... The app itself is the work of one Los Angeles-based 26-year-old
freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, who has devoted the last 16 months to
Buycott. “It’s been completely bootstrapped up to this point,” he said.
Martinez and another friend have pitched in to promote the app.
Pardo’s handiwork is available for download on iPhone or Android, making its debut in iTunes and GoogleGOOG +2.28%
Play in early May. You can scan the barcode on any product and the free
app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent
company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.
Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate
family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for
instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a
subsidiary of Johnson & JohnsonJNJ +0.56%.
Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to
boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than
single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling,
will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the
36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory
labeling of genetically modified food. ...
American food aid is sent to places with dire need. And until now, the commodities have been bought from U.S. farmers and shipped overseas on U.S. vessels to be donated. Margaret Warner reports on a new budget proposal that would redirect nearly half the money to buy bulk food more locally to the countries that need it.
Agribusiness and farm state politicians are oppossing the change. I'm opposing them on this one. Paying local farmers to grow the food has greater potential for creating sustatinable economic growth and avoiding dependence.
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
Africans are helping themselves more than aid workers are, according to new research.
Analysis of cash flows by Hong Kong-based Ghanaian academic
Adams Bodomo shows that Africans living outside the continent send more
money home to their families than is sent by traditional Western aid
donors in what is called Official Development Assistance (ODA).
In 2010 - the most recent year for which meaningful
comparisons can be made, according to Mr Bodomo - the African diaspora
remitted $51.8bn (£34bn) to the continent.
In the same year, according to World Bank figures, ODA to Africa was $43bn (£28bn).
"I started the research to see if I could support a hunch I
had that money remitted by African families was more efficient aid than
ODA money," the Ghanaian professor told the BBC.
"I found it was clearly more efficient and better targeted but to my surprise I found it was also a much bigger sum." ...
Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it.
IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.
It is not clear why climate change has “plateaued” (see article). It could be because of greater natural variability in the climate, because clouds dampen warming or because of some other little-understood mechanism in the almost infinitely complex climate system. But whatever the reason, some of the really ghastly scenarios—where the planet heated up by 4°C or more this century—are coming to look mercifully unlikely. Does that mean the world no longer has to worry?
No, for two reasons. ...
Here is a graph from the article:
Here is a another chart from The Mail Online showing actual temps versus the forecasted temps based on computer models. The article is written in the publications typical bombastic style but graph is nevertheless helpful:
I'm glad to see reputable publications like the Economist addressing this
development. It is clear to even the most casual observer that a plateau is
happening. To keep behaving as if it isn't there and that people who are drawing
attention to it are sinister does not help the public discourse. In fact,
embracing anomalies that are particularly problematic for a narrative you want
to communicate is key to making winning broad public support. As I've said
before, I don't question scientific thought that human behavior has an impact
on the environment. I do question our ability, to date, to appreciate the
complexity involved or the sensitivity to human behavior. Prudence is an
important value here.
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who
are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical
advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new
laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every
month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
The federal government spends more money each year on cash
payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and
welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often
overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal
disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the
labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.
In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of
the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the
story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens
after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's
the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden,
increasingly expensive safety net. ...
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.
Incarceration rates for black Americans dropped sharply from 2000 to
2009, especially for women, while the rate of imprisonment for whites
and Hispanics rose over the same decade, according to a report released
Wednesday by a prison research and advocacy group in Washington.
The declining rates for blacks represented a significant shift in the
racial makeup of the United States’ prisons and suggested that the
disparities that have long characterized the prison population may be
starting to diminish.
“It certainly marks a shift from what we’ve seen for several decades now,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, whose report was based on data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Justice Department. “Normally, these things don’t change very dramatically over a one-decade period.”
The decline in incarceration rates was most striking for black women,
dropping 30.7 percent over the ten-year period. In 2000, black women
were imprisoned at six times the rate of white women; by 2009, they were
2.8 times more likely to be in prison. For black men, the rate of
imprisonment decreased by 9.8 percent; in 2000 they were incarcerated at
7.7 times the rate of white men, a rate that fell to 6.4 times that of
white men by 2009.
For white men and women, however, incarceration rates increased over the
same period, rising 47.1 percent for white women and 8.5 percent for
white men. By the end of the decade, Hispanic men were slightly less
likely to be in prison, a drop of 2.2 percent, but Hispanic women were
imprisoned more frequently, an increase of 23.3 percent.
Over all, blacks currently make up about 38 percent of inmates in state
and federal prisons; whites account for about 34 percent....
The juvenile incarceration in the US rate has fallen 41 percent in the past 15 years, reaching the lowest level since 1975, a new study finds. What is behind the rapid decline?
Fewer young people are behind bars than at any point since 1975, due in
part to lower rates of juvenile crime and a shift away from
interventions focused on long-term incarceration.
The number of young people in a correction facility on a single day
dropped from a high of 107,637 in 1995 to 70,792 in 2010, according to a
new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that used data from the US Census Bureau. The incarceration rate – the number of young people confined per 100,000 youths – dropped by 41 percent in the same period.
The
trend might be stronger than the data show, says Bart Lubow, director
of the foundation’s Juvenile Justice Strategy Group. Some of the biggest
decreases in youth incarceration in some states have occurred in the
past two years, and those numbers are not included in the report. ...
The main reasons behind the declining numbers:
A shift in thinking about the best ways to handle kids who break the law.
A sustained period of decreasing juvenile crime.
Fiscal pressures on state governments that have many people – including conservatives who in the past espoused tough-on-crime policies – clamoring for less-expensive alternatives to mass incarceration. ...
... “Even with the drops we’re describing in this report, the US, compared to similarly governed countries like those in Western Europe, has a much, much higher [youth] incarceration rate than any of those places,” he says.
America’s incarceration rate for juveniles is 18 times greater than that of France, and more than seven times greater than that of Great Britain. It’s hard to even compare it with the juvenile incarceration rates in places like Finland or Sweden, where young offenders are seldom locked up. ...
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. ...
Since President Obama proposed an increase in the federal minimum wage in the U.S.,
from $7.25 per hour to $9 per hour and then index it to inflation, the
debate has been raging about whether or not this would make low wage
workers better paid or not paid at all (or in other words if they would
get unemployed).
The short answer is that it would be a little bit of both, but with
emphasis on little. To understand why we must first examine the issue
theoretically and then look at current U.S. conditions. ...
... If the legal minimum wage is lower or equal to the current pay level,
nothing happens at all. If it is higher than current pay but lower than
marginal productivity then workers get higher pay. If it is higher than
marginal productivity, workers lose their jobs.
Since minimum
wages are usually far below median pay, for most workers nothing
happens. For the small numbers that are affected some will receive a
raise, while others will lose their jobs. The exact proportion of
workers who are unaffacted, of workers who receive higher pay and of
workers who lose their jobs depend on the specific conditions in each
specific country (or state or city) and each specific period of time and
will therefore differ between different locations and different periods
of time ...
This fits makes sound economic sense to me. I think most people intuitively know that if you put the minimum wage at $30 you would wreck the economy. There is an upper limit on high you can go before businesses would be paying people more than the economic value of the labor they are getting in return. Presently, $9 is well below that threshold in most contexts and will therefore have only a modest impact on either improving wages or destroying jobs. I suspect the political and symbolic value is greater than the actual economic impact.
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. ...
One of the challenging features of poverty aid is to avoid creating disincentives toward achieving self-sufficiency.
... Take a hypothetical single mother of two, Jane, earning $18,000 a year.
Earning an additional $1 will increase Jane's actual cash available to
spend by just 12 cents.
How can this be? The
effect comes about because governments at various levels give aid to the
very poor, such that the extremely low earners face negative tax rates.
In short, we pay some poor to work -- this is the "welfare to workfare"
move of Bill Clinton's legacy. But then the law takes these benefits
back from the near-poor via high marginal tax rates in a "phaseout"
range. The most important of these provisions is the earned income tax
credit (EITC) located in the federal income tax. This provision pays the
working poor up to 40 cents on the dollar up to approximately $10,000
of earnings.
If Jane makes $10,000,
the government mails her a check for $4,000. Over a certain range, Jane
keeps that money. But as she starts earning more than approximately
$18,000, Jane begins to lose the $4,000, at a roughly 20% rate. Add that
to payroll taxes (7.65%), the regular income tax (15%, at that range),
and Jane is in a rate bracket over 40%, and we are just getting started
-- other federal, state and local programs and taxes pile on to the same
effect.
You might be thinking
that losing a benefit is not a tax. That is an understandable sentiment,
but Jane will not be comforted by it. Looking just at the EITC, as
Jane's earnings go over $18,000, she loses some of the dollars she is
earning to "regular" taxes, and the $4,000 she was getting in assistance
is disappearing. It's real, green, money that she is losing. This is
the net effect that Shaviro was describing: Compare Jane earning $10,000
in the workplace to Jane earning $25,000, and the latter Jane simply
has over $2500 fewer dollars to spend.
If this is all so complex, how can it affect anyone's real behavior? But what we don't know, or don't fully, can affect us. ...
Tax policy is not my strong suit but articles like these explain why the seeming "irrational" or "lazy" of low-income folks is often not that irrational. It is the system they are navigating that is irrational.
"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?
Sociologist Peter Berger concludes this article with this observation:
... But I do want to make a general observation: In all these cases the
authorities accused of violating the plaintiffs’ rights operate with a
definition of religion as a private matter to be kept out of public
space. There is here a general issue of government overreach, as clearly
illustrated by the (still unresolved) attempt by the Obama
administration to force Catholic institutions to provide contraception
coverage in their employees’ health plans. Beyond that, though, there is
a very ideological view of the place of religion in society. In other
words, religion is to be an activity engaged in by consenting adults in
private. The attorney for the Judeo-Christian side in the aforementioned
American case had it quite right when he compared the treatment of his
client’s religion with measures of disease control. This is not an
attitude one would expect to find in a Western democracy. It is
curiously reminiscent of policies toward religion in Communist countries
and toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule.
An aggressive secularism seems to be on the march in all these cases.
It seems more at home in Europe, which is far more secularized than
America. Even in the United Kingdom, it seems, the drums of the French
Revolution still reverberate. But how is one to explain this sort of
secularism in the United States? The “nones”—that is, those who say
“none” when asked for their religious affiliation by pollsters—are a
very mixed lot. One theme that comes through is disappointment with
organized religion. There is an anti-Christian edge to this, since
Christian churches continue to be the major religious institutions in
this country. Disappointment then, or disillusion—but why the aggressive
hostility? There is yet another theme that comes through in the survey
data: An identification of churches (and that means mainly Christian
ones) with intolerance and repression. I think that this is significant.
Let me venture a sociological hypothesis here: The new American
secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution. Since the 1960s there
has indeed been a sexual revolution in America. It has been very
successful in changing the mores and the law. It should not be
surprising that many people, especially younger ones, enjoy the new
libidinous benefits of this revolution. Whether one approves or deplores
the new sexual culture, it seems unlikely to be reversed. Yet Christian
churches (notably the Catholic and Evangelical ones) are in the
forefront of those who do want to reverse the libertine victory. Its
beneficiaries are haunted by the nightmare of being forced into chastity
belts by an all too holy alliance of clerics and conservative
politicians. No wonder they are hostile!
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.
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." ...
... But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one
more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and
creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately
improves life as we know it? ...
... It does not, however, follow that the future arc of these changes is
disastrous. Unwanted, unwelcome and uneasy? For sure. Potentially
lethal? Yes. But so much of the debate over the past 30 years has been
over what is causing climate change, and how to prevent more
change from happening, that comparatively less energy has been spent on
adapting to it. In part, those most focused on these issues, from Green
parties in Europe to environmentalists in the United States, have often
believed that any discussion of mitigating the effects of climate change
is tantamount to giving up on preventing it. That has led to a jeremiad
mentality, epitomized by Al Gore and the scathing warnings of what lies
ahead in his hugely influential 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.
The advantage of that approach was that it alerted many to the
dangers of climate change; the disadvantage was that it scared people
into passivity and closed fruitful avenues to policies focused on
mitigating the effects rather than halting the trend. And while halting
the trend might have been feasible (just) 20 years ago, the most we can
achieve now is to reduce the rate and intensity of climate change until
the world’s population levels off sometime in the middle of the 21st
century. Activists can and should still focus on reducing global
emissions, but not at the expense of answering how we will live with the
change.
Perhaps in recognition of the need of a new paradigm, “resilience”
has quietly become a buzzword. The ever provocative Nassim Nicholas
Taleb in his recent book Antifragile argues that only
organizations capable of meeting crises can survive crises. In the wake
of Hurricane Sandy, counties and cities in the Northeast have been
contemplating how best to prepare for future weather shocks. That has
led to renewed appreciation for cities, such as Rotterdam, that have
long undertaken environmental planning organized around the notion that
floods will happen no matter what humans do. The challenge isn’t to find
a way to prevent floods; it’s to find a way to live with them.
The two approaches could not be more distinct: One warns of
catastrophe and attempts to steer away from it. One pragmatically
accepts that some undesirable things will happen no matter what.
Rotterdam has thus focused both on preventing as much flooding as
possible (floodgates) and on urban infrastructure that is as
flood-resistant as possible: power grids that have dispersed nodes,
waterproof insulation, even floating parts of the city in case of truly severe inundation.
Far from signaling a resignation to climate change, resilience,
adaption and mitigation all shift energy away from holding back the tide
and toward innovation and creativity in meeting it. ...
I especially like the bolded portion below in thinking about complex human systems
... That approach is imperative not just for climate change but for multiple
areas that generate such anxiety about the future. The imbalance of the
financial system? Those are only made worse by the false belief that a
system could be created where such risks don’t exist; better to find
ways to mitigate the risks of a global interconnected financial system
than seek, Don Quixote-like, ways to eliminate risk. ...
Some provoactive stuff! I may not entirely agree with his assessment of particular risks but I think his strategy for addressing risk is right on.
WASHINGTON — National health spending climbed to $2.7 trillion in 2011,
or an average of $8,700 for every person in the country, but as a share
of the economy, it remained stable for the third consecutive year, the
Obama administration said Monday.
The rate of increase in health spending, 3.9 percent in 2011, was the
same as in 2009 and 2010 — the lowest annual rates recorded in the 52
years the government has been collecting such data.
Federal officials could not say for sure whether the low growth in
health spending represented the start of a trend or reflected the
continuing effects of the recession, which crimped the economy from
December 2007 to June 2009. ...
Jonathan Klick - University of Pennsylvania Law School; Erasmus School of Law; PERC - Property and Environment Research Center
Joshua D. Wright - George Mason University School of Law
November 2, 2012
Abstract: Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.
"... Although the number of evangelical churches in the United States
declined for many years, the trend reversed in 2006, with more new
churches opening each year since, according to the Leadership Network’s
most recent surveys. This wave of “church planting” has been highest
among nondenominational pastors, free to experiment outside traditional
hierarchies.
“I hear a lot of pastors say, ‘I’m not just trying to be creative and
avant-garde, I think this is maybe the last chance for me,’ ” said Doug Pagitt, the founder of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.
Mr. Pagitt has written several books on church innovations, many of which were first developed in the “emergent” church movement of the last decade or among “missional” churches whose practices focus on life outside the church.
Many of their innovations are being adopted by an increasing number of pastors in the mainstream.
... But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.
Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.
The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.
Executives at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel say those shifts have convinced many electronics companies that they must also overhaul how they interact with foreign plants and workers — often at a cost to their bottom lines, though, analysts say, probably not so much as to affect consumer prices. As Apple and Foxconn became fodder for “Saturday Night Live” and questions during presidential debates, device designers and manufacturers concluded the industry’s reputation was at risk. ...
"...Launched in July, the Seattle-based Egraphs' business model is simple, but pretty clever. Fans can peruse the company website to see if their favorite athlete has partnered up with Egraphs. Each player's section has a number of professionally shot action photographs included, typically priced between $25 and $50. The fan pays and sends the athlete a message through the website, including some personal details or memories.
The athlete then receives that message on his custom iPad app, using the the information provided to write a personalized note and electronic autograph on the selected photo. The photo is then sent electronically to the fan, who can save it digitally, share it on social media or order a physical print. Revenue is split between company and athlete. ..."
8. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, legalizing abortion across the country. Time magazine has a feature article about the Pro-Choice movement this week that suggests 1973 may have been the high-water mark for the movement. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall. Here is a short clip summarizing their take.
"...Academic Publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices. But as Kevin Carey noted in a recent Slate piece, the industry also shares some of the dysfunctions that help drive up the cost of healthcare spending. Just as doctors prescribe prescription drugs they'll never have to pay for, college professors often assign titles with little consideration of cost. Students, like patients worried about their health, don't have much choice to pay up, lest they risk their grades. Meanwhile, Carey illustrates how publishers have done just about everything within their power to prop up their profits, from bundling textbooks with software that forces students to buy new editions instead of cheaper used copies, to suing a low-cost textbook start-ups over flimsy copyright claims. ..."
12. Baseball Pitchers like Phil Niekro, Tim Wakefield, and now, R. A. Dickey did their magic throwing a knuckleball. Pitchers who master usually do very well and it puts less stress on the arm. So why don't more pitchers throw it? Why the Knuckleball Isn’t Thrown by More Pitchers in Major League Baseball
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. ...
3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?
"... Despite
its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for
rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and
conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has
sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of
the health service.
Their success is envied by the centre right
in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to
grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006.
The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right
government had been re-elected after serving a full term.
As the
state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a
former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a
visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all
welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."
"... We
have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly
clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but
also for their impact. And I’m not just talking about writing a check or
funding a charity; I’m referring to business models for which community
involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers.
(Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went
to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea:
the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger
idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this
early on.
At a time when the moral framework of America appears
to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the
propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore
values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive
enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and
promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in
business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is
now.
Whether it’s the job of the corporation or not to set the
moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies
setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in
entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish
strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money
must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business,
greater profit will follow. ..."
"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."
More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state’s economic woes continue to drive residents away.
Most statisticians attribute California’s net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.
The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.
Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a “labor pool with the right skills at the right price” — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...
"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."
15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to a statement President Obama made at Newtown, CT. When we deal with complex topics like gun control, we are always
talking about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more
than 30,000 lives. The were 32,367 traffic fatalities last
year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just
one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular
policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making statements like this, as politicians often do.
"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a
result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that
served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive.
The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they
splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old
evangelicalism whimper and wane."
He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature but I think his articulation of trends is right.
The Atlantic Cities has a piece about ten interesting maps from 2012. Year in Review: 2012's Year in Maps The map below is just one of them.
"Mayor Bloomberg's insistent support for the NYPD's Stop and Frisk
policy has been the single most contentious policy of his tenure, and
WNYC's illustration of where the stops occur makes clear why. For one
thing, it gives a geographic base to the racially biased search data. As
I wrote in August, the mix of those subjected to the humiliating
procedure sometimes varies from population data by a factor of nine:
"last year, black and Hispanic men between the ages of 14 and 24
accounted for 41.6 percent of stops, though they make up only 4.7
percent of the city's population." According to the same ACLU report from which that data comes,
"the number of stops of young black men exceeded the entire city
population of young black men (168,126 as compared to 158,406)."
Most importantly, though, the map shows that blocks with large numbers
of searches don't yield more guns than blocks with fewer searches."
... In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in "radiative forcing" (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.
The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).
This is much lower than the IPCC's current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).
Mr. Lewis is an expert reviewer of the recently leaked draft of the IPCC's WG1 Scientific Report. The IPCC forbids him to quote from it, but he is privy to all the observational best estimates and uncertainty ranges the draft report gives. What he has told me is dynamite.
... That is an extraordinary claim and clearly requires extraordinary
evidence to support it. Much as I like Ridley (we swap stories and
information regularly) I’m not going to accept it on the basis of one
newspaper column. And Ridley wouldn’t expect me or you to either.
But if it is true then climate change stops being a looming diaster
threatening all we hold dear and becomes instead just a minor background
effect. One that we really don’t have to do anything particularly
active about at all: the advancing technologies of low or non-carbon
energy generation will take care of it all for us. ...
I share Worstall's caution but I also think that to
acknowledge that the earth is warming and humans play a contributing role,
something for which there seems to be strong agreement, doesn't tell you the
magnitude of the impact or what policy options are optimal. As I've pointed out
in early posts, the global average temperature has plateaued for more than a
decade. Violent hurricane activity has not increased. Arctic ice is melting,
although, as I understand it, it is summer ice not winter ice where the change
is being observed. Dueling scientists publish studies with partisans
cherry-picking the elements that are most supportive of their narrative. I do
not doubt that human behavior is having impact on the climate. But I am uncertain
of how robust climate models are and how serious the challenges are likely to
be.
... But Kloor isn’t really talking about politics. Rather, I think, it’s how
we conceive of the environment and environmentalism. The message of the
modernist greens is: in a world of 7 billion plus people, all of
whom want (and deserve) to live modern, consuming lives, we need to be
pragmatic about how we use—and how much we protect—nature. We don’t have any other choice, so we’d better start dealing with the realities on the ground.
The realist in me thinks the modernist greens are right. There are simply too many of us,
and we want too much, for our footprint on the Earth to get anything
but bigger. And I’m cheered by the scientists and thinkers who suggest
that we might be able to have it all—a huge, thriving human population,
and an environment that can support it—as long as we plan right. What’s
more, I’m very conscious that industrialization and globalization have
largely been forces for good, expanding human access to wealth, health
and longevity. There’s no better time in history to be human being.
Industrialization is not going to be rolled back—and it shouldn’t be.
There’s also a larger social shift at work that’s altering our concept of nature. Today more human beings live in cities
than live in the countryside, and that proportion will only grow in the
future: by 2050, as many as three-quarters of the estimated 10 billion
people on Earth will live in urban areas. This is a historic change—as
recently as 1800 just 2% of the world’s population lived in cities—and
it’s a sign that humanity, inevitably, is decoupling from nature. I
suspect that’s true even of environmentalists, who are just as likely as
anyone else to come into contact with what passes for wilderness these
days more in a managed park than untrammeled rainforest or woodland.
For a lot of us, “environmental issues” increasingly have to do with
improving urban life—think cleaner mass transit or access to organic
food in farmer’s markets. As the writer Emma Marris argued in her book Rambunctious Garden,
environmentalism needs to stop drawing simplistic lines between what’s
natural and what’s manmade—with the former always good and the latter
always bad—and learn to celebrate the biodiversity that’s in our
backyards. ...
A mass shooting is four or more people murdered in 24 hours. A mass public shooting occurs in a public place like a business or a school, but excludes events like domestic killings, gang violence, and robbery attempts. Brad Plummer at The Washington Post has a chart today that shows the instances of all mass shootings (Graph of the day: Perhaps mass shootings aren’t becoming more common.)
Consistent with the thesis of my post, this graph does not show a society spiraling out of control with violence. It shows a remarkably stable pattern, altough a pattern that is well above the rates for other OECD nations.
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that
it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do
something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds. …
… The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate
change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about
it. That's up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009. …
“Good
news! People are finally coming around to believing what scientists have been
telling us all along!” I can just hear some folks declaring. Hold that thought
for a moment. The article goes on to say:
…
The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a
little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that
category. …
…
[John] Krosnick [Stanford social psychologist],
who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes
the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers, but in
the next group, who had serious doubts.
"They don't believe
what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick
said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they
had been seeing all along." …
The rise in belief in global
warming does not stem from science, but inductive reasoning based on heuristics
… relying on personal experience as evidence of a broader reality. It is possible this
will be the warmest year on record in the United States but more moderate
globally. People in the United States look at their thermometers and see warmer
temperatures. The news shows super-storm Sandy. Therefore, from experience in our
particular context it is reasoned that
there is a global trend.
The irony is that average
global temperatures haven’t changed much for more than a decade. Global hurricanes
and cyclones that make landfall are not more prevalent, as has been predicted. In fact, the last four
years have been quite mild. I’m not making the case that climate change isn’t
happening. Climate models don’t necessarily preclude plateaus in change. Rather
I’m saying that if you are a skeptic, then recent trends should bolster
skeptical interpretations. Yet, because of personal experience, some science
skeptics are extrapolating from their narrow context to global realities. Furthermore,
another survey finds that One
in three Americans see extreme weather as a sign of biblical end times. This
is not good news for science.
But I want to suggest that
there is more to the story than this. Many true believers in climate change
insist that the science is settled on this matter and no further dissent may be
tolerated. Yet, as I have written about earlier, some of these folks are
staunch skeptics about the safety of genetically modified crops and nuclear
power, despite what the scientific community says. (see Why
Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? and The
Anti-Science Left) The issue is not so much that they are persuaded by
science, as it is that claiming scientific authority for conclusions reached by
other means (heuristics? ideology?) is rhetorically useful. This is not good
news for science either.
Any number of futurists
have written about this challenge. For our entire human history, individual lives were
consumed with challenges that were immediately present to us … like shelter from
the elements and not becoming prey for some animal. But with the recent explosion
in knowledge, technology, and economics, many of the imminent threats we face
have been tamed and the new challenges we face are vastly more complex. Over
reliance on heuristic models and rigid ideological sense-making strategies,
once essential, can become obstacles to good decisions. The challenge for the next several
generations is going to be learning how to develop social institutions that
effectively reflect on and address complex challenges.
... Across the nation, conservation groups in partnership with ranchers
are using cattle to restore native plant species by grazing invasive
grasses. Other groups are working with fishermen to fish sustainably,
and using logging and mining profits to pave way for forest and salmon
restoration.
"There's been a shift to working more with
industries," said Lynn Huntsinger, professor of rangeland ecology at the
University of California, Berkeley. "This is a human landscape. We need
food, we need wood, people are crazy about eating salmon. Working
closely with those who produce on the land offers opportunities for ...
teaching them about conservation."
In the past, conservationists
relied on purchasing land and setting it aside, away from human
activity. Logging, ranching or mining were seen as harmful and
incompatible with preservation.
But in recent years, the use of
conservation easements to retire development rights on private land has
exploded. The easements, which cost a fraction of what it would cost to
buy the property, allow landowners to continue working the land. ...
ead more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/15/3967248/conservationists-team-up-with.html#storylink=cpy
The
horrific massacre in Newton, Connecticut, is to sparking debate about
guns and violence, as well it should. As the discussion gets underway, I
think it is helpful to get a sense of where we stand in the flow of history as
it relates to violence in the United States. Here are a few
things to consider.
Below is data
from the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The annual report compiles
reported crimes. It strength is the use of hard data. Its biggest weakness is the
absence of unreported crime. The willingness of people to report crime varies
by type of crime and their willingness to report may change over time. Also, law enforcement’s diligence with
different types of crime may change over time. Tougher enforcement can lead to fewer
incidents of actual crime, even as incidents
of reported crime rise. Nevertheless,
the UCR is an important measure.
Crimes
are grouped in two categories:
Violent - murder and non-negligent manslaughter,
forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Property - burglary,
larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.
Violent
crime is at a forty year low.
A second
measure is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Twice a year, surveys ask members of households if they have been victims of particular crimes, reported or
not. The strength of the survey is that it captures unreported crime. A
weakness may be that some crimes, like domestic violence, are underreported.
The NCVS
is also broken into two categories:
Violent - rape, robbery, and assault.
Property
- burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.
(A
different methodology was used in 2006 that makes it incomparable with other
years. Also, 2011 data has been published and shows an uptick in crime.
However, the 2002 and 2010 data in the recent report, used as comparison points, do
not match earlier publications and I have yet to determine why. I chose not to
include it here until I have a better understanding.)
An
interesting question: Was there truly less crime fifty years ago or were people
simply less likely to report crimes? I doubt there is a definitive answer. Murder
is sometimes used as a proxy for overall violence in society. Here is the United States murder
rate per 100,000 population:
Additionally,
there is this estimation of the murder rate over the last 300 years. (Source: The Public
Intellectual)
The
lowest murder rate ever was 4.6 in 1963. It was 4.7 in 2011.
It can conclusively
be said that that violence in American society is not spiraling out of control.
We are living in one of the least violent eras in
American history. But this is not the
whole story.
(Go to
the source linked above for info about individual countries.)
The 4.7
homicide rate for the United States is a near record low but it is still two or
three times the rate of other Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development nations. Guns are a big part of this difference. The good news is
the precipitous decline in aggravated deaths. The bad news is how much more violence there is in
the United States compared to other nations, even at all-time lows.
… And
yet those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.
"There
is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox
of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since
the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.
The
random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox
says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer. …
… Grant
Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has
written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings
rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And
mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He
estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first
decade of the century.
Chances
of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being
struck by lightning.
Still,
he understands the public perception - and extensive media coverage - when mass
shootings occur in places like malls and schools. "There is this feeling
that could have been me. It makes it so much more frightening." …
(I realize
that does not seem to square with the statement about mass shootings peaking in 1929. I suspect a typo and "1999" was what was intended.)
This
data was reported in March of 2010. According to a recent Los Angeles Times
article, Deadliest
U.S. mass shootings, there have been nine mass shootings in the United
States in the first three years of this decade. That projects out to thirty for this decade. But there have been five mass shootings in the last five months.
There clearly has been an uptick in mass shootings over the past year.
On
a final note, the Sandy Hook massacre involved young children at school. Over
the past twenty years, the number of children 5-18 years old murdered at school
has ranged from a low of 14 (school years ending in 2000 and in 2001) and a
high of 34 (schools years ending 1993 and in 1998.) (Source: Indicators of School Safety: 2011) According to an article in the Guardian, Mass
shootings at schools and universities in the US – timeline, over the last fifty years there have been
six school mass shootings (including Sandy Hook) that have taken the lives of
children 5-18. Three of the mass shootings were at primary schools (Stockton, CA,
in 1989; Nickel Mines, PA, 2006; and now Sandy Hook.)
So
here are a few observations and comments:
The United States has an excessively violent culture.
Violence has lessened significantly in recent years. We are not spiraling into
chaos.
Guns are an important factor in the excessive homicide rates. I don't know why citizens need to own semi-automatic weapons. But there is more
than access to these guns that needs to be addressed here.
While a case can be made that mass murders have been declining in the long run,
the sudden frequency of them in recent months is alarming (five in five months).
Nothing that is said above should take away from our outrage at the senseless
death of innocent children and their teachers. But Friday’s shooting should not
send us into despair that things are spiraling out of control. Friday’s
shooting should motivate us to ask anew how we can accelerate our march toward
becoming a less violent society.
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. ...
A group of South African students and an aid agency in Norway
are challenging the stereotypical image of Africa as a continent
riddled with conflict, disease, corruption, poverty, and brutal
dictatorships needing rescue from developed nations. ...
... The video is humorous, but there is a serious message. The point is
that images of helpless Africans are just as inaccurate as the idea of
helpless freezing Norwegians. A lot of Africans cannot relate to the
patronizing videos and development initiatives.
The organization says it has certain goals with the video.
Among them, that fundraising "should not be based on exploiting
stereotypes" and that media should have more respect in portraying
suffering children.
"We want to see more nuances," it writes on
its website. "We want to know about positive developments in Africa and
developing countries, not only about crises, poverty and AIDS. We need
more attention on how western countries have a negative impact on
developing countries."
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
The first crack in a firewall that has protected big coal for decades.
Since the 1990s, small bands of Appalachian residents, regional environmental groups, and more recently the EPA have fought what often seemed like a futile battle against mountaintop-removal mining, the radical practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal seams underneath. The coal companies, backed by local political establishments and conservative jurists skeptical of possible regulatory overreach, have fended off multiple attempts to shut down mountaintop operations. As a result, an ever-widening swath of Appalachian peaks and valleys has been obliterated: approximately 2,200 square miles, according to the EPA, in what is likely a conservative estimate because the footprint often extends beyond the permit zones. That’s an area almost the size of Delaware.
That expanse kept growing as the battles mostly went in coal’s favor. Until this month, that is, when environmental groups won a decisive legal victory over a coal company. It may prove to be turning point in the war over the mountaintops, and for the future of coal.
On Nov. 15, St. Louis-based Patriot Coal agreed to phase out its mountaintop excavations and redirect its efforts back to underground mining. Adding a symbolic punch, Patriot agreed to decommission its two draglines—enormous boom excavators that do the actual mountaintop demolitions—and can sell them only on the condition that they’re never used in the Appalachian coalfields again. Coal executives usually shrug off complaints about mountaintop-removal impacts as the grumbling of dilettantes and naysayers who don’t understand the need for mining jobs. Yet here was the practically unheard-of spectacle of Patriot’s CEO, Ben Hatfield, acknowledging that mountaintop removal affected both people and ecology: “Patriot Coal recognizes that our mining operations impact the communities in which we operate in significant ways, and we are committed to maximizing the benefits of this agreement for our stakeholders, including our employees and neighbors," Hatfield said in court. "We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint." ...
As you can see, some of the worst declines in life expectancy are in moutain top mining areas of Kentucky and West Virginia. Allen Johnson of Christians for the Mountains makes the, as does this article, that this strongly connected to the mining operations.
Evidence is mounting that moderate minimum wages can do more good than harm
... America’s academics still do not agree on the employment effects. But
both sides have honed their methods and, in some ways, the gap between
them has shrunk. Messrs Card and Krueger moved on to other work, but
Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Michael
Reich of the University of California at Berkeley have generalised the
case-study approach, comparing restaurant employment across all
contiguous counties with different minimum-wage levels between 1990 and
2006. They found no adverse effects on employment from a higher minimum
wage. They also argue that if research showed such effects, these mostly
reflected other differences between American states and had nothing to
do with the minimum wage.
Messrs Neumark and Wascher still demur. They have published stacks of
studies (and a book) purporting to show that minimum wages hit jobs. In
a forthcoming paper they defend their methods and argue that the
evidence still favours their view. But even they are no longer blanket
opponents. In a 2011 paper they pointed out that a higher minimum wage
along with the Earned Income Tax Credit (which tops up income for poor
workers in America) boosted both employment and earnings for single
women with children (though it cost less-skilled, minority men jobs).
Britain’s experience offers another set of insights. The country’s
national minimum wage was introduced at 46% of the median wage, slightly
higher than America’s. A lower floor applied to young people. Both are
adjusted annually on the advice of the Low Pay Commission. Before the
law took effect, worries about potential damage to employment were
widespread. Yet today the consensus is that Britain’s minimum wage has
done little or no harm.
The most striking impact of Britain’s minimum wage has been on the
spread of wages. Not only has it pushed up pay for the bottom 5% of
workers, but it also seems to have boosted earnings further up the
income scale—and thus reduced wage inequality. Wage gaps in the bottom
half of Britain’s pay scale have shrunk sharply since the late 1990s. A
new study by a trio of British labour-market economists (including one
at the Low Pay Commission) attributes much of that contraction to the
minimum wage. Wage inequality fell more for women (a higher proportion
of whom are on the minimum wage) than for men and the effect was most
pronounced in low-wage parts of Britain.
This new evidence leaves economists with lots of unanswered questions.
What exactly is going on in labour markets if minimum wages do not hurt
employment but reduce wage gaps? Are firms cutting costs by squeezing
wages elsewhere? Are they improving the productivity of the lowest-wage
workers? Some of the newest studies suggest firms employ a variety of
strategies to deal with a higher minimum wage, from modestly raising
prices to saving money from lower turnover. ...
Finally, the United States is beginning to take energy efficiency seriously. ...
... The Negawatt is the general principle of cutting electricity
consumption without necessarily reducing energy usage through things
like energy efficiency. Lovins first introduced it in the keynote
address to the 1989 Green Energy Conference in Montreal:
Imagine being able to save half the
electricity for free and still get the same or better services! … You
get the same amount of light as before, with 8 percent as much energy
overall—but it looks better and you can see better. … In the space
conditioning case—heating and cooling—you get improved comfort. ... It
is doing more with less.
The Negawatt itself is a theoretical unit of power measuring energy
saved—Lovins came up with the idea after seeing megawatt misspelled with
an n and deciding that this was a potentially useful
conceptualization. It sounds self-evident now that you could reduce
electricity consumption not by cutting back on energy usage but by
improving energy efficiency standards and modernizing antiquated power
sources. But the concept was revolutionary at the time. A major problem
with getting people to understand the environmental and cost-savings
benefits of energy efficiency was a perverse incentives structure that
rewarded power companies based on amount of electricity sold, not for
how much of a needed service it was providing. Lovins described the
dilemma as such:
There isn't any demand for electricity for
its own sake. What people want is the services it provides. …
Nonetheless, most of our utilities have gotten into the habit of
thinking they're in the kilowatt-hour business, so they should sell
more. … For some reason, it's hard for them to get used to the idea that
it's perfectly all right to sell less electricity, and so bring in less
revenue, as long as costs go down more than revenues do.
Though Lovins brought the idea to the fore of the environmental
policy discussion, he wasn’t the first to articulate the issue: In 1982,
California devised an inspired solution, called decoupling,
to this problem. The idea was that the state would reverse the
incentive structure by establishing the revenue rate that the power
company would need to meet in order to return a profit, along with a separate
target for electricity production needed. Any revenue over the target
amount would be returned to customers, while anything below would be
added on to the following year’s bills. This meant that greater
efficiency could actually return greater profit.
Decoupling is largely credited
with making California the most energy efficient and environmentally
friendly state in the country. But a mere disincentive to keep utilities
companies from pegging profits to electricity usage was not enough, so
the state launched a second program called “decoupling plus” in 2007 in order to incentivize
power companies to lower their electricity production. Through this
program, regulators set savings targets, and customers are asked to pay
fees to help provide the down payment for power companies to meet these
targets. Regulators then calculate long-term economic savings of this
efficiency. If the utilities meet or surpass their targeted electricity
savings, they get a cut of the projected savings. If they don’t meet the
targets, the utilities pay a fine.
In 2007, California was still the only state in the union to have even a
basic decoupling system in place. In the last five years, though, there
has been a decoupling revolution across the country. By the start of
2011, 27 states and the District of Columbia
had adopted gas decoupling, electric decoupling, or both. While the
incentive programs are not yet in place in the vast majority of these
states, at least the initial roadblock of the bad incentive structure
has been largely removed.
After the loss of 10 million American lives in the Three-Mile Island
calamity in 1979, the death of 2 billion in the Chernobyl holocaust in
1986 and, now, the abandonment of all of northern Japan following the
death of millions in last year's Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, it is
hardly surprising that the world's biggest users of nuclear power are
shutting their plants down.
Oh, wait a minute. Nobody died in the Three-Mile Island calamity, 28
plant workers were killed, and 15 other people subsequently died of
thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl holocaust, and nobody died in the
Fukushima catastrophe. In fact, northern Japan has not been evacuated
after all. But never mind all that. Governments really are shutting down
their nuclear plants. ...
She explains that Japan has closed their 50 nuclear reactors for inspections and the government promises to close them permanently by 2040, replacing them with renewable energy. Angela Merkel wants to close German plants by 2022. France is proposing to scale back their nuclear sector.
She concludes:
The Greens prattle about replacing nuclear power with renewables,
which might happen in the distant future. But the brutal truth for now
is that closing down the nuclear plants will lead to a sharp rise in
greenhouse gas emissions.
Fortunately, their superstitious fears are largely absent in more
sophisticated parts of the world. Only four new nuclear reactors are
under construction in the European Union, and only one in the United
States, but there are 61 being built elsewhere. Over two-thirds of them
are being built in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), where
economies are growing fast.
But it's not enough to outweigh the closure of so many nuclear plants
in the developed world, at least in the short run. India may be aiming
at getting 50 percent of its energy from nuclear power by 2050, for
example, but the fact is that only 3.7 percent of its electricity is
nuclear right now. So the price of nuclear fuel has collapsed in the
past four years, and uranium mine openings and expansions have been
cancelled.
More people die from coal pollution each day than have been killed by
50 years of nuclear power operations – and that's just from lung
disease. If you include future deaths from burning fossil fuels, closing
down nuclear power stations is sheer madness. Welcome to the Middle
Ages.
Many of
the existing plants, like Fukushima, are second generation nuclear power. Third
generation nuclear power is much safer. Fourth generation, projected to come
online in about twenty years will be even safer, more efficient, and generate
wasted that must be protected a few hundred years instead of millennia. There
is reason to believe that even better methods are in the offing. What an irony
that those countries that have been the most adamant about reducing greenhouse
gas emissions may become the biggest stumbling block to curbing them.
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.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer is renowned for producing assessments of carcinogens. But it appears that some of the agency’s evaluations may overstate the risks, for reasons that tell us a great deal about the science and politics of risk assessment.
It is a paradox that, in spite of dramatic increases in life
expectancy and improvements in health in the developed world over recent
decades, as a society we are obsessively preoccupied with the specter
of hazards lurking in our environment and consumer products.
Many factors have contributed to this ever-increasing climate of
fear, including the success of the environmental movement; a deep-seated
distrust of industry; the public’s insatiable appetite for stories
related to health, which the media duly cater to; and – not least – the
striking expansion of the fields of epidemiology and environmental
health sciences and their burgeoning literature. ...
... One has to ask what “possibly carcinogenic” means, if extensive
evidence in humans and animals points to no threat. A major problem with
the IARC process is that it makes it almost impossible to assign an
agent to category 4 – probably not carcinogenic. Of the roughly one
thousand agents evaluated by the agency exactly one is in this category.
A second problem with the IARC process — one that reinforces the
classification problem — is that some of the working groups convened to
assess a particular agent have included scientists who have carried out
studies on the agent under evaluation. It is fanciful to think that
scientists who have a vital stake in a particular question can evaluate
the evidence, including their own studies, dispassionately.
Finally, IARC reaches its assessments by consensus. But this can mean
that those who are more forceful and persuasive may influence the group
decision-making process. In addition, consensus implies a philosophic
stance which has nothing to do with science.
All three of these flaws came together in IARC’s assessment of cell phones:
undue emphasis on a small number of positive epidemiologic studies from
a single group, when the much larger body of studies indicated no
elevated risk; the improper influence of an activist researcher (the
lead author of the anomalous positive studies) on the deliberations of
the working group; and, finally, a tilt toward the “precautionary
principle.”
The precautionary principle states that, if there is uncertainty
regarding the effects of exposure to an agent, the burden of proof that
exposure does not cause harm falls on those who utilize the agent. While
this formulation may sound reasonable, in actuality it has nothing to
contribute to the assessment of risks. First, there are always
uncertainties, and it is not possible to prove the absence of risk.
Furthermore, in practice invocation of the precautionary principle
focuses attention solely on the possibility of harm, often ignoring
information about the dose to which people are exposed, avoiding
consideration of benefits of the agent in question and whether safer
substitutes are available, and giving greater weight to studies that
appear to indicate a hazard, even when these studies may be of poorer
quality.
For all its self-justifying claims, the precautionary principle seeks to
deny a central fact – there is no way to avoid risk in life – all we
can do is to try to use available knowledge to distinguish between
large, well-established risks; those that are probable; and those that
available evidence suggests are trivial or non-existent. ...
Geoffrey C. Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology.
" ... 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?"
Some Oklahoma doctors are trying to reform the health care industry by offering cutting waste from surgical services and making costs transparent. They founded Surgery Center of Oklahoma. Reason.tv has produced a video about it. Here is what they have to say at their YouTube page.
Three years ago, Dr. Keith Smith, co-founder and managing partner of the
Surgery Center of Oklahoma, took an initiative that would only be
considered radical in the health care industry: He posted online a list
of prices for 112 common surgical procedures. The 51-year-old Smith, a
self-described libertarian, and his business partner, Dr. Steve Lantier,
founded the Surgery Center 15 years ago, after they became
disillusioned with the way patients were treated at St. Anthony Hospital
in Oklahoma City, where the two men worked as anesthesiologists. In
1997, Smith and Lantier bought the shell of a former surgical center
with the aim of creating a for-profit facility that could deliver
first-rate care at a fraction of what traditional hospitals charge.
The
major cause of exploding U.S. heath care costs is the third-party payer
system, a text-book concept in which A buys goods or services from B
that are paid for by C. Because private insurance companies or the
government generally pick up most of the tab for medical services,
patients don't have the normal incentive to seek out value.
The
Surgery Center's consumer-driven model could become increasingly common
as Americans look for alternatives to the traditional health care
market—an unintended consequence of Obamacare. Patients may have no
choice but to look outside the traditional health care industry in the
face of higher costs and reduced access to doctors and hospitals.
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.
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