capable of meeting crises can survive crises. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, counties and cities in the Northeast have been contemplating how best to prepare for future weather shocks. That has led to renewed appreciation for cities, such as Rotterdam, that have long undertaken environmental planning organized around the notion that floods will happen no matter what humans do. The challenge isn’t to find a way to prevent floods; it’s to find a way to live with them.

The two approaches could not be more distinct: One warns of catastrophe and attempts to steer away from it. One pragmatically accepts that some undesirable things will happen no matter what. Rotterdam has thus focused both on preventing as much flooding as possible (floodgates) and on urban infrastructure that is as flood-resistant as possible: power grids that have dispersed nodes, waterproof insulation, even floating parts of the city in case of truly severe inundation.

Far from signaling a resignation to climate change, resilience, adaption and mitigation all shift energy away from holding back the tide and toward innovation and creativity in meeting it. ...

I especially like the bolded portion below in thinking about complex human systems

... That approach is imperative not just for climate change but for multiple areas that generate such anxiety about the future. The imbalance of the financial system? Those are only made worse by the false belief that a system could be created where such risks don’t exist; better to find ways to mitigate the risks of a global interconnected financial system than seek, Don Quixote-like, ways to eliminate risk. ...

Some provoactive stuff! I may not entirely agree with his assessment of particular risks but I think his strategy for addressing risk is right on.

Young black men as entrepreneurs

Christian Science Monitor: Hope for US economy: Young black men as entrepreneurs

Young African American men, especially ex-offenders, face high obstacles to employment. That’s where entrepreneurship training comes in. If just 1 in 3 small businesses hired one employee, the US would be at full employment. Young men of color can be crucial to this progress.

... This new non-profit [City Startup Labs] was created to take at-risk young African American men, including ex-offenders, and teach them entrepreneurship, while creating a new set of role models and small business ambassadors along the way. City Startup Labs contends that an alternative education that prepares these young men to launch their own businesses can have far more impact with this population than other traditional forms of job readiness or workforce training.

Today’s economic climate allows employers their pick of candidates, leaving few options for anyone with a record. Young black men, who’ve had no brushes with the law, still routinely face real barriers in getting on a job ladder’s lowest rung.

According to a 2005 Princeton study, “Discrimination in Low Wage Labor Markets,” young white high school graduates were nearly twice as likely to receive positive responses from employers as equally qualified black job seekers. Even without criminal records, black applicants had low rates of positive responses – about the same as the response rate for white applicants with criminal records.

This is where entrepreneurship comes in. For example, a report done by the Justice Policy Institute states that, “…recidivism is higher for those persons who are unable to obtain employment after leaving prison and imposes a high cost on society; and yet employment opportunities are especially limited for ex-convicts. Thus self-employment would be a viable alternative for ex-offenders, at least for those with above average entrepreneurial aptitude…” Someone like a Lawrence Carpenter. ...

... Despite this entrepreneurial divide, black business development has quite a compelling story. According to the Census Bureau, during the period from 2002 to 2007 and before the Great Recession struck, the growth rate of black-owned companies was more than triple the national rate of 18 percent. Revenue generated by black-owned companies increased more than 55 percent to $137.5 billion. Many of those were businesses like Carpenter’s Super Clean Professional Janitorial Services. ...

Saturday Links

1. Too often Westerners perceive African economy as a monolithic basket case. There are actually many regions of that are very hopeful. Ozwald Boateng explains Why entrepreneurs are back in Africa

2. Want a higher paying occupation? Here Are The Jobs With The Biggest Wage Growth Right Now

3. Lots of recent talk about whether or not e-books will ever actually totally supplant hard copy books. This week Mashable explores Why Are People Still Buying CDs? (And people are still buying them.)

4. Speaking of transitions to digital media, Business Insider shows that Old Media Is Alive And Rocking

5. This fascinating chart shows Inflation Since 1775 And How It Took Off In 1933

6. Want to live to a ripe old age? US News reports on What People Who Live to 100 Have in Common.

7. I almost didn't link this article because I could swear I've linked it before. Why Does Deja Vu Happen?

8. Several months ago I saw a speech expert interviewed has offered voice training to a number of famous figures. One was Margaret Thatcher. They showed her speaking in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, after receiving voice training. A big piece of the change was lessening the modulation in tone and pitch, which tends to vary more widely with female voices. The changes were intended to make her sound more authoritative, which both men and women, unjustified as it may be, more often associate with male vocal traits. But apparently, the thing that really triggers gender detection in our language is the way we use S's. Change Your Perceived Gender by Pronouncing S's Differently

9. This has to be a new low technological achievement: a sensor-filled smartfork that tells you when you're eating to much. Medieval Tines: A Brief History of the Fork

10. And this has to be the Holy Grail of technology cool! Star Trek-Inspired 'CommBadge' Gives You Handsfree Access to iPhone, Android

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Water Scarcity and Desalination

A brief discussion with John Lienhard, the Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical Engineering on water Scarcity and Desalination.

Rich Countries Trashing Up To Half Of All Food: Report

Huffington Post: Rich Countries Trashing Up To Half Of All Food: Report

... People in developed countries throw away 30 to 50 percent of the food they purchase, according to a new report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. In total, the researchers estimated, 1.2 to 2 billion tons of food is thrown out every year without reaching a human stomach.

A major reason we're tossing our food is that stores push us to buy too much of it, the report found. Additionally, supermarkets often reject shipments of vegetables and fruits that don't meet their marketing standards. As a result, 30 to 50 percent of food produced on the planet is discarded as useless, even if some of it is perfectly edible.

Similar studies have reached the same conclusion. Americans throw away about 40 percent of all food they purchase, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released in August. ...

My understanding is that there is also food waste in developing nations, though for different reasons. Poor infrastructure and technology lead to spoilage and waste as the food moves from the field to the dinner plate. A combination of more productive agricultural methods and just modest reductions in waste would make food more plentiful without using one more acre of land.

'Don't Ask, Don't Get': How to Fix the Gender Gap in Salary Negotiations

Atlantic: 'Don't Ask, Don't Get': How to Fix the Gender Gap in Salary Negotiations

Many women have trouble asking for more money at work—but it doesn't have to be that way.

... Many women don't know how to ask for the money. So many, in fact, that Carnegie Mellon runs a Negotiation Academy for Women co-founded by Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics. Babcock has also co-authored two books on the subject, Women Don't Ask and Ask For It. In her first book, she offers some troubling statistics:

• Men initiate negotiations about four times as often as women.
• When asked to choose a metaphor to describe the negotiation process, women picked "going to the dentist." For comparison, Men chose "winning a ballgame."
• Women enter negotiations with pessimistic expectations about what wage increases are available, and thus if they do negotiate, they don't ask for much: 30 percent less than men.
• 20 percent of adult women say they never negotiate at all, even when it may be appropriate.

"If you don't ask, you don't get," said Holly Schroth, who holds a doctorate in social psychology and is a senior lecturer at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. ...

Schroth urges female students to vie for larger bonuses and salary increases and offers several strategies. In her experience, women have proven more successful with off-cycle requests, meaning they seek opportunities to negotiate outside of year-end reviews. The best time, Schroth strongly believes, is in the wake of an achievement. ...

Where the Children Are

This graph below comes from a Wall Street Journal article A California Drought: Not Enough Children. It is talking about the impact of this dynamic:

... In 1970, six years after the end of the baby boom, children made up more than one-third of California's population. By 2030, they will account for just one-fifth, according to projections by lead author Dowell Myers, a USC demographer. "We have a massive replacement problem statewide," Mr. Myers said in an interview. ...

It is interesting to see how this dynamic is playing out nationwide.

A Report on the 2010 National Profile of U.S. Nondenominational and Independent Churches

I haven't read the whole report yet but this summary is very interesting.

Hartford Institute for Religion Research: A Report on the 2010 National Profile of U.S. Nondenominational and Independent Churches

... If the nation’s independent and nondenominational churches were combined into a single group they would represent the third largest cluster of religious adherents in the country, following the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention; second largest in the number of churches – following the Southern Baptist. Overall, this research found over 35,000 churches representing more than 12,200,000 adherents. In total, four percent of the US population worships in an independent or nondenominational church.

And the phenomenon is on the rise. Our study identifies a larger number of people engaged in nondenominational churches than Barry Kosmin found in the American Religious Identification Survey in 2008 where they estimated 8 million Americans identified as nondenominational Christians. In their studies, this count was up significantly from only 0.1% or 194,000 in 1990. According to the General Social Survey, the percent of Protestants claiming “no denomination or non-denominational” has risen from roughly four percent in the 1970s to fifteen percent in 2006. (The Ties that Bind: Network Overlap among Independent Congregations Christopher D. Bader Christopher P. Scheitle and Buster Smith).

Pew’s Religious Landscape Study also found significant numbers of Americans affiliate with independent and nondenominational churches, although the exact number and percent is not entirely clear given how they divided their labeling. It is absolutely clear, as Kosmin said recently, that “The rise of non-denominational Christianity is probably one of the strongest trends in the last two decades…. It is nearly as sharp an increase as the no-religion response.” Additionally, the Baylor Survey of Religion report claims non-denominational churches are the fastest growing Protestant churches in America and in 2006, as it is now, they are the second largest Protestant group just behind the Southern Baptist Convention....

... These congregations should be seen as a separate and distinctive religious reality. If we begin to think of them as not just individual aberrant outliers or lone isolated congregations but rather as a unique religious phenomenon – as a distinctive religious market segment – then we can begin to address the question of why they have become so popular in the past few decades. As a group, they are a significant reality – one that demands consideration, study and reflection on why they are so prevalent currently. ...

... Megachurches often get associated with the nondenominational movement but in fact only about 35% of the Protestant churches over 2000 attenders are nondenominational. Nevertheless, roughly half of the nation’s largest and fastest growing Protestant churches, as determined by the most recent Outreach Magazine listing were nondenominational. ...

What do you make of this trend?

China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium

Telegraph: China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium

The Chinese are running away with thorium energy, sharpening a global race for the prize of clean, cheap, and safe nuclear power. Good luck to them. They may do us all a favour.

... The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium -- originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s -- opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima. ...

... The thorium story is by now well-known. Enthusiasts think it could be the transforming technology needed to drive the industrial revolutions of Asia -- and to avoid an almighty energy crunch as an extra two billion people climb the ladder to western lifestyles.

At the least, it could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas -- but on a bigger scale, for much longer, perhaps more cheaply, and with near zero CO2 emissions. ...

... The beauty of thorium is that you cannot have a Fukushima disaster. Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University, who anchor's the UK's thorium research network ThorEA, said the metal must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the process. "There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam," he said. ...

... Yet it leaves far less toxic residue. Most of the mineral is used up in the fission process, while uranium reactors use up just 0.7pc. It can even burn up existing stockpiles of plutonium and hazardous waste.

Cambridge scientists published a tantalising study in the Annals of Nuclear Energy in February showing that it is possible to "achieve near complete transuranic waste incineration" by throwing the old residue into the reactor with thorium.

In other words, it can help clean up the mess left by a half a century of nuclear weapons and uranium reactors, instead of transporting it at great cost to be encased in concrete and buried for milennia. It is why some `greens' such as Baroness Worthington -- a former Friends of the Earth activist -- are embracing thorium. Though there are other reasons.

The thorium molten salt process takes place at atmospheric pressures. It does not require the vast domes of conventional reactors, so costly, and such an eyesore.

You could build pint-size plants largely below ground, less obtrusive than a shopping mall, powering a small town the size of Tunbridge Wells or Colchester. There would be shorter transmission lines, less leakage, and less risk of black-outs. The elegance is irresistible....

About That Overpopulation Problem

Five years ago I wrote a piece called, Technophysio Evolution and Demographic Transition, explaining the dynamics and trends of global population growth and decline. Slate has and excellent article explaining the Demographic Transition Model.

Slate: About That Overpopulation Problem

Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.

The world’s seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.

Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”

A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.

And then it will fall. ...

... Why is this happening? Scientists who study population dynamics point to a phenomenon called “demographic transition.”

“For hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Warren Sanderson, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University, “in order for humanity to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to be very high.” Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out. The same pattern has repeated in countries around the world. Demographic transition, Sanderson says, “is a shift between two very different long-run states: from high death rates and high birthrates to low death rates and low birthrates.” Not only is the pattern well-documented, it’s well under way: Already, more than half the world’s population is reproducing at below the replacement rate. ...

... One of the most contentious issues is the question of whether birthrates in developed countries will remain low. The United Nation’s most recent forecast, released in 2010, assumes that low-fertility countries will eventually revert to a birthrate of around 2.0. In that scenario, the world population tops out at about 10 billion and stays there. But there’s no reason to believe that that birthrates will behave in that way—no one has every observed an inherent human tendency to have a nice, arithmetically stable 2.1 children per couple. On the contrary, people either tend to have an enormous number of kids (as they did throughout most of human history and still do in the most impoverished, war-torn parts of Africa) or far too few. We know how to dampen excessive population growth—just educate girls. The other problem has proved much more intractable: No one’s figured out how to boost fertility in countries where it has imploded. Singapore has been encouraging parenthood for nearly 30 years, with cash incentives of up to $18,000 per child. Its birthrate? A gasping-for-air 1.2. When Sweden started offering parents generous support, the birthrate soared but then fell back again, and after years of fluctuating, it now stands at 1.9—very high for Europe but still below replacement level.

The reason for the implacability of demographic transition can be expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce. But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies. “Women with more schooling tend to have fewer children,” says William Butz, a senior research scholar at IIASA. ...

Economic Incentives and Science

Science Nordic: Science has always been driven by money

There’s no way around it. Money is involved in just about everything. But just how has money affected history’s great scientific discoveries?

We may now come closer to an answer, thanks to a new Danish-led research project, which examines the background of some of the great scientific discoveries of the past 200 years.

The project is headed by Danish science historian Peter C. Kjærgaard, a professor of evolutionary studies at Aarhus University..

By digging into the archives, he aims to trace the money path from the hands of science-minded people to the final research findings.

This method has enabled him to chart the intricate web of economic, scientific and political interests that led to the discovery of the world’s first dinosaur nest in the Gobi Desert in the 1920s.

“We have taken the initial steps towards the first major systematic historical studies of how money has affected the production of scientific knowledge,” says Kjærgaard.

“Regardless of where and when in the history of science we look, we can see that researchers have always depended on money in their work and personal lives. It sounds banal, but it’s important to understand that without money we wouldn’t have the scientific data that we have today.”

The project has so far resulted in four journal articles about the role of money in science. ...

Growth of Health Spending Stays Low

New York Times: Growth of Health Spending Stays Low

WASHINGTON — National health spending climbed to $2.7 trillion in 2011, or an average of $8,700 for every person in the country, but as a share of the economy, it remained stable for the third consecutive year, the Obama administration said Monday.

The rate of increase in health spending, 3.9 percent in 2011, was the same as in 2009 and 2010 — the lowest annual rates recorded in the 52 years the government has been collecting such data.

Federal officials could not say for sure whether the low growth in health spending represented the start of a trend or reflected the continuing effects of the recession, which crimped the economy from December 2007 to June 2009. ...

'Print is Here to Stay': a WSJ article spreads like wildfire

Christian Science Monitor: 'Print is Here to Stay': a WSJ article spreads like wildfire

... What’s more, after “the initial e-book explosion,” the growth rate for e-book sales is slowing from triple-digits to about 34 percent in 2012, suggesting that initial spike in growth was an aberration, a reflection of the technology’s enthusiastic early adopters. In fact, a survey by Bowker Market Research revealed that 59 percent of Americans said they had “no interest” in purchasing an e-reader.

That may be because Americans are shifting from single-purpose e-readers to multi-purpose tablets. As the article pointed out, sales of e-readers are plunging while those of tablets are skyrocketing.

But [Nicholas] Carr sees something deeper in the trend. E-readers have been particularly well-suited to genre novels, like thrillers and romances, “the most disposable of books” that we tend to read quickly and not want to hang onto. By contrast, he notes, we’re less likely to go digital on genres like literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. “Readers of weightier fare,” he posits, “seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call ‘real books’ – the kind you can set on a shelf.”

If that’s the case, argues Carr, e-books may be just another format, “an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback” that readers use for certain genres, the same way we purchase mass-market fiction in paperback and cookbooks in hardcover.

Quite simply, print and digital serve different purposes, Carr concludes. The clinching evidence? According to Pew, nearly 90 percent of e-book readers continue to read physical books. ...

Despite my love of technology, I admit I do not own an e-reader and I have no intention of buying one. (I have read some books using a Kindle ap on my computer or iPhone.) Most of what I read is non-fiction. I highlight and take notes. I want access to those notes for years to come. You don't actually own e-reader books and the noting taking strategies all seem more cumbersome and tenuous than writing in a real book. I think Carr is likely on to something. Only time will tell.

Vertical Farms Solve Land Problem

From the Law of Unintended Consequences File: Grocery Bag Bans

Social Science Research Network: Grocery Bag Bans and Foodborne Illness

Jonathan Klick - University of Pennsylvania Law School; Erasmus School of Law; PERC - Property and Environment Research Center

Joshua D. Wright - George Mason University School of Law

November 2, 2012

Abstract:    
Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.

Saturday Links

1. Building Congregations Around Art Galleries and Cafes as Spirituality Wanes

"... Although the number of evangelical churches in the United States declined for many years, the trend reversed in 2006, with more new churches opening each year since, according to the Leadership Network’s most recent surveys. This wave of “church planting” has been highest among nondenominational pastors, free to experiment outside traditional hierarchies.

“I hear a lot of pastors say, ‘I’m not just trying to be creative and avant-garde, I think this is maybe the last chance for me,’ ” said Doug Pagitt, the founder of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.

Mr. Pagitt has written several books on church innovations, many of which were first developed in the “emergent” church movement of the last decade or among “missional” churches whose practices focus on life outside the church.

Many of their innovations are being adopted by an increasing number of pastors in the mainstream.

..."

2. Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China

... But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.

The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.

Executives at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel say those shifts have convinced many electronics companies that they must also overhaul how they interact with foreign plants and workers — often at a cost to their bottom lines, though, analysts say, probably not so much as to affect consumer prices. As Apple and Foxconn became fodder for “Saturday Night Live” and questions during presidential debates, device designers and manufacturers concluded the industry’s reputation was at risk. ...

3. Yet another reflection on the impact of 3-D printing in Spiegel: Technology May Bring New Industrial Revolution

4. Some states are no longer requiring that cursive writing be taught. The Wall Street Journal laments The Lost Art of the Handwritten Note

5. Speaking writing, an e-company has come up with a new spin on celebrity autographs: Is This Really the Future of the Autograph?

"...Launched in July, the Seattle-based Egraphs' business model is simple, but pretty clever. Fans can peruse the company website to see if their favorite athlete has partnered up with Egraphs. Each player's section has a number of professionally shot action photographs included, typically priced between $25 and $50. The fan pays and sends the athlete a message through the website, including some personal details or memories.

The athlete then receives that message on his custom iPad app, using the the information provided to write a personalized note and electronic autograph on the selected photo. The photo is then sent electronically to the fan, who can save it digitally, share it on social media or order a physical print. Revenue is split between company and athlete. ..."

6. Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

7. Huffington Post ponders whether or not Biblical Baby Names Falling In Popularity

8. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, legalizing abortion across the country. Time magazine has a feature article about the Pro-Choice movement this week that suggests 1973 may have been the high-water mark for the movement. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall. Here is a short clip summarizing their take.

9. Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?

"...Academic Publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices. But as Kevin Carey noted in a recent Slate piece, the industry also shares some of the dysfunctions that help drive up the cost of healthcare spending. Just as doctors prescribe prescription drugs they'll never have to pay for, college professors often assign titles with little consideration of cost. Students, like patients worried about their health, don't have much choice to pay up, lest they risk their grades. Meanwhile, Carey illustrates how publishers have done just about everything within their power to prop up their profits, from bundling textbooks with software that forces students to buy new editions instead of cheaper used copies, to suing a low-cost textbook start-ups over flimsy copyright claims. ..."

10. Feeling thirsty? Consider that Bottled Water Is More Dangerous Than Tap Water.

11. Good news for history mystery buffs. Amelia Earhart Plane And Flight 19 Wreckage Could Be Found By New NOAA Technology

12. Baseball Pitchers like Phil Niekro, Tim Wakefield, and now, R. A. Dickey did their magic throwing a knuckleball. Pitchers who master usually do very well and it puts less stress on the arm. So why don't more pitchers throw it? Why the Knuckleball Isn’t Thrown by More Pitchers in Major League Baseball

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Why Africa Is Essential to America's Future

US News and World Report: Why Africa Is Essential to America's Future

... So, yes, let us acknowledge these problems in Africa, and let us not be romantic about the opportunities that exist in Africa. Instead, let us be realistic about the opportunities, and the reality is that the opportunities for investment, trade, and economic development are almost limitless on the continent of 54 different nations. There are challenges in some places but extraordinary opportunity in other places.

Many parts of Africa are booming and they present the greatest growth opportunities in the world at this time. Accra is a boom town, emerging into a global city. Ghana itself is growing almost as fast. In the Sahel, next to a Mali is a Burkina Faso, which is becoming a regional hub of development and a trading center between Europe and Africa.

Southern Africa is full of promise and has a far more receptive business climate than in many parts of the world, and the work of the East Africa Community is beginning to open the nations of East Africa as important business destinations for the world.

The promise of Africa is recognized internationally by many nations. While we talk much about the Chinese in Africa, so too are the Indians, Malaysians, Japanese, the Arab nations, Turkey, Israel, the Russians, the South Koreans, the Brazilians, and of course the Europeans. Let us also not forget that when energy investment is taken out of the equation, South Africa is a larger investor in the rest of Africa than is the United States. ...

Environmentalist Mark Lynas Changes View on GMOs

Mark Lynas: Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.

These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.

This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.

For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes. ...

Christ Before the Cause: The Rise of a New Evangelical Politics

Peter Wehner has another good post this week following up on his comments last week about Jim Dobson, Christ Before the Cause: The New Evangelical Politics, courtesy of Tim Dalrymple.

...One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that some of the most prominent Christian figures in politics radiate a sense that their work is essential if the Lord is to accomplish His goals on earth. Because they believe so much depends on them, they develop an aggressive, anxious, even desperate spirit. They seem to believe that only they and a few others are strong enough to resist compromising with evil. And over the years they have demonstrated a barely contained disdain toward those who do not share their zeal for their cause. This can create its own set of problems.

I’m reminded here of the cautionary tale of Sheldon Vanauken, who in A Severe Mercy wrote about his days in the anti-Vietnam war movement. “I was one of those caught up in the mood and action oft the 1960s,” Vanauken wrote:

Christ, I thought, would surely have me oppose what appeared an unjust war. But the Movement, whatever its ideals, did a good deal of hating. And Christ, gradually, was pushed to the rear: Movement goals, not God, became first, in fact — not only for me but for other Christians involved, including priests. I now think that making God secondary (which in the end is to make Him nothing) is, quite simply, the mortal danger in social action, especially in view of the marked intimations of virtue — even arrogant virtue — that often perilously accompany it. Some may avoid this danger, perhaps. But I was not obeying the first and greatest commandment — to love God first — nor it is clear that I was obeying the second — to love my neighbour. Hating the oppressors of my neighbor isn’t perhaps quite what Christ had in mind.

Over the years, some politically active Christian leaders seem to believe that at stake in their work is nothing less than the influence of Christianity in America, as if Christ depends on them instead of the other way around. There are multiple effects to such a mindset, including apocalyptic rhetoric and absolutism. At some point, though, characterizing every election and every important piece of social legislation as a moral tipping point for America begins to wear thin.

My own sense of things is that an increasing  number of evangelicals, particularly younger evangelicals, want their brand of politics to be less partisan and bitter than in the past, as well as more high-minded and more firmly rooted in principles. They want their leaders to display a lighter touch, a less distraught and angry spirit, a more gracious tone. In short, they seem to be looking for a politics that is both moral and civil. And they are thirsting for more serious Christian reflection on human society and the human person — on first principles. ...

How Religion Is Making a Comeback on College Campuses

The Daily Beast: How Religion Is Making a Comeback on College Campuses

A dramatic shift in the global landscape has made religion a pressing issue on college campuses again. Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, authors of No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education, on how higher education found faith.

One in three Americans under the age of 30 reports being religiously unaffiliated, so it may be a surprise to learn that religion is making a comeback on American campuses. It’s not that campuses have become holy places, and religious zealots are not calling the shots. But religion is no longer marginalized from campus life as it was in the late 20th century. A generation ago, many Americans and most colleges and universities could live with the myth that religion was a purely private matter, but today no one questions that religion can have powerful effects on individuals and societies. ...

The Rise of Latin (mass) Youth

Real Clear Politics: The Rise of Latin Youth

Liberal bishops dismissed Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI's apostolic constitution authorizing wider use of the traditional Latin mass, as a bone thrown to over-the-hill conservatives. But Pope Benedict XVI probably wrote it more for the young than the old. ...

... The secular press covers youth interest in the traditional Latin mass far more respectfully. The Economist recently reported on the "traditionalist avant-garde." The old mass, it found, isn't petering out but picking up some speed: "The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, started in 1965, now has over 5,000 members. The weekly number of Latin masses is up from 26 in 2007 to 157 now. In America it is up from 60 in 1991 to 420. At Brompton Oratory, a hotspot of London traditionalism, 440 flock to the main Sunday Latin mass. That is twice the figure for the main English one."

The influx of conservative Anglicans has bolstered these numbers a bit: "Dozens of Anglican priests have 'crossed the Tiber' from the heavily ritualistic 'smells and bells' high-church wing; they find a ready welcome among traditionalist Roman Catholics."

But the principal source of growth comes from youth interest. "Like evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism is attracting people who were not even born when the Second Vatican Council tried to rejuvenate the church," says The Economist. "Traditionalist groups have members in 34 countries, including Hong Kong, South Africa and Belarus. Juventutem, a movement for young Catholics who like the old ways, boasts scores of activists in a dozen countries."

Self-consciously "relevant" Catholicism is increasingly seen by the young as irrelevant. Youth masses that try to imitate the trends of the world, often lamely, generate only sporadic attendance. ...

Are there lessons here for the Protestant world?

Peter Enns "6 Helpful Hints for Blog Commenters So You Can Avoid Looking Criminally Insane"

Peter Enns: 6 Helpful Hints for Blog Commenters So You Can Avoid Looking Criminally Insane

Enns writes:

I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now, and most of the comments I get are engaging–whether pro or con–and it’s been great fun and I’ve learned much from many of you.

But over the past year, mainly since my book The Evolution of Adam came out, I’ve seen an increase in comments that leave me wondering whether having an internet connection should be as closely regulated as becoming a foster parent.

So, for this next year, as you comment on my posts, please try to keep the following helpful hints in mind.

1. I hesitate saying this because it takes all the fun out of it, but blog posts are editorials, i.e., opinion pieces, meant to provoke conversation and stimulate minds. My thinking and experience fuel these posts, of course, and I stick by them, but they are also works in progress, not final “here I stand” moments. That’s why I allow comments.

2. Blog titles capture the emotive thrust of blog posts; they are not literal distillations of blog content. For example, ...

Read the whole thing. Good stuff!

 

Maybe “The Big Sort” Never Happened

The Monkey Cage: Maybe “The Big Sort” Never Happened

Many readers will remember the book The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.  It argues that Americans are increasingly clustered in like-minded political communities.  If one categorizes a county by how its residents voted in presidential elections, as of 2004 nearly half (48%) of Americans lived in “landslide” countries where one presidential candidate got at least 60% of the vote.  In 1976, that number was 27%.

A new article (currently and graciously ungated) by political scientists Samuel Abrams and Morris Fiorina challenges this account, however.  Abrams and Fiorina argue that presidential voting is not a reliable indicator of partisanship, as voting may depend on idiosyncratic features of candidates.  Better, they argue, is party registration, which more reliably measures people’s underlying partisan preference (if any).

When landslide counties are identified using party registration and this same 60/40 threshold, the trend is the complete opposite of a Big Sort.  The fraction living in such counties was 50% in 1976; in 2008, it was 15%.  This same conclusion emerges using thresholds lower than 60/40.

Abrams and Fiorina conclude: ...

I think Bishop's thesis is right. Still, it is interesting to hear some skeptical analysis.

Chinese Academics Are Openly Warning Of 'Violent Revolution' Without Reform

Business Insider: Chinese Academics Are Openly Warning Of 'Violent Revolution' Without Reform

A group of Chinese intellectuals has called on the government to implement urgent political reforms and respect human rights or risk "violent revolution".

In an open letter 71 top academics warned that growing economic imbalances were fuelling social unrest and an uprising could erupt if reforms were not implemented immediately, Hu Xingdou, one of the signatories, told AFP Monday.

"If urgent systematic reforms needed by Chinese society continue to suffer setbacks and stagnate, then official corruption and social dissatisfaction will boil up to a crisis point," said the letter, posted on the Internet last week.

"China will once again miss the opportunity for peaceful reform, and slip into the turbulence and chaos of violent revolution." ...

... While the latest call for reform steered away from Charter 08's advocacy of western-style democracy, it called on the Communist Party fully to implement the freedoms of speech, press and association that are protected by the constitution but routinely ignored by the authorities and police. ...