... He [Phil Pliat at Slate] also rattles off a list of anti-science Congressmen, all Republicans. Excluded from his list are the 53 Democratic Congressmen and Senators
(compared to only two Republicans) who wrote a letter to the FDA
demanding labels on genetically modified food. This policy position is
in direct opposition to that held by organizations representing
America’s finest scientists and doctors – the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Medical Association (AMA).
Plait also failed to mention the group of Democratic Congressmen who
support a resolution proposing a new hypothesis about global warming:
That climate change will cause an increase in the number of hookers around the globe.
Also AWOL from Plait’s list is Tom Harkin, the quack-loving,
homeopathy-pushing Senator from Iowa who is responsible for helping
legitimize alternative medicine. Such pseudoscientific voodoo has done
more to harm average Americans than any misguided teachings on evolution
or climate change.
Plait goes on to lament how scientific reports were censored in the
“Bad Old Days” of the George W. Bush administration. He conveniently
leaves out that the Obama Administration purposefully withheld information from scientists during the BP oil spill and doctored documents
to make it appear as if scientists agreed with the drilling moratorium
they implemented. And he did not mention that the Obama administration interfered with the FDA’s approval of genetically modified salmon. ...
... Finally, at the end of the article, Plait makes something of a confession:
I know I focus a lot on these attacks coming from the far right—because that’s where the overwhelming majority originate—but in truth they’re coming from all directions, and it’s up to us to do something about it. [Emphasis added]
Wrong. Plait focuses on the far right because he is a partisan. He
ignores the equally massive volume of anti-science garbage coming from
the far left because he sympathizes with that side of the aisle. It is
confirmation bias combined with motivated forgetting. ...
Business Insider has these three interesting graphs from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Personal taxes are a little below the forty year average but federal spending including transfers is near all time highs, mostly due to an explosion in transfer payments. There is some good news from the New York Times: The Incredible Shrinking Budget Deficit
... The number crunchers at Goldman Sachs have lowered their estimates of
the deficit both this year and next, on the back of
higher-than-expected revenues and lower-than-projected spending.
Analysts started the year projecting that the deficit in the current
fiscal year would be about $900 billion. Earlier this year, they lowered
the estimate to $850 billion. Now they have lowered it again, to $775
billion, or about 4.8 percent of economic output.
“Spending in the fiscal year to date is lower than a year ago and the
nominal growth rate is lower than it has been in decades,” the Goldman
economists wrote in a note to clients. “Revenues have also exceeded
expectations, with a 12 percent gain fiscal year to date. What is more
notable is that the strength in revenues preceded the payroll tax hike
at the start of the year, and the spending decline does not seem to
reflect sequestration, which has just started to take effect.” To
translate: the deficit could come in even smaller than currently
anticipated because of spending cuts and higher tax rates. ...
Not everyone is as postive about the growth projections. See the NYT piece for more details
Someday I'm actually going to finish reading Haidt's book but in the meantime I found this article fascinating. I think it fits well as I try to listen to the narratives and values underlying confrontation over controversial issues.
... I conducted interviews to find out how people feel about harmless taboo violations—for example, a family that eats its pet dog after the dog was killed by a car, or a woman who cuts up her nation’s flag to make rags to clean her toilet. In all cases the actions are performed in private and nobody is harmed; yet the actions feel wrong to many people—they found them disgusting or disrespectful. In my interviews, only one group of research subjects—college students in the United States—fully embraced the principle of harmlessness and said that people have a right to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. People in Brazil and India, in contrast, had a broader moral domain—they were willing to condemn even actions that they admitted were harmless. Disgust and disrespect were sufficient grounds for moral condemnation.
I had predicted those cross-national differences. What I hadn’t predicted was that differences across social classes within each nation would be larger than differences across nations. In other words, college students at the University of Pennsylvania were more similar to college students in Recife, Brazil, than they were to the working-class adults I interviewed in West Philadelphia, a few blocks from campus. There’s something about the process of becoming comparatively well-off and educated that seems to shrink the moral domain down to its bare minimum—I won’t hurt you, you don’t hurt me, and beyond that, to each her own. ...
... Drawing on the work of many anthropologists (particularly Richard Shweder at the University of Chicago) and many evolutionary biologists and psychologists, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that there are six best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral mind: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.
Moral foundations theory helped to explain the differing responses to those harmless taboo violations (the dog-eating and flag-shredding). Those stories always violated the Loyalty, Authority, or Sanctity foundations in ways that were harmless. My educated American subjects (who, in retrospect, I realize were mostly liberal) generally rejected those three foundations and had a moral “cuisine” built entirely on the first three foundations; so if an action doesn’t harm anyone (Care/Harm), cheat anyone (Fairness/Cheating), or violate anyone’s freedom (Liberty/Oppression), then you can’t condemn someone for doing it. But in more traditional societies, the moral domain is broader. Moral “cuisines” are typically based on all six foundations (though often with much less reliance on Liberty), and it is perfectly sensible to condemn people for homosexual behavior among consenting adults, or other behaviors that challenge traditions or question authority.
Everyone values the first three foundations, although liberals value the Care foundation more strongly. For example, they show the strongest agreement with assertions such as “Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” But this difference on Care is small compared to the enormous difference on items such as these: “People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong.” “Respect for authority is something all children need to learn.” “People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed.” Those three items come from the scales we use to measure the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, respectively. You can see how social conservatives, whose morality rests in large part on those foundations, don’t see eye to eye with liberals. Basically, liberals want to loosen things up, especially in ways that they believe will make more room for women, African Americans, gay people, and other oppressed groups to escape from traditional strictures, express themselves, and succeed. Conservatives want to tighten things up, especially in ways that they perceive will help parents to raise more respectful and self-controlled kids, and will assist the police and other authorities in maintaining order. You can see how those disagreements led to battle after battle on issues related to sexuality, drug use, religion, family life, and patriotism. You can see why liberals sometimes say that conservatives are racist, sexist, and otherwise intolerant. You can see why social conservatives sometimes say that liberals are libertine anarchists. ...
Defense mechanisms against emotional ambivalence incline us to fully embrace one side and fully reject the other -- which makes compromise nearly impossible.
... Such rhetoric reflects a black-and-white, us-versus-them approach that
views each debate over taxation, social policy and the role of
government not as a problem in need of a solution but a
battle within an ongoing war. During warfare, our aim is of course to
vanquish the enemy and emerge
victorious; to reach out to your enemy makes you a villainous collaborator,
a traitor to your cause. On the right, anyone with the temerity to
suggest that Obama and the Democrats have some redeeming qualities
is likely to be attacked from within the party. Just ask Chris Christie.
Propaganda during wartime typically dehumanizes the enemy. Our
current political rhetoric likewise relies on two-dimensional
caricatures to de-legitimize
the opposition, encouraging us to hate "them." The process is more
blatantly vocal on the political right, with the radio voices of
conservatism inciting
hatred for cartoon versions of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, members of
the liberal press, etc. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to compare Obama to Adolf Hitler,
the epitome of unalloyed
evil. While less obvious, the left has its own set of
two-dimensional villains to hate: greedy and heartless bankers, evil
corporations, gun-toting
religious freaks.
For both sides, the Other often lacks true dimension. In propaganda,
the enemy never has a legitimate point of view that needs to be taken
seriously and
balanced against our own views. Hating an enemy leaves no room for
complex, ambiguous problems without an obvious solution. It eliminates
the uncomfortable
tension that arises from doubt and uncertainty amidst difficult
choices. ...
I'm not convinced that "... process is more
blatantly vocal on the political right ..." but other than that I think he is on to something.
... As the neurologist Robert Burton has noted
, ambiguity or confusion is so difficult for many of us to bear that we instead retreat from it into a feeling of certainty,
believing we know
something without any doubts, even when we actually don't and often
can't know. Those of us who have trouble with such discomfort often
resort to
black-and-white thinking instead. Rather than feeling uncertain or
ambivalent, struggling with areas of gray, we reduce that complexity to
either/or.
We may define one idea or point of view as bad (black) and reject it, aligning ourselves with the good
(white) perspective. Feelings of
anger and self-righteousness often accompany this process,
bolstering our conviction that we are in the right and the other side in
the wrong. Hatred for
the rejected point of view keeps ambiguity and uncomfortable
complexity from re-entering the field.
Black-and-white thinking reflects the psychological process known as splitting. When we feel unable to tolerate the tension aroused by complexity,
we "resolve" that complexity by splitting it into two
simplified and opposing parts, usually aligning ourselves with one of
them and rejecting the
other. As a result, we may feel a sort of comfort in believing we
know something with absolute certainty; at the same time, we've
over-simplified a complex
issue.
On the emotional front, splitting comes into play when we feel
hostile toward the people we love. Holding onto feelings of love in the
presence of anger
and even hatred is a difficult thing for most of us to do. Sometimes
hatred proves so powerful that it overwhelms and eclipses love,
bringing the
relationship to an end. More often we repress awareness of our
hostile feelings; or we might split them off and direct them elsewhere, away from
the people we care about.
In other words, splitting as a psychological defense mechanism
resolves emotional ambivalence -- love and hatred toward the same person
-- by splitting off
one half of those feelings and directing them elsewhere, away from
the loved one. ...
And when you consider that a great many of the challenges we confront are polarities to be managed, not problems to be solved, our battles to be won, all sorts of dysfunction emerges from splitting. By analogy, try splitting inhaling from exhaling and see what happens. I think the same is true for many problems we face in social institutions and in society at large.
1. Conventional wisdom says wearing the red shirt in Star Trek will get you killed. Not so fast. Statistical analysis in Significance Magazine disagrees. (Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration)
"... In spite of wearing a redshirt, there is
only an 8.6% chance of a member of the operations or engineering
departments becoming a casualty. These personnel should ensure that
their life insurance plans are based on their departments and not their
uniform color.
Although Enterprise crew members in
redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other
uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold
uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the
entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek.
This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of
blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being
a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of
security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance
that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this
red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining
redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single
population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.
Red uniform shirts are safe, as long as the wearer is not in the security department."
2. Interesting piece on automation in the Economist: Robocolleague
Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers. ...
... Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for
workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show
surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University
and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example,
computerisation and automation have displaced “middle-skilled” workers
at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has
increased. This “hollowing out” is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note.
Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans,
like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile
production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and
white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation’s
insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass
unemployment. Quite the opposite.
The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine
tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a
skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of
workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where
labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The
relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they
choose how to deploy new technologies. ...
Indie Capitalism has three foundational principles:
• Creativity generates economic value.
Creativity is the source of profit. Yes, efficiency can squeeze more
out of what exists, but creativity gives us originality, which
translates into a market advantage and big margins.
• Creativity drives capitalism.
These past few years we have been victimized by the disastrous results
of “creativity” applied to the financial sector (mortgage-backed
securities, for starters). What we lost sight of is that the scaling of
creativity to actually make things of value sold in the marketplace is
the true heart of our economic system. It is the true generator of net
new jobs, wealth, and tax revenue.
• Creative destruction is crucial to economic growth.
Crony capitalism, which relies on monopoly and political power, is
antithetical to entrepreneurial capitalism. A faster cycle of birth,
growth, and death of companies boosts creativity, economic value, and
growth.
The bottom line: For the first time in decades, several key economic drivers have created a competitive advantage for the U.S. that will encourage corporate strategic decisions on capital allocation and acquisitions for generations to come.
Here's why:
1. Cheap and abundant natural gas. ...
2. Innovation. Despite talk of a brain drain, the U.S. remains the global innovation leader, maintaining a position enjoyed for 50 years. ...
3. Rule of law. Without the means to protect intellectual property, it cannot be exploited for competitive advantage. ...
4. Human capital. The wage gap between the U.S. and China has been shrinking. ...
5. De-complexity. Western multinationals continue to struggle with management of operations in developing countries. ...
6. Public policy and abundance. The federal government appears to be seizing the opportunity to promote job growth at home.
7. Credit, currency and the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions.
"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.
If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. ..."
Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand,
whether it’s breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs
or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are
trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or
the other.
But how would military operations change if soldiers on the
battlefield could have the best of both worlds: access to expert
engineers able to fabricate custom-designed fixes right on-the-spot and
in very little time? ...
"It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D
printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change
and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:
Natural systems obviously have this built in — the
ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire
to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of
photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely
difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or
need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or
the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the
processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic
instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial
or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure,
mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale
quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms."
The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the
digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year
for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought
recovery might have begun.
The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5
billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at
its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the
record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday
by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide
significant encouragement.
8. Teleworking: The myth of working from home from the BBC. "Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?"
"Reasons for high unemployment among the young include ineffective education systems (the share of early school dropouts is 20% in Italy and 30% in Spain) and dual labour markets with highly protected jobs for older employees. The good performance of Germany is not least a result of the German apprenticeship system, which facilitates labour market access for school leavers by lowering the company’s costs for employing them. The OECD’s latest “Going for Growth” report recommends reforms to strengthen the vocational training systems as one of the most effective ways to fight structural youth unemployment. This would also be a reasonable starting point for the EU’s youth employment programme."
"What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research,
it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects
the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format:
fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and
retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study
habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will
certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the
particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book."
The Catholic Church has struggled to bring in young members in the
United States. Less than half of U.S. Hispanics between 18 and 29
identify as Catholic, compared with the 60+ percent of Hispanics older
than 50.
The narrative of decline in the mainline church underestimates the continuing influence of its members, says a religion researcher.
16.Some interesting observations by NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He says we tend to process our social world through three lenses: Social distance, hierarchy, and disgust. Conservatives tend to have a lower threshold of revulsion while liberals, and praticularly libertarians, have a higher threshold.
Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.
"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are
thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new
survey shows.
Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance
surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said
they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years.
Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat
negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."
... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...
... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...
... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...
... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...
5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea
"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.
This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."
8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.
Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the
nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011
American Community Survey.
With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are
multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the
U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to
execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a
Latino market perceived to be homogenous?
11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”
"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an
enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about
the scarcity of resources. (If you belong to both of those groups,
there is little advice that I can offer.) However, in between those
poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."
... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.
Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...
... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs,
however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political
party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In
comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party
correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents'
political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the
researchers wrote. ...
STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.
He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...
... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...
Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new
meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed
not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the
building blocks for cutting-edge materials.
Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the
director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for
Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...
Not so long ago, most ecclesiastical officials and Catholic academicians emphasized solidarity as a political
ideal. Owing to a common misunderstanding of both government and
solidarity, that emphasis was almost always at the expense of
subsidiarity. In recent years, however, the tide in favor of
subsidiarity has begun to turn.
It remains true that concern for the poor and marginalized must be a
significant political priority, reflected in how we conceive and use
government. But what too many Catholics missed for much of the twentieth
century was that solidarity is not really a political virtue
at all, whereas subsidiarity is. Solidarity is the concern of all for
all. It is the sense of responsibility we are all supposed to have for
each other. It leads to that true care and reciprocity which are the
marks of a healthy society, and it is prior to politics and government.
But insofar as solidarity has been incorrectly viewed as a political
virtue, too many Catholics have insisted on the need to mimic solidarity
by using government to enforce what they think the results of
solidarity should look like. ...
... In contrast, the principle of subsidiarity is distinctively a political
virtue, though not exclusively so. Based on the truth that human dignity
includes the right and the duty of persons to freely participate in the
solutions to their own problems, the principle of subsidiarity states
that everything should be done at the lowest possible level of
organization, and that whenever something more is needed, higher levels
of organization are obliged to assist lower levels rather than to
supplant them. This means that in the political order the virtue of
subsidiarity actually preserves and fosters the conditions within which
solidarity can flourish, even if solidarity does not necessarily
flourish as a direct result. ...
Politicians from both right and left could learn from the Nordic countries.
...The idea of lean Nordic government will come as a shock both to
French leftists who dream of socialist Scandinavia and to American
conservatives who fear that Barack Obama is bent on “Swedenisation”.
They are out of date. In the 1970s and 1980s the Nordics were indeed
tax-and-spend countries. Sweden’s public spending reached 67% of GDP in
1993. Astrid Lindgren, the inventor of Pippi Longstocking, was forced to
pay more than 100% of her income in taxes. But tax-and-spend did not
work: Sweden fell from being the fourth-richest country in the world in
1970 to the 14th in 1993.
Since then the Nordics have changed course—mainly to the right.
Government’s share of GDP in Sweden, which has dropped by around 18
percentage points, is lower than France’s and could soon be lower than
Britain’s. Taxes have been cut: the corporate rate is 22%, far lower
than America’s. The Nordics have focused on balancing the books. While
Mr Obama and Congress dither over entitlement reform, Sweden has
reformed its pension system (see Free exchange). Its budget deficit is 0.3% of GDP; America’s is 7%.
On public services the Nordics have been similarly pragmatic. So long
as public services work, they do not mind who provides them. Denmark
and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a
universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools
competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that
you can top up. When it comes to choice, Milton Friedman would be more
at home in Stockholm than in Washington, DC.
All Western politicians claim to promote transparency and technology.
The Nordics can do so with more justification than most. The
performance of all schools and hospitals is measured. Governments are
forced to operate in the harsh light of day: Sweden gives everyone
access to official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off
their bicycles and into official limousines. The home of Skype and
Spotify is also a leader in e-government: you can pay your taxes with an
SMS message.
This may sound like enhanced Thatcherism, but the Nordics also offer
something for the progressive left by proving that it is possible to
combine competitive capitalism with a large state: they employ 30% of
their workforce in the public sector, compared with an OECD average of
15%. They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene
even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo
is now owned by China’s Geely. But they also focus on the long term—most
obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund—and they
look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects. Denmark, for
instance, has a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for
employers to sack people but provides support and training for the
unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks. ...
"The Easterlin paradox suggest that in terms of human happiness -- a
squishy concept to be sure -- there is a limit to economic growth beyond
which there really is just no point in attaining more wealth. Further, a
decoupling between income and happiness at some threshold would imply
that GDP would not be a good measure of welfare, we would need some
other metric.
A recent paper (PDF) by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argues that the Easterlin paradox is also wrong. ..."
"Why isn't there more outrage about the president's unilateral targeted assassination program on the left?"
5. Arnold Kling with an interesting piece on the role of Jews in the rise of the modern urbanized economic order. The Unintended Consequences of God
"In those days, most people were farmers, for whom literacy’s costs
generally outweighed its benefits. However, in an urbanized society
with skilled occupations, literacy pays off. As urbanization gradually
increased in the late Middle Ages, Jews came to fill high-skilled
occupations. Botticini and Eckstein argue that literacy, rather than
persecution, is what led Jews into these occupations."
"But while progressives would clearly mock this policy [trickle-down economics], modern day
urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics,
though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as
being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to
the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that
employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that
somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair."
8. Mark Perry excerpts a quote from green libertarian John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market.
“Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.”
9. Economist Gavin Kennedy with some interesting thoughts on the relationship between the state and the economy in developing nations:
The problem is to achieve the right balance between a competitive market economy and an effective state: markets where possible; the state where necessary.
11. Great piece about yet another way family life is changing. Yes, I’m a Homemaker
I’m a guy. My wife works. We’ve got no kids. I’m a stay-at-home dude.
"... What a sweet picture this conjures: the stay-at-home dad nurturing his
children, looking after the house and helping support his wife in her
budding career and shelving his own big ambitions for later. Now it gets
a little awkward. There is no adorable kid, nor plans to have one. No
starter home that needs knocking into shape. I'm not just doing this
temporarily until I find something meaningful to do. I’m
actually a full-time homemaker ... not stay-at-home dad but stay-at-home
dude. A conversational pause. Where do you mentally file this guy?
Usually I just change the subject. ..."
A new study shows that high-earning women are more likely to let their houses be messy than to hire a housekeeper or get their husbands and kids to pitch in. ...
... "You can purchase substitutes for your own time, you can get your husband to do more, or you can all just do less," Killewald says. "Whether women outsource housework in particular has less to do with resources, but whether or not paid labor is viewed as an appropriate strategy for undertaking domestic work.
Doing less housework seems to be a popular option. ...
Psychiatrists have
concluded that males take longer to assess facial expressions as their
brains have to work twice as hard to work out whether another person
looks friendly or intelligent.
In particular, researchers found that 40% of people say they would avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook, while 50% say they would not avoid a person who unfriended them. Women were more likely than men to avoid someone who unfriended them, the researchers found.
... Libraries are responding to the decline of print in a variety of creative ways, trying to remain relevant – especially to younger people – by embracing the new technology. Many, such as New York’s Queens Public Library, are reinventing themselves as centers for classes, job training, and simply hanging out. In one radical example, a new $1.5 million library scheduled to open in San Antonio, Texas, this fall will be completely book-free, with its collection housed exclusively on tablets, laptops, and e-readers. “Think of an Apple store,” the Bexar County judge who is leading the effort told NPR. It’s a flashy and seductive package.
But libraries are about more than just e-readers or any other media, as important as those things are. They are about more than just buildings such as the grand edifices erected by Carnegie money, or the sleek and controversial new design for the New York Public Library’s central branch. They are also about human beings and their relationships, specifically, the relationship between librarians and patrons. And that is the relationship that the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder’s Paul G. Allen is seeking to build in a recent round of grants to libraries in the Pacific Northwest. ...
3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more,
but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human
embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer,
researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and
tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed
valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a
specific pattern.
"... President Obama was also right, from a Millennials’ perspective, to
emphasize the need for America to become a leader in sustainable energy
technologies. Seventy-one percent of Millennials believe
America’s energy policy should focus on developing “alternative
sources of energy such as wind, solar and hydrogen technology; only a
quarter believes that it should focus on “expanding exploration and
production of oil, coal and natural gas.” Similarly, the RICN’s “Blueprint for a Millennial America,”
a report prepared by thousands of Millennials who participated in
their “Think 2040” project, placed the development and usage of
renewable sources of energy at the top of all other environmental
initiatives.
The participants’ proposed solutions to the challenge, however, were
not focused on the kind of top-down change so common to Boomers.
.Instead the proposals emphasized taking action at the community
level. No one, the RICN blueprint said , should be asked to “make
sacrifices without fully considering the cost to communities” whose
“texture” is most likely to be impacted dealing with the challenge.
Many politicians fail to notice this unique Millennial perspective.
Members of the generation disagree sharply with their elders on the
best way to address environmental challenges, preferring to tackle them
through individual initiative and grassroots action rather than a
heavy-handed top down bureaucratic approach. ..."
That last sentence gives me hope for the future. ;-)
Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!
"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've
identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall
flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those
elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic
plan."
"In this way a conception of subsidiarity “from below” is focused on the location of sovereignty from the “bottom up” rather than on the delegation of authority from the “top down.” We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity “from above” and “from below” that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of “sphere sovereignty” in the late nineteenth century and beyond."
"Pally’s essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have “left the right.” But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’ve left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."
"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.
But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."
10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)
From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.
Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.
12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before
"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."
15. Okay purists, Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff. Pitchers will no longer be able to fake a throw to third before throwing to another base. Good idea or bad?
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.
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.
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.
"... 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.” ..."
"UCLA's survey of incoming
college freshmen shows fewer identify as liberals and an increasing
number saying the economy significantly affected their college choice."
"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."
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.
(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." ...
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."
...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. ...
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.
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. ...
... Moreover, there are sound reasons why a conservative would support a welfare state. Historically, it has been conservatives like the 19th century chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, who established the welfare state in Europe. They did so because masses of poor people create social instability and become breeding grounds for radical movements.
In postwar Europe, conservative parties were the principal supporters of welfare-state policies in order to counter efforts by socialists and communists to abolish capitalism altogether. The welfare state was devised to shave off the rough edges of capitalism and make it sustainable. Indeed, the conservative icon Winston Churchill was among the founders of the British welfare state.
American conservatives, being far more libertarian than their continental counterparts, reject the welfare state for both moral and efficiency reasons. It creates unhappiness, they believe, and inevitably becomes bloated, undermining incentives and economic growth.
One problem with this conservative view is its lack of an empirical foundation. Research by Peter H. Lindert of the University of California, Davis, shows clearly that the welfare state is not incompatible with growth while providing a superior quality of life to many of those left to sink or swim in America.
In a new paper for the New America Foundation, Professor Lindert summarizes his findings. He points out that there are huge efficiencies in providing pensions and health care publicly rather than privately. A main reason is that in a properly run welfare state, benefits are nearly universal, which eliminates vast amounts of administrative overhead necessary to decide who is entitled to benefits and who isn’t, as is the case in America, and eliminates the disincentives to work resulting from benefit phase-outs. ...
(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)
1. Pray for Egypt Today!
More than 50 million Egyptians are voting today on a constitution that would be a giant step backward for Egypt and much of the Middle East, marginalizing women and religious minorities. A nation that has historically been a voice of moderation, the largest Muslim nation in the region, will likely move toward becoming an Islamist state. Remember to pray for Egypt. (See the Economist'sThe Founding Brothers)
2. Our prayers are with families of the victims at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Grace and peace to the entire community.
Traffic deaths in the USA continued their historic decline last year,
falling to the lowest level since 1949, the government announced
Monday.
A total of 32,367 motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians died in 2011,
a 1.9% decrease from 2010. Last year’s toll represents a 26% decline
from 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
said. ...
... The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as
well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The
state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white
students.
“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have
any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health
commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in
the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011....
....The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells. ...
... The research is still in its early stages, and many questions remain.
The researchers are not entirely sure why the treatment works, or why it
sometimes fails. One patient had a remission after being treated only
twice, and even then the reaction was so delayed that it took the
researchers by surprise. For the patients who had no response
whatsoever, the team suspects a flawed batch of T-cells. The child who
had a temporary remission apparently relapsed because not all of her
leukemic cells had the marker that was targeted by the altered T-cells. ...
....In 2011, 1.4 million chlamydia infections were reported to the CDC.
The rate of cases per 100,000 people increased 8%, to 457.6 in 2011 from
423.6 in 2010.
The CDC reported 321,849 gonorrhea infections. The
rate increased 4% to 104.2 cases per 100,000 in 2011 from 100.2 in
2010. Like chlamydia, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease,
a major cause of infertility in women.
Last year, 13,970 primary and secondary syphilis cases were reported. The rate of 4.5 cases per 100,000 was unchanged from 2010. ...
7. You may be bilingual but can you write in two languages, one with each hand, at the same time?!
10. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones speculates on why liberals have more exaggerated perceptions of political differences. We Are More Alike Than We Think
11. A surprising "right to work" bill was signed into law in Michigan, of all places. That has spurred a lot of debate about unions and the right to work. Michael Kinsley wrote a thoughtful piece opposing RTW, The Liberal Case Against Right-to-Work Laws. David Henderson has piece in support of RTW, The Economics of "Right to Work".
12. Slate has a piece about The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement.
Keith Kloor opines on the division between mondernist environmentalists
(or eco-pragmatists) and conservation traditionalists.
...
Modernist greens don't dispute the ecological tumult associated with the
Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as
well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this
end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft "a new vision of a planet
in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient
ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."
This
shift in thinking is already under way. For example, ecologists
increasingly appreciate (and study) the diversity of species and
importance of ecosystem services in cities, giving rise to the
discipline of urban ecology. That was unthinkable at the dawn of the
modern environmental movement 50 years ago, when greens loathed cities
as the antithesis of wilderness. ...
13. One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes I remember from my
childhood was when this woman ends up trapped in a department store at
night. The mannequins begin calling to her. She discovers she is actually a mannequin who
has over stayed her time out in the world and it is time for the next
mannequin to spend some time outside the store. This story confirms my worst nightmares: In Some Stores, the Mannequins Are Watching You
15. One of the biggest concerns about fracking technology is the enormous amount of water it uses. A company has figured out how to recycle water so that far less water is used in the fracking process. Solving fracking's biggest problem
... 3D printing represents the latest version of what industry experts call
"additive manufacturing" — a way to turn practically any computer
designs into real objects by building them up layer-by-layer using
plastics, metals or other materials. The technology could end up
affecting every major industry — aerospace, defense, medicine, transportation, food, fashion — and have an even bigger impact on U.S. manufacturing than the robot revolution. ...
20. Michael Cheshire has a great piece in Leadership Journal on "What I learned about grace and redemption through my friendship with a Christian pariah." Going To Hell with Ted Haggard
".... A while back I was having a business lunch at a sports bar in the
Denver area with a close atheist friend. He's a great guy and a very
deep thinker. During lunch, he pointed at the large TV screen on the
wall. It was set to a channel recapping Ted's fall. He pointed his
finger at the HD and said, "That is the reason I will not become a
Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that's what
keeps me away."
It was well after the story had died down, so I had to study the screen
to see what my friend was talking about. I assumed he was referring to
Ted's hypocrisy. "Hey man, not all of us do things like that," I
responded. He laughed and said, "Michael, you just proved my point. See,
that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and
forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys
can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you
talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say
he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I
stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy
failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to
him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat
your own. Always have. Always will."
He was running late for a meeting and had to take off. I, however, could
barely move. I studied the TV and read the caption as a well-known
religious leader kept shoveling dirt on a man who had admitted he was
unclean. And at that moment, my heart started to change. I began to
distance myself from my previously harsh statements and tried to
understand what Ted and his family must have been through. When I
brought up the topic to other men and women I love and respect, the very
mention of Haggard's name made our conversations toxic. Their reactions
were visceral."
21. Leonardo Bonucci got a yellow card for faking collision during a
soccer game. It should have been a red card. No one deserves to be a professional soccer player with acting skills
this bad!
All-natural domesticity has adherents on both sides of the political spectrum.
The current cultural mania for DIY domesticity—backyard chickens,
urban knitting circles, the rise of homeschooling, the sudden ubiquity
of homemade jam—shows no sign of abating. Across the country,
progressives are embracing home and hearth with new vigor under the
guise of environmental sustainability, anti-consumerism, and better
health.
The movement has made for some very odd attitudes, especially when it
comes to gender. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" barely seem to
apply. The new progressive morality about food sometimes feels as retro
and conservative as anything dreamed up during the 1950s. In many
well-educated, well-heeled quarters, what you cook determines your worth
as a mother (Is it organic? Local? BPA-free?), laziness in the kitchen
is understood to doom your children to lives of obesity and menial
labor, and the very idea of convenience is slatternly and shameful. In this culture, we have Berkeley heroes like Michael Pollan writing scoldingly about how feminism killed home cooking. Michelle Obama, every Democrat's favorite organic gardener, has been criticized for saying she doesn't like to cook. And not by Fox News, but by food writer and noted latte-apologist Amanda Hesser in the New York Times....
... It's hard to know what to make of all this. Crunchy progressives are
arguing that quitting your job to become a homemaker is a radical
feminist act, far-right evangelicals are talking about "women's
empowerment" via Etsy, lefty liberal writers are excoriating the First
Lady for hating to cook, and dyed-in-the-wool conservatives are giving
birth in their bathtubs with midwives and self-hypnosis tapes.
Both sides of the political spectrum turn to domesticity for many of
the same reasons: distrust in government and institutions from the EPA
to the public schools to hospital maternity wards, worries about the
safety of the food supply, disappointment with the working world, the
desire to connect with a simpler, less consumerist way of life.
The fact that domesticity is so appealing speaks to the failure of
these systems. Until these things are fixed, I predict we'll see an
increasing number of people from all parts of the political spectrum
deciding to go the DIY route with their food, their homes, their
children. And yes, this will mean more progressive people opting for
lifestyles that seem uncomfortably retro. But maybe too we'll see Rush
Limbaugh at the farmer's market.
"... Drawing on data from the [Harvard] university's library collections, the animation
below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it
full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the
lower left corner. ..."
4. There is a U-shaped happiness curve, consistent across cultures, that shows happiness declines from childhood until about our mid-forties and then begins to improve as me grow old. It appears it may hold true in primates as well. Our ability to discount bad news, even when we shouldn't, follows the same U-shaped curve. Our brains and experience are optimal for discerning bad news in middle-age. Turns out that ignorance (or maybe denial) truly is bliss. Viewpoint: How happiness changes with age. On a related note, it appears that Elderly Brains Have Trouble Recognizing Untrustworthy Faces.
5. The holiday season is in full swing and many people falsely believe this a time of elevated suicide rates. Actually, spring and summer have the highest rates and Nov - Jan have the lowest. In 2010, July was highest and December was lowest. Holiday suicide myth persists, research says
"Michael" was in the top 3 names for boys from 1953-2010. It dropped to sixth last year. Want to know how your name ranks for each year since 1880? Go to the Social Security Online's Popular Baby Names. The Baby Name Wizard is also pretty cool.
"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel
is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift
in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just
as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to
play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science
skills early on.
It’s a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions —
they are pink, of course — but Lego promoting a line of pastel
construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit.
The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ’n Style line, available next week, has both
girls — and their fathers — in mind.
“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this
play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” said Dr.
Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set...."
And this reminds me of last year, or the year before, when cooking sets were becoming big with boys. They've been watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. "Bam!" New merchandising angle.
11. Love them or hate them, the Koch brothers are intriguing. Many political junkies know of them but few others seem to know about them. Forbes has an interesting feature article in the most recent issue on the Koch empire and its influence: Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America
14. "Data-driven healthcare won't replace physicians entirely, but it will help those receptive to technology perform their jobs better." Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do
"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."
"... Last month, at the first ever conference of the Sustainable
Nanotechnology Organization in Washington DC, Michail Roco of the
National Science Foundation, and architect of the U.S. National
Nanotechnology Initiative provided a response. He said, “every
industrial sector is unsustainable…and nanotechnology holds the promise
of making every one of them sustainable.”
It’s my belief that that is true: nanotechnology, or the ability to
manipulate matter at a scale of one billionth of a meter, has
far-reaching implications for the improvement of sustainable technology,
industry and society.
Already, it is being used widely to enable more sustainable
practices. Safer manufacturing, less waste generation, reusable
materials, more efficient energy technologies, better water
purification, lower toxicity and environmental impacts from chemotherapy
agents to marine paints are all current applications of nanotechnology.
There is no reason for this technology to develop in an unsustainable
manner.
In the past, a lack of foresight has resulted in costs to society – people, businesses, and governments, and—
that could have been avoided by proactive efforts to manage risks.
Today, the tools to develop safer technologies and less harmful products
exist. Let us not miss this opportunity. ..."
"It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before
that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via
memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave
sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the
announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook,
with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to
connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of
memorials for the dead."
20. From the "That's just not right!" file. Harvard Economics Department does their version of "Call me maybe."
Last year, I had the privilege of visiting the leaders of
the Synod of Syria and Lebanon and the Synod of the Nile (Egypt) a year ago,
partner denominations to the Presbyterian Church USA. I heard firsthand about
the struggles of Christians in these countries. It was made apparent to me that
a central component to any lasting peace in the region is for moderate Muslims,
Christians, and religious minorities to form a healthy civil society. Dedicated
Christians from our partner denominations in these regions have worked diligently toward that end.
We are hearing a great deal about the violence in Syria, and
with good reason. The immediacy of the suffering is tragic. But I sense that
Egypt may be the bigger story in the long run. There are more than eighty million
Egyptians, dwarfing the size of other nations in the region. There is also a
history of stronger, more tolerant, societal institutions. If Egypt is transformed
into an Islamist state, then I think the implications well be tragic and far
reaching for much of the rest of the region.
As I recall, about 90% of Egyptians are Muslim. About 9% are
Coptic Orthodox Christians. About 1% are Protestant. Moderate Muslims
and Christians alike were part of the protests that ousted Mubarak. Moderate Muslims
and Christians are leading the protests against Morsi’s power grab and against
the troubling new constitution that is being proposed.
While in Egypt, I had the privilege of dining in the home of
a young family who also acted as our tour guides for a day. The wife and mother of this family has been posting
articles and pictures relating to the protests on Facebook, like this picture
of brave women taking the front row of a march towards
the presidential palace carrying their own shrouds (coffin cloth) in their
arms.
And this picture of a Christian
doctor treating an injured member of the Muslim Brotherhood on the grounds of a
church in Cairo.
Three hours ago my friend posted that the
referendum on the constitution has now been delayed until the 12th. The
pressure has been to get this constitution passed as quickly as possible and
there is some hope this delay may lead good things.
Let us all remember to keep Egypt in our prayers. Let us
pray that moderate Muslims and Christians will be able to influence events
toward the creation of a healthy civil society, delivering Egypt from the
bondage of extremist elements, even was we continue to pray for an end to the horrific suffering in Syria.
I'm not making a case either way about the battle over the tax increases on the wealthy currently being debated. Strategically, I think the Republicans would have been better to compromise on the tax rate increase. That would put the question squarely back on spending and entitlement reform, where the central focus of the discussion should be. As it is, they just hand the President and the Democrats a populist club to beat them with.
Still, this article does a great job of debunking comparisons of tax rates from different eras.
A liberal article of faith that confiscatory taxes fed the postwar boom turns out to be an Edsel of an economic idea.
Democratic Party leaders, President Obama in particular, are forever
telling the country that wealthy Americans are taxed at too low a rate
and pay too little in taxes. The need to correct this seeming injustice
is framed not simply in terms of fairness. Higher tax rates on the
wealthy, we're told, would help balance the budget, allow for more
"investment" in America's future and foster better economic growth for
all. In support of this claim, like-minded liberal pundits point out
that in the 1950s, when America's economic might was at its zenith, the
rich faced tax rates as high as 91%.
True enough, the top marginal income-tax
rate in the 1950s was much higher than today's top rate of 35%—but the
share of income paid by the wealthiest Americans has essentially
remained flat since then.
In 1958, the top 3% of taxpayers earned
14.7% of all adjusted gross income and paid 29.2% of all federal income
taxes. In 2010, the top 3% earned 27.2% of adjusted gross income and
their share of all federal taxes rose proportionally, to 51%.
So if the top marginal tax rate has
fallen to 35% from 91%, how in the world has the tax burden on the
wealthy remained roughly the same? Two factors are responsible. Lower-
and middle-income workers now bear a significantly lighter burden than
in the past. And the confiscatory top marginal rates of the 1950s were
essentially symbolic—very few actually paid them. In reality the vast
majority of top earners faced lower effective rates than they do today. ...
... It's hard to determine how much otherwise taxable income disappeared
through tax shelters in the 1950s. As a result, direct comparisons
between the 1950s and now are difficult. However, it is worth noting
that from 1958 to 2010, the taxes paid by the top 3% of earners, as a
percentage of total personal income (which can't be reduced by
shelters), increased to 3.96% from 2.72%, while the percentage paid by
the bottom two-thirds of filers fell to 0.51% in 2010 from 2.7%. This
starker division of relative tax burdens can be explained by the
inability of upper-income groups to shelter income.
It is a testament to the shallow nature
of the national economic conversation that higher tax rates can be
justified by reference to a fantasy—a 91% marginal rate that hardly any
top earners paid. ...
Arnold Kling is a libertarian economist who blogs at askblog. His tag line for his blog is "taking the most charitable view of those who disagree." In a recent post, Being Uncharitable to Those Who Disagree, he began with:
In his recent book, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jason Brennan writes,
American politics has two large camps. The first camp advocates an
American police state–one that polices the world at large while policing
its citizens’ lifestyles. It advocates having government promote
traditional Judeo-Christian virtues. It wants to marginalize or expel
alternative modes of life. The second camp advocates an American nanny
state–one that tries to nudge and control the behavior of its citizens
“for their own good.” Both camps support having the government manage,
control, and prop up industry and commerce. In rhetoric, a vicious
divide separates the two camps. Yet when in power, the two camps act
much the same.
Brennan’s book is in large part an effort to refute the uncharitable
views that others hold about libertarians. In that regard, it may be
valuable. However, the quoted paragraph offers what I believe is an
uncharitable view of progressives and, especially, conservatives. ...
He continues:
... I think that if you want to be convincing in an argument, taking an
uncharitable view of the opponent is a bad strategy. Just as
libertarians become scornful and defensive toward those who take an
uncharitable view of our beliefs (think of people who say “libertarians
just want to let people starve” or “libertarians believe markets are
perfect”), we can expect others to become scornful and defensive if we
take an uncharitable view of their beliefs.
I have written an essay, to appear next month, in which I suggest
that the core conservative belief is that civilization is always
threatened by barbarism. Think Lord of the Flies. Meanwhile, I
think that progressives also see a threat everywhere–the threat of
oppression. Think of the Biblical story of the Exodus. Libertarians do
not typically focus on barbarism or oppression. Instead, we focus on
coercion vs. free choice. We celebrate the fruits of voluntary
cooperation via markets. Think I, Pencil.
Suppose that my characterization of conservatives is correct. Then
libertarians need to address their concern. How do you keep
civilization from sliding into barbarism? Conservatives viewed
Communism as barbaric, and they saw a need for our government to defend
against it. Similarly, they see terrorism as barbaric, and they see a
need for our government to defend against it.
How should this concern with external barbarian threats be addressed? ...
Cleansing our conversations of all caricature and uncharitable characterizations is probably not realistic. It may not even be desirable. On occasion, such characterizations can sharpen communication as we passionately debate. Not every conversation is an attempt to persuade. But Kling's point is exactly right. If your point is to persuade or open a conversation, why would you resort to uncharitable characterizations of the person you want to persuade? It continues to amaze me how common it is to read a book, article, or blog post that starts out with stated aim of convincing readers of a particular view but then uncharitably mischaracterizes the audience that the author intends to persuade.
Do you agree about the prevalence uncharitable characterizations in conversations that are intended to persuade? If so, why are we so prone to it?
Here are the links. BTW, if you haven't already, you can "like" the Kruse Kronicle Facebook page and see daily links in your Facebook feed.
1. When I was a kid, I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to minute 5:00, and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!
7. If you are a man, getting along with the in-laws means you have 20% higher chance of not getting divorced. If you are a woman, getting along well the in-laws makes you 20% more likely to get divorced. Getting Along With The In-Laws Makes Women More Likely To Divorce
"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."
I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)
15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution in as if it happened in 24 hours.
"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S.
birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable
record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center
for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.
What was
news was Pew’s analysis of the government data, which showed that the
birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. “We were the
first to point that out,” Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew’s
report, said in an interview. ..."
... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of
"strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious
traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly
devout and committed to their faith.
According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference
between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their
religion.
By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points,
with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly
affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics.
Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity
than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."
"Indeed, for America’s Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.
The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."
21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every candidate who is losing often tries to spin things positively until the very end but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis is revealing that was true. From The New RepbulicThe Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win
Imagine you live in rural Montana. One hot August afternoon
you decide to barbecue some meat on a grill. Your nearest neighbor, two miles
away, decides to do the same. In fact, all your neighbors in a several square
mile area … all two or three dozen of them … decide to barbecue that afternoon.
There is no problem created by your individual actions.
Now move this though experiment to Manhattan, New York. Thousands
of people living on each city block in a neighborhood all decide to barbecue
some meat. Now you have a problem.
There is nothing inherently wrong with barbecuing and any
one individual who chooses to do so doesn’t pose a problem for anyone else. But
when this freedom is practiced in densely populated areas by many people it can
cause a problem.
It seems to me that increased population density creates
both challenges, like the barbecue example, and opportunities, like the
creation of mass transit. These realities require a degree and type of cooperation
that is not necessary in less densely populated areas; it’s not right or wrong,
but different. Yet country folks view city dwellers as controlling, while city
folks view country folks as anti-government and uncooperative.
Since the days of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, the
Republican Party has been deeply influenced by leaders from contexts of Western
wide-open spaces. But the country is now heavily tilted toward a population
that lives in densely populated areas.
I’ve seen other articles recently that suggest that what we
have is less a red vs. blue state problem and more of a city vs. non-city
problem. Look at this chart from The Atlantic Cities taken from The Real Republican Adversary? Population Density:
I wonder if it is possible that a key component of the party
divide is this demographic shift. Cause and effect are always murky. Maybe
people with particular leanings move to contexts that mirror their values, but
I suspect a bigger influence is that our demographic context shapes our
socio-political outlook. I’m not suggesting this is the determining issue in
our divide but I think it may play a bigger role than we realize.
After the election, I published an article
in this space that struck a chord with many Christians. I suggested
that engaging in a bitter 'culture war' in order to preserve America's
formerly dominant Christian culture has been largely a failed strategy.
We cannot win in the courts and at the ballot box that which we have
lost in the court of public opinion. Instead, I argued, we should
embrace the strategy that has successfully attracted people to Jesus for
two thousand years - authentic Christianity.
What if we simply stuck to what Jesus commanded us to do: love our
neighbors as ourselves, care for the poor and the sick and the
brokenhearted, stand up for the oppressed, be generous with our time and
our money, and live winsome lives filled with grace and gentleness?
Christians have always lived, and often thrived, in cultures where
they are minorities. Christianity began in a Jewish culture and thrived
in a pagan Roman one. The apostle Paul, writer of nearly half the New
Testament, actually offers advice to the church in Corinth which lived
in the midst of a very pagan society. His words should guide us today.
In I Corinthians 5:9, Paul encourages the Christians to clean up
their own affairs. The church was in a mess with sexual shenanigans,
internal bickering, and a deep division between rich and poor. Paul
gives them some advice, but he also says Christians shouldn't worry
about whether others follow Christian moral teaching.
"I wrote you in my earlier letter that you shouldn't
make yourselves at home among the sexually promiscuous. I didn't mean
that you should have nothing at all to do with outsiders of that sort.
Or with crooks, whether blue- or white-collar. Or with spiritual
phonies, for that matter. You'd have to leave the world entirely to do
that! ... I'm not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don't we
have some responsibility for those within our community of believers?
God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide when our brothers
and sisters are out of line and, if necessary, clean house. (I Cor.
5:9-13, The Message)
Paul's point is this: Be strict with yourselves, expecting fellow
Christians to obey the demands of Jesus. But don't hold others to the
same rules. ...
Stearns post also brought to mind another passage I recently read. I just finished going back through Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.
“In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern
today, of the left or the right, is the social concern of a church that seems
to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism,
and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with
ersatz Christian ethical activity – lobbying Congress to support progressive
strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little
less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwell’s Moral Majority is little
different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups
imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian
community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way
for the gospel to present in our world without asking the world to support our
convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The
result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.” (Stanley Hauerwas and
William Willimon, Resident Aliens,
1989, 80-81.)
There is much I resonate with in Stearn’s post and with the Resident Aliens quote, but I shade
things a little differently.
I don't have a neat label for my position. Maybe what I see is a polarity.
I'm uneasy with the overemphasis of social activism within my Mainline Reformed
world, partly because of its domestication of "justice" to
contemporary leftist framings. But mostly I'm uneasy because of the neglect of
the central mission of the church to be a "sense-making" witness of
God's Kingdom by connecting the daily routines of life to God's mission in the
world, to be a communities reflecting on the contexts and relationships where
they have genuine authentic influence and being the body of Christ in those
particularities.
And yet I'm uneasy with quotes like those above, and similar cases made by
neo-Anabaptists, that seem to suggest we should not be seeking to influence the
state at all. If some ways of ordering society are more just than others
according to God's Kingdom, is it appropriate to remain silent in the public
square as citizens of a democracy where we are invited to interject what wisdom
we may have? And curiously, it seems to me that while many of those who want to
avoid entanglement with the state have a stronger sense of the congregational
community, they also have a weak practical theology for how the people of God, as
they live dispersed in the world, are to make sense of work and daily life as
the relate to God's mission in the world.
Rather than embracing either the activist Reformed pole or the neo-Anabaptist
separatism, I'm inclined to embrace the strength's and cautions of both camps
and to press for better integration of daily life with God's mission in the
world.
"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their
surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things
(IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M)
connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here’s a glimpse of our possible future.
Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the
lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet
are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to
start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear
your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your
favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After
you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a
drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder.
Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly
adds this info to your medical file at the doctor’s office; it will also
text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.
Your smart TV
automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat
breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you’ve eaten,
while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone
to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your “smart” car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you
that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no
longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved
one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud.
Don’t worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors
locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save
energy and money.
Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn’t since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."
4. Speaking of computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World’s Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.
"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study
of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income
workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line). The study looks
at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program
formerly known as Food Stamps). The bottom line is that the
average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30
percent. In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired
and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect,
the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.
What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal
tax rates at the top of the income distribution. This means that we
could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a
flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve
approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."
7. What are the conservative streams and thinkers that are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States. David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.
" ... If you thought the
presidential election revealed the nation's political rifts, consider
the outcomes in state legislatures. The vote also created a broader tier
of powerful one-party governments that can act with no need for
compromise. Half of state legislatures now have veto-proof majorities,
up from 13 only four years ago, according to figures compiled for The
Associated Press by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
All
but three states - Iowa, Kentucky and New Hampshire - have one-party
control of their legislatures, the highest mark since 1928.
The result could lead to stark differences in how people live and work.
"Usually,
a partisan tide helps the same party across the country, but what we
saw in this past election was the opposite of that - some states getting
bluer and some states getting redder," said Thad Kousser, an associate
political science professor at the University of California-San Diego
who focuses on state politics. As a result, "we'll see increasing policy
divergence across the states." ...
I don't know that this is an entirely bad thing. The states are sometimes called laboratories of democracy. Let supermajority states play out their wisdom and their hubris. Let's see what we learn.
One of my favorite blogs is Adam Smith's Lost Legacy, written by economic historian Gavin Kennedy. He frequently finds mentions of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" from around the web and then goes to work debunking the abuse of Smith's views. The metaphor, mentioned only twice in passing in The Wealth of Nations, was appropriated by economists over the last half century in support of modern notions of free markets. He wrote an intriguing article on this topic Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: From Metaphor to Myth.
But Kennedy also helps interpret other aspects of Smith's work. Some economists apply economic principles to the formation of religious organizations and Smith is indentified as having supported a competitive religious marketplace over state run monopolies, as a way to promote religion. Kennedy writes the following in Adam Smith's Authentic Views On Church and State.
... Laurence Iannaccone’s selective
inference, upon which Tim Harford draws, that amount to saying that Smith’s
asserted that “more competitive religious marketplaces lead to
more dynamic churches”, deserves closer examination.
The key emphasis of Smith’s suggestion that a
multiplicity of local religious sects which “allowed everyman to chuse his own
priest and his own religion as he thought proper” was aimed at breaking to
relationship between authorised established state religious churches and the
state. ...
Kennedy gives a lengthy quote by Smith and then writes:
... I think these long quotations encapsulate what Smith
was about in arguing for a multiplicity of sects, namely that the very
competition of each would act as a balm on the otherwise violent, or at least
the disturbing clamour of their zealots at the expense of public
tranquility. It was not aimed at
causing larger congregations so much, perhaps, as allowing room for the tolerance of a
third-sect of potentially non-religious citizenry, living amidst a large number of
religious sects at peace with each other. ...
Understanding Smith's comments in context adds a lot. Interesting stuff!
3. "British people - and many others across the world - have been brought up on the idea of three square meals a day as a normal eating pattern, but it wasn't always that way." Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?
7. "It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay." Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president
8. You may have heard that there was a presidential election last week. Here is a map showing how the counties voted, with red being the most intensely Republican and blue being the most Democrat. (Source: The Real Reason Cities Lean Democratic)
9. Speaking of the election, there has been a lot written about how the GOP will need to change if they want to win national elections. As a right-leaning guy, I thought this article in Slate, The New Grand Old Party, and this one by Bobby Jindal, How Republicans can win future elections, were among the best.
13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more amazing. "The latest invention from Stanford University’s Department of Electrical
Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A
self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of
professors, researchers and graduate students." New Self-Repairing Material Invented at Stanford
15. Speaking of 3D-Printing, how big a deal is it? "Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing -
Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine - to pursue the life of an
entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new
phase of the industrial revolution." Chris Anderson: Why I left Wired - 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web
"A
flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a
place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time,
then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and
artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications,
social media, or viral emails." [Wikipedia accessed 11.12.12]
How do you define a church?"
David Brooks wrote a column last week that I think offers considerable insight into the history and future of the Republican Party. Brooks writes:
... Starting in the mid-20th century, there was a
Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching Republicans like
Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their version drew on
the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of greatness;
individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be
given maximum freedom to do so.
This is not an Ayn Randian, radically individualistic belief system.
Republicans in this mold place tremendous importance on churches,
charities and families — on the sort of pastoral work Mitt Romney does
and the sort of community groups Representative Paul Ryan celebrated in a
speech at Cleveland State University last month.
But this worldview is innately suspicious of government. Its adherents
generally believe in the equation that more government equals less
individual and civic vitality. Growing beyond proper limits, government
saps initiative, sucks resources, breeds a sense of entitlement and
imposes a stifling uniformity on the diverse webs of local activity....
As I read this, my mind went immediately to an article recently published in The New Republic, The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The author describes the journey of Mormonism from communalism to economic individualism. Jackson Lears writes:
Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism;
they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in
moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their
monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean
striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to
correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America
was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be
hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the
post–Reagan Republican Party.
Brooks could probably add Romney as a Mormon variant of the Goldwater,
Reagan, and Bush tradition.
But the demographics of the nation are shifting. The community that
intuitively embraces the GOP equation of "more government = less
vitality" is shrinking. I think Brooks nails it with this observation:
The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and
Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups
have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these
groups value industriousness more than whites.
Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey
after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can
incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.
Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and
threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a
modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages
still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the
world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but
unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by
withdrawing government programs.
For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear
Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they
think: He doesn’t get me or people like me....
I've lived in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood
for more than twenty years. This rings very true to me.
A lot is being made of Republicans needing to change their stance on
immigration. While agreeing they need to change, I don't think this is the
primary obstacle. Republicans have not artfully made the case for how their
small-government model creates more, not less, opportunity for minorities. Republicans
have not addressed how opportunity can be improved and risk reduced for many
vulnerable people who work hard but live at the margins. Republicans once had a
minority of leaders (like Jack Kemp) who thought in these terms. If they
want to win elections, they need to recover that part of their heritage.
... In Latin America, Mexico City is not unique. Use of social media is
growing at a breathtaking pace across the region. When Facebook passed
the 1 billion user mark in October, few people noticed that 19 percent
of those users live in Latin America (which only accounts for 8 percent
of the world's population). The governments of virtually all large Latin
American cities now use social media to engage with citizens, and
smaller cities are quickly following suit. The Inter-American
Development Bank recently found that social media is used by governments
in 70 percent of the region´s 140 "emerging cities" (those having
100,000 to 2 million residents and above-average economic growth rates).
Although the press has focused on Latin American presidents who have
embraced social media as a potent new channel for old-fashioned
political communications, something very different is happening at the
municipal level.
Mayors seem to be betting that by micromanaging urban issues via
Twitter or Facebook, they will give voters concrete evidence of their
effectiveness in office. This is a risky tactic, of course. Many local
governments that find it easy to virtually "engage" with constituents
may not have the budgets, the organization, or the staff to actually
solve the problems that generate complaints. The result, in that case,
could be a voter backlash amplified, ironically, over the same social
media channels. ...
... Over the coming decade, hundreds of millions of city dwellers in
emerging economies such as Mexico, Brazil, India and China are likely to
rise from poverty. Much has been written about how their increasing
expectations will pressure governments like never before to deliver
tangible improvements that make urban life safer, healthier, and more
egalitarian.
I predict that social media will have a highly disruptive but largely
positive effect in this context. At a minimum, these technologies will
give new vitality to the ancient ideals of participation and
accountability. At best, they might shorten the wait for new lights in a
darkened park. In either event, the next mayor of Mexico City, like
others across the developing world, will not really have the option of
ignoring social media. That's where people are choosing to speak, and
where they expect to be heard.
A polemical new book, Science Left Behind, argues persuasively that there is less than meets the eye in self-righteous claims by Democrats that they represent the “pro-science party.” Jon Entine, Director of the Genetic Literacy Project, reports:
The debate over which political party, Democrat or Republican, is more
faithful to science has been a hot button topic since the 1990s. ...
... A slew of books and articles
from left-leaning science writers—which means most of the science
journalism establishment—has elevated the popular narrative that
Democrats adhere faithfully to the inspiration of Newton, Galileo, Bacon
and Darwin while Republicans look more to ethereal authorities for
their application of the scientific method.
But now, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, co-authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left,
make a nuanced and convincing counter argument: Ludditism is not a
partisan issue. In fact, on many of the most critical issues of our
time, the “progressive” perspective is often rooted in out-dated,
anti-empirical, junk science paradigms that threaten innovation—and are
beginning to unnerve the most scientifically minded thinkers on the
left. ...
... The central thesis of Science Left Behind—that the left’s
view of science has drifted decisively from empiricism into ideology—has
now emerged as a genuine debate within the left community. This
contentiousness became very public over the past month as “progressives”
debated the merits of California Proposition 37, which would have
mandated labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms.
For the political left, suspicion of biotechnology in general and
more specifically the rejection of genetically modified crops as
environmentally hazardous and GM foods as health hazards are now
canonical. Almost every major activist environmental NGO supported Prop
37. But their contention that biotech crops and foods posted unusual
environmental or health hazards is not based on science. In fact,
fanning fears about biotech crops and foods has become a scandalous
leftwing obsession. It’s an anti-science mindset, argues Keith Kloor, a
frequent contributor to the Washington Post-owned, liberal online magazine Slate:
“[F]earsare stoked by prominent environmental
groups, supposed food-safety watchdogs, and influential food columnists;
that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and
propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists; and that
progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric
that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it
comes to GMOs,” Kloors wrote. “In short, I’ve learned that the
emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind
of fever swamps that have polluted climate science beyond recognition.”
This soft conspiracy, promoted by mainstream Democrats, infects a
broad array of science issues and highlights the religious-like iconic
beliefs of the left (as Kloor has noted): Nature is sacred, big business
is dangerous and corrupt, technology can cause more problems than it
helps solve, the world is on the verge of an eco-apocalypse, and we need
more precaution, regulation and legislation. I call it enviro-romanticism, a criticism documented in distressing detail in Science Left Behind. ...
... As George Monbiot, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent
environmental writers recently concluded when discussing the left’s
contradictory and increasingly anti-environmental energy policy, “[T]he
environmental movement to which I belong has done more harm to the
planet’s living systems than climate change deniers have ever achieved.”
We could all benefit from the emergence of what I call “science
independents”—those who base their views on data and evidence rather
than partisan leanings and litmus tests. ...
I think the challenge is that all of us tend to latch on to science that confirms our experience and ideology. We are dismissive when it doesn't. We need better models for incorporating science into discussions in the public square.
We live in a polarized world. I know few people who doubt that.
Through increased mobility and our digitally-enhanced ability to form
like-mined communities, we are segregating into echo-chambers.
Last Thursday I wrote about Moderating
Opinions by Confronting Confirmation Bias. (Confirmation bias is the tendency
to only take note of information that confirms our biases.) I suggested ways we
can resist confirmation bias as we wrestle with issues and gain better
understanding. But it is wrong to think that this will always, or even often, lead
to agreement on the truth of the
matter and a unified course of action.
I say this because many issues we wrestle with are not actually
problems. They have no solution. For instance, which is more essential to
breathing: inhaling or exhaling? That is an unsolvable problem. It pits two opposite
but interdependent realities against each other. Like breathing, many
challenges we face are not problems to be solved but polarities to be managed.
The answer lies in embracing both poles.
Dr. Barry Johnson, author of Polarity
Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, uses a chart with
four quadrants to illustrate how a polarity works. The columns represent two
poles. The rows represent the positive (top) and negative (bottom) aspects of
each pole.
So let’s look at an example. The board for a congregation is
divided between those who want a regimented and well-planned ministry, and those
who want an adaptive and free flowing style of ministry. We’ll call Pole 1
“Planned” and Pole 2 “Free-Flow.”
Quadrant A - The positive side of a planned environment is
that everyone knows their responsibility. Lines of accountability are clear.
People know what to expect and how to plan. Resources can be effectively and
efficiently marshaled for a given task.
Quadrant B – Over time, life and ministry becomes stale.
Activities are done by rote. Creativity is stifled. Opportunities are missed
because the focus is on keeping the “machine” running. New people with new
gifts and passions have no way to plug in.
Quadrant C – The congregation moves toward the free-form
pole. The possibility of new dreams and visions is embraced. New opportunities
are identified and pursued. Creativity is unleashed. People begin to find new
ways to minister.
Quadrant D – Eventually chaos ensues. Overlapping activities
happen while other concerns drop through the cracks. Creativity is stifled
because there is no way to effectively engage the community. Opportunities are
missed because there is insufficient structure to mobilize people to action.
This pushes the group to Quadrant A and the whole thing starts over.
This oscillation is a natural and healthy part of community.
Polarization blocks the ability of this natural flow from happening. Our
confirmation biases can lead us to see only the positive of the pole we favor
and the negative of the pole we dislike. We may come to see the “problem” as an
insufficient commitment by others to our pole. As we become more entrenched in
our view of “the problem,” people predisposed toward the other pole of the
polarity, usually influenced by their confirmation biases, cling more strongly
to their pole. They define the “the problem” as departure from their pole. This
escalates into seeing opponents as “the problem.”
When polarization over a polarity emerges, the solution is
to regain a polarity perspective. If I gravitate toward Pole A, I need to genuinely
confess the downside of Pole A to those who gravitate to Pole B. I need to
express an appreciation for the upside of Pole B. That opens the conversation
to a discussion of balance, rather than of right/wrong or good/bad. It frees
those that embrace Pole B to be able to confess the downside of their pole and
the upside of Pole A. We cease seeing an issue as a problem to be solved and
begin seeing it as polarity to be managed.
This doesn’t mean that polarity management will always lead
to entirely satisfying decisions or resolve all differences. Most decisions require
trade-offs. We value options differently. We assess risks differently. We have
differing degrees of risk aversion. Sometimes we don’t agree on the practicality
of particular options, even though we agree on ends. But correctly identifying
polarities, and addressing them as such, leads to less polarization.
Working on our confirmation biases and being aware of
polarities can significantly minimize polarization. They will not resolve all
problems. Some things are not polarities. They have a binary quality. These
conversations move us into another set of issues. But those issues become more manageable
if we have learned and practiced the disciplines of depolarization where we
can. I’m convinced that our practice of these disciplines is always imperfect
and learning these disciplines is a lifelong transformational process. But the
rewards are well worth the journey.
In
a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their
attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered
paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now
requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly
allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was
announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how
they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to
pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper,
visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly
those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an
experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the
paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and
willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive
proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both
support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react
negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be
facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.
... Beyond the United States, global statistics point undeniably toward
progress in achieving greater peace and stability. There are fewer wars
now than at any time in decades. The number of people killed as a result
of armed violence worldwide is plunging as well — down to about 526,000
in 2011 from about 740,000 in 2008, according to the United Nations. ...
... Most top Pentagon officials say the statistics showing that the world is
safer are irrelevant and don’t reflect the magnitude of the risks. The
result is what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has dubbed a “security paradox.” The world may seem safer,
Dempsey says, but the potential for global catastrophe has grown as the
planet has become more interconnected and potential enemies have greater
access to more powerful weapons and technology. ...
9. How much difference is there in the coming of age experience between Baby Boomers and Millennials? Mother and daughter team Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig are interviewed about their new book: What’s the Matter With Millennials?
"The online startup Kaggle assembles
a diverse group of people from around the world to work on tough
problems submitted by organizations. The company runs data science
competitions, where the goal is to arrive at a better prediction than
the submitting organization's starting 'baseline' prediction. Results
from these contests are striking in a couple ways. For one thing,
improvements over the baseline are usually substantial. In one case,
Allstate submitted a dataset of vehicle characteristics and asked the
Kaggle community to predict which of them would have later personal
liability claims filed against them. The contest lasted approximately
three months, and drew in more than 100 contestants. The winning
prediction was more than 270% better than the insurance company's
baseline.
Another interesting fact is that the majority of Kaggle contests are
won by people who are marginal to the domain of the challenge — who, for
example, made the best prediction about hospital readmission rates
despite having no experience in health care — and so would not have been
consulted as part of any traditional search for solutions. In many
cases, these demonstrably capable and successful data scientists
acquired their expertise in new and decidedly digital ways"
Stephen Novella has written an interesting piece about confirmation bias as it relates to politics, Moderating Political Opinions. What he has to say applies to many other areas of life including conversations about theology and our faith experiences. Novella begins his discussion recounting findings from recent experiments conducted by psychologists. He summarizes their findings here:
... The researchers interpret all of this as the action of confirmation bias
– a core cognitive bias that motivates people to seek out and notice
information that confirms existing beliefs and either ignore or dismiss
evidence against their existing beliefs or in favor of a competing
belief. Confirmation bias is the default mode of human thinking – the
cognitive pathway of least resistance that we will tend to follow. If
you force people to slow down and think harder, even in a manner
tangential to the question at hand, confirmation bias is moderated by
deeper evaluation. However – deeper evaluation takes cognitive energy,
and if you deprive subjects of this energy by giving them another task
to perform, then the default mode of confirmation bias takes hold. ...
How do we overcome confirmation bias?
... Imagine if students were systematically educated to engage abstract
thinking and to ward off the effects of confirmation bias (and other
biases) when considering important issues (or all issues, for that
matter). This, in essence, is scientific skepticism. Skeptics are those
who do not simply flow down the path of least resistance, giving in to
the lowest energy state of thought, surrendering to cognitive entropy.
Skepticism is about understanding the nature of cognitive biases and
then doing the hard mental work of thinking complexly and abstractly
about important questions.
The trigger for skeptical evaluation needs to be internal. In this
way being a skeptic is partly just a habit of thought. The skeptic stops
and asks, “wait a minute, is this really true?” When confronting an
opposing opinion or interpretation of the evidence, the skeptic tries to
understand the various points of view and will at least try to fairly
assess each point, recognizing that many topics are complex, with good
and bad points on all sides.
Being a skeptic is also about applying the findings of decades of
psychological research to our everyday lives. It is a shame that
psychologists have conducted thousands of experiments carefully
describing the many ways in which human thinking is biased, and yet
public awareness of this useful body of knowledge is limited. ...
It is impossible to escape confirmation bias. Fortunately, most of the time, our
imprecise understanding is close enough. And in many cases, even where our
understanding is way off, the consequences aren’t that significant. Yet in some
cases, confirmation bias can be deadly.
Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people. Many people believe minorities and the poor were disproportionately
represented among the fatalities. But Amanda Ripley points out
in The Unthinkable that this was not true. The disproportionately affected demographic was the elderly. Why? Because many of them had weathered hurricanes
in the past. They “knew” they could weather this one as well. They discounted
information that suggested otherwise. By the time they learned they were wrong it was too late.
We can't avoid confirmation bias altogether. Our brains are wired to find patterns in our experiences that will inform us in future decisions. We often see patterns that aren't there, or at least as strongly there as we imagine. We simply don't have the capacity to pause and scrupulously analyze every issue or decision that presents itself. But we do need to be especially
diligent about confirmation bias when something significant is at stake. This
could be a financial decision, a job decision, or a decision that deeply affects
relationships. Politics and religion are two topics that frequently have such an impact. This is especially true when there is conflict. I suggest we need to do at least the following:
Strive to be conscious of our own logic and emotions driving
us toward a particular conclusion.
Make time to truly focus on the issues at hand and resist being emotionally hijacked during deliberation.
Restrain our impulse to declare someone ignorant or
malicious because they hold a different position. Assume positive intent until
there is strong evidence to the contrary.
Enter each discussion with a personal committment to having a positive experience.
Ask questions. Read and listen to alternative views. Seek to know other positions well enough that when we explain a position to a
person who holds that position that they will affirm our description.
Be in community with others who don’t share some of our
most cherished views. It helps us to hear others more fully. This type of community will
continually remind us that there are decent reasonable people who do not see the world the way we do.
As the hymn says, in all we do, "Guard each person's dignity and save each person's pride." (And sometimes that means when they are not returning the favor.)
Undergird this all with prayer for insight. Pray that God will bring clarity to
everyone involved.
I have a follow-up post on this topic tomorrow but for now I have a few questions. When have you discovered confirmation bias in your own thinking? Do
you agree with the list of practices above? What would you add?
Somewhere overnight or this morning the eschatology of American
Christians may become clear. If a Republican wins and the Christian
becomes delirious or confident that the Golden Days are about to arrive,
that Christian has an eschatology of politics. Or, alternatively, if a
Democrat wins and the Christian becomes delirious or confident that the
Golden Days are about to arrive, that Christian too has an eschatology
of politics. Or, we could turn each around, if a more Democrat oriented
Christian becomes depressed and hopeless because a Repub wins, or if a
Republican oriented Christian becomes depressed or hopeless because a
Dem wins, those Christians are caught in an empire-shaped eschatology of
politics.
I can’t imagine 1st Century Roman Christians caught up
in some kind of hope whether it would be Nero or Britannicus who would
succeed Claudius.
Where is our hope? ...
... Now before I take another step, it must be emphasized that I
participate in the election; and I think it makes a difference which
candidate wins; and I think from my own limited perspective one
candidate is better than the other.
But before I take the next
step I’ll say this: if our candidates lose won’t make one bit of a
difference for our obligation to follow Jesus today. Not one bit.
Participation
in our election dare not be seen as the lever that turns the
eschatological designs God has for this world. Where is our hope?
November 6 may tell us. ...
... Our hope is in the gospel of God that creates a kind of people that extends God’s gospel to the world. Chris Wright’s big book, The Mission of God,
reminds us that election is missional: God creates the people of God
not so the people of God can compare themselves to those who are not
God’s people, but so that God’s people will become a priesthood in this
world to mediate the mission of God, so that all hear the good news that
God’s grace is the way forward.
Our hope is in God’s mission in this world, and that mission transcends what happens November 6th.
As I have watched this election, my mind has gone back just a
few years ago to when left-leaning Christians were preaching about America and
Empire. As I follow social media, how curious it is to see many of those same
Christians who embraced that critique in delirious joy over the inauguration
the latest "Emperor." It confirms much of what I suspected all along.
The critique was partisan, not prophetic.
Be sure to read all of McKnight's post. I consider The Mission of God to be one of the top five most important books I've ever read. I strongly resonate with McKnight's post.
Mark Regnerus was running some number using New Family Structure Study (NFSS) data when he found out this about people disassociating from religion:
... The most dramatic shifts, however, appear around personal politics.
Political affiliation—a one measure, 1-5 scale of just how politically
conservative or liberal our respondents consider themselves—takes the
cake for shifting the bar on perceived growth or decline in organized
religious involvement. Only 23 percent of respondents who said they were
“very conservative” politically reported being less active in organized
religion today, while 31 percent said they were more active than as a youth. Keep in mind that’s compared with 53 and 13 percent of the total population, respectively.
It’s
a linear association, too: 48 percent of just plain “conservative”
respondents reported being less active religiously, compared with 52
percent of moderates, 62 percent of those who said they were “liberal”
and 76 percent of those who self-identified as “very liberal.” That’s
quite a span–from 23 percent (among the most conservative) to 76 percent
(among the most liberal).
The Democrats truly are losing their
religion. Or perhaps these are persons who lost their religion and then
decided the Democratic Party seemed most in line with their sentiments.
There is probably plenty of both types. ...
Neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney has made poverty a big part of his campaign. It's no wonder. Poverty has become something of a toxic issue for many American voters.
A presidential campaign, it would seem, is not the best time to have a comprehensive debate about poverty in America.
During the primary season, Republican candidate Newt Gingrich called President Obama the “food-stamp president.” It was not a compliment.
Mitt Romney later told CNN: “You can focus on the very poor. That’s not my focus.”
And President Obama – the former community organizer many expected
would make poverty a core concern? His health-care reforms were
historic. But on the stump he “can barely bring himself to say the word
‘poor,’ ” wrote Bob Herbert for the African-American news website, theGrio.com.
This, of course, is nothing new. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan coined the pejorative term “welfare queen” in 1976. But at a time when America
is still extracting itself from the after-effects of the Great
Recession – when unemployment continues to hover near 8 percent and Republicans themselves argue that it is actually much higher – why is talking about the poor politically toxic?
Primarily,
it is a matter of political calculus, experts say. Though the
percentage of people living under the poverty line is roughly equal to
the percentage of Americans who are Hispanic, no one is courting the
poor because their turnout on Election Day is traditionally low.
Moreover, presidential candidates are largely fighting for those few
undecided votes in the American political middle who decide an election.
For those voters weaned on America’s middle-class sensibilities and a
national ethic of “rugged individualism,” public appeals for the poor
can sound dissonant. The result is that political advocacy for the poor
has largely fallen to the likes of openly liberal groups such as Occupy Wall Street. ...
This is an interesting article. Yet I'm not fully convinced by the idea that because the poor don't vote it is politically unhelpful to talk about poverty policies. In his The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan points out the most voters do not vote on narrow self-interest ... liberal or conservative. The vote based on what they think is in the greater good. Liberals don't tend to vote for entitlements because of what the personally will get out of it but because they think it is in the best interests of society. Libertarians don't tend to vote against taxes just to get more money but because they believe society will function better if taxes are lower.
While there may be stark differences among us in how to adress poverty issues, I think most people want to see themselves supporting a candidate that does what is just and right concerning the poor. The absence of debate on this topic is part of what has made more disenchanted with both candidates.
A political scientist explains the disconnect between our moderate policy views and our intense hatred for the other side.
As another bitterly fought, closely contested presidential campaign
comes to an end, the American electorate appears hopelessly conflicted.
Even as we plead for compromise and bipartisanship in Washington, we
increasingly split into two mutually antagonistic camps.
This apparent contradiction has led puzzled academics to different conclusions: Some insist the public is becoming strongly polarized, while others believe the phenomenon is largely limited to the political and media elite. Political scientist Lilliana Mason’s analysis is more subtle, and more disturbing.
Her research
suggests that, in terms of our attitudes towards issues, we are no more
polarized than we were decades ago. But our emotions, and the behaviors
they drive, have largely uncoupled from our actual analysis of the
issues.
Essentially, the Stony Brook University scholar argues, our
identities have become increasingly intertwined with our political
affiliation. As a result, we feel ever more certain that our party is
right and the other is wrong—even in cases where their positions aren’t
far apart.
Our attitude towards the opposing party has become, basically, tribal: We detest them simply because they’re the other side.
“The American public can hold remarkably moderate and constant issue
positions, while nonetheless becoming progressively more biased, active
and angry when it comes to politics,” she argues. “Even as we agree on
most issues, we are becoming increasingly uncivil in our approach to
politics.” ...
... Mason discovered that what she calls “behavioral polarization”—anger at
the other side, activism for one’s own side, and a tendency to look at
political arguments through a biased lens—is driven much more strongly
by that sense of team spirit, as opposed to one’s views on public
policy.
“Ideological identity doesn’t necessarily reflect your position on the issues,” she said. “It means you feel like a liberal or a conservative. ...
... And the notion of defending “your people” is an emotional impulse that can be traced back to our distant evolutionary past. ...
She is not optimistic about the future.
... At least potentially, such people [non-aligned voters] are “more clear-minded in their
assessment of what the parties are doing, and less blinded by the bias
that partisans have,” she said. But on the other hand, they also tend to
be less informed about the issues, and most are disengaged from the
political process.
That leaves the rest of us: People who feel kinship with our own
side, distrust toward the other side, and wariness regarding compromise.
Mason sees no obvious way out of this distressing dynamic.
If her analysis is accurate, the only way to reduce the anger and
bias would be “to reduce the strength or alignment of political
identities.” In other words, a hugely impactful issue would have to come
along—something that forces us to question our emotional connection to
our respective parties. ...
I found this article both fascinating and depressing. What makes it deeply troubling to me is how different faith communities have aligned themselves according to political affiliation. As a consquence the church in our culture has severly compromised its ability to speak meaningfully to the issues that confront us. Near term, I share the author's lake of optimism.
Amazon.com has taken the top 100 "red" books and "blue" books, and then mapped where they were sent in the last thirty days. The map below is a screen capture. Go to the website to see the list of books and use the interactive map: Amazon Election Heat Map 2012. Any thoughts?
4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world’s first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm is able to produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."
5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:
"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism;
they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in
moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their
monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean
striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to
correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America
was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be
hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the
post–Reagan Republican Party."
"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."
I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten
minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had
gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided
nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been
raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be
fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say
anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys
around the table nodded in agreement."
7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history
8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online
"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."
Man does not live by GDP alone. An introduction to the Legatum Institute's latest Prosperity Index.
It
doesn't take a degree from Oxford to understand that a nation's average income --
even after adjustments for purchasing power, to make international comparisons
more relevant -- is an inadequate measure of comparative well-being. That
reality has inspired numerous attempts to create a better measure. The latest,
most comprehensive, and arguably most insightful, is the Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index for 2012,
released just this week. I can't claim utter objectivity here: I've been a
consultant to the Legatum Institute. I suspect, though, that you won't need
much convincing to be captured by this ambitious effort.
Back to
that pesky measurement problem. For decades, the United Nations has been
brewing a straightforward improvement on income rankings on a regular basis, work
largely inspired by the passions of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen.
The UN's Human
Development Index blends per capita income, years of schooling, and life
expectancy. And in the past few years, it's added an "inequality adjusted"
version that discounts each component according to how equally it is
distributed in the population before combining them in index form.
Obviously,
though, other elements matter to well-being -- among them human rights,
economic freedom, socioeconomic mobility, personal security, social insurance,
and social cohesion. Other indexes try to capture one or more of these
attributes. Thus the Heritage/WSJ Index of Economic Freedom
ranks countries according to ten criteria ranging from property rights to
entrepreneurship. The World Economic Forum measures
national competitiveness, writ large. The Life
Satisfaction Index simply cuts to the chase, ranking countries according to
surveys of self-reported happiness.
The
Legatum Institute's approach is truly catholic (with a small c). First,
countries are rated according to eight sub-indexes (economy,
entrepreneurship/opportunity, governance, education, health, safety/security,
personal freedom, and social capital), which are derived from 89 variables. Some
are objective (e.g. the unemployment rate) and some subjective (the percentage
who answered "yes" to the question: "Did you worry yesterday?") The raw data,
by the way, can be accessed on the website.
Scores
on each of the eight sub-indexes are given equal weight in producing the
aggregate rankings. ...
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